May be someone's in the know -- is Cline's 'The Dark Chamber' available on the net?

I think that it's still under copyright. There was a paperback edition out in the 1980's that is still fairly easy to find; I've found it at used book stores on several occasions.
Scott

THE DARK CHAMBER is due to be reissed by Cold Spring Press with an introduction by Cline authority Douglas Anderson later this year.

Jim

A little aside: CAS's comments on The Dark Chamber in the Selected Letters have always surprised and puzzled me. He claims to like and appreciate the work, but he criticizes it, in essence, as being insufficiently weird. Fair enough, I suppose, but I find it absolutely astonishing that CAS seems to have been tone-deaf to the extraordinary poetry of Cline's writing. (I should add that, next to CAS's work, The Dark Chamber has sent me to the dictionary more often than the work of any other author since I was a teenager reading the fiction of J.G. Ballard). Given CAS's hatred of the pared-down, modern style, I should think that he would have been in ecstasy to read such a magnificently poetic stylist. When he claims that the (in my opinion) mostly pitifully mediocre Frank Belknap Long has done "sounder" work, I hardly know whether to react with anger or laughter!

At any rate, that is very good news that there is to be a new edition of The Dark Chamber. Since information about the author is scarce, I hope that the person who is writing the introduction to the book will rememdy that situation, at least somewhat.

Anderson's introduction is not long, but offers a lot of accurate information on Cline's life, work, THE DARK CHAMBER's milieu and its reception.

Jim

Kyberean: I'd have to agree with your reaction. I've finally got around to reading the novel beginning early this morning (about 3 a.m. -- insomnia again!) and am extremely impressed with the lyrical quality of Cline's writing here. Some of the passages are pure poetry, and this isn't simply affectation or verbiage, but adds not only to the atmosphere but the broadening of the central concept, and of the implications and scope of the dark chamber of the title. At this point I'd have to call it a fascinating and beautiful piece of work....

Oh and yes, Anderson's introduction definitely gives more information on Cline than I've seen most places. (A rather more terse but still quite informative version of the facts is supplied by Anderson in Supernatural Literature of the World: An Encyclopedia, edited by S. T. Joshi and Stefan Dziemianowicz.)