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Man, I hope they focus on the human misery that just has a bit of supernatural poo poo boiling in the background instead of putting the spooky stuff front-and-center. On that note, am I crazy or is Monsters of Heaven is a thinly-veiled allegory for dealing with the fact that climate change is going to probably murder us and definitely all our children?
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May 24, 2019 18:45
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nankeen posted:the good husband is just... wow.  What a note to end on. Great book, but drat.
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May 26, 2019 22:44
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chernobyl kinsman posted:yeah collapse owns 
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Sep 28, 2019 21:19
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chernobyl kinsman posted:im begging all of you to read Aickman I'm just getting into the collection Compulsory Games and it owns hard. So far Marriage and Le Miroir have really stuck with me. MockingQuantum posted:Dark Entries or Cold Hand In Mine are both good, but I'm not sure you could go wrong with any of the collections Yeah this sounds kind of disappointing, from what I've seen so far the main "horror" of his stories have been normality (and with it any sense of security) dissolving around the characters rather than overtly supernatural stuff. Big Mad Drongo fucked around with this message at 15:28 on Jan 16, 2020 |
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Jan 16, 2020 15:17
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I liked The Troop, but didn't care much for The Deep, haven't read anything else. A lot of body horror in both of those, not sure if that's the same across everything he's written. On a balance I would say he's firmly "okay" but not a heavy hitter.
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Feb 7, 2020 20:55
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I feel like The Troop worked, insofar as it worked at all, because the actual effects of the body horror were relatively subdued. You're you're agonizingly hungry at all times to the point where you'll eat anything as opposed to having your body actually melt or become an alien or whatever. While I'll stand by it overall, I agree it kind of fell apart when the worms started speaking to (and maybe mind controlling? it's been a few years) the infected characters. "This horribly virulent disease makes you starve to death because you literally can't eat fast enough to live, and you're going to infect other people as you desperately search for more food" is way creepier than "lol psychic worms want to torment you and make you infect other people." I actually disliked The Ruins and The Deep for the same reason: they both seemed like excuses to torture unpleasant people to death. I don't mind books full of unlikeable characters, but those two seemed to be full of cardboard cutouts designed to die for your reading pleasure. Also seconding The Cipher, that book felt even more gritty and dirty and full of awful characters, but in an earned way, for lack of a better description.
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Feb 7, 2020 23:36
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I enjoyed A Collapse of Horses by Brian Evenson. I'm too stupid to say whether it's properly literary and/or easily Googleable, but if nothing else it's a cut above most horror schlock.
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Feb 19, 2020 21:19
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Skyscraper posted:gotti gang? This is good. Also I need to read more Ligotti.
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Mar 4, 2020 18:54
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I would pay very good money for a Ligotti commentary track for any Muppet movie/Muppet Show episode.
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Mar 6, 2020 17:45
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COOL CORN posted:It would be an hour and a half of existential screaming punctuated with body-heaving sobs I feel like listening to
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Mar 6, 2020 19:59
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Mods, please gimme dat Gotti.
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Mar 9, 2020 14:17
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Reading through The Imago Sequence and Laird Barron seems to feel about old people the same way Ligotti feels about puppets. Just finished Hallucigenia and it's definitely the best in the collection thus far. I also liked Procession of the Black Sloth, but all the others have felt kind of samey, if competent.
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May 18, 2020 15:47
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I actually read The Wasp Factory a few months ago, and while it's intense it's bearable because the narrator is so detached. He's describing awful things, but it's all in a matter-of-fact way, so it's more a look into the mind of a budding serial killer than WHAT'S GROSSER THAN GROSS? READ ON TO FIND OUT!
