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It would make sense in a mystery, I think. That's about the only place.
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Nov 1, 2016 19:25
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Captain Candyblood posted:It annoys me whenever writers include exact weight/height/clothing measurements in their stories, it's never not weird. Unnecessary and boring to read too. Why would you write down your character's medical chart instead of describing them with, you know...descriptive language. In defense of Thomas Harris (a phrase I intend never to use again in this thread), the clothing-size thing in SotL is a plot point; the serial killer is a tailor who wants to make a full-body costume out of a woman's skin, so he's specifically targeting women of an appropriate size for his plans. I do agree that stating specific heights/weights is just an opportunity to get poo poo wrong without adding narrative value, though.
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Nov 1, 2016 19:29
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pookel posted:I believe The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is the best thing he's ever written. It's tight, it's dramatic, it features a realistic child character, it leaves the supernatural elements mostly mysterious, and most importantly, it HAS A loving RESOLUTION THAT MAKES SENSE. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is easily my favorite thing King has ever written. It seems like a lot of people who like King's other stuff really dislike it though, which I never understood at all.
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Nov 1, 2016 20:45
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Dapper_Swindler posted:this. dracula is one of my favorite book, (Victorian horror/writing in a epistolary style) the idea that modern science stops vampires, thing is, blood typing wasn't invented yet. so lucy was getting who knows what kind of blood in her.(which i am sure the fan ficitionists have used as an excuse.) What the gently caress is this post.
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Nov 1, 2016 22:10
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The Wikipedia description of bestselling Victorian-era vampire story [i]Vary the Vampire]/i] is kinda pricelessquote:Though the earliest chapters give the standard motives of blood sustenance for Varney's actions toward the family, later ones suggest that Varney is motivated by monetary interests. The story is at times inconsistent and confusing, as if the author did not know whether to make Varney a literal vampire or simply a human who acts like one. Varney bears a strong resemblance to a portrait in Bannerworth Hall, and the implication throughout is that he is actually Marmaduke Bannerworth (or Sir Runnagate Bannerworth; the names are confused throughout the story), but that connection is never clarified. He is portrayed as loathing his condition, and at one point he turns Clara Crofton, a member of another family he terrorizes, into a vampire for revenge. Mods please change my name to "Marmaduke Bannerworth"
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Nov 2, 2016 01:40
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Penny-Dreadful stuff tended to be like that since they were published in a magazine first, and writers were paid by the word. The only reason Varney is noted is because it's longer than War and Peace. I'm reminded of Harry Stephen Keeler , a pulp-fiction writer whose books aren't just dreadful, they're hopelessly convoluted and bizarre: http://home.williampoundstone.net/Keeler/Jones.html quote:X. Jones is the story where midget-hating tycoon Andre Marceau is found strangled to death in the middle of a freshly rolled croquet lawn. His dying words are "The Babe from Hell!" The only footprints, other than Marceau's own, are some tiny, baby-sized footprints. These do not lead out to the body but merely describe a small arc around it. No wonder the police suspect a Flying Stranger-Baby! Keeler supplies several handsome maps of the scene of the crime.
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Nov 2, 2016 03:26
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Where did the baby footprints come from?
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Nov 2, 2016 05:50
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Aliens
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Nov 2, 2016 05:57
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Inspector Gesicht posted:I'm reminded of Harry Stephen Keeler , a pulp-fiction writer whose books aren't just dreadful, they're hopelessly convoluted and bizarre: This work of art is in the wrong thread. 
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Nov 2, 2016 08:27
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i am three inches tall and weigh barely a fluid ounce
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Nov 2, 2016 08:46
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Inspector Gesicht posted:Penny-Dreadful stuff tended to be like that since they were published in a magazine first, and writers were paid by the word. The only reason Varney is noted is because it's longer than War and Peace. Real disappointed the solution wasn't Napoleon Bonaparte loving his neck up with a running DDT outta nowhere.
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Nov 2, 2016 10:29
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If we've learned anything from reading penny dreadfuls it's that you can't afford to be a candy-rear end.
