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I haven't seen it mentioned in the thread yet, but in addition to a Ligotti collection, Penguin is also putting out a Charles Beaumont collection. He's probably most famous nowadays as a Twilight Zone writer ("The Howling Man", "Shadow Play", a bunch of other well known episodes) and for screenplays, but his stories really hold up.
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Jul 21, 2015 15:33
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Dr. Killjoy posted:Personally I'm really looking forward to Stross' next book Nightmare Stacks [working title] if only to see how elves (with TANKS! You know, it's usually Elves on the other side of a Tank...
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Jul 21, 2015 15:58
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) fit into the Laundryverse 
. Not so much looking forward to it being narrated by the 
PHANG Alex from Rhesus Chart.
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Roark posted:I haven't seen it mentioned in the thread yet, but in addition to a Ligotti collection, Penguin is also putting out a Charles Beaumont collection. He's probably most famous nowadays as a Twilight Zone writer ("The Howling Man", "Shadow Play", a bunch of other well known episodes) and for screenplays, but his stories really hold up. This looks really great, thanks for the mention! Do we know yet if the Ligotti collection is the original prose or his edited prose?
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Jul 21, 2015 16:38
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China Miéville's upcoming collection Three Moments of an Explosion has a handful of great weird/horror stories. • "Säcken" is like Laird Barron meets Suzuki's Ring, with a couple staying at a lakeside cabin in Germany. The horror is historical and zoological in nature, hope that's tantalising enough. • "The Bastard Prompt" is about an actress working as a standardized patient (you know, a fake patient for med students to practise on), who begins to channel symptoms of diseases not quite from this world. • "The Rabbet" is Miéville's take on an "evil object" horror story. Not entirely original, but super creepy in its execution. The rest of the collection (28 stories in total) is a mix of fantasy, horror, SF and general weirdness. There's some real creepy stuff in there. I recommend it!
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Jul 21, 2015 17:25
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Holy poo poo, I didn't think his rejected pitch for Scrap Iron Man would be in there!
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Jul 21, 2015 19:23
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Hedrigall posted:China Miéville's upcoming collection Three Moments of an Explosion has a handful of great weird/horror stories. That sounds like my kinda thing, thanks for the heads up!
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Jul 21, 2015 23:14
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anilEhilated posted:I'm kinda torn on Vandermeer since I loved Southern Reach but almost equally hated Verniss Underground (how can you even turn a setting this cool into so dull a story, ugh) so I'm honestly not sure how the rest of his work is. Any books stand out? That is probably his least favorite for me. City of saints and madmen was great, as are the other ambergris books.
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Jul 21, 2015 23:29
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Wachter posted:Holy poo poo, I didn't think his rejected pitch for Scrap Iron Man would be in there! Sadly it's not :/
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Jul 22, 2015 00:13
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Roark posted:I haven't seen it mentioned in the thread yet, but in addition to a Ligotti collection, Penguin is also putting out a Charles Beaumont collection. He's probably most famous nowadays as a Twilight Zone writer ("The Howling Man", "Shadow Play", a bunch of other well known episodes) and for screenplays, but his stories really hold up. It doesn't come out till October.  I want it now!
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Jul 22, 2015 01:30
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Hedrigall posted:Sadly it's not :/ Aw, what? Is his movie trailer script/pitch thing for "The Crawl" there?
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Jul 22, 2015 13:44
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Wachter posted:Aw, what? Is his movie trailer script/pitch thing for "The Crawl" there? That one is, as well as two other fake movie trailers. "The Crawl" is the best of the three, though. The other two don't really make sense. There's quite a bit of flash fiction in the collection. 11 of the 28 stories are 6 pages or less. Some of them are really drat good, like "A Second Slice Manifesto" and "Four Final Orpheuses" (which was also originally from his blog). Edit: if you're interested, I did three blog posts in which I reviewed every story of the collection (as well as the book overall). I don't spoil anything major although I do describe the general premise of each story. The first post is here. Now I should stop spruiking my blog. Hedrigall fucked around with this message at 14:08 on Jul 22, 2015 |
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Jul 22, 2015 14:05
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I finished Annihilation Score. gently caress Annihilation Score. It would've been perfect as one of those short side stories, but it absolutely doesn't work as a full novel.