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May 19, 2020 15:25
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So Night Film sure gets transphobic in a hurry, huh? The main character is a consistently racist, misogynist piece of poo poo, so I can deal with a lot of the stuff in here, but when they visit an ultra-exclusive night club that can only be found through riddles and requires an invite from an elite patron, it's the tamest party in the world except for the fact that some of the women inside are trans. This is apparently the reason for the insane security and secrecy surrounding the place, and enough to make it a den of otherwise indescribable hedonism. Like, I know the main character is expected to overreact upon seeing a woman with an Adam's apple, but there is nothing else in the narrative to make this place worthy of being spoken of in fearful whispers. It's a lame nightclub with a vaguely weird/interesting layout, elevated to apparent bachannalia status by the mere existence of trans people. Am I overreacting or missing something here?
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Jul 26, 2020 20:40
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the_enduser posted:Uh, from what I remember it was run by Russian mobsters or something to do with drug trade. My problem is, unless something changes later in the book, the only difference between that place and any other lovely nightclub is that it has trans people. It's described as this insane party that defies belief and that gets used to build up the Cordova mythology, but what's actually shown is vanilla as hell. They even call back to "I spoke to a lady there, or was it even a lady?" in a later chapter for no real reason. The book is mostly pulpy fun, but that part left a bad taste in my mouth.
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Jul 31, 2020 02:10
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...we're joking? But North American Lake Monsters, if you somehow read this thread but haven't read that book, fits the bill. A lot of Brian Evenson's stuff works too, but it's more things falling apart under the veneer of normalcy in general rather than U.S.-specific.
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Sep 9, 2020 13:16
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Untrustable posted:I heard it's exceptionally good but touches on issues much deeper than "spooky scary monsters" and I don't wanna think that hard. I started The Only Good Indians, and the writing is weird. I'ma stick it out, but the writing is weird. NALM does get real grim, it's pretty much Capitalism Is The Real Monster: The Book. Here is a series of spoilers for the second story, Wild Acre, which is a good representative of the rest of the book: The main character owns a small construction firm. Someone has been making GBS threads inside of and causing property damage to a stalled development he's working on, so he and his two friends/employees stake out the place expecting rude teens. Surprise, it's actually a werewolf! It murders the hell out of the employees, but the main character runs to their truck and escapes. The rest of the story is about how the development never resumes construction, the main character's business goes under and he can't afford to pay the families of the friends he got killed or even his own mortgage. He lamely pretends it was a wolf that killed his buddies as his life unravels. The piece ends with him returning to the site and demanding the werewolf come back and either he will shoot it or it will kill him too, but it never shows.
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Oct 3, 2020 21:24
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Also if you want a lighter Ballingrud check out Wounds, it's still real good but it's very straightforward if weird stories about hell without the underlying messages of NALM. The last story in particular is a swashbuckling novella about a ship full of pirates, cannibals and satanists sailing to the far shores of Hell and evading Hell's navy while being chased by transdimensional parasite-angels. Good times.
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Oct 3, 2020 22:03
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e: Misread, these aren't really modern so feel free to skip Can't go wrong with The Weird edited by Jeff Vandermeer, it covers more than a century of weird horror with names from Lord Dunsay to China Meiville and plenty of more obscure authors in between. A great way to discover new writers. If you like classic ghost stories, Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories is excellent. They're not very scary for the most part, but they're all solid and obscure enough that you won't find them elsewhere.
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Oct 6, 2020 13:00
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a foolish pianist posted:I'm further along in this collection, and I'm kinda running out of steam. The first story (about a young actress caught up in a strange occult film) was pretty good, but the rest feel kinda like factory seconds from other authors - there's even a bad sequel to Laird Barron's Hallucigenia. I've still got about 20% of the book to go, but the collection has been pretty weak. That's my favorite Barron story and by the sound of it I'm not gonna bother with the collection, so I'd love to hear about this one if you care to tell. 
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Oct 19, 2020 18:02
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With the second book, I thought the first two-thirds was the worst part of the trilogy but the last third or so was the best, truly a novel of contrasts.
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Nov 18, 2020 18:36
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Just finished White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi and really enjoyed it. Very slow paced and I think the first half could have been cut down significantly, but overall a good read. I've heard some people complain about the bluntly racist haunted house and the fact that it is one of the book's several narrators, but I think Oyeyemi does a good job weaving that element directly into the supernatural parts, which makes them stand out from fiction I've read with similar themes.