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Nov 2, 2016 12:58
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Captain Candyblood posted:It annoys me whenever writers include exact weight/height/clothing measurements in their stories, it's never not weird. Unnecessary and boring to read too. Why would you write down your character's medical chart instead of describing them with, you know...descriptive language. Perfect timing! I've become enchanted with all the dumb stuff you can read with the Kindle's monthly subscription - mostly laughably terrible short horror stories, but some that show a bit of promise. My most recent discovery is the suspiciously-named Jon Athan, who falls mainly in the former category and whose primary defining characteristic is introducing every character with, well, uh: "40-year-old Jacob Barrens stood six-one with a strapping physique" "The dark-skinned police officer stood six-one with a bald dome and burly physique" "He stood six-one with a lean figure" "Randall Fox stood six-two with a burly physique" "Andrew Rosenberg stood six-one with a lean physique" "Sylvester stood six-three with a lanky figure" "Michael Martinz stood six-one with a sturdy physique" "55-year-old Carl Caldwell stood five-eight with a feeble figure" "Marcus stood five-eleven with a strapping physique" "58-year-old Robert stood five-eleven with a frail figure" "Shawn Lake stood five-eleven with a lean but muscular figure" "Bertha stood five-five, five-eight with her sleek black high heels" "His body shriveled to a five-five stature with a timorous posture" (!) "A frail old man standing five-five" "She stood five-five with a slender figure" "He stood five-ten with a scrawny physique" "Victor Barton stood five-five with a pusillanimous posture" "Harrison Cassidy stood five-eleven with a strapping physique" This is where I got tired of typing, but a quick search showed over a dozen more. Out of just a randomly-chosen book with ten short stories.
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Nov 3, 2016 01:40
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Captain Hygiene posted:Perfect timing! I've become enchanted with all the dumb stuff you can read with the Kindle's monthly subscription - mostly laughably terrible short horror stories, but some that show a bit of promise. My most recent discovery is the suspiciously-named Jon Athan, who falls mainly in the former category and whose primary defining characteristic is introducing every character with, well, uh: Hey, you found Bill O'Reilly's new pseudonym
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Nov 3, 2016 09:01
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I'm reading Autumn Rain by David J. Williams and it's mostly alright futurewar cyberpunk idiocy, but it's getting pretty annoying how his characters are constantly super condescending towards each other. Like literally all conversations are like this:quote:“What the hell does that mean?” Also there's a lot of one character saying something, the other saying "Meaning what?", then the first one saying "Meaning blah blah ..."
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Nov 3, 2016 10:14
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Powaqoatse posted:I'm reading Autumn Rain by David J. Williams and it's mostly alright futurewar cyberpunk idiocy, but it's getting pretty annoying how his characters are constantly super condescending towards each other. Like literally all conversations are like this: Ah, the Metal Gear Solid tradition of dialogue. "Dialogue?"
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Nov 6, 2016 23:54
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canis minor posted:I pretty much enjoyed Earthsea, especially Ged's journey to defeat the wizard in the Dry Land - how his influence is compared to a narcotic, and how he's slowly destroying the entire world, because, well, nobody wants to die. On the other hand Tehanu is terrible garbage and she should have left it as a trilogy. I read the Tombs of Atuan as a kid because someone did not do their job in our private Christian school's library. They were supposed to, you know, filter out stuff with content like that book had. I am pretty sure I was the only person to ever read it, and I really enjoyed it! The next time I found a LeGuin book, I was like "oh boy!" and it was Tehanu, and that's why I've never read any of her other books.
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Nov 10, 2016 02:55
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You should try reading some of her other books. That aren't Tehanu.
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Nov 10, 2016 03:01
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For people who haven't read it, the only thing I remember clearly about Tehanu was that I have no idea what the plot was, other than "bad guy comes in at the end and the wizard guy and the ex-priestess from Tombs of Atuan can't do anything, and he kicks her in the tits, and then the random new girl turns out to be part dragon and saves them the end". I'm being literal, by the way, he makes her crawl on all fours and kicks her in the tits.
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Nov 10, 2016 03:11
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WickedHate posted:Which is funny, because book Dracula was an ugly as sin old man, which some people might coincidentally recognize as "corpse-like". Nosforatu was actually a fairly straight adaption of Dracula(although an unlicensed one, hence the title just being German for vampire and the count being named Orlok, and they invented the sunlight weakness to make for a cheaper climax). Um Actually Nosferatu is probably a corruption of "Nesuferitu" a Romanian word for the devil which means "the unclean one". 
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Nov 10, 2016 05:19
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The Lone Badger posted:You should try reading some of her other books. That aren't Tehanu. This. Rocannon's World and The Left Hand of Darkness are good reads.
