six random horror literature thoughts on a hot sunday afternoon

What the title says. Well, I do have a beer on hand and a library of vinyl. So let's do this. 

1.  Turns out my first Kindle read is...Charles L. Grant's The Hour of the Oxrun Dead. One of those books I've always meant to read and since I've got less than two weeks before our big international trip, I wanted to get familiar with using the Kindle. Knocked out six chapters so far this afternoon; I have to say I'm quite enjoying it. A sad part of me says "they just don't write them like this anymore." Mostly because writing a horror novel meant something different in 1978, I think...there's almost an innocence to a book like this. And dammit, writers then didn't have to contend with smartphones and the internet. That makes me a bit jealous. 
2.  Poppy Z. Brite. I miss Poppy. Was thinking about Wormwood this afternoon, and how there's nothing that has that kind of sensual beauty to it in the genre right now. Or maybe there is and I just don't know of it. It's unfair to expect someone else to write something as decadently lovely as His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood but dammit, I wish someone would.
3. My favorite mass-market paperback cover of all time is Stephen King's Bachman Books with the skulls in the road. I still get a total thrill when I pull it off my bookshelf. Of course, that might also be because I'm usually about to do my yearly reading of The Long Walk...
4. Laird Barron's work gets better with each read. He reminds me of Ligotti in that way. I don't always fully appreciate his stories until I've read them a couple of times. But then they end up being among my favorites. I re-read Occultation last week and goddamn. So inspiring. Oddly, I didn't recall having read the story "Mysterium Tremendum" but it was my favorite in the book: horror done right, honoring its roots while living in the present. 
5. I don't know what my exact list of favorite horror short stories of all time would include, but I do know that Clive Barker's "In the Hills, the Cities" would be on there, pretty close to the top. My friend once said Clive could do whatever he wanted because he wrote that story. I'm not sure what happened to Clive, but I'd be hard pressed to think of a more depressing reading experience than the one I had reading Galilee in early '00s. I mean, Sacrament wasn't great but it at least had potential. Galilee turned me off anything new by him forever. I still think it had to be an elaborate joke. 
6. Presumably due to the success of True Detective, there will be a Penguin Classics (!) version of Grimscribe/Songs of a Dead Dreamer by Thomas Ligotti published this fall. It's totally awesome to think more people are discovering his work. I look forward to buying this since I don't own copies of either of those and they've been out of print too long (thankfully the local library has long had both so I could read when I got the itch.)  I never watched True Detective but I'll give it props simply for exposing more people to the work of probably the most important voice in horror literature the last two decades (well, him or Ramsey Campbell...but Ramsey transcends everything.)