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Also, I can see why people might object to the female characters. They're far from the worst in spec-fic/urban fantasy, but Stross does sometimes edge slightly into Jim Butcher-esque greasy neckbeard territory.
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Sep 8, 2012 15:06
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So, what cosmic horror is best at being cosmic? Y'know, giving a sense of scope and grandeur, conveying a universe that is alien, uncaring, and utterly inimical to human life.
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Feb 4, 2014 01:26
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JerryLee posted:Appropriately for the conversation, Stross should definitely be up there, even if weird fiction in the cosmic horror sense is only one part of his oeuvre. His Laundry shorts and Colder War are available online to boot, though I don't know if I'd recommend people read the Laundry shorts before at least The Atrocity Archives--Colder War ought to be enough to tell someone if they'd enjoy Stross's brand of Lovecraftian thriller, though. It should be noted that Colder War is probably his truest piece of cosmic horror, though - while the Laundry novels can get pretty bleak, they're more Lovecraft-lite horror-comedies. Just so's people know what they're getting.
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Jul 10, 2014 12:17
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JerryLee posted:I would avoid reading "Overtime" without a grain of salt, because it is one of the shorts that even I found too goofy for my taste. It's basically a Christmas special, though, so it gets a bit of a pass on that. Also, it still has a bit of cosmic-horror 'oh poo poo' because it marks the start of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, which means far worse stuff is coming than Santa turning out to be an Old One.
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Jul 10, 2014 22:33
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I didn't like The Shadow out of Time - the twist was too telegraphed and not scary enough. Cosmic horror should not leave you going 'wait, that's it?'. The Colour out of Space is Lovecraft's masterwork, and the rest of his famous stories are all pretty good (especially Innsmouth), but I want to throw out a shout for one of his more obscure and unpromising pieces, Beneath the Pyramids. Yes, it stars Harry Houdini and is set in Egypt (with the expected racism), but it's hella atmospheric. The Unnameable is also pretty great for seeing Lovecraft do self-parody.
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Jun 2, 2015 13:15
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Pththya-lyi posted:The main problem with that story is that body-hopping, time-and-space-bending librarians are not so much scary as they are totally awesome. (See also: Deep Ones. :iamafag:) Right, yeah. There was this huge dissonance between the glamorous and somewhat sympathetic perspective we got on the alien monsters and how they and their actions kept being described as scary, monstrous, and so on. The showing really conflicted with the telling.
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Jun 3, 2015 00:45
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Ghostwoods posted:I read the Void just a couple of weeks ago. Found it rather disappointing, actually -- flat characters, and a plot that could be characterized, if slightly unfairly, as "Event Horizon meets, uh, Event Horizon". Sure, there's a pinch of Lovecraftian gribbliness in place of the overt Infernalism of EH, and the dreams manage some nice atmosphere in places, but it's not enough to carry a novel for me. Yeah, it felt really amateurishly written. Not sure why it gets so much buzz.
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Jun 8, 2015 03:36
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Neurosis posted:a lot of the substance abusers might have been fun in small doses Aren't small doses exactly what you wouldn't get with them, though?
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Sep 28, 2015 17:49
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Clipperton posted:Is it as nuts as Tom Kratman's Caliphate? Because I can read that for free. It never fails to terrify me that Kratman was Director (Rule of Law) for the Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute for the US Army War College. I mean, how does one job description have so much multilayered  in it?
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Sep 28, 2015 17:54
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Rough Lobster posted:I'm actually certain you could show Lovecraft a picture of Eva Mendez and he'd rescind his racist ways instantly. Nah, wouldn't work. Go for a really sexy piece of African architecture instead.
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Sep 30, 2015 11:37
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Phi230 posted:So like a total neckbeard I just bought the Necronomicon. I've never read Lovecraft before, so where should I start since this is a collection of all his poo poo. I've heard that his writing is incredibly bloated with description of things like houses and other kind stuff like that but what really sparked my interest is how he built up a horror for pages where the payoff is just a black person. If you want really typical Lovecraft (as in, a good feel for what his work is generally like), try The Shadow over Innsmouth or Call of Cthulhu. If you want genuinely great (but less typical) Lovecraft, The Color out of Space is your best bet. Really, though, if that's the collection I'm thinking of (the one with the black and gold cover, right?), you can just make your own way through it without requesting a guide, because it's mostly bite-sized short stories with the odd longer work thrown in. Not that much time investment if you come across a dud. I will say that The Shadow out of Time was a big letdown, though. The big reveal was way too telegraphed and underwhelming. So you might wanna skip that one, seeing as it's pretty long.
