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GreyjoyBastard posted:I am 60% through The Luminous Dead and things are not optimal. I'm a couple chapters from the end of this, and wondering if there's anything out there that fulfills the promise of The Luminous Dead's back cover, rather than being a love story between two deeply dysfunctional people that happens to be set in a spooky cave. Caving is inherently terrifying, and I'd love to read more in that vein.
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Jul 26, 2019 02:16
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Any recommendations for stand-out horror in audiobook format, either books or short story collections? I have to do most of my reading on audio these days, and horror is especially tricky to do right in that format: I was looking forward to Wounds, for example, but some of the narrators are terrible fits for the material. Some things I've listened to and enjoyed include: Dark Matter, A Ghost Story - Michelle Paver Dracula - Bram Stoker The Elementals - Michael McDowell The Haunting of Hill House Heart-Shaped Box - Joe Hill The Imago Sequence - Laird Barron The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Stories - John Langan ... and a lot of Stephen King, which has consistently gotten good narrators for some reason. Ghost stories and weird/cosmic horror are my jam, but I'll check out anything that isn't gore-porn or really extreme body horror.
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Aug 5, 2019 19:52
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Forgall posted:Blindsight? It's this, 100%.
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Jun 12, 2020 05:16
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a foolish pianist posted:The Luminous Dead? It's a cave, but yeah, it's all about being lost and alone. It's worth noting, however, that The Luminous Dead is more a tense drama about a deeply dysfunctional relationship than a horror story.
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Jun 16, 2020 01:39
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Where should I start with Ramsey Campbell? Heard a description of his work recently and was instantly sold, but it didn't include a "start here with Campbell" recommendation.
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Sep 28, 2020 01:48
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The Elementals is a masterpiece and I wish there was more like it. I do most of my reading on audio these days due to time constraints, which isn't the ideal environment for horror, but that book legitimately froze my blood on more than one occasion despite listening to it while driving or doing household chores.
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Feb 2, 2021 09:39
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Good Citizen posted:Did anyone ever read that forum post book from a long while back where hell and heaven declared war on earth and humanity fucks them both up relatively easily and half the book is military porn describing how bad rear end human weapons are? The one where the amazing Randi (rip) played a pretty significant role. Anyone have any recommendations for anything else where humanity faces a serious big bad and ends up being the real horror that the 'bad guys' need to worry about? This sounds hilarious and I'd love to know what it's called.
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Mar 26, 2021 09:10
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This is going to be a weird one, but are there any decent horror novels that evoke a similar feel to the Resident Evil games? There's a teen in my after-school D&D group who I've been gently encouraging to try reading for pleasure rather than just for school, and he's expressed an interest in horror broadly and wondered if there were any books like Resident Evil, since he apparently loves that series. I'm at a loss, having never played a RE game.
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Apr 24, 2021 08:21
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Conrad_Birdie posted:Specifically what does he enjoy about the Resident Evil games??? It's tricky to get good self-reflective descriptions out of teens sometimes, but my impression is that the appeal is fast-paced body horror with a military aesthetic. Zombie fiction would probably work too, although I can't think of much in that vein that's decent.
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Apr 25, 2021 04:10
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Thanks for all the recommendations, everyone  My taste in horror leans in the "spooky ghost" and "cosmic" directions so I was rather adrift here. Fingers crossed we get another reader. I really need to get around to Carrier Wave myself, especially since it's apparently getting an audiobook.
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Apr 27, 2021 02:59
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I'm a quarter of the way through Carrier Wave and starting to wonder if I can finish. It's not the gore that's getting to me, it's that Brockway really seems to want to write the POV of people who are either "skeevy slacker rear end in a top hat" or "person romantically/sexually obsessed with their coworker" and it's starting to grate. If the prose were better than workmanlike I might be able to forgive it, but no luck there. I'm up to The Black Spot and almost rooting for the monsters at this point. Does he ever mix it up, or am I in for another 18 hours on audio of this?
