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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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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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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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One of his best books imo
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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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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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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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Should probably spoiler-tag that whole post. Edit: I suppose it doesn't really help the issue if I quote the post. And it's fine if you want to piss and moan about being asked to spoiler tag a ten year old book, but the reason it's being discussed now is in part because I just finished it for the first time about a month ago. If I'd accidentally read that post before finishing the book, I would have been pretty drat disappointed. MockingQuantum fucked around with this message at 05:52 on Apr 22, 2018 |
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Apr 22, 2018 05:18
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I'm thinking about starting The Weird myself, so I'm interested to read your impressions of stuff as I finish it, Solitair. Anybody read A God in the Shed? It looks interesting, and popped up on a lot of "Best Horror of 2017" lists, but I know very little about it.
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Apr 25, 2018 21:24
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So I read Cutter's The Deep a few months ago and actually really enjoyed it, despite general horror goofiness and it underutilizing how terrifying the ocean is. How are Cutter's other books? I'm thinking of picking up The Troop or Little Heaven. For that matter, how's his stuff under his actual name (Craig Davidson), if anybody's read any? Not horror, but I figured there's an off chance somebody in here has read some.
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Apr 30, 2018 18:21
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What makes a book "extreme" horror? I don't think I've ever read anything that's been labeled as such, it makes me think everybody is grinding some mad rails while chugging surge and listening to nu-metal while running from a guy in a mask. Also I can't recommend Hell House without reservation any more. I love it, but I think I love it for a lot of the same reasons that I love terrible B- and C-list horror movies. It's kind of a beautiful mess of a horror story, and at least in my experience opinions on how "good" the book actually is vary pretty wildly. Though I guess the same could be said of most "classic" horror novels released since about 1970. Like I said, I loved it, but I've recommended it to a few people who were looking for pretty much exactly what the book is (creepy, gruesome haunted house novel) and more than a couple of people thought it was a pretty bad book.
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May 6, 2018 04:18
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chernobyl kinsman posted:all of the bizarre and tasteless sex and violence. it's a bad book I'm not gonna lie, I'm tempted to see if I can get it through interlibrary loan or something, because I'm curious to see what makes extreme horror warrant its own genre, in sort of the same way that I'm curious to see what people mean when they're talking about bizarro horror. Though I've read JDATE which seems to be the gateway drug/poster child of the latter and it was less revolutionary than I was led to think. I can see how it would have been when it was first released though. On a different note, I'm maybe a third of the way through A God in the Shed and it's weird. I'm having trouble really deciding how I feel about it. The plot is so far walking a line that really works for me, a kind of mix of mythology and personal drama, with a large scale mystery that I'm hoping the author manages to spin out effectively for the rest of the book. But it's right on the edge of too much mythology and secrets and whatever, in the way that reminds me of how a lot of web fiction stuff sometimes builds too much of a mythology around itself and never really manages to pay it off. So far I'm enjoying it, though, and I'm hoping it stays that way. Overall the plot reminds me of Hex in little ways (small town with a supernatural secret, old traditions that exist to protect people, etc) The weird thing that makes me feel conflicted about the book is that it's oddly amateurish in terms of actual writing. It varies how much I notice it, but the book seems very under-edited at times. The prose itself isn't terrible (though this is by no means Literature here), but there's odd things like clumsy extraneous adverbs, confusion about who is speaking, etc. And there's some large scale structural... quirks, I guess you'd say. Sometimes it's hard to parse out how much time elapses between chapters, and some chapters feel entirely out of time, like they could be lifted out of where they are and moved a chapter earlier or later. It's really hard to explain, and I'm curious if the other goon who said they were going to read it feels the same way. It's nothing that makes the book totally unreadable, depending on your own personal standard for writing quality in the ghetto-est of genres, but it does make the book feel like it was written with wavering attention to detail.
