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Xiahou Dun posted:Is it any good? I remember kind of liking it ages ago when the blog format was novel, but the writing wasn"t great even then and I imagine it reads like a primitive, overly long exploration-based SCP these days.
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# ? Nov 26, 2022 12:55 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 09:01 |
It was worth reading, iirc the end kinda went wonky but i'd give it a shot
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# ? Nov 26, 2022 13:07 |
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That's it! Thank you, it goes wonky at the end but oh well.
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# ? Nov 26, 2022 16:56 |
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The General Horror Thread: it goes wonky at the end but oh well.
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# ? Nov 26, 2022 16:59 |
Rereading it I think it holds up better than I thought, but the blog framing doesn't do any favors & kinda hurts it tbh
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# ? Nov 27, 2022 06:14 |
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anyone read ted's caving page recently to see how that holds up?
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# ? Nov 27, 2022 17:50 |
that's one where it actually should be in the form of a piece of poo poo blog from the incredible futuristic year 2000. My main criticism of the sick land is that there's no possible way it could work as described, the weakest part is the blog concept because there's no way the military industrial complex would allow it to be posted. It'd be better if it had been posted using the device of "i found this kinda cool old rear end computer at a thrift store in [foreign country] and got it working and there's these files on there..." or something roughly like that. e2: The Sick Land is pretty good and i think works, but it would have worked better if the author had had a better grip on academics (probably, i'm a dropout but some of it seems like a stretch) & computer stuff. There's a few things I'd think about changing to try and make it more plausible but it's basic concepts i think work really well. e3: it's kind of a link between the ideas of lovecraft what you get in annihilation or roadside picnic or stalker or w/e, except i think annihilation might have come out after SniperWoreConverse fucked around with this message at 18:40 on Nov 27, 2022 |
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# ? Nov 27, 2022 18:19 |
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Suggestions for other collections like Wounds? It's something I constantly recommend and love. I did lose interest in carrier wave but I'll maybe revisit it some day.
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# ? Dec 2, 2022 01:05 |
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Idle Amalgam posted:Suggestions for other collections like Wounds? It's something I constantly recommend and love. I’m assuming you read North American Lake Monsters but absolutely do that if not. Is there anything specific you’re looking for or just good horror anthologies?
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# ? Dec 2, 2022 01:15 |
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Idle Amalgam posted:Suggestions for other collections like Wounds? It's something I constantly recommend and love. The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature by Christopher Slatsky
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# ? Dec 2, 2022 01:26 |
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Idle Amalgam posted:Suggestions for other collections like Wounds? It's something I constantly recommend and love. I ran through Matthew Bartlett’s collections lately and loved them. Its more genre horror than Wounds but there’s an underlying pathos in his writing that hits kinda the same vein. Also, Nicole Cushing is a little extreme i guess but ive read a few of her novellas now and they’re pretty great. Lil Mama Im Sorry fucked around with this message at 04:09 on Dec 2, 2022 |
# ? Dec 2, 2022 02:31 |
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Brian Evenson’s short story collections
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# ? Dec 2, 2022 04:43 |
Traxis posted:The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature by Christopher Slatsky Lil Mama Im Sorry posted:I ran through Matthew Bartlett’s collections lately and loved them. Its more genre horror than Wounds but there’s an underlying pathos in his writing that hits kinda the same vein. I love his work as well. Similarly, Philip Fracassi. And I'm also a Gemma Files stan
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# ? Dec 2, 2022 16:07 |
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Opopanax posted:I’m assuming you read North American Lake Monsters but absolutely do that if not. Is there anything specific you’re looking for or just good horror anthologies? The more specific about you liked about Wounds, the better the recommendations, but obviously I gotta plug Wide Carnivorous Sky. poo poo, I need to finish Corpsemouth.
