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Drunken Baker posted:The worst part for me was when the aul girl (who Pinhead literally kicks to death) quips, "These aren't your usual sado-machoists from beyond the grave!" The worst part for ME is when Hell is properly described for the 1st time and some of the demons are riding about the City of the Damned on bicycles. loving bicycles. I'm hoping I hallucinated that particular detail so please let me know if I'm mistaken. A much better and unjustly much-neglected novel is The Shaft, by David Schow, which I read recently. Written in the late 80's, The Shaft is set in Chicago in the depths of winter and it's a gritty crime thriller where the supernatural elements are only slowly and subtly introduced (most of the key characters don't realise that they're actually starring in a horror story until it's FAR too late...). This is a beautifully well-written book: I've read plenty of godawful horror, so I know something good when I see it. The key characters are deftly drawn and you really start to care about them, even the shithead drug dealer Cruz, who flees to Chicago after successfully daring his bosses girlfriend to leap from a hotel roof into the pool while they're all shitfaced drunk (you can probably guess how that turns out). Also, look at this front cover. LOOK AT IT:  In short, this book owns and everyone should read it.
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May 19, 2018 19:47
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Jedit posted:If the BBC adapted it, it's probably good. The BBC always gently caress them up, though. They take a perfectly crafted, stand-alone short story, that James spent the best part of a year polishing and say: "Heyyyyy, this story is good, I guess, but what if we add this to it!" Like, they took Whistle and I'll come to You and added in a subplot where the dude's wife had Alzheimers and he was super-conflicted about it and the haunting all somehow fed into that and it sucked balls. It also completely missed the dry, understated humour that's an essential ingredient of an M R James story by making the protagonist a lonely, regretful old guy rather than an earnest young nerd who totally doesn't believe in ghosts... until he's faced with the evidence of his own eyes! An M R James story is already a near-perfect little tale: all they have to do is translate it into a visual medium but no, every time it's "We're updating this for the modern era!" and they poo poo out a high-budget, star-studded, impeccably produced failure. Yeah, I'm mad.
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Mar 18, 2019 22:27
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Flopstick posted:You should respect the source material, of course, but part of that is accepting that you are working in a completely different medium and need to make accommodations for that.) Yes, I'm aware of the technical issues in translating a printed story into a visual one. Conveying something through film is quite different to achieving the same thing in a written story. My issue is that the directors of MR James adaptions (doing an annual Xmas adaption has become a bit of a tradition at the BBC) invariably start adding in fresh and incongruous elements to the stories, just so they can boast that they've "made their mark" on an established classic. Invariably, it fails to work and detracts from the story, rather than making it more comprehensible for a contemporary audience.
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Mar 22, 2019 21:21
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He has a new novel out at the end of October! https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-reddening/adam-nevill/9781916094116 quote:The Reddening is an epic story of folk and prehistoric horrors, written by the author of The Ritual, Last Days, No One Gets Out Alive and the three times winner of The August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel. 
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Sep 2, 2019 22:23
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alf_pogs posted:just finished "The Inhabitant Of The Lake and Less Welcome Tenants" by Ramsey Campbell and its very enjoyable - but pretty meat and potatos weird Cthulhuverse fiction In his defense, those stories were all written when he was between the ages of 14 and 19! Owlkill posted:
Yes, Campbell wrote a lot of good stuff in the 70's and 80's, all set in the bleak, declining, post-industrial urban landscapes of the era. Lots of lonely protagonists trudging home in the dark, down streets of empty, condemned houses to their grim rented rooms, while something unspeakable (but strangely and horribly familiar) lurks behind them in the shadows.
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Oct 15, 2019 17:32
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Just finished John Lindqvist's 'I'll Always Find You' and, well, that was a chilly and uncomfortable read. It's highly autobiographical and Lindqvist claims in the book that everything he's writing about actually happened. This means that you're never sure where the truth ends and the fiction begins and you're left with the unsettling feel that rather more of it is accurate then you'd like. Lindqvist writes his best when he's drawing on the grim experiences of his early life and there's a horrible authenticity to the events that he describes.
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Nov 27, 2019 08:58
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It's well worth reading but lacks the rawness of I'll Always Find You. The narrator of the later book is basically an older Oskar who never got to meet Eli: lonely, isolated and embittered. Let The Right One In was itself highly autobiographical and it's jarring to see some of the characters and locations from that novel reappearing in a book that the author assures us is completely true this time. I am Behind You is a bit more Twilight Zone: you can read it as an enjoyable supernatural thriller without having to squirm through the author's unflinching accounts of screwing up his relationships or getting arrested for shoplifting (I found these harder to read than the horror bits lol).
