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MockingQuantum posted:True, though not what I was thinking of. It was a reworking of The Night Lands, someone suggested it over reading the original. I can't find out much about the reworking, though, anybody read it? I have, and highly recommend the reworking. It's called The Night Land: A Story Retold or something like that.
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Apr 3, 2018 01:34
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yeah. it's good. strongly recommend john c wright's Awake in the Nightland, which has four novellae in the Night Land universe, if you like the rewrite. last story has a theme that might cause some eye-rolling that being divine love, which is ironic because wright wrote it while he was an atheist given his known political predilections but the first three are really good and ape the feel of the original very well.
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Apr 3, 2018 09:45
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MockingQuantum posted:I remember reading (possibly in here?) ages ago that some major work of weird fiction or cosmic horror had a reworking that should be read instead of the original. Anybody know what I'm talking about here? I feel like it was maybe a Clark Ashton Smith or William Hope Hodgson novella but I can't remember precisely. Oh I'm actually pretty sure you're talking about The Night Land.
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Apr 3, 2018 15:51
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For the lazy among us. Ignore the cover, or recognize that The Night Land is a love story...set in a weird, hosed up vision of the far future. Either one works  .
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Apr 3, 2018 16:14
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Ornamented Death posted:For the lazy among us. Hahaha I was already convinced it was The Night Land that I was thinking of, but that cover confirms it. I remember that cover way too well, I think the last time I considered reading Night Land I saw that cover and thought "... well I do have a bunch of other books I want to read". (That's totally not the reason I didn't read it, that cover is just worthy of derision)
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Apr 3, 2018 16:34
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I have the US edition of Saturn's Children on my bookshelf, so I am immune to bad covers.
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Apr 3, 2018 16:39
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To be honest I kind of love awful book covers, and there are some truly terrible ones for horror and weird fiction. Plus I'd take a bad, but unique, cover over the boilerplate options of "a cold-looking barren landscape and/or leafless tree" and "an abstract red/black gradient" that seem to be the only two covers used for every recent horror novel
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Apr 3, 2018 17:17
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My friend let me introduce you to the wonderful world of small-press horror publishing. http://thunderstormbooks.com/thunderstorm/books/ http://dimshores.storenvy.com/products https://subterraneanpress.com/horror-thriller Some are good, some are awful, but they're all interesting.
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Apr 3, 2018 19:22
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Ornamented Death posted:My friend let me introduce you to the wonderful world of small-press horror publishing. Oh man, those are fantastic. My local library has a copy of Beneath an Oil Dark Sea and I've always found that cover to be strangely funny. Yet still, lots of barren cold landscapes. I get that a lot of horror novels actually take place in barren cold places, but it seems like a wildly overused cover material. Like, it makes sense for Ararat or Stranded or The Terror, but there's so many books that don't really need that kind of cover. Edit: oh that Thunderstorm link is particularly funny because based on my experiences with Keene he genuinely thinks they're really good covers. I mean, a lot of them aren't bad, but some are pretty cringe-worthy. MockingQuantum fucked around with this message at 19:39 on Apr 3, 2018 |
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Apr 3, 2018 19:37
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You have to put it in perspective when it comes to Keene and covers: one of his very early books, Earthworm Gods got a stupid name change (The Conqueror Worms) and one of the worst covers I've ever seen, all against his wishes. He's still bitter about that, 15 years later. And most of the Maelstrom covers are fine, if a bit uninspired at times.
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Apr 3, 2018 19:49
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Is this cover... intentional?
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Apr 3, 2018 20:00
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Fire Safety Doug posted:Is this cover... intentional? Ornamented Death posted:...some are awful... Yep.
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Apr 3, 2018 20:14
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Adam Nevill's "Last Days" gave me a drat nightmare. I couldn't tell you the last time I woke up genuinely afraid rather than just buzzed about whatever horrible poo poo just went through my mind.
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Apr 5, 2018 16:31
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MockingQuantum posted:To be honest I kind of love awful book covers, and there are some truly terrible ones for horror and weird fiction. Plus I'd take a bad, but unique, cover over the boilerplate options of "a cold-looking barren landscape and/or leafless tree" and "an abstract red/black gradient" that seem to be the only two covers used for every recent horror novel Oh boy, do I have a Voyage to Arcturus cover to share with the thread when I get home. I haven’t read Night Land Retold but it seems really lame in concept to me. Hodgson’s weird archaism of style is often awkward and he didn’t have as good a command of it as he thought, it doesn’t work for him in every story, but in Night Land it does. It conveys the alienness and weirdness of the world far more effectively than any modernization could. To try and retell it in plain language misses the point, it’s like simple English Shakespeare.