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May 6, 2018 09:07
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Hey spookybook thread, I'm thinking about doing one of two things, and I want to hear what people in this thread think. This thread is kind of dead-ish (how appropriate, I'm getting chills) so I want to either: 1) Petition for a name change to something along the lines of General Horror, since that's basically what the thread has become or 2) Start a brand-new thread that's a general horror thread, yeah, breathe in that new thread smell Second option is appealing since I think a lot of people look at the first handful of pages of this thread and assume it's just Lovecraft & Friends discussion and don't bother to post. But it'd probably be the nail in the coffin for this thread, which would drift off into the deeper pages of TBB and likely disappear forever, along with some good discussion and recommendations. Also with a new thread I think I'd be more likely to write up an actual, useful OP of some variety. Thoughts?
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May 10, 2018 15:47
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anilEhilated posted:A God in the Shed is pretty good. Plot's really contrived and unlikely and I think it would have gone much better if the prologue ended up as a reveal later (to underline the absurd nature of the "curse") but it's an enjoyable read. I'm about 2/3rds of the way through it and really struggling to finish because it feels like the author had a couple of decent ideas and is kind of stalling to draw out the book, or build tension, but it's just not working for me. It's unfortunate because those couple of decent ideas could have been great in the hands of a more experienced writer, but the whole book feels a little amateurish, especially when it comes to the head inspector flagrantly beating the poo poo out of the guy dying of cancer because he's not bending over backwards to be helpful, apparently? and other characters behaving in kind of contrived, unjustified ways. So much of the descriptions of characters and what they're doing kind of reads like someone's armchair psychoanalysis notes too-- which makes some scenes feel like you're just being told a bunch of loosely connected impressions rather than a connected narrative. So yeah, "contrived and unlikely" is a good description overall. It's not trash, but I don't know that I'd call it one of the "best horror novels of 2017" as I've seen suggested in a couple of places.
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May 12, 2018 04:03
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A general horror thread has been made: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3856663 As suggested, I'm not gonna close this one, but I suspect traffic will taper off and tbh a lot of the cosmic horror discussion is probably fine to happen in a general horror thread anyway. If anybody has any suggestions on what should go in a decent OP as far as different subgenres and suggestions of books in those genres, PM me about it or  . I'll probably hack something together but there's a lot of subgenres I've never really touched, like splatterpunk, bizarro horror, extreme horror, etc.
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May 12, 2018 04:26
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Big Mackson posted:I have now read everything H.P lovecraft wrote and i gotta say... a little tinge of racism here or there. Also grotesque penguins. My condolences. I did that a couple of years back and while it was an interesting journey, Lovecraft wrote a whole lot of stuff that just isn't very good. At least I kind of figured out which stories I felt confident suggesting to people when they ask for recommendations, and I know which ones are worth re-reading. Well, with the help of story synopses, at least. I can't always keep straight the various permutations of The Lurking Colour on the Model's Doorstep at this point.
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Apr 18, 2019 18:05
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Big Mackson posted:I treated it as a historical look at racism in the beginning of 1900's and that made it more tolerable so i was able to concentrate more on other types of horrors (besides mixing of the races). There's definitely a lot of extremely objectionable poo poo in Lovecraft's writing that, as stated before in this thread, was super racist even by the standards of his time. But I was also kind of surprised by how much there was that wasn't really problematic at all and I'd love to see those recommended more. On the subject, I just read Winter Tide and it's better than I expected-- it's basically a Lovecraft pastiche, but written from the perspective of a former resident of Innsmouth years after it gets raided by the government. Kind of in the same boat as Ballad of Black Tom in regards to reframing a pretty explicitly xenophobic Lovecraft story. It's basically the follow-up to the short story Litany of the Earth if anybody's familiar with it.