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Dec 2, 2020 20:00
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Just finished The Raw Shark Texts and it's a killer intro that steadily goes downhill. Overexplains unnecessary things while leaving cool concepts unexplored, randomly falls in generic action genre pastiche for long stretches and has the worst secondary villian I ever read he doesn't actually appear in the book or even do anything besides send a single goon to drop a plot macguffin, we're just repeatedly told he's a Bad Dude and the main driver of events for 2/3 of the novel. Despite what it sounds like I didn't hate it or even regret reading it, but man the squandered potential.
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Feb 20, 2021 15:42
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I don't have much to add other than to nth The Cipher as a good read, it's grimy but in all the right ways.
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Feb 23, 2021 20:14
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Anyone looking for something new should check out The Weird edited by edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. It's got over 100 stories, each by a different author, so it's a great sampler platter of all sorts of weird horror and an excellent way to discover new writers. There's also a few stories in there that are hard to find elsewhere.
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Mar 3, 2021 20:19
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I'm like a year late to the party but The Only Good Indians was really good. The first section was the strongest (which seems to be the norm for horror for me, evil forces tend to become less scary as they become more familiar), but it stayed strong overall to the end.
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Aug 18, 2021 20:11
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Retro Futurist posted:I really want to check out that Lesser Creatures book from the OP, but there's no ebook I can find, nothing at the library, and all the copies in Amazon are going for $800 for some reason? This seems to be the curse of obscure horror books with small print runs. I've wanted a copy of Feesters in the Lake by Bob Leman since reading one of his stories in an anthology, and the cheapest copy I've seen is $600.
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Sep 2, 2021 19:36
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https://twitter.com/UweBollocks/status/1435234604940734465 Anyone know this book? I've been trying to get a vibe on it without too many spoilers, and it seems like it may be my cup of tea (an epistolary novel about a two LBGTQ+ women in an early 2000s chatroom that explores the nature of relationships and features body horror) but the negative reviews seem to harp on the gore being over-the-top and the relationship shallow. Reading about a relationship going sour in a very, very bad way sounds interesting, but I generally hate books where people are tortured for the hell of it while the grounded parts of the narrative exist as background noise.
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Sep 8, 2021 13:07
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I've finally had the time to start reading Feesters in the Lake (shout out to Ornamented Death for hooking me up with a digital copy) and this is beautiful, it's a sin that there are almost no physical copies in existence. Not every story has been a hit but Industrial Complex is the best episode of the Twilight Zone to never exist and The Pilgrimage of Clifford M. is my new favorite vampire story. I really dig that, rather than hide the monsters behind vague flowery prose and unreliable/insane narrators, every grody beast is described in great detail, often from their point of view and/or in the opening of the story. It's refreshing for this genre.
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Oct 20, 2021 21:57
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Shaman Tank Spec posted:I recently finished Quiet Houses (very good), and I'm about done with the Elementals. I'm in the mood for more good ghost stories, haunted house or otherwise. I've read the Haunting of Hill House, Hell House, Amityville Horror, Summer of Night, Ghost Story and a few others but largely you can assume I ain't read poo poo. Late to this but if you like "classic" ghost stories Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories has a good array of them. He didn't actually write any, it's a collection of the best 14 he found while browsing hundreds to use in a (never filmed) TV show.
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Nov 28, 2021 23:47
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The best audio horror I've listened to by a long shot were I Am in Eskew and The Silt Verses, both done by the same people. I Am in Eskew is about a man trapped in a bizarre city (quite literally; he's technically free to leave, but all that's outside is an endlessly repeating suburb) full of bizarre happenings. Starts off slow, gets more intense as it goes and ends up with an overarching plot by the end, but imo the more weird than scary slice-of-life-in-an-impossible-city stuff (akin to a short story audiobook) in the beginning is better. It's entirely voiced by the two people who created it. The Silt Verses is about a world where gods are real, and the two illegal murder cultist main characters might actually worship one of the nicer ones, all things said. This one is plot-heavy from the word go and full of super intense body horror. A second season is coming. This one brings in real voice actors, which is good because it actually has a cast. Not as audiobookish as early Eskew, but still worth noting.