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Apr 5, 2018 18:59
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Hodgson didn't do that weird language thing in other stories; House on the Borderland and Boats of the Glen Carrig are written in perfectly normal English, for example. On top of that, The Night Land is a perfectly weird story without the horseshit language tricks Hodgson failed at, so reading a version that doesn't make you go cross-eyed is fine.
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Apr 5, 2018 19:19
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Ornamented Death posted:Hodgson didn't do that weird language thing in other stories; House on the Borderland and Boats of the Glen Carrig are written in perfectly normal English, for example. Matter of degree. House on the Borderland is relatively non-archaizing, but it shouldn’t be, because its setting is quite contemporary. Even so it has a lot of the more difficult characteristics that Boats and Night Land will dial up, like the tendency towards rarity of dialogue and long sentences with tons of semicolons. Boats of the Glen Carrig however has an 18th century setting and is accordingly archaic in style, though as I said I don’t think he really pulls it off all the time. For Night Land he kind of plays this up: it’s narrated by a 17th century voice, but immersed in a culture which is far further from contemporary than the 17th century is. So he gets to play with funky orthography and semicolon-madness, but also a lot of unusual features that aren’t so much archaic as intentionally weird; stuff that I guess could be called dialectical usage. I’m thinking of stuff like the narrator’s frequent (but not constant) use of “did be” instead of “was” here. To my knowledge, this is not an archaism, it’s a deliberate choice of style. If you don’t like the style, that’s fine, but it was a choice he made in how to present the book (and frankly is not at all hard to understand) which is why I think it’s lame to strip that out for a retelling.
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Apr 5, 2018 20:53
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Ornamented Death posted:Hodgson didn't do that weird language thing in other stories; House on the Borderland and Boats of the Glen Carrig are written in perfectly normal English, for example. When even Lovecraft thinks the writing in The Night Land's original version is hard to read, it definitely becomes something in need of fixing for the average reader to be able to enjoy
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Apr 5, 2018 20:56
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skasion posted:If you don’t like the style, that’s fine, but it was a choice he made in how to present the book (and frankly is not at all hard to understand) which is why I think it’s lame to strip that out for a retelling. Most people don't like the style, and it's not because it's hard to understand, it's just kind of dumb. The goofy language Hodgson chose to employ doesn't actually add anything to the story. Like, you do not need weird speech cadences to understand that we're not dealing with "modern" times; the fact that it's a weird, hosed up world where the sun has burned out and the last remnants of humanity live in a giant pyramid are more than enough to establish that. I've read both Hodgson's original and the retelling; you lose literally nothing and probably gain a few hours of your life back by not trudging through his tortured prose.
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Apr 6, 2018 02:41
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I got halfway through Hodgson's original Night Land before I gave up. I wasn't enjoying the prose, either, and this is coming from someone who loving loves Gormenghast. The breaking point came when the guy slapped the woman around for being too hysterical. Either that or the prose I could take on their own, but both in one story made me decide to stop, though I still want to give the revised version a shot. Anyway, The Screaming Skull by F. Marion Crawford It's a ghost story reminiscent of The Tell-Tale Heart, but written from an odd perspective: a first-person character narrating to a second-person character who is present for events in the middle of the narrative. This leads to awkward moments where, since the reader can only hear what the first-person character says, that character has to describe or infer to what happens around him and his guest, as well as what his guest says to him when they can get a word in. It'd be hard to get away with that in a modern story, but in the context of a story from 1908, this conceit works fairly well. There's not as much melodrama in it as, say, parts of Dracula, but there's enough to turn the inherent artificiality of the narrator commenting on everything from a distracting flaw to a deliberate style choice. It also adds some ambiguity to the ending. Neither of the characters are named prior to the newspaper article at the end of the story detailing a mysterious death, so it could have been either one that died. It was probably the narrator, but he also might have lured his guest to his house deliberately so that the ghost would kill the guest instead of him. I also might have missed a detail that would confirm it was either of them, but I like my interpretation better for now. Let's see if I can pick up the pace on this. At this rate I only have seventy hours of reading to go. 
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Apr 6, 2018 04:52
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Ornamented Death posted:Like, you do not need weird speech cadences to understand that we're not dealing with "modern" times; It still blows my mind that Alan Moore worked on Crossed (comic about "rage" zombies who rape and dismember people. infamous and reviled by most) and he did that. Set it a hundred years in the future where "gently caress" had evolved into "Hello" and "love" was "poo poo" or something mad like that. It was like he was trying to avoid the plague in Pontypool.