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Nov 10, 2016 05:23
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David Mitchell is the guy who wrote Cloud Atlas.
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Nov 10, 2016 06:33
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Fritz Leiber was a pretty cool dude, but the Wanderer is sort of... well. While showing how humanity would react to an alien planet's sudden appearance near Earth is cool and novel for the time, I don't think sex with a hot catgirl was necessary for the story. And it won a Hugo. I guess creepy sex fantasies were just considered a normal part of sci-fi at the time.
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Nov 10, 2016 12:32
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Dapper_Swindler posted:this. dracula is one of my favorite book, (Victorian horror/writing in a epistolary style) Have you read King's Jerusalem's Lot? Not to be confused with Salem's Lot, although that, too, should be your poo poo
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Nov 10, 2016 13:43
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hackbunny posted:Have you read King's Jerusalem's Lot? Not to be confused with Salem's Lot, although that, too, should be your poo poo Isn't Jerusalem's Lot the Lovecraft Church in the woods?
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Nov 10, 2016 13:45
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flosofl posted:Isn't Jerusalem's Lot the Lovecraft Church in the woods? Yes! a Victorian epistolary Cthulhu Mythos tale
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Nov 10, 2016 13:52
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Suleman posted:Fritz Leiber was a pretty cool dude, but the Wanderer is sort of... well. While showing how humanity would react to an alien planet's sudden appearance near Earth is cool and novel for the time, I don't think sex with a hot catgirl was necessary for the story. And Jack Chalker was basically Internet Fetish Guy before the internet came along. Women being magically forced into fatness, interspecies sex, characters being transformed into mind-controlled sexy women - I can't believe I didn't figure out what was going on with him until I discovered creepy fetish sites and the penny dropped.
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Nov 10, 2016 22:53
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Runcible Cat posted:And Jack Chalker was basically Internet Fetish Guy before the internet came along. Women being magically forced into fatness, interspecies sex, characters being transformed into mind-controlled sexy women - I can't believe I didn't figure out what was going on with him until I discovered creepy fetish sites and the penny dropped. Chris Claremont wrote novels under a pseudonym? Huh, learn something new everyday.
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Nov 11, 2016 01:01
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Double posttt
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Nov 11, 2016 01:02
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ahem, R. Crumb is the weird fetish grandmaster
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Nov 11, 2016 01:25
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WickedHate posted:Chris Claremont wrote novels under a pseudonym? Huh, learn something new everyday. I think he also wrote a few Wild Cards stories.
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Nov 11, 2016 01:31
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Suleman posted:I guess creepy sex fantasies were just considered a normal part of sci-fi at the time. "At the time". 
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Nov 11, 2016 03:16
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are there still a lot of popular sci-fi books with weird sex fantasies in a post-racial and post-gender Hugos
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Nov 11, 2016 07:23
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The Saddest Rhino posted:are there still a lot of popular sci-fi books with weird sex fantasies in a post-racial and post-gender Hugos How quickly people forget that such an author, the best of authors, was actually nominated for a Hugo? 
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Nov 11, 2016 13:27
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The Saddest Rhino posted:are there still a lot of popular sci-fi books with weird sex fantasies in a post-racial and post-gender Hugos They're not there yet. IIRC they've passed a rule change to devalue slate-voting (like the puppy slates), but that won't have an effect until next year. The last couple years, people have had to vote "no award" to the racist/sexist nominations instead of vote for actually good books (with exceptions ofc).
