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The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > The General Horror Book Thread: Between Two Fires fucking RULED! Hell yeah!!!!
 
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Drunkboxer
Jun 30, 2007

StrixNebulosa posted:

Joshi is out, Klinger is tentatively in. Thank you.

fwiw I know I can just plop Lovecraft on my kindle for free or read in my browser but I want a nice paperback / hardback if I must edition so I can lounge around in a fancy chair and feel like some old-timey rich rear end in a top hat as I read about fear of the other (while being queer/female/disabled/etc myself)


Late to this discussion and I’m only a lurker in this thread but fwiw this is why I got a copy of Klinger. Yeah I’m not getting a lot of out the annotations because of long familiarity with HPL but I wanted a decent hardback collection that I could thumb through while drinking coffee or scotch or something. Well, that and I was passing through Providence and I wanted a souvenir (I didn’t even realize Klinger had signed my copy until I got home). The annotations aren’t super revealing like I said but I do like the photos and illustrations and Moore’s forward. Also its got a pretty dust jacket :shrug:

* # ¿ Mar 6, 2024 19:01
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# ¿ May 8, 2024 10:53
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Drunkboxer
Jun 30, 2007

escape artist posted:

Jeffrey Ford wrote a strange "sequel" to Moby Dick called Ahab's Return... anybody check it out? I was pulled in by the initial story- finding out that Ahab never died and actually had a son to reconnect with. I did feel like the idea fizzled out before the end... Curious if anyone else has read it.

What’s the point of Ahab if he doesn’t die? I don’t come to the Ahab shop for personal growth.

* # ¿ Mar 16, 2024 15:46
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Drunkboxer
Jun 30, 2007
 The structural elements of a haunted house are 4 walls and a ghost.

* # ¿ Apr 2, 2024 19:16
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Drunkboxer
Jun 30, 2007

Yarrington posted:

Maybe an obvious one but Alan Moore's "Providence".

EDIT: Just realized I walked into the 'little context or description provided". It's superficially his take on Lovecraft, and most of the issues riff on a specific story but in the context of a frame story that's pure Alan Moore. A wealth of historical detail, and parts really emphasize the horror of things that have become fairly rote/tropes by now (the mind/body swap issue really got under my skin). Benefits from either a reference or an encyclopedic knowledge of the extended canon, but doesn't require it. It has a lot on its mind.

It’s really great. My only minor gripe with it is that I wish it didn’t connect with his previous two Lovecraft comics at the end. Those aren’t bad but Providence is so much better and I wish it could stand on its own.

edit: nitpicking here but I also could have done without a cameo from ST Joshi.

Drunkboxer fucked around with this message at 14:35 on Apr 20, 2024

* # ¿ Apr 20, 2024 14:20
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Drunkboxer
Jun 30, 2007

Wachter posted:

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.


Have you read The Haunting of Hill House?

* # ¿ May 6, 2024 12:01
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The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > The General Horror Book Thread: Between Two Fires fucking RULED! Hell yeah!!!!