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Apr 6, 2018 09:24
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Drunken Baker posted:It still blows my mind that Alan Moore worked on Crossed (comic about "rage" zombies who rape and dismember people. infamous and reviled by most) and he did that. Set it a hundred years in the future where "gently caress" had evolved into "Hello" and "love" was "poo poo" or something mad like that. I read Crossed and I don't remember a lot of that. EDIT: The one in the future with Alan Moore is Crossed: +100
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Apr 6, 2018 16:42
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FYI, this month's BOTM, The Twenty Days of Turin, is an insanely good, unsettling, deep bit of horror:quote:The Library is where The Twenty Days begins, with De Maria's narrator, a self-made investigator into the "collective psychosis" of the citizens of Turin following the appearance of The Library and the strange events surrounding it . There was the smell; the vinegary stink that no one could explain. The insomnia which seemed to grip the entire city. The noises — the far-away screaming and the war-cries — that were equally inexplicable.
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Apr 10, 2018 04:41
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Cheers for the heads up! Also "Last Days" has some pacing issues it feels. The whole thing is this great slow burn with a dude biting off more than he can chew and getting haunted by spooky bastards then right at the very end it turns into a locomotive and there's all this exposition and I'm 40 pages before the end and I have no idea where it's going. Still a great yarn, just kind of came out of nowhere even with the little hints as to what was coming set up throughout the book. edit: I know we've been over Nevill and his endings before, I apologise if this feels like the thread is treading water. Drunken Baker fucked around with this message at 14:18 on Apr 10, 2018 |
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Apr 10, 2018 13:47
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Drunken Baker posted:Cheers for the heads up! Yeah, I love Nevill, and he does spooky really well, but every novel of his that I've read has had mad issues. His books often switch gears pretty dramatically at a certain point (The Ritual is the most extreme example). I have no objections to that, and I think switching modes is cool and good. It's just that the second parts are consistently much inferior to the first, usually trading spookiness and unease for batshit stuff that is not done very well. This bothered me most in Under a Watchful Eye, where there is a lot of well done dread injected into the quotidian in the first chunk, and a lot of over explained and not very well done stuff about the cult in the second. I haven't read Last Days in a while (it was the first novel of his that I did read--I had stumbled across it when looking for Brian Evenson's novel of the same name), but I recall the last sequence as being likewise very different and much worse than what preceded. I keep meaning to check out his short story collection. Like Stephen King, he may be better in that vehicle.
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Apr 12, 2018 14:19
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Speaking of King being better as a short story writer, I just finished Pet Sematary and while it's overall good (even having had pretty much everything softly spoiled ahead of time, since it's been around for a while) it does feel like it's about 150-200 pages longer than it needs to be. Still a good option for King, though, and it does deserve to hang out in the standard list of his best books, I think. I can totally see why it'd be a rough read for some people. Just gonna throw this out there, since I like to every chance I get, From a Buick 8 is an underrated little gem of a King novel. It doesn't overstay its welcome, it does some neat/unusual things, and the plot actually benefits from some of King's short story strengths based on how the book is written.
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Apr 12, 2018 16:24
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MockingQuantum posted:Speaking of King being better as a short story writer, I just finished Pet Sematary and while it's overall good (even having had pretty much everything softly spoiled ahead of time, since it's been around for a while) it does feel like it's about 150-200 pages longer than it needs to be. Still a good option for King, though, and it does deserve to hang out in the standard list of his best books, I think. I can totally see why it'd be a rough read for some people. I have an actual toddler now so I should try a reread and see how it goes quote:Just gonna throw this out there, since I like to every chance I get, From a Buick 8 is an underrated little gem of a King novel. It doesn't overstay its welcome, it does some neat/unusual things, and the plot actually benefits from some of King's short story strengths based on how the book is written.  One of his best books imo
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Apr 12, 2018 18:08
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Clipperton posted:
I'd definitely rate it higher than a lot of his that end up on "best of" lists. It has a great level of weirdness that fits the story very well (as opposed to weirdness in books like It, where ymmv how off-the-wall bizarre and stupid it is) and it actually ends in a satisfying way, which is King's biggest downfall, IMO.
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Apr 12, 2018 19:10
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The Willows by Algernon Blackwood I got sidetracked and struggled to find a way to describe this story that isn't just saying it's like if Walden transitioned into The Blair Witch Project. Two people go camping, and the story is frontloaded with descriptions of the natural world around them. Those descriptions gradually become more unnatural as it becomes apparent that something is watching them. It's mildly creepy and technically competent, but didn't leave much of an impression on me.
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Apr 12, 2018 19:16
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Solitair posted:The Willows by Algernon Blackwood I read The Willows and The Wendigo last year, and kind of felt the same about both. I'm glad I read them, and you can definitely feel Blackwood's influence on a whole host of writers that followed him, but his writing does have the same problem as a lot of his contemporaries, where it now just feels a little tame and (sometimes intentionally, to a fault) archaic. I think I enjoyed The Wendigo slightly more, though it's a more conventional horror story compared to The Willows, too.