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Jul 23, 2015 03:18
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I figured I'd ask this here since I haven't seen it discussed elsewhere on the forums: can anyone recommend something else in the vein of the Southern Reach trilogy? I read it over a week last month and absolutely loved it-- I found the characters to be moving and relatable (often not a strong point in weird fiction, in my experience), especially Control (writing an otherwise serious novel set in an intelligence agency where the main character is likable but profoundly incompetent, and "Control" itself is not a job title but a derisive nickname given to him for said incompetence, is just great), and a couple of the passages, particularly in the second book, were among the most genuinely unnerving things I'd ever read. Particularly the sequence in the recovered videos from the first expedition to Area X where Lowry is staring at two copies of the expedition leader, both screaming at him to "Make her stop, make her stop!"... are there any other books out there that have that same kind of atmospheric dread and fascination, without totally losing focus on the humans in the story? Are Jeff VanDerMeer's other novels similarly good, or is Southern Reach unique among his work?
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Jul 23, 2015 05:14
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I'm desperate to start the Southern Reach trilogy, think I'm going to have to make a lot of time for reading with how much is has accumulated on my to-read pile. Meant to do this ages ago, as well, but I want to throw out a super-strong recommendation for Mask of The Other by Greg Stolze. Really cool straight-forward cosmic-tinged B-movie schlock elevated hugely by very strong characterisation and pacing. It's knocked around my brain since I read it last November and it always makes me smile.
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Jul 23, 2015 11:39
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k-uno posted:Are Jeff VanDerMeer's other novels similarly good, or is Southern Reach unique among his work? I read Finch some while ago. It was... Well, it was utterly insane, actually. Not in a bad way, mind. But very, very nuts. You also could look at Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers -- some definite parallels to the Southern Reach stuff.
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Jul 23, 2015 22:59
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Ghostwoods posted:I read Finch some while ago. It was... Well, it was utterly insane, actually. Not in a bad way, mind. But very, very nuts. The whole Ambergris series is pretty strong, starting at The City of Saints and Madmen. That one is full of short stories and the two follow ups are Shriek and Finch, both of which are pretty good and very strange. Veniss Underground is really odd and although I didn't really enjoy it a lot of the strange imagery has stuck with me. I'm not sure I can recommend it but I'm certain I've never read anything like it before.
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Jul 28, 2015 06:50
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k-uno posted:I figured I'd ask this here since I haven't seen it discussed elsewhere on the forums: can anyone recommend something else in the vein of the Southern Reach trilogy? I read it over a week last month and absolutely loved it-- I found the characters to be moving and relatable (often not a strong point in weird fiction, in my experience), especially Control (writing an otherwise serious novel set in an intelligence agency where the main character is likable but profoundly incompetent, and "Control" itself is not a job title but a derisive nickname given to him for said incompetence, is just great), and a couple of the passages, particularly in the second book, were among the most genuinely unnerving things I'd ever read. Particularly the sequence in the recovered videos from the first expedition to Area X where Lowry is staring at two copies of the expedition leader, both screaming at him to "Make her stop, make her stop!"... are there any other books out there that have that same kind of atmospheric dread and fascination, without totally losing focus on the humans in the story? Are Jeff VanDerMeer's other novels similarly good, or is Southern Reach unique among his work? Other people's suggestions are good, but you should check out the VanDerMeer edited The Weird http://www.amazon.com/The-Weird-Compendium-Strange-Stories/dp/0765333627 and follow up any of the authors you like there.
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Jul 28, 2015 22:09
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Dr. Benway posted:Stross has a habit of writing himself into corners when it comes to large story arcs and has admitted as much on his blog in the past. The first two books were mearly meant to be pastiches ... Once the stories took on a life of their own he followed what he thought was a suitable progression which unfortunately ... Not really many places to go after that.
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Jul 29, 2015 02:36
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Thanks for your suggestions, guys-- I picked up City of Saints and Madmen and I'm really looking forward to it. Southern Reach really stuck with me for quite a while after I finished reading it, and I'm hoping his other works are similarly affecting.
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Jul 29, 2015 16:10
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Pope Guilty posted:There's not a surprisingly lengthy aftermath chapter in which the protagonist returns to the Laundry and the impact of the book's events is examined, which is weird for a Laundry book. The Rhesus Chart Auditor chapter at the end might be one of my favorite things Stross has ever written. 
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Jul 30, 2015 07:16
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GreyjoyBastard posted:The Rhesus Chart Auditor chapter at the end might be one of my favorite things Stross has ever written. Which makes the Annhilation Score so much worse because of that. All of a sudden I switch perspectives and so I miss out on the further aftermath.
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Jul 31, 2015 11:33
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Ramadu posted:Which makes the Annhilation Score so much worse because of that. All of a sudden I switch perspectives and so I miss out on the further aftermath. I don't think the ending was bad per se but after having the Sleeper in the Pyramid awoken in one book, and a close call with The King in Yellow I'm seriously ready to stop being blue balled. Also, what was the cylinder or tube that Officer Friendly through in the portal before they closed it? I might have missed if they alluded to it earlier but I got the feeling it was a nuke?