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# ? Dec 2, 2022 17:57 |
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Bilirubin posted:And I'm also a Gemma Files stan I just snagged Spectral Evidence after reading In That Endlessness, Our End, which is a great collection that sorta falls off towards the end but has some bangers in the front half.
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# ? Dec 2, 2022 20:18 |
Lil Mama Im Sorry posted:I just snagged Spectral Evidence after reading In That Endlessness, Our End, which is a great collection that sorta falls off towards the end but has some bangers in the front half. We Will All Go Down Together is my favourite of hers so far but I have enjoyed all these collections very much
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# ? Dec 3, 2022 01:23 |
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I went back to Gemma Files’s first collection and it leads off with extremely detailed necrophilia. It’s…. a lot.
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# ? Dec 3, 2022 03:43 |
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Opopanax posted:I’m assuming you read North American Lake Monsters but absolutely do that if not. Is there anything specific you’re looking for or just good horror anthologies? That is definitely one I enjoyed as well. Just looking for good collections that are tonally similar. Traxis posted:The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature by Christopher Slatsky Added it to the list. Thank you! Lil Mama Im Sorry posted:I ran through Matthew Bartlett’s collections lately and loved them. Its more genre horror than Wounds but there’s an underlying pathos in his writing that hits kinda the same vein. Added some of Bartlett's collections to the list. I've listened to the audiobook for Gateways to Abomination. I've not heard of Nicole Cushing and will have to do some investigating. Conrad_Birdie posted:Brian Evenson’s short story collections Definitely got a few of these on the list. Xiahou Dun posted:The more specific about you liked about Wounds, the better the recommendations, but obviously I gotta plug Wide Carnivorous Sky. I've got maybe one or two stories left in Corpsemouth, and am about halfway through the updated Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters. Bilirubin posted:A favourite of mine as well. Its a bit bleaker (think more Laird Barron in tone) than Wounds but its stories really stick with you. I've tried a couple times to get into Laird Barron, but I could not. I want to give their stuff another try. I'll have to look into Philip Fracassi and Gemma Files. I appreciate the recommendations!
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# ? Dec 3, 2022 04:37 |
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Saw a new Aaron Beauregard came out about a week ago, Playground, and decided to give him another chance. If you want to read about kids going through a Saw 2-esque playground themed trap gauntlet then its pretty much that. Even if that sounds good to you I'd advise skipping the chapter(s) with the evil head lady's backstory tho, nobody needs to read all that. As a palette cleanser I also ready Night Weaver by Brian Berry and if you want some quick B-movie spider schlock then I'd recommend. It's a horror movie playing on TNT on a Saturday afternoon from the 90s in book form, and will take you about as long to get through. I'd post more but mostly I'm just reading a dozen different short story collections at once and can't keep them straight in my head.
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# ? Dec 3, 2022 05:37 |
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seconding Phillip Fracassi, he's a genius, the collection Beneath A Pale Sky was one of my favorite reads
Help a goon out! Lots of books - horror, nonfiction, classics and more for sale.
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# ? Dec 3, 2022 05:52 |
ShutteredIn posted:I went back to Gemma Files’s first collection and it leads off with extremely detailed necrophilia. It’s…. a lot. There are books she wrote (I have heard) that verge more on the side of erotica too, but its minimal in the three collections mentioned ITT I don't recall what you are speaking of though, was that in Experimental Film? e. I'm guessing that was from Kissing Carrion, given that title. Have not read. Bilirubin fucked around with this message at 20:19 on Dec 3, 2022 |
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# ? Dec 3, 2022 20:15 |
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Bilirubin posted:There are books she wrote (I have heard) that verge more on the side of erotica too, but its minimal in the three collections mentioned ITT Yeah, Kissing Carrion. I don’t really recommend it, there’s a few interesting stories but she really hadn’t found her style yet - most of it reads like she was aping Poppy Z. Brite but not really hitting it,
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# ? Dec 3, 2022 21:21 |
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How is The Secret of Ventriloquism?