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Mar 5, 2016 02:49
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Dr. Killjoy posted:Finally got to read Nightmare Stacks and gotta say that I was remarkably surprised that Stross fulfilled every expectation and more on depicting elves as the assholes they'd be (although they did come off a little too much like Eldar from WH40K for my tastes). I hated Alex in Rhesus Chart but gotta say that he was better fleshed out here and dare I say sympathetic. I was expecting a war but I think Stross went a bit overboard on the techno-thriller aspect (though I guess that really can't be avoided - war rooms and switchboards lighting up are nice and dramatic but boring if used too much). I think it helped that it was played slightly more for horror than Clancy technobabble usually is. The loving descriptions of demented weaponry and frantic military preparation were basically a Lovecraft-esque buildup emphasising that holy gently caress a ridiculous number of people are about to die horribly. Stross does that quite a bit - see also, A Colder War and the later parts of Merchant Princes.
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Jul 2, 2016 11:18
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anilEhilated posted:The elven cavalry rides unicorns with spiral horns. It's a cameo, really. A bit more than a cameo, considering that the cavalry are their main military forces outside dragons that we see in action. We certainly get a better idea of why the Laundry freaks out so badly over unicorns. You know, apart from the severely icky reproduction process.
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Jul 7, 2016 11:36
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Solitair posted:I read a few blog posts detailing how some people were turning against Lovecraft because of his racism, and IIRC "Litany" was brought up in one of them as a subversion of the Cthulhu mythos in light of how people's attitudes to race have changed in the decades since Lovecraft was alive. Having it star the Deep Ones is a particularly good pick. They've always been one of his more accidentally sympathetic races.
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Jul 18, 2016 01:21
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ravenkult posted:Kiernan hates ebooks with a passion and is kinda uh...eccentric. There was also her blowup with Benjanun Sriduangkaew, in which she initially came across as the victim and then... uhh... less so (long story short, Sriduangkaew was revealed to be a highly vitriolic Internet personality called requireshate, an expose of her won an award for sci-fi journalism, and then it turned out that while she had been a bit of an rear end in a top hat, Kiernan and a cabal of other authors had either distorted or outright fabricated most of her worst offences because they were super mad about being called racist, and were trying to drive her out of the industry). Can't help but wonder if that's damaged her with some publishers.
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Nov 4, 2016 15:13
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The Vosgian Beast posted:Requires Hate was a horrendous person, and anyone opposed to her certainly can't be all bad Read the link. Requires Hate's schtick was going super-aggressive against anything she percieved as bigotry in sci-fI and fantasy, which meant that she could frequently come across as an rear end in a top hat but tended to make enemies who were even worse. The Kiernan incident was one of those. Remember that the Mixon report, which ended up being the source on most of her bad behaviour online, was mainly sourced from one of her proto-Rabid Puppy stalkers, and that Mixon never bothered to mention this.
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Nov 5, 2016 13:20
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The Vosgian Beast posted:Suuuuuuuuuurrrreeeeeeeeeeeee Again, read the link. That turned out to be a fabrication by one of her stalkers. She's said some pretty questionable poo poo, and she's often been meaner than the situation really warrants, but she's also been subject to an intense defamation campaign that should be familiar if you've ever seen what happens to high-profile non-white women calling out racism (see also, NK Jemisin, who Requireshate has chewed out but who I believe later came to her defence as the defamation campaign picked up speed).
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Nov 5, 2016 15:00
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The Vosgian Beast posted:In which keeping track of usernames counts as e-stalking The stalker in question also doxxed her and imitated her on Twitter. There's also testimony about physical, real-world stalking, not just the Internet kind. Come on, man.
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Nov 5, 2016 16:24
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Buca di Bepis posted:Well that's certainly a tame way to say "routinely posted death and rape threats" I'm being tame because while her actual behaviour was unpleasant, and her efforts to cover it up troublesome, what she was genuinely responsible for is way less than what she's accused of doing. Seriously, I get lots of folks aren't all that interested in author drama (even if the folks responsible for this genre were amongst the richest sources of drama in their field), but if you're going to spew poo poo like this, at least bother to do some goddamned reading, because it's a story that reveals an uglier and further-reaching mess in the fantasy/horror community than just 'newbie author was a cyber-bully'. Sorry about derailing the thread like this, but given the highly charged origins of cosmic horror and weird fantasy, it can be hard not to have the politics creep in every so often. Anyway, back to discussing things that care not for race, colour, or creed, because we're all crunchy and good with ketchup.
