Ameritrash, Literature, and You!

Ken B. wrote:

"...And Eternity" was interesting but does sort of go off the rails.

Yeah, it goes completely off the rails early on, when the two girls take turns raping each other, especially if the reader is aware that Anthony has two daughters who were about the same age as those characters at the time. I was a fan of Piers Anthony until I realized that he was a creepy pedophile fixated on his own daughters. Avoid reading his book Firefly at all costs... it has nothing to do with the excellent tv show, but does feature an adult male having sex with a very young girl.

Mad Dog wrote:

Have you read the books/stories that brought us these excellent Ameritrash games?

A Game Of Thrones
Arkham Horror
Dune
Fury Of Dracula
War Of The Ring

I read the first Game of Thrones book and thought it was trash. It's bog-standard airport lounge thriller material set to a highly unimaginative fantasy background. The idea of wading through what - seven, eight - more those novels was just nauseating.

Lovecraft is massively variable. I've read most of his published material. His best stuff - The Colour out of Space, for example - is brilliant and genuinely creepy. However the bulk of it is very much bog-standard pulp horror. Lovecraft is remembered and treasured mostly, I think, for his imagination, and rightly so. The man was a quite appalling racist though and doesn't half show through in some of those stories.

I've read the first three Dune books and thought them very good. They belong in that rare and very special category of sci-fi books which have the potential to satisfy both as a page-turner and as an intellectual exercise. I'm given to understand that later Dune material - especially the stuff in which Frank Herberts' son is involved, is dreadful.

Dracula is excellent, and highly underrated in my opinion, especially in terms of its influence on later writers.

I consider myself a bit of a Tolkien nerd, and have read far more of his material than I probably ought to have. His lasting contribution, like Lovecraft, is not his actual literature (which is good, not great) but his imagination. On the back of my copy of the Silmarillion is a review quote which I've often used before to summarise my view of the importance of Tolkiens' work: “...how, given little over half a century of work, did one man become the creative equivalent of a people?”.

Others to check out?

I'm surprised no-one has mentioned Michael Moorcock yet. His output is so astonishingly vast that like Lovecraft it varies massively in quality and much of it is pulp trash. But at its best it has that same rare balance of imagination, thrills and intellectualism that characterises the very best literature. The Elric books, especially, are astonishing.

Iain M. Banks? I haven't read that many of his Culture series, but The Player of Games is would make a list of my favourite books. And it's title alone should make it required reading for any game hobbyist!

For good old-fashioned ghost stories, very little can challenge M. R. James. Except perhaps for Edgar Allan Poe.

Going out on a limb I'm going to have to mention Cormac McCarthy. The Road has huge AT connotations and is quite possibly the best novel I've ever read. I just finished Blood Meridian which I didn't think quite as good, but The Road was so utterly amazing that that's still high praise and again, being set in the wild west, it has solid AT connections.

Yeah, I was appalled when I first read what Lovecraft named his cat. Then I thought about it some, about the fact that Lovecraft loves cats, and that made it kind of puzzling.

The Road was one of the best books I read last year. Hell, it's one of the best books I've ever read. If you haven't read it, don't be fooled by the Oprah endorsement. Occasionally, the bitch recommends good reads.

This just in--MattDP likes Moorcock.




Kidding, man. Elric is good stuff, very trippy. A lot of Moorcock's stuff seems to have been written while on some very strong acid, but he's got his own style and I read a lot of his stuff whenever I can. I've got the two Elric compendium hardbacks, some of his trippy detective guy stuff, and something called "The Sword Trilogy" or something like that I picked up cheap and haven't gotten around to reading.

read the first Game of Thrones book and thought it was trash. It's bog-standard airport lounge thriller material set to a highly unimaginative fantasy background. The idea of wading through what - seven, eight - more those novels was just nauseating

I laughed out loud when I read this from Thrower! CLASSIC! Perhaps it struck me so funny because I just watched an old Sherlock Holmes movie last night and imagine Thrower saying that with the same British arrogance.

Are there any AT games based on Elric or The Road? Because I hadn't intended this to be a "recommend the same books you recommended fifty times on this site already" thread.