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# ? Dec 5, 2022 22:44 |
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FPyat posted:How is The Secret of Ventriloquism? I wanted to like it, really badly, but I found it to be a chore and pretty derivative. Help a goon out! Lots of books - horror, nonfiction, classics and more for sale.
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# ? Dec 6, 2022 21:45 |
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Fanatical has a pretty decent looking horror comics bundle . Nothing I've read personally but a few I've definitely heard good things about.
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# ? Dec 10, 2022 19:25 |
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Sooooooo. It's the end of the gregarious year. Anyone have some spotify esque top 10 hits to rec? I got hit with a reading slump and all I've read in the last month is.... It Rides a Pale Horse - Andy Marino quote:From a new star in horror fiction comes a terrifying novel of obsession, greed, and the shocking actions we’ll take to protect those we love, all set in a small town filled with dark secrets. Supernatural and paranormal. hosed up magic users. hosed up magical book - not Necronomicon but in that [ha!] vein Eldritch horror with a hint of folk horror, but not lovecraft. Think a la Experimental Film but with apocalyptic themes. Small town locale. Small rag tag team. Otherworlds / unreality. If you like the general concept of SCP foundation but on a much smaller scale, you might like the bad guys here. But they aren't containing anything so much as the opposite. Good amount of gore but not splatterpunk levels. Body horror involved, too. Art horror theme. It sort of reminds me of a few episodes from the podcast 'I Am In Eskew', specifically the art museum gallery one with the labyrinthine situation. No Gods For Drowning by Hailey Piper. quote:IN THE BEGINNING, MAN WAS PREY. WITHOUT THE GODS, THEY'LL BE PREY AGAIN Apocalypses and eldritch horror centered mystery. Yes there's cop characters but it's not copaganda imo. I liked the mystery and rotating cast. The Witch In the Well by Camilla Bruce quote:The Witch in the Well is a dark Norwegian thriller from Camilla Bruce, author of You Let Me In. Eh. Ehh. It was interesting enough that I'd rec it, but her other novel, You Let Me In, was far better. Read that if the concept of 'incest csa horror but fae themed and it's not the fae who are the main abusers' appeals to you. I know that book is still stuck in my head next to Experimental Film and Night Film. Malice House by Megan Shepherd quote:Of all the things aspiring artist Haven Marbury expected to find while clearing out her late father’s remote seaside house, Bedtime Stories for Monsters was not on the list. This secret handwritten manuscript is disturbingly different from his Pulitzer-winning works: its interweaving short stories crawl with horrific monsters and enigmatic humans that exist somewhere between this world and the next. The stories unsettle but also entice Haven, practically compelling her to illustrate them while she stays in the house that her father warned her was haunted. Clearly just dementia whispering in his ear . . . right? I'd compare this in the same but very VERY distanced venn diagram of Alan Wake. Only in the sense of fictional creations altering reality. I thought the mystery was great, the supernatural poo poo really did ramp up at the end. Honorary recs that I liked but have no strong feelings about. The Leviathan by Rosie Andrews Historical gothic demonic possession with witch hunts and mild political social maneuvurign? Good poo poo. The House of Footsteps by Mathew West <-I feel questionable about this because it has a predatory gay character and while it makes sense in a historical context it comes across as uhm. Odd. Especially considering the ending wherein MAJOR ENDING SPOILERS The male MC rejects the gay male character to enter a marriage with the ghost witch woman. Is this simple horror or a weird way of reinforcing cishet gender norms? Idk, I'm not going to think much on this. Sometimes it's not that deep. It did leave a weird feeling in my lil gay bones. The isolation, small town horror was neat. Bonus. This is not horror at all but it was suspenseful and hosed me up enough to add it here. Because phew what the gently caress. The Skeleton Key by Erin Kelly Kestral posted:Horror thread, I have a weirdly specific request: first-person epistolary horror with a reading level that isn't impenetrable for an inexperienced reader. This is so way late but. Maybe The Last Days of Jack Sparks by Jason Arnopp? I remember that being comedic and not too hardcore.