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Nov 8, 2016 01:16
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Flopstick posted:Well, I've just published a new cosmic horror novel. Took me two and a half bloody years to research and write, so I've basically got no objectivity left - and reviews aren't in yet - but early feedback has been gratifyingly positive. If anyone fancies an excursion to a remote Siberian plateau where a covert FSB medical experiment might be about to go horribly wrong, I've sorted a goon discount: 50% off with code BZ24P at Smashwords. Ferretbrain's Arthur B didn't like it very much, and he's hardly an uncritical Lovecraft fan.
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Mar 11, 2017 12:56
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It's also on Amazon and should be percolating through to other channels soon. Available in
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chernobyl kinsman posted:i don't mind slow burn, i actually really like slow burn horror. the issue is that it's just not good You're putting your spoiler-tags in some very strange places.
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Apr 12, 2017 16:53
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Rough Lobster posted:Superheroes make an uneeded appearance as well. A kaiju attacks Japan at some point and no one really mentions it other than like one comment. To be more precise, superheroes are humanity's psychological reaction to the stars becoming right and more and more people spontaneously becoming able to alter reality. The vampires were an early, limited example of that, and the elves are a straight-up, gently caress-off alien invasion/refugee crisis as the walls between worlds begin to collapse. The latest book involves the Great Old Ones beginning their takeover, and Britain having to pick its patron. The genre stuff is always flavouring on an ongoing apocalypse.
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Aug 28, 2017 07:51
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Waroduce posted:what is the novel that best represents his work He’s mainly (though not exclusively) a short story writer, so Teatro Grottesco is your best bet for a sampler of his style.
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Oct 17, 2017 18:32
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anilEhilated posted:You realize Kraken isn't horror, right? Just checking. I mean, it does have horror elements. It’s kind of on the divide between horror and urban fantasy
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Nov 20, 2017 21:05
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Word of advice about The Deep - you may find it a more upsetting read than most if you happen to have pets. On the other hand, if you liked it, I might suggest Seed by Ania Ahlborn. It’s small-scale supernatural horror without The Deep’s grander, more cosmic leanings, but it has an extremely similar tone - a dark, sadistic, and deeply personal psychological assault. The warning this time around, though, is for parents of young children.
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Nov 27, 2017 03:46
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They explained the afterlife in Worlds of Hurt - you’re locked on a shelf in a cosmic bank vault for all eternity by a covetous higher power, and the heavenly choir are people pleading to get out. It’s pretty nasty, especially if you know what prolonged confinement does to someone’s mind.
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Dec 2, 2017 12:05
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Ornamented Death posted:Just to clarify, I think the Books of Blood are important when considering the history of the horror genre, because they told types of stories that, for the most part, had never been told before. Barker was one of the first successful horror writers (if not the first) to fully incorporate sex and sexuality into his stories. What he did with Books of Blood was a watershed moment and the genre is unquestionably better for them. This seems a funny thing to say given works like Carmilla. Sexuality in horror goes back a long, long way. Maybe Barker was the first to be so graphic, but I wouldn’t put money on it.
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Dec 20, 2017 21:52
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Ornamented Death posted:I guess I phrased that wrong. Sex and horror have always walked hand in hand, but the sex part of the equation was always hidden away in the shadows, generally only alluded to, never front and center. Barker shined a spotlight on it. Carmilla, to use your example, while not necessarily subtle about the sexuality of the title character, was still very coy with the whole thing. By comparison, In the Hills, the Cities opens with two dudes stopping in a field for a quick gently caress session. I think you’re still a little way off. Cinema had been doing that sort of thing for decades before Barker, especially Italian giallo. For original English-language stuff, there’s Don’t Look Now as one of the classic examples from the Seventies.
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Dec 21, 2017 00:37
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Relevant to the thread’s interests.
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Jan 22, 2018 21:04
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Tertius Oculum posted:Just caught up on this thread, got some great book recommends, thanks! Try Ship of Fools/Unto Leviathan (different regional titles for the same book) for a bit more of your spooky space exploration needs.
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Dec 4, 2018 22:50
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chernobyl kinsman posted:haha i missed that. what a weird dude Initially thought the tree was a dragon, was disappointed when it wasn't.
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Dec 15, 2018 21:51
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Also, Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire is an amazing name for a Lovecraftian author.
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Apr 1, 2019 13:23
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