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Jan 11, 2022 20:53
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I didn't care for Antimemetics, mainly because it carried on way too long. The same author just released a new story that's much shorter, subtler and imo more horrifying.
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Jan 12, 2022 03:07
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There are definitely bees, but more body horror bees than dick bees. Which could be the same thing? It's been a few years. Also for some reason The End of the Whole Mess is playing out in the wider world, which has zero impact on the story outside the intro. As noted The Deep is kind of a weirdly mediocre mishmash of various other horror stories. It's not bad, but it's kind of forgetable.
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Jan 24, 2022 21:32
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Opopanax posted:I kind of dig it, it's like all these big stories are happening but the book focuses on these smaller pieces. I particularly liked it in the Werewolf one, but I think it has more of a point there. It's all about this misplaced aggression and him trying to feel like an Alpha male in a world that is constantly beating him down in ways he can't fight back on, so he finally bucks up his courage and goes to face this thing and try to erase his mistake, but it's too late by then. Xiahou Dun posted:I would die on the hill defending those endings. Yeah for Wild Acres in particular, which was one of my favorites, the werewolf is the one that directly caused the pain but it's ultimately small potatoes to the forces that are actually running/ruining his life and fighting back against it rather than digging deeper was never going to have a satisfying end. I would also argue that the book's overall theme is people lashing out against the injustices of modern life/capitalism specifically rather than life as a whole but that may be because I was reading a bunch of Ligotti around the same time and Ballingrud is downright hopeful compared to Ligotti. Also in remembering the name of the story I found a take that the MC "becomes" the werewolf himself when he confronts his wife's co-worker which... well, I think that's stretching the metaphor to its breaking point but I can at least see where they're coming from.
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Apr 11, 2022 20:47
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zoux posted:Well I could do with some drat less metaphors and some more pirate feasts in the broken open skull of a colossal dead angel!!! It's incredible how that whole book was firmly "okay but not as good as NALM, kind of a sophomore slump of short stories" and then you get to The Butcher's Table and suddenly holy poo poo! gently caress yeah! YEAH!
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Apr 11, 2022 21:48
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I always ranked Insomnia as one of his worst, personally. I'd probably stand by The Gunslinger or The Wasteland as his best novel, but I'm a huge sucker for weird fantasy and post apocalyptic stuff so I'm biased. In general King's short stories are far better than his longer works. They tend to be more creative and memorable and don't give him a chance to indulge in his worst habits.
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Apr 19, 2022 15:26
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If anybody wants to read good horror instead of bad here's a scan of Jean Ray's Ghouls in My Grave. The Mainz Psalter is a great "ship sails into another dimension" tale ala The Butcher's Table, but with more quiet dread than hellish action, and The Shadowy Street is just some classic weird urban horror. Those two are also in The Weird so probably everyone has read them but the rest of the book is great fun too, most in that pulpy 30s way but with a few other standouts.
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May 3, 2022 01:06
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Another good podcast in that vein is I Am In Eskew, about a man trapped in a city that doesn't exist. It's technically one long narrative but every episode is its own disconnected short story until the halfway point or so, and even then there are standalone episodes that technically connect to the metaplot but stand alone just fine as little bits of city planning horror (they focus on events the narrator isn't seeing in places he's never been to so they never reference established details).
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May 30, 2022 03:15
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Have you read any Brian Evenson? Song for the Unraveling of the World is probably his best collection, but it's all solid.
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Aug 2, 2022 02:47
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Speaking of beloved horror authors: https://twitter.com/MrHolness/status/1559829545519300609 I'm cautiously curious about this one. Darkplace was genius but I'm not sure how well Idiot Stephen Koontz will translate into actual prose. The excerpts he read in the show were hilarious but a few hundred pages of that could just end up tiring.
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Aug 18, 2022 16:06
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