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# ? Dec 11, 2022 20:50 |
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My reading list has so much from this thread and the majority still come from your write ups value-brand cereal. Thank you fellow forum posters for keeping me spooked throughout 2022
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# ? Dec 12, 2022 10:22 |
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ShutteredIn posted:I went back to Gemma Files’s first collection and it leads off with extremely detailed necrophilia. It’s…. a lot. Well I'm glad I didn't go in cold.
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# ? Dec 12, 2022 11:06 |
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Jedit posted:Well I'm glad I didn't go in cold. Unlike the character I assume
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# ? Dec 12, 2022 11:42 |
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ClydeFrog posted:Thank you fellow forum posters for keeping me spooked throughout 2022
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# ? Dec 12, 2022 14:07 |
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Just read Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke last night, and I'm echoing a lot of the same disappointment as other people in this thread. The pacing is janky -- I get that the idea is that the main characters are lonely people moving way too fast, but it still feels like this should all take more time, with maybe some elided time to imply a "normal" borderline-abusive power-exchange relationship happening before things start getting gory -- and the character voices read much too much alike and much too "writerly" for this setup, IMHO. I think there are good bones here (Agnes's history of generational family violence creating warped expectations of intimacy, and Zoe constantly testing Agnes's boundaries and being simultaneously horrified and fascinated that those boundaries don't really exist), but it all needed more time and space and more distinct voices. About halfway through the next story in this edition, "The Enchantment," and it's... okay, I guess? LaRocca keeps doing this thing where we get huge ideas with minimal exploration, and it bothers me even though I know being evocative is the point. I just feel like "science has disproven the afterlife" is a big thing to just throw out there! Why? How? Maybe there's going to be some payoff for this, but I'm not sure, because LaRocca doesn't seem to do payoff worth half a drat.
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# ? Dec 14, 2022 00:29 |
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Opopanax posted:Fanatical has a pretty decent looking horror comics bundle . Nothing I've read personally but a few I've definitely heard good things about. I liked Something Is Killing the Children but I didn't read very far.
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# ? Dec 14, 2022 01:06 |
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The collection that stuck with me the most this year was probably The Puppet King and other Atonements by Justin Burnett — the standout story for me being “devourer” which sorta twists the whole “academic researcher goes too far in the search of forbidden knowledge” into a music journalism horror piece.
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# ? Dec 14, 2022 03:00 |
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ShutteredIn posted:I went back to Gemma Files’s first collection and it leads off with extremely detailed necrophilia. It’s…. a lot. It's a sick story though. Literally and figuratively. I just finished it and
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# ? Dec 14, 2022 16:30 |
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ClydeFrog posted:My reading list has so much from this thread and the majority still come from your write ups value-brand cereal. Oh you're welcome! I also get my recs from word of mouth so I'm glad to share the horror and joys! My current attempt to get back into reading involves some recent releases. A History of Fear by Luke Dumas. His work also showed up in some lgbt anthologies but I forget if it was horror related. All the same, the premise sounds interesting. quote:The Devil is in Scotland. You Have Never Been Here by Mary Rickert aka M. Rickert quote:Open this book to any page and find yourself enspelled by these lush, alchemical stories. Faced with the uncanny and the impossible, Rickert's protagonists are as painfully, shockingly, complexly human as the readers who will encounter them. Mothers, daughters, witches, artists, strangers, winged babies, and others grapple with deception, loss, and moments of extraordinary joy. The Transgressionists and Other Disquieting Works by Giorgio de Maria [anthology of short fiction] I loved Twenty Days of Turin so mcuh that it's stuck in my head. If you like weird fiction, give this a go. quote:Before an untimely mental breakdown cut short his two-decade career, Giorgio De Maria distinguished himself as one of Italy's most unique and eccentric weird fiction masters. With a background in the post-war literary culture of Turin -- Italy's urbane but eerie "city of black magic" -- De Maria drew inspiration from the Turinese underbelly of occultism, secret societies and radical politics. His writing coincided with the decade of terrorist violence known to Italians as the Years of Lead; the outcome was a weird fiction suffused with panic, rage, trauma, paranoia and meditations on antisocial hubris. In 1978, he told an interviewer: "...I think that the dimension of the fantastic, as much as this may seem paradoxical, is the most fitting one to express a reality as complex as ours today." If my brain doesn't like words, I can always fall back on this very friendly picture book, goofy smile emoji, The Devil's Atlas by Edward Brooke-Hitching [nonfiction] quote:The Devil’s Atlas is an illustrated guide to the heavens, hells and lands of the dead as imagined throughout history by cultures and religions around the world. Packed with colourful maps, paintings and captivating stories, the reader is taken on a compelling tour of the geography, history and supernatural populations of the afterworlds of cultures around the globe.