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Apr 18, 2019 18:19
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anilEhilated posted:I'd actually say it's more of a dilution - Litany of the Earth is really good standalone (although not exactly a horror), but the following books feel like they were written just to milk the story for more cash. Nowhere near as tight, nowhere near as coherent thematically and nowhere near as chilling. Glad you spoke up, I read Litany at least a year ago, so I only sort of remembered it (and actually didn't immediately realize Winter Tide was related, until the narrator mentions what happened in it). And I guess saying "it's good for a Lovecraft pastiche" is sort of damning with faint praise to begin with. So I'll amend my recommendation to: go read Litany of Earth. It's good. I actually did start Deep Roots but wasn't very impressed with the beginning, it feels like it took the reasonably well-handled racism themes of the first book and started banging a very big racist gong at the start of the second (I know it's probably not inaccurate of the kind of casual racism that existed in the 40s, but talking about skull shapes and phrenology feels pretty blatant). What did you like better about Deep Roots? I'm pretty undecided about continuing, though I think I'm only a couple chapters in.
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Apr 18, 2019 21:08
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Skyscraper posted:I'm about halfway through it, but I'm really enjoying The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch (not to be confused with The Gone-Away World, a very different book) so far. It's about investigators using quasi-real time travel in the 90's to project into possible futures where people have more information on current criminal cases (and also science), but also running into the seemingly inevitable cosmic horror end of the world in every possible future they end up in. I'll say more once I finish reading it. I'm curious to hear your thoughts, I ultimately liked the book a lot, though I wish he'd done a little more with the conceit, and the author has a couple of writing tics that really bother me. That aside, it's definitely worth a read.
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May 13, 2019 19:32
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General Battuta posted:I don’t know. Season 3 isn’t bad. It would probably be at least a cult hit if nobody had Season 1 to compare it to. I'd believe that he'd be annoyed about that being the focus... but I feel like that just speaks to a creative short-sightedness about what actually made the show appealing. Season 1 did that cosmic horror teasing better than just about anything else, but yeah, his themes of good and evil were so broad as to be kind of tepid and meaningless, and while I loved the season, the things I liked best were the little sprinklings of supernatural we got. The characters were very well done too, imo, but it's hard to say how much of that is Pizzolatto and how much is McConaughey and Harrelson. Basically I'm saying, he should retread that ground because it was so good, and the directions he went instead are... bad? I know it's a matter of taste, but I feel like he didn't get what made the show good. Though I imagine everyone liking the aspects that you stole or stumbled on or didn't want as the focus has to be that much more distasteful of a style to return to. edit: I guess it's worth saying, who know how much of that choice is Pizzolatto vs HBO vs showrunners or whatever, but at least the couple of interviews I've read with Pizzolatto make it seem like he does kind of resent that people fixated on the supernatural elements of the show, in a way that came across a little more personal than I expected MockingQuantum fucked around with this message at 19:56 on May 20, 2019 |
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May 20, 2019 19:54
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General Battuta posted:He should pair lots of terse old man dialogue with a new genre of horror and a new auteur director (to drive off halfway through) every season. Do slashers next. Do pulp detective Freddy vs. Jason. Then do Saw. Then do aliens and make it like that one scene from Fire In the Sky but with no cuts. God imagine how much he could write the hell out of the hypno-regression scenes. Okay at first I hated the idea but by the end of the post you won me over, make it so, Pizzolatto
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May 20, 2019 20:18
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immolationsex posted:Thanks for this, just finished the book. Russo is no Gene Wolfe, but his prose gets the job done without getting in the way of the story, which is something one sees regrettably often in genre fiction. In this particular niche of science fiction, the most important thing (to me) is to convincingly convey the idea of the truly alien – agencies not human, not even remotely understandable in terms of how humans perceive the world. Russo manages to thread the needle of creating a mysterious entity that is frightening to humans, not necessarily because of any malevolence but the understanding that this entity is completely removed from and indifferent to us – but without veering into melodrama. Mildly spoilery: I especially liked how almost casually Russo describes some of the exploration party members losing their minds. It's a topic rich in clichés he could have trotted out (padded rooms, straitjackets, cryptic warnings howled by doomed madmen, blah blah), but instead, the reader is left with the impression that the various mental disturbances are just something that happens as an incidental side effect of coming into contact with forces beyond our comprehension. I am 100% with you on the second spoiler. It kind of ruined the book for me. I'd love to see a similar story done without what felt like a weird need to take a right turn, tonally, at the end.
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Oct 10, 2019 16:42
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