#tim curran

Stephen King: Submitted for the approval of the midnight society, i call this the tale of the evil clown Barker: evil clown? boring! Barker: evil clowns have been done, steve King: yeah, i was the one that did them! Barker: sure steve King: i King: i did!

King: people don't like my take on evil clowns anymore? well i'll fix that King: i'll enroll in thomas ligotti's clown school and learn all the tricks of the trade! Barker: yeah you do that steve

Thomas Ligotti: welcome to thomas ligotti's cloon school Ligotti: where you will learn all the skills in order to become the best possible cloon Ligotti: so that you can bring a sense of unease to any situation as a dark mirror of life's inherent cruel absurdity

Ligotti: in order to be a cloon you will first need to master the art of capering and the art of buffoonery King: aren't those the same thing? Ligotti: hm Ligotti: perhaps you are not cut out to be a cloon, steve King: no no don't give up on me! King: i can do it!

King: hello children! observe me, sideshow steve! Ligotti: hm King: i uh have prepared a pie take Ligotti: hm

Ligotti: to be a true cloon, you must understand the pain of sentience Ligotti: every breath you take, a cruel taunt by an unfeeling creator Ligotti: what is life but a gauntlet of meaningless pain Ligotti: also you get to perform at birthday parties

Ligotti: observe my comical appearance, children King: ha ha i'm laughing already! Ligotti: it's not funny King: i- oh Ligotti: it is actually very uncanny King: right, right

Ligotti: subsume your entire being into the cloon until you cease to exist Ligotti: gaze into the void and let the whisper a name to you in the gutteral utterances of the abyss, giving free reign to the inner dark and the chaos of this pointless existence Adam Cesare: ok my clown name is dumpy doodles

Judith Sonnet: jiggles pompom Ramsey Campbell: loopy poops Tim Curran: fart hardy Will Elliot: booboo bananaramagram Jane Flett: wiggly giggles King: i King: wait i King: give me a second, i didn't know i needed to think of a clown name Ligotti: a cloon name King: give me a second!

King: ok i got it! King: Pennywise Ligotti: hm King: that's a pretty good clown name, don't you think? Ligotti: hm King: what? King: it's a perfectly good clown name! King: it is!

An Antarctic expedition led by Paleobiologist Dr. Robert Gates has uncovered frozen, but partially thawed mummies of an ancient race of beings that very well may upend every aspect of what we know about science and religion, including who or what may have made humankind. Dr. Gates brings the frozen bodies back with him to Kharkhov Station, a mistake which may just cost the world.

Hive by Tim Curran is a direct sequel to At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft, mixed with heavy aspects of John Carpenter's The Thing. It takes one hundred percent in Antarctica and primarily in three locations, Kharkhov Station, Medusa Drift (Deep Field Camp) and the subterranean caves and city of the Elder Things, who are the primary antagonists of the book and the Old Ones.

I think Curran does a great job setting the place up, giving a great isolated atmosphere to the story, though at no time did I love this crew say as much as the crew of Outpost 31 in The Thing. Even the main protagonist Jimmy Hayes is just sort of there for me (though I did like that he was from Kansas). All of the characters in Hive are pretty stereotypical blue collar workers, with a pencil pusher basically with LaHune, who is "running" the expedition and is the main human antagonist, consistently getting in the way of the scientists and workers.

I loved Curran's descriptions of the Elder Things as gelatinous winged creatures, thought that was really awesome. I absolutely loved the part with the video feed of drilling down into Lake Vordog and what is discovered in the ice, that was probably my favorite section of the book.

I have a couple critiques that kept me back from *loving* this book, as someone else said "Their tiny minds could not hope to contain or understand what it was they were seeing" (p54) but yet there are pages upon pages of descriptions of the beings. So I think that Curran sort of fails to properly convey the insanity inducing/mind breaking aspect of the Elder Things/Old Ones/Shoggoths that Lovecraft is able to convey and also I think an aspect that is dropped, never really approached, is the paranoia that is present in John W. Campbell's Who Goes There? and its adaptations. These beings are taking over people from Kharkhov Station, but why? They seem to do better when they stay in their own form. I feel like Curran never really justified this beyond being a cool horror image (and it is a cool image, discarded human skin like a spider shedding it's skin).