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Jul 3, 2021 18:35
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DreamingofRoses posted:I finally finished North American Lake Monsters. That last story hurt, a lot. I absolutely love it but I don’t know if I’m going to be able to read it again. You want Michelle Paver's Dark Matter: A Ghost Story. If you have any tolerance for audiobooks I can highly recommend that version, great narrator.
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Aug 31, 2021 01:45
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DreamingofRoses posted:I just finished it and thank you for this recommendation. It was an excellent book. I'm glad people here are enjoying it, it's nice to be able to give back to a thread that's given me so many great recommendations I actually had no idea Paver had written more horror since Dark Matter until the thread pointed it out; has anyone read Thin Air or Wakenhyrst? Might be good Halloween reading.
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Sep 21, 2021 02:12
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Paddyo posted:Man, "Cold Moon" is so grim compared to "Elementals" and "Blackwater". It wasn't really the horror of the supernatural that stuck with me afterwards, but the bleak and depressing atmosphere. It's a great book, but sure was tough to read at the same time. More grim than The Elementals?! Jesus. That book was pure creeping dread. Looks like I need to check this out.
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Oct 15, 2021 04:11
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Horror thread, I have a weirdly specific request: first-person epistolary horror with a reading level that isn't impenetrable for an inexperienced reader. One of the teens I work with recently discovered Doki Doki Literature Club, and was telling me about how much they liked the short story hidden in that game, which is essentially the first-person confession letter of young sociopath describing the circumstances of her first murder. Since I'm always eager to get these kids to read, and they said they'd be interested in checking out other things that strike a similar chord, I'm looking for something that might work for them. The first-person epistolary format is the secret sauce here, and I also don't want to scare them off with prose that's going to make them run to the dictionary every paragraph. Honestly, even good creepypasta might fit the bill, and act as a gateway drug to more serious horror lit. Any suggestions?
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Sep 5, 2022 08:51
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Conrad_Birdie posted:Are there any Michael McDowell audiobooks? Blackwater seems like it’d be awesome on a long road trip. Soap opera Southern gothic family epic? The Elementals has an audiobook and it's great - or at least, I as a person with no experience of southern accents thought it was great, I'm not sure how accurate the performance is. Still, fantastic audiobook with a performance that managed to capture the genuinely unnerving effect of the prose. It's a hair over eight hours, so it doesn't quite fulfill OP's 10-hour needs, but it's close!
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Oct 14, 2022 01:36
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Does Wounds continue the trend from NALM where the stories are less about unsettling supernatural events, and more about how sad and lonely and lovely people are? Because while NALM was beautifully written, it sort of maxed out my capacity for stories of that nature for the foreseeable future.
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Oct 15, 2022 02:13
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Hill House is peak Halloween spookums, read Hill House now and then Blackwater will be a good transition.
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Oct 19, 2022 18:30
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Struggling with Winterset Hollow at the moment. I quite like the premise, but the prose is... Odd. I want to say overwrought, but maybe it's trying to do something that I'm just not here for. Some individually great sentences surrounded by paragraphs that feel like English as a second language, and deeply strange adjective choices. Now I wonder: aside from Ligotti, who's writing horror with masterful prose these days, who isn't also trying to do allegory? Like, North American Lake Monsters is beautiful, but I can only read so many stories about how people / grief / toxic masculinity are the real monsters. Sometimes you just want a monster surrounded by great prose, you know? Or, in Ligotti's case, a monster in the form of brief glimpses into a relentlessly nightmarish universe behind the thin veil of our illusions. On a separate note, how are John Langan's collections since Sefira? I haven't really heard anything about Children of the Fang or Corpsemouth, didn't even realize they'd come out until I went looking to see if he'd done anything lately.