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Nov 27, 2019 19:44
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Anyone reading Adam Nevill's new book, The Reddening? It's pretty much like his other books to date: folk horror, detailed research, isolated protagonists with troubled pasts and the inevitable flakey and unreliable boyfriend but Nevill IS awfully good at pulling it all together. I just wish he'd extend his range a bit: I've always thought he has at least one excellent crime novel in him.
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Dec 4, 2019 11:42
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escape artist posted:11/22/63 is in my top 5 King novels ever. Definitely a must read. 11/22/63 is good 'cos it forces King into a time period where he can't mangle modern technology  More seriously, it's kinda freaky to think that a time period that we regard as another era is one that King's old enough to have experienced 1st hand.
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Jan 31, 2020 09:22
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a foolish pianist posted:The Shaft by David Schow. It's fun, and it loving loves going on and on about cocaine. The Shaft is great: the characters all think that they're in a gripping, sleazy crime thriller and don't realise that it's actually a horror story until far too late. Beautifully written, too. Speaking of beautifully written, I'm on T.E.D. Klein's The Ceremonies at the moment. You can tell the dude spent years writing this because it's so perfectly polished. Trouble is, I've come to really like the four main characters in the book (Ok, not the college-lecturer protagonist so much, 'cos he's a bit of an rear end in a top hat tbh) and I'm getting to the point of the book where bad stuff is going to start happening to them, rather than the walk-on characters. I kind of want to sneak a look at the end, to see who gets to survive but then that would spoil the book.
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Feb 3, 2020 22:00
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anilEhilated posted:Tangentially related to the Klein talk - where would you folks recommend starting with Ramsey Campbell? He's written a lot and his short stories are generally better than his novels. A collection like Cold Print or Alone With the Horrors is a good place to start. Ramsey's short stories are often about unspeakable things slithering around in the shadows of English post-industrial urban landscapes, so if you like that sort of thing, either of those collections should be good. Alone With the Horrors also comes illustrated with some, ahem, terrifying... proto-photoshopped images based on the stories.  The unspeakable horror!
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Feb 5, 2020 21:01
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fez_machine posted:I love Midnight Sun but it's more a mood piece than anything else. Given the terrible sense of loneliness and isolation that permeate so much of his work, it's kinda nice to learn that Campbell himself has children and a long, happy marriage 
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Feb 7, 2020 14:24
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ravenkult posted:I have bad news, friend. Reading Richard Laymon, you can always tell that he really enjoyed writing that stuff and didn't feel any need to hide the fact.
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Oct 6, 2020 21:32
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MockingQuantum posted:I'm tempted to read it because I love Blackwood, but I did not like The Twisted Ones at all. It felt like she wanted to write a love letter to this deeply weird, fascinating early horror story but did it in the most bland, straightforward way (with, imo, a very grating main character). It felt like a book with a lot of potential, but it just never got close to paying any of it off. I found the (2) main characters in this book annoying as hell and I don't know why the author went down this path. The Hollow Places could have been an excellently creepy book but it's horribly marred by having protagonists who seem to have wandered in from a sitcom. Having these two stumble through an alien world having 'wacky' exchanges and amusing domestic mishaps sure is an interesting way to build atmosphere. And yeah, it was all just a bit 'young adulty', too, like the author didn't want to go all in on the horror but keep it diluted with more reassuring stuff, so as not to unsettle the readers too much. I give the Hollow Places 3 stars for effort, minus 1 star for awful protagonists and minus another star for screwing up the atmosphere.
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Jan 4, 2021 16:44
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Paddyo posted:I read Elementals immediately before jumping into Blackwater, and yeah, you can definitely tell that McDowell approaches the supernatural stuff with a certain vagueness, and doesn't really feel the need to dump exposition on the reader. On one hand it's pretty cool because it preserves the sense of weirdness and mystery, but on the other hand I can't help but to feel like he's pulling a bit of a JJ Abrams and doesn't wrap up all of his plot threads. Yeah, I felt similar: great plot, unforgettable characters but the supernatural elements could feel strangely haphazard, like McDowell was thinking: "Ok, better throw some spooky poo poo in, 'cos that's my thing." The family saga by itself is more than enough for a set of novels without adding in a race of shape shifting river monsters and murdered characters periodically reappearing as vengeful ghosts.
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Mar 29, 2021 22:49
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Ornamented Death posted:Most anything by Skipp and Spector with the caveat that their books meet your criteria but lack the humor of JDatE. The Light at the End is a beautiful (ok, perhaps that's not the right word) evocation of grimy, dangerous 1980's New York. Quite apart from its merits as a horror novel, it's become a period piece that pictures a New York that doesn't exist any more and it's fun to read for that reason alone.