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Apr 12, 2018 19:54
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I adore Blackwood but you really have to be invested in the descriptions of nature and camping/hunting to really get the most out of a lot of his stories. His stuff is just so pleasant and engrossing to read. "The Man Whom the Trees Loved" is my favorite of what I've read. On the other hand, if you don't want to read interminable descriptions of camping minutia, the John Silence stories are mostly absent of them, with the exception of "The Camp of the Dog." My students last year ended up really liking "A Psychical Invasion" and the whole psychic detective figure even though they didn't like the other Blackwood they read very much.
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Apr 12, 2018 21:06
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Are there any writers that are kind of direct descendants of Blackwood when it comes to how they handle horror? Specifically I really enjoy the aspect of his work that centers around nature being kind of loving terrifying (at least for city folk), and how he kind of blurs the line between supernatural horror elements and the totally mundane. I get a kick out of any books that make nature ambiguously scary, but most kind of cock it up halfway through (The Ritual, sort of). I know Barron has frequent nods to Blackwood in his writing, and one story that references him by name in the title, but are there other writers that really capitalize on that sort of inherent fear of being lost in the wilderness? There's lots of good books that remind you how terrifying a place the ocean can be, but not as many that seem to accomplish the same with plain old forests or whatever.
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Apr 12, 2018 21:30
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julietthecat posted:His books often switch gears pretty dramatically at a certain point Hahaha even with all the warnings from this thread it STILL sideswiped me. Going from Blair Witch to Aliens over the course of a few pages. With The Ritual being done so well in film format, I'd love to see Last Days adapted as well. With some re-writes and a nip-tuck, naturally. Speaking of trees and the like, just started Ramsey Campbell's "Darkest part of the Woods". Heard good things, though I'm finding the colloquialisms used a bit hard to penetrate.
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Apr 13, 2018 11:51
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Ornamented Death posted:I wish there was a legal way to get ahold of the original version of JDATE. I didn't read it until a five or so years ago, and I'd like to see what was changed. Check your post office around midnight after smoking a bunch of herb, that's how I got mine. As tradition demands with a book like that I put it back where I found it once I'd finished it.
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Apr 14, 2018 01:16
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Relevant Tangent posted:Check your post office around midnight after smoking a bunch of herb, that's how I got mine. As tradition demands with a book like that I put it back where I found it once I'd finished it. Weirdly this is not the only account I've heard of someone randomly stumbling on a copy of JDATE out in the wild. A friend of mine found one in an empty concession stand in a public park once. He, too, put it back when he found it.
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Apr 14, 2018 01:24
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Strom Cuzewon posted:Book is Full of Spiders and What the Hell Did I Just Read (how the heck do I abbreviate these?) massively dialled back on how Dave is a barely functioning psychopath... S P O I L E R S F O R A N O L D A S S B O O K I thought Dave changed halfway through JDatE when he got murdered by Korok and replaced by !Dave who is Dave for the rest of the book(s). I kind of assumed that's why he was so generically heroic etc. because that's how his friends saw him and so that's who he ended up being, the same way the reporter was a crusty white dude because that's who he was expecting rather than being the actual (black) reporter. ^^^If you find a book in the wild you'd better put it back there, they don't take to domestication once they've had a taste of freedom ime.
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Apr 14, 2018 03:38
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Speaking of, I finished What the Hell Did I Just Read and the title... fits. One question - what is the deal with the BATMANTIS??? It might be Dave on Soy Sauce because that can apparently do anything and the whole thing turned unreliable narrator or it's an unrelated monster? Then what's the point of the note that says do not release it from the garage it's trapped in?
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Apr 14, 2018 11:51
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MockingQuantum posted:Are there any writers that are kind of direct descendants of Blackwood when it comes to how they handle horror? Specifically I really enjoy the aspect of his work that centers around nature being kind of loving terrifying (at least for city folk), and how he kind of blurs the line between supernatural horror elements and the totally mundane. I get a kick out of any books that make nature ambiguously scary, but most kind of cock it up halfway through (The Ritual, sort of). I know Barron has frequent nods to Blackwood in his writing, and one story that references him by name in the title, but are there other writers that really capitalize on that sort of inherent fear of being lost in the wilderness? This is basically Richard Gavin's entire thing.
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Apr 14, 2018 21:39
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Relevant Tangent posted:S P O I L E R S F O R A N O L D A S S B O O K Yeah, I thought the same myself. Psychopath Dave is replaced by good Dave by the end of JDaTE. Also, when people are talking about the original release of JDatE, do they mean the Permuted Press version or is there an older one?
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Apr 15, 2018 13:51
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I think people mean the old online serialized version? That's where I first read it, at least.
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Apr 15, 2018 14:49
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I was referring to the online serial that predated the Permuted edition.
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Apr 16, 2018 02:26
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