What was the best decade?
Last edited Wed May 27, 2015, 08:58 AM - Edit history (1)
My 7 year old was watching this and as one who came of age in the 80s I laughed pretty hard at the description of that decade 
Talking Friends
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I almost never hear anyone mention M.R.James and Algernon Blackwood. I love them. Do you also like Arthur Machen? He's my favorite. I love just about all the horror fiction from that period and the decades immediately following. A golden age of horror, if you ask me.
Yes it would be quite something to visit that period. I've also always wanted to time travel to the late 1940s, early 1950s, because I identify so strongly with film noir. The age of cynicism and the anti-hero. Although I'd never be able to handle all the second hand smoke 
Robert Aickman is my absolute favorite author of any era, bar none, and I never encounter anyone who's even heard of him! That's so cool that you mentioned him!! I swear, just about everything I read by Aickman burrows it's way directly into my subconscious and permanently haunts me. It does not pass go, it does not collect $200 - it just needles it's way straight in there.
May I say, one particular story called "The Inner Room" - I am absolutely obsessed with it. And of course, "The Stains"! He is just.... amazing.
Actually, every name you mentioned is amazing!
Robert Chambers - I've done artwork based on "The King in Yellow"
Joyce Carol Oates - Night-Side is one of my favorite anthologies
Shirley Jackson - as a child I used to take my copy of "We Have Always Lived in the Castle" with me everywhere I went
Saki - hell yes! (who couldn't love Sredni Vashtar?)
Lord Dunsany - one of my favorites!
And I would also add:
William Hope Hodgson
Clark Ashton Smith
Guy de Maupassant
HR Wakefield
Elizabeth Bowen
A.M. Burrage
L.P. Hartley
E.F. Benson
Lafcadio Hearn
Gertrude Atherton
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
F. Marion Crawford
Anthony Boucher
Karl Edward Wagner
Many Wade Wellman
Ah, so many deliciously dark places to go. 
Thanks for making me smile by bringing up some of my favorites.
But then I thought if I start hitting mid-century authors I'll type 50 more names
God yes, "The Hospice" is incredible. It's one of his most anthologized stories, so it turns up a lot. It's a masterpiece really. I also particularly love "The Swords", "The School Friend" and "The Trains". So exquisitely creepy!
(edit because I forgot to answer your question) I took the "The Hospice" to be a nightmare scenario where the protagonist is being lured to his death while his consciousness is shifting into some kind of fugue state, and whether he actually is dead by the end of the story is something for each reader to decide. That's a gross oversimplification of course - there are so many deliciously creepy elements and ominous subtexts.
I love what this critic says about Aickman:
"The surest way to comprehend Aickman is to read a lot of Aickman. You’ll have to work for it. You’ll return to his stories and turn them over, hunting for the access point, a seam, a code, or a hidden catch. Once you’re inside, once you’ve read and absorbed the message, you’ll return later to find everything has shifted, everything has changed, nothing is as you left it hours ago, or years ago. Maybe it’s you. Maybe it’s the seed Aickman has implanted in your brain. A multiplying, damnably adaptable psychic virus that sprang from the man himself (gods know where he picked it up) and manifested as several collections of the uncanny. To interact with Aickman on any meaningful level is to experience a form of quantum entanglement. His ideas entrain the subconscious and mutate it in the fashion that transgressive art must. And yes, I’m implying that the old boy has fucked your mind. Buttoned down or not, it’s just what he liked to do."
^^^ What he said. Yes.
Part of the problem with Aickman is his work is so hard to find. His penultimate collection, "Sub Rosa" is long out of print and the last time I checked, existing copies are going for hundreds of dollars. You can find "The Wine-Dark Sea", "Painted Devils" and "Cold Hand in Mine" - all of which I have, needless to say. Other than that, you have to try to track him down story by story in obscure anthologies. It's so worth it though!
...the "modern" decade. Maybe the most self-contained "decade" of all--it began with a bang, the Armistice, and ended very suddenly with another one, the Stock Market collapse. Yeah, it had prohibition--but it also had the American people's thumbing their nose at it, which made it collapse, too. And it had Mencken, Armstrong, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, the Golden Age of Broadway, The Algonquin Round Table, the maturation of silent film, pulp magazines, and Babe Ruth--just to mention a few of the attractions. If I could visit anywhere, anytime, it would be New York in the 20s--with a side trip or two to Paris and Hollywood...
Response to tk2kewl (Original post)
I was in my 20s.
Got my Air Force wings.
Became a 'hot-shot' fighter pilot in the Air National Guard.
Safe and sound, never deployed, never in combat, but playing fighter pilot was a hell of a lot of fun.
The swingin' 60s were a blast for me.
Hoo boy, did we swing.
The Rat Pack!
BIRTH CONTROL PILLS!
Then in '68 I met the future Miz t.
Sweet talked her into marrying me in'69.
My bachelor days were over.
End of an era.