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Apr 9, 2023 20:58
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Idle Amalgam posted:I liked more stories in Children of the Fang, than I did Corpsemouth or Sefira, but there's a certain consistency to his writing that I enjoy now that I've worked through all of his stuff. And I still generally liked all the stories, there are just some that clearly stand out. Excellent, I'll put Children of the Fang into the queue and come back for Corpsemouth later - thanks! zoux posted:Crossposting from the scifi thread because I ended up reading and quite enjoying this, excellent prose and dialog, strange setting and characters, and very interesting perspective. If short fiction is okay, The Things by Peter Watts is exactly this and quiet good, nominated for a Hugo among several others, and winner of the 2010 Shirley Jackson award. Watts is a master of the alien POV, also featured in (and arguably central to) his full-length SF horror novel Blindsight, highly recommended.
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Apr 12, 2023 03:00
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ShutteredIn posted:I would put Gemma Files in this category. A lot of her monsters are just hosed up monsters for monstersake. Bilirubin posted:Same for Christopher Slatsky and Philip Fracassi. The former writes along the Ligotti lines and the latter similar to what you get in Wounds, but with a good hit of Americana in some stories (The Soda Jerk being one short story). Thank you both for the recommendations! Any suggestions on where to start with these folks? I just finished up Ship of Fools and found it desperately wanting, so I'm still very much in the mood for some well-written horror. Funny you should mention WXXT, I've had Gateways to Abomination in my to-read list for a while now. Is that a good place to start, or is there a better entry point? Oxxidation posted:I made it about five pages into one of Fracassi’s collections before moving on. atrocious prose and worse dialogue Now this is fascinating, which collection was it? Beneath a Pale Sky seems well-regarded, but I haven't been able to find any excerpts to judge by.
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Apr 15, 2023 01:30
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Gateways to Abomination is great so far, and I'm almost certainly going to read whatever comes next in this cycle - thanks for the recommendation! Can recommend for people who want a bunch of very short (1-6 pages), somewhat-related horror stories wherein people's experience of the supernatural is having the thin veneer of reality get stripped abruptly away to reveal sickening grotesqueries just beneath the skin of the world. Our sane world is a soap bubble enclosing and enclosed by fathomless horror, the end, no moral, and I'm here for it. Summer of Night has been on my to-read list for a long time, but I've always wondered if I'll be let down by my brain constantly making comparisons to IT, which was one of the earliest horror novels I read and I can't help but love it, warts and all.
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Apr 17, 2023 04:55
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Opopanax posted:I have one just debating giving it to him, he's going through a fantasy and horror phase. I'm going to reread it anyways I just have a few books on my list first before I'll get to it. If he's in that phase then yeah, just give it to him. Kids are very good at feeling out whether they're ready for a book or not, and they will drop it without hesitation if they're not. You can't do any harm here. They're also usually much more ready for books than adults tend to think they are, and if it's pushing their boundaries a little (but not too much, in which case they'll abandon it), they tend to appreciate it - at least, this has been my experience with kids who like to read enough that they go through genre phases. Edit: Tying back to the earlier discussion of getting scared by literature, reading Lovecraft and King at around 11-12 definitely scared me, but I liked it, because it was scary in a way I was completely in control over. I'd get too spooked and just put the book down for a while, play some Final Fantasy or what-have-you, and a little while later I'd be good to go again and excited to do so. Kestral fucked around with this message at 04:15 on Apr 24, 2023 |
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Apr 24, 2023 04:10
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Opopanax posted:OTOH usually when I give him a book it just sits on his shelf for a few months while he does yet another reread of Calvin and Hobbes so he'll probably age into it by the time he reads it If my own childhood is anything to judge by, the trick is to leave books with interesting covers out on a table somewhere and, when asked what it is, to feign indifference. Also, your son has excellent taste, well done.
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Apr 24, 2023 07:21
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Just finished Smear and... What exactly happened there? I've clearly missed something.
