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Negative Space hosed me up good and proper. Anybody got any recommendations for bleak, existential horror like that and Blindsight?
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Mar 10, 2024 10:37
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| # ¿ May 8, 2024 05:37 |
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Just finished North American Lake Monsters and I'm struck by in how every single story the real monster or ghost is male failure, inadequacy, and neglect: - The absence of the waitress's abusive husband is filled by Alex, a sort of parasite who exists by co-opting the identities of other men. He didn't make the skins he wears, he just chanced upon them. - The construction worker is haunted by his failure to defend his colleagues from the werewolves, and, later, to avenge them. - The doctor's hesitance and sentiment towards the dog, contrasted with the gruff pragmatism of his colleagues, nearly wipes the whole expedition, and is karmically punished by a shoggoth infecting his charge. - The aspirant neo-Nazi is groomed into nearly committing a hate crime by bigger Nazis with bigger dicks. - The father in the angel story is haunted by his own negligence, becomes impotent, and is cuckolded by a guy who beats the poo poo out of him. - The absence of the kid's abusive father is filled by the vampire. - The abusive ex-con infected by the lake monster is cuckolded, and haunted by his disconnection with his daughter. - The homeless father is literally haunted by his disconnection from his daughter. - The Good Husband fails to react to save his wife, fails to accept her zombification, fails to protect his daughter from it all. They're all good stories but taken one after another they really did feel like the author working through some poo poo.
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Mar 12, 2024 01:38
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I'm 100% reading Wounds soon. I'll take well-written horror that retreads similar themes over garbage every time. I want to read some Laird Barron too. I've only read one short story in that Jeff Vandermeer Weird anthology. Is there a good place to start? Imago Sequence?
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Mar 12, 2024 09:56
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Franchescanado posted:Weird question, but when does this get into the Ghost part of the Ghost Story? I read the first chapter last weekend on a whim trying to find something new to read and it was seemingly a kidnapping story? I liked it, but it was not at all what I was expecting with the title and blurb. Pretty quickly, and it does a real good job of building an overwhelming sense of dread. Book-ruining spoilers: Sadly it goes off the rails a bit. By the end the seventy-year-old protagonist is chopping up shapeshifters with an axe in a cinema playing Night of the Living Dead and I kind of switched off
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Mar 14, 2024 21:53
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value-brand cereal posted:Arithmophobia: An Anthology of Mathematical Horror by Robert Lewis This was not good. Opens with three decent ones and the rest is pretty much drivel, e.g.: Real Numbers, by Liz Kaufman posted:Numbers are real. And they are watching us very, very closely. lol
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Mar 23, 2024 03:03
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Between Two Fires loving RULED! Hell yeah!!!!
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Mar 26, 2024 18:16
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It reminded me of Glen Cook's trilogy that begins with The Black Company (I forget what it's called), but Fires is more polished. I found both by searching for "books that feel like Soulsbornes" and they both fit the bill of underequipped protagonists battling unimaginable evil and despair
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Mar 26, 2024 20:22
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Hell House loving sucked. Hell no.
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May 4, 2024 12:12
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Jedit posted:Matheson's Hell House, and not some other book with the same name? Yeah, Matheson. The prose is bad to the point of incoherence. The word "no" is used as an exclamation about 2,000 times, giving every character a stilted, robotic voice, and those characters are wafer-thin. The book is named for a location which is then given no sense of place whatsoever. This is a personal quibble of mine, but the back-and-forth between Professor Sceptic von Hubris and the beatific spiritualist over whether the source of her very real magic powers is "residual energy" (serious science) or ghosts (preposterous nonsense) is interminable and consumes most of the plot. This was also my least favourite part of The Exorcist (the book, I mean - the movie adaptation wisely downplayed this aspect). It's like one character scoffing about another character's belief in unicorns while expounding their own theory of leprechauns. But the icing on the cake - and what makes it read like a screenplay for a lost episode of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace - is that they eventually defeat the big bad ghost by discovering he was short in real life and insulting him. It's an exorcism by mogging. It was all just pretty risible from start to finish.
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May 6, 2024 00:54
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| # ¿ May 8, 2024 05:37 |
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Drunkboxer posted:Have you read The Haunting of Hill House? Yep, one of my favourites.
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May 6, 2024 14:06
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