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Aug 2, 2015 04:03
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Rough Lobster posted:I don't think the ending was bad per se but after having the Sleeper in the Pyramid awoken in one book, and a close call with The King in Yellow I'm seriously ready to stop being blue balled. It was the score that Mo was being forced to play.
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Aug 2, 2015 04:05
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I just finished the second book in the Southern Reach trilogy... I was a little undecided about continuing after the first book, since I felt it ended in kind of a compelling way and didn't feel like it needed much of a continuation. That said, I'm excited to finish out the trilogy. The second book was solid, but really felt like the middle book of the trilogy. Beyond introducing Control and setting up maybe one or two major plot points that (I hope) will get resolved in Acceptance, a lot of the book felt like it was biding time. Not filler, per se, just not big plot movement. Holy wow did it have some of the eeriest moments in a book, at least one that I've read in recent memory. Not scary, but definitely eerie.
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Aug 6, 2015 00:00
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Just finished House of Small Shadows by Adam Nevill and it's seriously the creepiest loving thing I've read in MANY years. The book very gradually shifts from reality to waking nightmare, as his rather damaged and paranoid protagonist struggles to distinguish between her irrational assumptions and the very real threats that face her. The phrases 'unspeakable horror' and 'fate worse than death' are much overused in horror fiction but entirely loving appropriate here. That book's going to be scrabbling around behind the walls of my psyche for a looong time to come. I'm saying read it, basically More generally, Adam Nevill is very good at describing horrible and inhuman forces without ever fully bringing them out of the darkness. It always mars a good horror story for me when, two thirds of the way through the book, you get a chapter of Scooby-doo style exposition where some little band of heroes breathlessly explain the methods, motivations and origin of whatever the shadowy evil is to each other, the rest of the book turning into the usual race against time to seal Skeletor back in his tomb once and for all, or whatever. Nevill never does this: he hints and sometimes devastatingly shows but you're always left with the impression that the ultimate natures of the forces in his books are utterly beyond human comprehension. I'm basically saying read all his other books, too
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Aug 11, 2015 19:07
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OK, OK I bought it.
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Aug 12, 2015 00:57
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Pistol_Pete posted:Just finished House of Small Shadows by Adam Nevill and it's seriously the creepiest loving thing I've read in MANY years. The book very gradually shifts from reality to waking nightmare, as his rather damaged and paranoid protagonist struggles to distinguish between her irrational assumptions and the very real threats that face her. The phrases 'unspeakable horror' and 'fate worse than death' are much overused in horror fiction but entirely loving appropriate here. That book's going to be scrabbling around behind the walls of my psyche for a looong time to come. So I grabbed this based on this and I'm like 10 chapters in and my impression is "Oh my god this is the most British thing I've ever read". Like some of the slang and sentences are words that are English, I can tell, but they are put together in some weird rear end ways. Pretty cool scenes when she reaches the Red House though, that was really well done with the eyes and other stuff.
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Aug 13, 2015 01:07
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Pistol_Pete posted:Just finished House of Small Shadows by Adam Nevill and it's seriously the creepiest loving thing I've read in MANY years. The book very gradually shifts from reality to waking nightmare, as his rather damaged and paranoid protagonist struggles to distinguish between her irrational assumptions and the very real threats that face her. The phrases 'unspeakable horror' and 'fate worse than death' are much overused in horror fiction but entirely loving appropriate here. That book's going to be scrabbling around behind the walls of my psyche for a looong time to come.
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Aug 13, 2015 13:28
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Forgall posted:I've enjoyed it, my only problem was that constant refrain of "this isn't happening, I'm crazy, there must be rational explanation" etc got pretty repetitive by the end. Also the ending felt pretty predictable, though it's not necessarily a bad thing. Reading the online reviews, a lot of them did complain about how the protagonist kind of drifts through the book, never able to firmly act on her own initiative. I think they were missing that this completely ties in with the central theme of the book: human beings being played on and manipulated by forces far greater than themselves. it only becomes clear at the end of the book that every step along the way has been part of some terrible and highly ritualistic supernatural dance and the protagonist, first figuratively, then horribly actually, has just been another puppet having her strings pulled by... Something. The book echoes classical Greek tragedy where, once events have been set in motion, they proceed inexorably to their predestined conclusion, with the actors in the drama unable to break free of their prescribed roles. Ramadu posted:So I grabbed this based on this and I'm like 10 chapters in and my impression is "Oh my god this is the most British thing I've ever read". Like some of the slang and sentences are words that are English, I can tell, but they are put together in some weird rear end ways. Pretty cool scenes when she reaches the Red House though, that was really well done with the eyes and other stuff. Keep reading! Every time you think: "ok, this book can't possibly get any more twisted now." .. it does.