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Apr 29, 2023 02:59
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Good Citizen posted:The RL Stine to Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (original artwork only) to 12 year old with a copy of IT pipeline is real This was literally, exactly me. And honestly, I was better able to handle IT than some of those loving Goosebumps books. I remember going house-hunting with my parents as a little kid, and I'd just read a Goosebumps book where the kids are also moving into a new house, and they discover an evil sponge under the sink that terrorizes them. Every goddamn house we went to, I would sneak off and check - very, very carefully - under all the sinks to make sure there were no sponges with glowing green eyes lurking under them. The dread was real. The Gone World is excellent so far! Something I'm wondering about though: do they ever explain how people in Ifs can be convinced that they're in an alternate timeline that will wink out once there's no one from Terra Firma to observe it? That seems... challenging, to get people to believe in their own unreality. Might be something they address later on, and if it's a plot point don't tell me: I've just gotten to the point where the narration has switched to first-person and Moss is visiting her mother in the nursing home.
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Jun 20, 2023 20:25
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Finished The Gone World and wow, that was great. I’d held off on it for years and years because the Amazon description of it made it sound like it would be a police procedural with some light sci-fi going on, but even in the part of the book that is a police procedural, the sci-fi and the horror are constant presences. It’s smart, well written, the people in it feel like human beings with motivations and flawed but reasonable psychology, and if you go for the audiobook version you get an excellent narrator. A+, great recommendation!
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Jul 4, 2023 21:02
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General Battuta posted:Obviously this fear passed pretty quickly in the light of day but for a few moments it was remarkable to feel like a child hiding in the dark again. You can all make fun of me for my goony fear now In college I binged the X-Files DVDs, and had an incredibly vivid dream in which greys had surrounded my house and were skittering around outside and peering in through the windows. To this day I sometimes keep the blinds closed at night, because the terror-adrenaline of that nightmare was so intense that I can clearly see the loving things if I look at a dark window of approximately the right shape and size. So, yeah, solidarity. Brains are weird.
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Jul 10, 2023 21:44
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Tiny Timbs posted:NASA guy Ed Harris (not that one) claims that Jimmy Carter cried when he learned the horrible truth that aliens made Jesus up to keep us in line 90s Art Bell style UFO conspiracy stuff was a magical thing. There’s a big archive of Coast to Coast AM floating around where you can go listen to the Fun Kind of Crazy, iirc
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Jul 11, 2023 00:50
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MockingQuantum posted:I really wish there was more UFO horror fiction out there, it seems to be a weird hole in American fiction for how prevalent they are in urban mythology/conspiracy theories. Or maybe that's why, and there's some great UFO horror out there being marketed as nonfiction, lol. But yeah the whole subculture/phenomenon seems to have kind of evaporated in favor of more mundane and angrier political conspiracy theories, which is scary in a different way and a whole hell of a lot less fun. There's a podcast, Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff, that is ostensibly aimed at the RPG crowd but features an academic of horror, the occult, and the weird with an eidetic memory (Ken Hite) and covers a lot of subjects in the name of providing material for horror and investigative gaming (and cooking and film reviews, because they're food and film nerds). They talk a lot about the nature of conspiracy theories and belief, and had an episode a while back where the evaporation you're describing was the subject of a segment. Ken's argument, if I remember correctly, is that UFO mythology filled a specific American cultural niche, and that it was essentially outcompeted by the modern QAnon insanity like an invasive species, which then in turn terraformed the cultural landscape so that Fun UFO Conspiracies and the like can never get off the ground. nate fisher posted:Also, speaking of UFO movies, I found the recent The Vast of Night quite excellent. A must watch in my opinion. "A must watch" is not an exaggeration, Vast of Night is incredible. It's honestly better going into it knowing nothing, even knowing it's related to UFOs will diminish it a bit because the buildup is great, but it's not defined by the buildup and the reveal, so it's still worth your time.
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Jul 11, 2023 21:27
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The Cipher is one of maybe five books in my life that I’ve had to put down unfinished, and it’s the only one where that DNF is a compliment. I absolutely could not endure it. A masterpiece.
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Oct 1, 2023 21:58
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Franchescanado posted:Shot in the dark, but does anyone have any Audible exclusive horror audiobooks they love? Audible’s adaptation of Dracula is very, very good. I can also highly recommend Dark Matter by Michelle Paver as a book that comes alive in audio format.
