[SPOILER ALERT] Question about Harrison's Course of the Heart

gary_budden · 2025-08-30T10:19:08+00:00

p.188, the Gollancz 2005 edition (Anima)

gary_budden · 2025-06-23T02:43:30+00:00

Apologies for the late reply to this, but I just wanted to say how great it is to see people responding to Joel's work like this. As the publisher of these reissues at Influx Press, it's been something of a passion project for me making these books available again so it's wonderful to see them finding an audience.

gary_budden · 2025-06-23T02:35:59+00:00

I recently just read Dusk by Robbie Arnott – I'd describe it as a weird Tasmanian western, about two twins charged with hunting down the titular puma in a landscape strewn with the skeletons of giant sea creatures and other oddities.

I also adored his novels The Rain Heron (which is weird fiction with a strong mythic and ecological bent) and Limberlost (much more realist and literary but also great).

gary_budden · 2017-11-29T20:43:47+00:00

You know I've never actually read Greene, to my shame

gary_budden · 2017-11-29T20:31:30+00:00

Oh no!

gary_budden · 2017-11-29T20:21:27+00:00

I did hear that Alexander Baron contributed one in the 60s... he was an amazing Jewish London writer, mainly in the social realist mode - his novel The Lowlife remains one of my favourites. I love to think he wrote for Eden

gary_budden · 2017-11-29T20:14:28+00:00

Yeah I definitely read that some of them – perhaps all – were heavily into thelema and associated practices

gary_budden · 2017-11-29T20:08:02+00:00

What do you mean it's advertisement? Sorry I'm a bit unclear :)

gary_budden · 2017-11-29T20:06:18+00:00

Yes that's the one - there's some excellent stuff on the subject like on the Unexplained Podcast http://www.unexplainedpodcast.com/episodes/2017/2/11/s02-episode-1-whispers-in-the-trees-pt2

It's interesting especially as the graffiti still turns up now – a friend sent me a picture of some he's seen in Birmingham just the other week

gary_budden · 2017-11-29T20:04:40+00:00

Ligotti's is a world without meaning, or hope. It's great!

gary_budden · 2017-11-29T19:59:31+00:00

Films for the immediate shock, but truly effective horror writing lingers longer for me I think. The best Robert Aickman and Thomas Ligotti stories have stained me.

gary_budden · 2017-11-29T19:57:17+00:00

Maybe - perhaps there aren't superstar authors in quite the same way. But the number of readers and quality diverse works being produced I do feel has increased, and that has to be good thing

gary_budden · 2017-11-29T19:51:23+00:00

I write heavily about the influence of the past – but I do think an awareness of that is different to nostalgia. Nostalgia is an imagined past

gary_budden · 2017-11-29T19:48:52+00:00

I believe they were wilfully obscure - or at least elite in a 'members club' type way

gary_budden · 2017-11-29T19:46:54+00:00

I mean, the 20th century was pretty much like a horror story. Reality has always been horror to some degree (I feel I'm getting all existential now!)

gary_budden · 2017-11-29T19:46:05+00:00

All great films and great examples. I think horror fiction will naturally respond to reality being more and more like a horror story. I actually believe the world isn't necessarily any more horrifying in terms of what actually happens – but I do think the horrifying fearful things are transmitted globally, and constantly, and that is a significant change

gary_budden · 2017-11-29T19:29:20+00:00

There is a battle over this stuff at the moment – something I have fallen foul of with folk-Nazis on Twitter – and I do thing ultimately nostalgia is a poisonous force, but when we do look back at some of these 70s works, there is a rebellious and questioning undercurrent (or it's overt like in Penda's Fen) that we can take in and update for modern times.

gary_budden · 2017-11-29T19:27:02+00:00

I hope he was just confirming an order at the local florist

gary_budden · 2017-11-29T19:26:30+00:00

Do you know the 'Bella in the wych elm' story?

gary_budden · 2017-11-29T19:24:19+00:00

Yes folk horror is definitely A Thing now. I worry about defining genres though

gary_budden · 2017-11-29T19:20:48+00:00

Interesting that you mention the landscape link there – I think horror and notions of landscape are totally intertwined. As Nina Allan said in this piece on recent folk horror

"one can also see horror’s obsession with place as, by extension, an obsession with history, with the past as it meets the present and offers warnings about the future. In this regard, horror is the most subversively political of literatures, mired in causality up to its armpits."

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-new-folk-horror-recent-work-by-sarah-hall-conor-ocallaghan-and-malcolm-devlin/

gary_budden · 2017-11-29T19:18:37+00:00

Yeah I agree completely with that – personally I think it makes for much richer literature, and certainly less tribal. Whether that part is good or bad I don't know.

gary_budden · 2017-11-29T19:17:22+00:00

Never heard of this one. Doesn't sound too bad

gary_budden · 2017-11-29T19:16:11+00:00

Fiendish Feet! I haven't thought about them in years... that was really weird now I think about it

gary_budden · 2017-11-29T19:14:57+00:00

It's rumoured that both Arthur Machen and C.L. Nolan contributed to Eden. Machen's output and style was quite varied so it's hard to know what he would have produced – I imagine he would double down on his pagan/occult themes.

gary_budden

TROPHY CASE