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May 4, 2021 07:00
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Opopanax posted:No definitely prose. It was made into a laughably terrible film at one point, but I guess you don't mean that then.
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Mar 16, 2023 13:49
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Opopanax posted:I don’t know how people itt feel about comics, but I’m finally getting around to Lake of Fire and it’s really good. A ship full of basically Xenomorphs crash lands in France during a crusade and a handful of knights have to deal with it. Good little story to scratch that Between Two Fires itch You should read The High Crusade by Poul Anderson. An alien scout ship lands in England during the Hundred Years War, next to an army mustering to cross the Channel. The aliens try to intimidate the locals by frying a few randoms with rayguns; the English army immediately storms the ship, takes it over and blasts off into space. Hilarity ensues! 
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Apr 2, 2023 14:42
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General Battuta posted:I don't think it's at all what you're looking for but Carrion Comfort by Dan Simmons (he of the writhing post 9/11 brain worms) is SOME kinda fuckin vampire story. It's gross in many dimensions and probably racist but it's certainly a hell of a take on 20th Century Vampires. They're running the government and Hollywood, or they're preachers or ex-Nazis, and they're all competing to be invited to an annual rich people get together on what's basically Epstein's Island, except it's about mind controlling human puppets to hunt down hapless victims, or playing chess games with living people where you eat the pieces that get taken. And a Holocaust survivor and a victim's daughter have to fight them. It's also about twice as long as it needs to be: his editor wanted to massively slash it down but he successfully fought her off, which was unfortunate. I tried reading it recently but gave up after ploughing through hundreds of faintly repetitive pages only to realise that I was still only 40% through the book. Get on with it, Simmons!
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May 21, 2023 20:52
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Count Thrashula posted:I'm a couple hours into Necroscope and it's ridiculous and fun yeah, even if the writing is... Not great haha. This thread's inspired me to pick it up too: yeah, the writing's pretty bad but it's done with such joyful enthusiasm that it's impossible to hate it.
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Jun 20, 2023 21:13
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Vargatron posted:My favorite part about reading old horror books in an urban setting is people getting upset that gas went up to $.55 and that Vietnam is still actively referenced. Yeah, it's one of the pleasures of reading King's older books, like Christine, or Salem's Lot: they're essentially period pieces, with all the little details that King likes to include being interesting due to how they recreate the feel of the 1970's.
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Jun 27, 2023 12:15
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Kestral posted:Picked up Datlow's Best Horror of the Year Vol. 1, which covers 2008ish, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that it begins with a 40ish page overview of the horror genre from the previous year by a person who seems to read (maybe literally?) every horror novel and short story on the market. I wasn't keeping track of horror for several years on either side of 2008, so there was a lot there for me to add to my terrifyingly deep backlog. Looking forward to getting into the actual stories, but this was a good start. M. R. James was a brilliant academic who eventually became Chancellor of the university of Cambridge. When that became too much for him, he semi-retired to become the Headmaster of Eton College, England's poshest and most prestigious private school. He was a very busy man who wrote his stories as a hobby. He took a year (!) over every one, meticulously revising and revising them in his free time until he was completely happy with the output. They're probably the most carefully polished short stories in the English language and his annual unveiling of the new one became a much-anticipated event. So yeah, there's a reason they're such a strikingly unsettling read.
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Oct 15, 2023 19:15
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He'd first read his new story out loud to a select group of friends and colleagues. When you read an M.R. James story, think of it being narrated in front of a blazing fire, in an ancient university common room, by a chatty and dryly humorous academic, detailing unspeakable horrors in between draws on his tobacco pipe and sips of his sherry.
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Oct 15, 2023 19:20
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ScreenDoorThrillr posted:Adam Nevill and stick-thin arms Adam Nevill is successful now but spent years living pretty grimly and that really bleeds through into his writing. It's a really common theme in his books that his protagonists get into the situations they do either because they're trapped by poverty or desperately chasing the promise of money. I remember from his first novel, where the protagonist is a depressed security guard who lives in a damp, dingy room above a dodgy pub where there's blood stains on the wall from past violence and a previous occupant molested his daughter there and I was like: "Ok Adam, I get it: this dude's life sucks, do you HAVE to lay it on so thick?" Then I read an interview with him where he said that was basically the room he actually lived in when he was doing dead-end jobs and trying to establish his writing career lol.