My biggest problem with the book is the two flashback sections of previous expeditions. I feel like there had to of been a better way to incorporate them into the narrative if Curran felt they were necessary. As they are, they grind the main narrative to a halt and I don't feel that there's anything in them that couldn't have had a way to be conveyed in the main story. As a world building exercise, they're fine I guess, though sort of plodding, possibly could have worked better as separately published short stories. I did find out in the originally published version of Hive these weren't present and I don't know if that was a publisher edit or an author edit, but I think it was a correct edit. If they were absolutely necessary, maybe they could have been published as a side-novella?

I hate my critiques were longer than my positives, because I really did enjoy this book. I will definitely read the sequel, Hive 2 and I added another book from Curran to my Halloween Reading List for 2023 as I think Curran is a really talented writer.

I red those three:

1. SOW

Creepy, horrifying and grotesque. This story is gut wrenching, disgusting, horror-filled, vile -- but what a `delicious' read.

Richard and Holly are expecting their first child and the doctor had ordered her on bed-rest. As each day passes and the day grows closer for the blessed entrance of the baby into this world, Holly changes. Unfortunately, Richard is the only one who can see his wife's transformation.

Partially inspired by "Rosemary's Baby" by Ira Levi, but written from the point of view of a terrified, loving husband.

2. NIGHT CRAWLERS

In Haymarket, WI, a cemetery has been found, a dumping ground, the bodies are incomplete, and they've been gnawed on by, well, something. Something not human, but, not animal either. Then, while on patrol, two deputies, the local Snow, and the ex-big city Riegan, find themselves the hunted. Only one will come back.

As the police search for their lost comrade, the foggy landscape takes on Lovecraftian dimensions as their searches lead them to a long-dead ghost town. Abandoned, broken down, and decayed into its very foundations, the hungry creatures, which seem to flit about just the edges of the police's perceptions, they quickly become more concrete, and these creatures will resemble the ghouls in Lovecraft's story "Pickman's Model" and also "The Colour Out Of Space".

3. SKIN MEDICINE

Tim Curran's Western style horror novel is just the sort of brutal, grim, unflinchingly disturbing tale of the macabre I expected from Tim Curran.

Tyler Cabe, civil war veteran-turned bounty hunter is hunting a man dubbed the Sin City Strangler, known for his strangling prostitutes and then surgically disassembling them. What he finds when he gets to a town called Whisper Lake is a whole lot more than he has figured on: a way to battle something beyond the imagination of living man. Again here I found a lot of Lovecraft and Howard. Very impressive and unexpected story.

Do you like The Descent but wish it was about dude miners instead of ladies who def have some issues outside of the crawlers to deal with? This novella captures the claustrophobia essential to cave stories and I really enjoyed the horrific descriptions. However, I feel like this story could actually be two different novellas with one focused on the creeping dread of just BEING in a mine and the other of 'oh shit there's something else with us in this creepy mine'. That division between creeping dread and final payoff could have flowed a bit better, but for 80 pages is a quick and gross time. The horror was gross in the latter half but sort of shifted back at the last second to the creeping dread. I would have liked it to have fully escalated to on page nastiness. But that's just me.

Format: e-book

Qualche tempo fa vi parlavo di questo scrittore americano e, in particolare, di uno dei romanzi che ha scritto (“Dead Sea”) che ho trovato molto coinvolgente.

Ho letto qualche altro titolo (“Dead Sea Cronicles”, “Clownflesh” e “Resurrection”, tutti davvero notevoli), fino a questo “Biohazard”.

Tim Curran è uno scrittore horror, un pò Stephen King, un pò Edgar Allan Poe del XXI secolo.…

Been suggested that instead of calling that style of science fiction, fantasy and horror 'Lovecraftian' because of H.P.'s views that we collectively use 'Cosmic Horror' as an alternative. Lovecraft being a  product of his time isn’t a great excuse for his world views. Plenty of others did not behave that way or express such ideas. Lovecraft himself we now know is problematic at best more factually imperialistic and racist at worst.