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Aug 13, 2015 17:47
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Pistol_Pete posted:Reading the online reviews, a lot of them did complain about how the protagonist kind of drifts through the book, never able to firmly act on her own initiative. I think they were missing that this completely ties in with the central theme of the book: human beings being played on and manipulated by forces far greater than themselves. it only becomes clear at the end of the book that every step along the way has been part of some terrible and highly ritualistic supernatural dance and the protagonist, first figuratively, then horribly actually, has just been another puppet having her strings pulled by... Something. The book echoes classical Greek tragedy where, once events have been set in motion, they proceed inexorably to their predestined conclusion, with the actors in the drama unable to break free of their prescribed roles.
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Aug 14, 2015 16:23
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I just grabbed House of Small Shadows from the library myself. I'm excited to see what all the spoiler tags are about. Also Acceptance was really dragging. I'll get through it eventually, I just had a hard time getting started with it.
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Aug 14, 2015 21:49
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Getting back to Southern Reach because it really stuck with me, I was wondering if those of you who've read it think that (spoilers for those who haven't because it's amazing and I don't want to ruin anything) the ending is intended to be a "happy" one or not? When I first finished the book I thought it was an incredibly bleak and heartbreaking ending, since we're left with just Grace and Ghost Bird wondering if the entire rest of the world survived or has been assimilated/destroyed/depopulated by an expanding Area X. And this is reasonable; the last book is titled Acceptance after all, and any situation where the human characters "won" by destroying the entity behind Area X or convincing it to leave Earth would have seemed absurd, given that the entity behind Area X is some sort of cosmic being so far beyond our ability to fight or even comprehend. Aside from Ghost Bird and Grace everyone has died, and Grace is forced to mutilate herself daily to postpone an inevitable transformation into some kind of hideous monster. And there's no obvious path for them to get out, or really any meaningful "goal" left for them to pursue aside from aimless exploration. But despite that, I think it actually ended on a subversively positive note, entirely due to Control's self-sacrifice. Considering that: (a) Ghost Bird is told or shown that Area X is some kind of "terraforming" creature created to prepare a new homeland for a race that no longer exists, and thus has completely lost its set of instructions and can't be said to really know what it's doing. (b) Area X sprang into existence through infecting Saul, and everything manifested within it is at least partially filtered through Saul's past experiences that have been extracted/interrogated out of his mind. This combined with (a) may be why its actions on humans are so twisted and alien-- it has no directions save what it takes from Saul and some fragmentary, alien ideas about what intelligent life is/should be, and for whatever reason (probably because of greater emotional resonance in Saul's mind) it focuses mostly on a particularly apocalyptic portion of his former faith. To have left a job as a minister to take a job as a lighthouse keeper is to go from being a pillar of one's community to a kind of self-imposed exile, and while that part of his past is never discussed directly to do something like that generally suggests a lot of past trauma. Saul being trapped in/transformed into the Crawler in the Tower at the heart of Area X and endlessly writing about strangling fruit and the like is clearly describing/steering whatever Area X is doing to the region and humans that enter it, and given the book's broader obsession with language and semiotics I think it's reasonable to assume that Area X does some of the things it does based on these extracted personality fragments. (c) Despite this, Saul is able to occasionally assert his own humanity; he emerges from the Crawler to warn Gloria to run, for example. (d) According to Whitby (who is often proven correct in his assumptions about Area X), the border separating Area X from the rest of the world may have been generated by a different being/process than the one that created Area X itself, and may exist to contain Area X rather than to keep humans out. Given (abc) it's possible Saul created the border to protect his loved ones elsewhere. If all those things are true, then Control may have saved the rest of the world by replacing Saul; he's the only non-clone to make it all the way to the bottom of the Tower, and his last act is to throw himself into the very heart of Area X in defiance of death and transformation. In doing so he is adding a new "template" for Area X to build upon, and throughout the book he's been shown as fundamentally kind, decent and ineffectual. It's therefore possible that despite being a figure of weakness and pity for the last two books, he has the most impact at the end, and what Area X finds in him could slow its advance or make its effects more benign. Grace and Ghost Bird both comment that something has changed in Area X after his sacrifice (though neither can say what), the Crawler is not mentioned again, and the last pages of the book are a young Gloria's letter to Saul, perhaps more evidence of Saul's humanity having been preserved in some way and him now finally attaining peace and rest. It's possible that this whole interpretation is wrong and everything is doomed. But within the reasonable space of endings given the events of the second book, it's probably the most hopeful. k-uno fucked around with this message at 01:39 on Aug 16, 2015 |
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Aug 15, 2015 23:26
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Austin Grossman's Crooked is a lot of fun and y'all should read it. It's a first-person account by Richard M. Nixon of the secret war behind the Cold War; a war fought with black magic and eldritch abominations. It's really funny and pretty smart, and you can burn through it in like a day probably. NPR has a good review of it up.