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Nov 13, 2023 10:58
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Kestral posted:Anyone here read William Hope Hodgson’s House on the Borderland ? I’m about two thirds of the way through The Night Land and good god I can’t take much more of the drippiest, most saccharine romance ever put to paper, but I’m fascinated by the way this guy’s brain works, and some of the nightmare imagery he conjures up. Wondering if Borderland holds up after all this time, hopefully with more of the great imagery and weirdness and less awkward faux-17th century prose and excruciating romance. Yeah, you read The Night Land despite the prose, not because of it. It's a classic for a reason but boy does it have its flaws. It can be particularly difficult to read because it's presented as a far-future, incomprehensibly hi-tech and alien world as viewed through the mind of this 17th century dude who doesn't really understand anything that he's looking at.
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Nov 18, 2023 21:17
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value-brand cereal posted:
Just got hold of this: it's very good so far.
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Nov 25, 2023 17:04
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I finished Gollitok and while it did turn out to be a bit: Annihilation: Eastern Europe edition (it even has a spooky lighthouse!), it was original enough to hold its own. Based on a real life prison island too, which was a bit grim to discover.
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Nov 27, 2023 10:37
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HEX is really good, yeah.
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Dec 12, 2023 09:51
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Ok, I've now finished Hex and would like to amend my previous opinion. Hex is rather like a Stephen King novel, in that it chronicles supernatural goings-on in a small American town with a dark secret. It's also rather like a Stephen King novel, in that it has an excellent beginning, a workmanlike middle and a dogshit ending. It's a great concept for a horror novel, but is clumsily and ultimately frustratingly implemented.
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Dec 14, 2023 10:25
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value-brand cereal posted:
Have you read The Maw, by Taylor Zajonc? It's pretty cheesy but hey, if you want mysterious, spooky caves, this book has them! Publisher blurb posted:For fans of Clive Cussler and Michael Crichton, a thrilling tale of an underground expedition to the deep . . . and the ultimate struggle for survival.
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Jan 21, 2024 19:56
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value-brand cereal posted:
Just read this! It was competent enough, although not super-original, except for the climbing plot hook, never read a horror novel before where rock climbing was a key thing. It did get me looking at Kentucky on Google Streetview though! Man, Kentucky has some pretty countryside 
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Jan 25, 2024 13:43
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Black Griffon posted:This gets me thinking, is there any good horror out there that really gets into the sort of peliagic horror of vast timescales? That's the theme of The Reddening, by Adam Nevill - the persistence of evil in a location over geological periods of time. It also has spooky caves in it!
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Jan 27, 2024 09:32
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Nevill was inspired to write it after moving to the UK's Jurassic Coast, where he became fascinated by the vast age of the landscapes and the fact that humans had lived there since the times when they weren't exactly humans like us, and decided to work it up into a novel.
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Jan 27, 2024 09:39
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fez_machine posted:Have you checked out what Valancourt Press is publishing? This link has introduced me to John Blackburn, who I'd literally never heard of, but who was a brilliant horror writer from the late 1950's through to the early 1970's who has since been inexplicably forgotten. I've just read Bury him darkly and For fear of little men, both of which start off as interesting horror thrillers and then veer off into completely unexpected directions. They're great period pieces (think Sean Connery era James Bond films) and surprisingly well written too, although the social attitudes are very much of their period ("But he'd only had 3 large gins, then 3 lunchtime pints at the Rose and Leek! Nobody could believe that would be enough alcohol to send an experienced mountaineer stumbling over a cliff!"). Check his books out, they're great!
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Mar 28, 2024 22:32
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Kestral posted:While this isn't exactly what I was thinking of, it will be very useful in other ways, since I struggle to visualize and describe this sort of thing. Thanks! I've seen at least two old-school 1950's horror comics where the house was the narrator of the story and watches with dismay as the protagonist is lured into disaster: "No, don't accept the drink, you fool! Can you not smell the scent of the soporific; are you really so blind to the sinister leer on your host's face as he hands it over? Alas! All too soon you shall know the horrors that fiend has prepared for you down in my cellar!" *The protagonist turns the tables 'cos he's secretly a werewolf or some poo poo and drugs have no effect on him*
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Apr 6, 2024 19:12
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value-brand cereal posted:
It's good! Like War of the Worlds crossed with a Bruegel apocalypse painting (to paraphrase the author a little). It's not just about an alien invasion, but an alien invasion, with normal existence abruptly ended by a terrible incursion beyond human understanding. Basically, imagine being hunted through an abruptly emptied world by creatures like those portrayed in Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion and go from there. 
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Apr 8, 2024 21:41
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