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# ? Dec 15, 2022 05:51 |
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Wanders back into the thread hi hey. A long while ago I posted about an anthology of epistolary-esque found horror called Journals of Horror: Found Fiction, edited by Todd Keisling. I found [ha!] another anthology, just published this year in october! Woo! I have no idea on the quality, or the plots. I'm hoping for Scanlines by Todd Keisling, but I'll settle for Wylding Hall. *dangles it in the thread like catnip* someone kindly read this and report back, thanks in advance /jk FOUND: An anthology of found footage horror stories by Cull, Andrew; Baxter, Alan; Cook, Georgia; Hepler, Jeremy; McGregor, Tim; Kolakowski, Nick; McLeod Chapman, Clay; Vincent, Bev; Wilkes, Ally ISBN 9780648731528 (ISBN10: 0648731529) <- I added the isbn because 'found' is a terrible name for an anthology or novel. Way too generic, way too hard to sift for. Nitpicking, I know. quote:Eighteen stories of found footage horror. Between April and August 2021 eighteen horror writers disappeared. Gathered together for the first time, these are the stories they were writing at the time of their disappearances. Sorry for the lousy summary but that's the best that's offered on websites... Effort.jpg, I agree. I personally added the table of contents, by the way. God, why are ebooks formatted so poorly? My version has all caps table of contents, then another non hyperlinked TOC after two different editor introduction essays.
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# ? Dec 17, 2022 05:29 |
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Antivehicular posted:Just read Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke last night, and I'm echoing a lot of the same disappointment as other people in this thread. The pacing is janky -- I get that the idea is that the main characters are lonely people moving way too fast, but it still feels like this should all take more time, with maybe some elided time to imply a "normal" borderline-abusive power-exchange relationship happening before things start getting gory -- and the character voices read much too much alike and much too "writerly" for this setup, IMHO. I think there are good bones here (Agnes's history of generational family violence creating warped expectations of intimacy, and Zoe constantly testing Agnes's boundaries and being simultaneously horrified and fascinated that those boundaries don't really exist), but it all needed more time and space and more distinct voices. The overly written first part of Things Have Gotten Worse drove me insane, and it was so unnecessary! He doesn't write like that in the two other stories in the collection. I agree that the pacing was way off. The idea behind the story is excellent, but the execution is disappointing. What did you think of the final story in the collection? I liked it a lot!
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# ? Dec 17, 2022 20:39 |
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drunk idiot
escape artist fucked around with this message at 02:25 on Dec 19, 2022 |
# ? Dec 18, 2022 01:22 |
Themed anthologies have been around for decades. If you want collections, there are no shortage of them. That said, Found was mediocre. A few decent stories and a few stinkers. You're not likely to see any of them in the usual Year's Best anthologies.
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# ? Dec 18, 2022 06:06 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 09:01 |
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Ah yes, the anthology, the lazy man's collection. What?
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# ? Dec 18, 2022 21:05 |