There is a way out-of-print Elric game, with editions published by both Avalon Hill and Chaosium:

www.boardgamegeek.com/game/1628

I have a copy of the Avalon Hill edition, and yet, despite my love of the first six Elric books, I have never played. It's a bizarre cross between wargame and the original Arkham Horror, and also not quite a finished game in my opinion. The rules are a mess, and the game appears to have completely skipped any kind of playtesting process. ONe huge mistake is that there are counters representing the armies of the various nations, but these counters are not identified except in the rule book, and then by color scheme. Given that these counters are about four times as big as the usual Avalon Hill counters of that era, they should have been able to at least fit abbreviated names.

For a bunch of clowns who are supposedly 'well read' you sure can't read the topic of this thread.
Bloody thread derailers.

the*mad*gamer wrote:

read the first Game of Thrones book and thought it was trash. It's bog-standard airport lounge thriller material set to a highly unimaginative fantasy background. The idea of wading through what - seven, eight - more those novels was just nauseating

I laughed out loud when I read this from Thrower! CLASSIC! Perhaps it struck me so funny because I just watched an old Sherlock Holmes movie last night and imagine Thrower saying that with the same British arrogance.

Because nothing says "high quality adult literature" like Tom Bombadillio.


Ohhh bath song!

Thrones: Nope. Didn't even know about the books before hearing about the game.

Arkham Horror: Playing the game really made me want to read the stories, so I took out a "Best Of" from the library. Read a couple, then wondered why I was reading mostly mediocre stories when I could create much more entertaining ones by playing the game.

Dune: I loved this book when I first read it some 20 years ago. Indifferent to the next two sequels. I reread it a few years ago, and I have to say that I didn't find it anywhere near as interesting as the first time through. It's lost something for me; I don't know what.

Dracula: Nope. This seems to be a glaring error in my Ameritrash reading list.

Rings: I never read any Tolkien when I was a kid. When I tried to read him more recently, I kind of got the feeling that maybe I should have done it earlier, because he just wasn't doing anything for me as an adult. And I actually like books for young readers. The poetry has got to go. Embarrassing.

Michael Moorcock is the motherfucking king. Everyone loves Elric best (and they are awesome), but for me it's easily Corum. He's the protagonist of that Swords Trilogy that Ken picked up. It starts off a little slowly, then rapidly turns into the wildest fantasy trip you can imagine. The Swords Trilogy was actually the first book I bought of my own choice when I was a young boy-- totally randomly-- and it was one of those life-changing, eye-opening experiences. Hooked me on fantasy, and more broadly, Ameritrash, for life. The Hawkmoon books are great, too.

I thought that the Hawkmoon books had great potential but fell flat. The Gran Bretanians had great style as villains, kind of a cross between Nazis and furries, only crazier. But the actual stories are lacking, in part because Hawkmoon himself is a dull character, defined more by his abilities than his personality.

A Game of Thrones - I read the first half of the first book when my Creative Writing lecturer recommended them to me, and practically forced it into my hands. I really liked it, but I'm waiting for them all to come out so I can read them in one big binge.

Arkham Horror - I am a complete Lovecraft nut, and have been since I was fourteen (now twenty-six). I'm pretty much a walking encyclopaedia. I love virtually everything of his, and a good chuck of the other Mythos writers as well. I play the Call of Cthulhu RPG as well.

Dune - My joint-first favourite novel ever. I stopped after the third one, because 99.8% of people who'd read them advised me to. Totally, mind-bogglingly awesome.

Dracula - My joint-first favourite novel ever. I love it every step of the way. I'm the guy who spent three days formatting it on Wikisource so that it's actually possible to read that fragging thing...purely as a labour of love (I'm currently doing the same thing to the complete Lovecraft).

Tolkien - I like his stories, but not his writing style - especially his habit of spending two pages describing the scene, then half a paragraph describing all the action therein (cf. The Mines of Moria, followed by Gandalf's battle with the Balrog). I think this is why I love the films/radio adaptations, but don't generally have a lot of time for the books.

The above post probably goes a long way towards explaining why I'm pretty much Kevin Wilson's Financial Bitch.

BradH wrote:

The above post probably goes a long way towards explaining why I'm pretty much Kevin Wilson's Financial Bitch.

Huh...I didn't realize he was cheating on me....

Shellhead wrote:

I was a fan of Piers Anthony until I realized that he was a creepy pedophile fixated on his own daughters. Avoid reading his book Firefly at all costs...

Where were you ten years ago? I could have used such advice then.

-MMM