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Nov 11, 2016 15:05
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I'm a big fan of Iain M. Banks, but some of his early stuff just doesn't do it for me. I read The Wasp Factory, and while it wasn't bad for most of the length - a little shocking for shocking's sake, but compelling enough I wanted to see what happened next, the ending ruined it for me. One of the main plot points in the book introduced early on is that the main character is a sociopath because a dog bit off his junk when he was a little kid. He's also literally misogynistic - he hates women. At the end of the book it's revealed that he was actually born a girl, and while a dog did bite his junk, it didn't castrate him, just "slightly chewed" his labia. His father hid this from him by putting testosterone in his food. Once he finally finds this out - because even though the book goes to great lengths to convince you that he's incredibly intelligent and well-read, he never once looked at his crotch, then a diagram of the female reproductive system, and went "wait a sec" - he suddenly decides, tee hee, this is all cool and good, I'm a big sister now, I'm gonna go take care of my insane little brother now that all my issues are worked out!. I would've thrown the book across the room if it hadn't been on my Kindle. Consider Phlebas was not as offensively bad, just insanely dull. It's not even that the plot is unexciting - there's a lot of stuff going on - it's something about the way it's written. The author spends pages describing these elaborate sets, then describing the characters moving around in it, almost like he was trying to describe a play through text, but I could never clearly see what he was describing so I didn't care that Horza took three steps to the right and fired around the corner at the lefthand side of the upper terrace or whatever. Right after that book I read Look to Windward, which was kind of a spiritual sequel to Consider Phlebas, and it was shocking how much better it was. I couldn't put Look to Windward down. On Piers Anthony chat: the first book I ever read from the adults section of the library was Through The Ice, by Piers Anthony and Robert Kornwise. The most shocking thing I remember from it was that one character wears a "three-quarter sarong", so named because it covers three quarters of her torso - guess which quarter is the uncovered one! I'm about to give it a re-read though, because after reading the rest of the poo poo he's done I'm sure he snuck something in there that gradeschool age me just didn't twig to.
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Nov 12, 2016 15:45
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I haven't read it for a long time but I remember one of the gimmicks of Piers Anthony's Incarnation of Time novel was that the protagonist becomes the manifestation of time and ages in reverse, so his future is his lover's past... meaning at one point he will be an old man and his love interest will be a little girl.
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Nov 12, 2016 19:18
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Alistair Reynolds' latest 'Revenger' is pretty well outside his normal style and not very good. I read everything he writes but Revenger in particular smacks of a book he wrote quickly to fulfill a contract.
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Nov 12, 2016 19:21
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A Pinball Wizard posted:I'm a big fan of Iain M. Banks, but some of his early stuff just doesn't do it for me. I read The Wasp Factory, and while it wasn't bad for most of the length - a little shocking for shocking's sake, but compelling enough I wanted to see what happened next, the ending ruined it for me. One of the main plot points in the book introduced early on is that the main character is a sociopath because a dog bit off his junk when he was a little kid. He's also literally misogynistic - he hates women. At the end of the book it's revealed that he was actually born a girl, and while a dog did bite his junk, it didn't castrate him, just "slightly chewed" his labia. His father hid this from him by putting testosterone in his food. Once he finally finds this out - because even though the book goes to great lengths to convince you that he's incredibly intelligent and well-read, he never once looked at his crotch, then a diagram of the female reproductive system, and went "wait a sec" - he suddenly decides, tee hee, this is all cool and good, I'm a big sister now, I'm gonna go take care of my insane little brother now that all my issues are worked out!. I would've thrown the book across the room if it hadn't been on my Kindle. Wasp Factory is flawed, but I would recommend it just for the sheer "seeing is believing" factor. Never going to get what happened to crazy brother out of my head. Never.
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Nov 12, 2016 19:23
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Is a collection of shirt stories outside the purview of "terrible books?' I really like Chris Crutcher books as a teen. They're standard fiction YA, and always involve some kid dealing with prejudice while trying to help a friend/friends in some kind of seriously abusive situation. Dramatic stuff, but not simple morality tales and the teens mostly acted like teens if a little quippier and braver than you might normally find. (If anyone ever watched the movie Angus, that's from one of his books) So I feeling some nostalgia I picked up Angry Management, a short story collection where he takes a few of his old characters from different books and has them meet up and do stuff. I figured at worst it would be fanficy, and it was. And then I got to the last story. It's a loving bury-your-gays story, literally and thematically with a layer racism added in. Openly gay, black Marcus James is living in smalltown-bigotry Idaho and finds a noose in his locker, which he opts to wear around his neck since it was "made for him. Administrators call him in for being "disruptive" and good Christian white boy, Matt Miller shows up to rat on the rear end in a top hat football players who did it. Later on, Marcus get lynched by said assholes; they run over him with a boat and claim it was an accident and get away with it. Some teacher has a talk with Marcus' grandfather about his loss that goes into sundown towns, and grandfather decides to move away. Teacher also has talk with Matt about the injustice of it all during which he says Matt was filled with a sort of light, and he could tell this kid was really going to go places. So the smart, gay, black kid gets murdered with no hope for justice and it prompts his grandfather to leave the town all together. But that's o.k. because this Christian kid will have some undefined great future as a result of the tragedy. It's absolutely disgusting, and I can't imagine ever reading this guy's books ever again.
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Nov 13, 2016 23:46
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