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Aug 16, 2015 14:57
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k-uno posted:Getting back to Southern Reach because it really stuck with me, I was wondering if those of you who've read it think that (spoilers for those who haven't because it's amazing and I don't want to ruin anything) Also going to pick up Crooked and House of Small Shadows on the recommendation of this thread!
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Aug 17, 2015 23:21
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Forgall posted:Anyway, which other books of his would you recommend the most? The more incomprehensible and cosmic the better. Apartment 16 is good for cosmic evil: it's an earlier work highly influenced by Ramsey Campbell, very similar in tone to his bleak 70's novels like Incarnate or The Parasite. If you like isolated and alienated characters wandering through gritty urban landscapes where reality frays and vile horrors come squirming out of forgotten corners of run down buildings, then Apartment 16 is for you! My other favorite is The Ritual, which is something more of a straightforward horror novel but told much more in Nevill's own personal style. The basic plot seems a classic horror cliche: bunch of suburbanites head off into the wilderness and find themselves way out of their comfort zone. As they bicker and fall out, they gradually become aware that there's something nasty lurking in the woods around them... I say 'seems' cliched because Nevill handles this with such skill, enthusiasm and originality that it's like he invented the concept. Won't give away any details except to say that the book draws heavily on Scandinavian mythology and folklore.
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Aug 17, 2015 23:47
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End Of Worlds posted:Austin Grossman's Crooked is a lot of fun and y'all should read it. It's a first-person account by Richard M. Nixon of the secret war behind the Cold War; a war fought with black magic and eldritch abominations. It's really funny and pretty smart, and you can burn through it in like a day probably. That is a really smart way to spin a historical biography into something profitable. Will check it out.
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Aug 18, 2015 02:45
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Pistol_Pete posted:Scandinavian mythology and folklore. Shut up and take my money. Well, not you, Adam Nevill.
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Aug 18, 2015 03:12
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Reposting this because you guys may appreciate it. Pvt.Scott posted:I've just started playing Infra Arcana today and it is awesome. H.P. Lovercraft presents: Rogue. One of my early attempts ended with claustrophobia induced terror and a swarm of giant locusts! My take: The tileset and sounds are appropriately spooky. Along with managing your health, you also have a spirit stat that functions as an integrated mana/second health bar. Casting spells costs spirit. Some monsters can strictly attack spirit. If your spirit reaches zero, you die. Instead of a hunger mechanic there is an sanity mechanic. Sanity is broken down into two meters: Shock and Insanity, each on a 0-100% scale. Enter a darkened room without a light source or see a cosmic being, you gain shock. Wait too long around a level and you will begin to accrue shock as well. Once shock reaches 100% you have a minor mental breakdown that can be anything from making noise because you are gibbering to having shadows appear and stalk you. Upon reaching 100% shock resets to 0% and Insanity increases by a certain amount. If insanity reaches 100%, you die. Reach the stairs for the next level however and your shock meter is set to zero, encouraging you to explore efficiently. Currently you can be a War Veteran, Rogue, or Occultist. I recommend Rogue for your first few times since you start with a cloaking spell to escape enemies. In my second game I got cursed for kicking open the slab to an ancient tomb, grabbed a Tommy gun and unloaded drum after drum into Keziah Mason until the foul witch fell, found out that chopping apart reanimated corpses with an axe is a great way to gain shock way too quickly, drank an insight potion and identified an eldrich artifact that scattered my opponents around the level, threw knives at gun wielding cultists with varying success, watched an infected wound become diseased because I couldn't treat the wound in time oh god oh god the zombies beat down the door I spiked, and threw a bunch of dynamite at Major Clapham-Lee and his undead hoard only to eventually fall to their clutches.
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Aug 18, 2015 06:16
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Finished Apartment 16. Why did Hessen even care about capturing people who killed him. Everybody goes to the Vortex after they die to be tortured forever, what could he possibly add to that?
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Aug 19, 2015 22:31
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Helical Nightmares posted:Reposting this because you guys may appreciate it. Hey, someone played Darkest Dungeon.
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Aug 20, 2015 13:31
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