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Oct 4, 2023 18:10
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I didn't notice it at first because I was on mobile, but now - oh my god I love this subforum so much.Kerro posted:Hopefully you'll enjoy Boy's Life too then - it's absolutely one of my favourite coming-of-age stories, and my favourite McCammon book that I've read (though I've only read Swan Song, They Thirst, The Listener, and the Matthew Corbett series). I am surprised that his work hasn't been adapted to the screen the way King's work has. I've had this one on my list for a while now, but I'd appreciate a spoiler before I commit to it: is what's happening actually supernatural? Not a fan of horror that stories that eventually go, "But no, it was actually some perfectly mundane kind of horror after all!" Gimme the impossible kind of horrors, please.
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Oct 5, 2023 09:19
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Are any of Ellen Datlow's horror collections particular standouts? I know they're reliably pretty good, but was there a particular year where Best Horror of the Year was completely full of bangers, or other non-annual collections that were especially strong?
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Oct 8, 2023 02:35
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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. But since I also needed an audiobook for after I finish my daily allotment of A Night in the Lonesome October, I started on The Complete Ghost Stories of M.R. James, read by David Collings. Jesus. I'd never read a James story, and now I wish I'd gotten to him a decade or two earlier. It spooked me badly with the sun pouring in through an open window while shaving, so I'm pretty sure I've just ruled it out as something to listen to at night while jogging on empty streets. I wish more people were writing in this vein now. I'm increasingly weary of allegory and thinly-veiled metaphor, I don't want the ghost to actually be how hosed up your relationship with your mom was. Give me more stories about people's encounters with inexplicable wrongness beneath the skin of the world, with no more point to them than to make your skin crawl and give you a powerful urge to avoid looking in a darkened mirror at night. HouseOfLeaves99 posted:My puppy snagged the highlighted and bookmarked copy of HoL and destroyed it. Just bought a new one. Incredible username-regdate-post combo, I am genuinely in awe.
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Oct 9, 2023 22:25
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Ravus Ursus posted:Ok thanks for validating that I'm not alone in this. I read North American Lake Monsters and got very tired how everything was a metaphor for the true horror that is man's inhumanity to man. I'm only a few stories in since I'm absorbing it as an audiobook, so it may get allegorical later on. So far though, just spooky ghosts, which is exactly what I'm in the mood for at this point in Spooky Season.
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Oct 10, 2023 06:12
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Metaline posted:Just listened to the audiobook of A Haunting on the Hill by Elizabeth Hand. It's the first book about Hill House given the blessing of Shirley Jackson's estate. Amazing, I was just coming in here to ask about that very book. Welp, looks like I know what's on the menu next!
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Oct 13, 2023 10:14
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MeatwadIsGod posted:I read the first book in the Aching God trilogy last month and need to pick up the next one. It had a very overt tabletop vibe which I appreciated. The author writes Pathfinder adventures, so that’s probably where that vibe comes from.
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Oct 21, 2023 23:40
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Started on A Haunting on the Hill, and so far it's good, but it's really driving home the degree to which the original is a timeless masterpiece. The prose in Hill House is incredible, and even all these years later it doesn't really feel dated. ... on the Hill pins itself very specifically to a certain time - 2023 - and the concerns and aesthetics of that time: lots of vaping, lots of pandemic references, lots people getting priced out of real estate, etc. It's had some genuinely creepy moments already though, and I do love me a ghost story, so I'm strapped in for the ride.
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Oct 22, 2023 08:22
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I’m listening to an audiobook version of The Book of Cthulhu, a mythos anthology, and one of the stories (Nethescurial) went off on a tangent about how the people involved are helpless puppets reenacting a doomed narrative, and I had to immediately go back and confirm that it was in fact Ligotti. I wonder if he’s actually irl terrified of puppets, or just finds them a potent metaphor for the particular brand of dread he experiences 24/7. Edit: Okay yeah now there’s puppets ALL up in this piece Kestral fucked around with this message at 23:01 on Nov 11, 2023 |
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Nov 11, 2023 21:49
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