|
fez_machine posted:It's largely on twitter. The crux of it is that Gretchen has been consistently opposed to softening or otherwise making queer expression palatable and will argue about it strongly on internet in ways that aren't softened or palatable. This has made her a lot of enemies. I've followed Gretchen for a while on Twitter, and read her self published stuff, as well as her essays/media criticism, and I will say so much of that is people being absolutely ridiculous and cruel and who just don't even understand (or want to take even the tiniest effort to try to understand) what she's writing about or why she's writing it. And yes, she is Mean Online to people who act like assholes toward her, and has a mean persona, but a lot of this backlash is just because she's an outspoken trans woman and people, even other queer and trans folks, love to poo poo on trans women. And, as a trans person, I will say that Manhunt sounds like it'll be a lot of gross, nasty fun and I can't wait to read it and I preordered it instantly. She posted (part of?) the first chapter a while ago and if that's still up online you can check it out for yourself (it might have just been her Patreon, though, I can't remember).
|
#
¿
Jun 17, 2021 16:23
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 9, 2024 20:42 |
|
|
a foolish pianist posted:Are there lots of gender-based apocalypse stories out there? The only one I can think of offhand is The Screwfly Solution. Maybe not a lot, but I've seen them around before besides Screwfly Solution. Y: The Last Man is probably the biggest recent one, but any of those sort of "Last Man On Earth"-type scenarios would count too (there was even a 4-season long Fox show called "The Last Man on Earth" a few years back that I had to doublecheck and make sure wasn't a feverdream memory). There's even a different gender dystopia book (sort of different from a gender apocalypse, of course, but I'd say the genres probably have more in common than not) coming out in October called "Femlandia" but from some ARC reviews I've seen, it looks like it's exactly the sort of thing Manhunt is written in response to, hah.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 18, 2021 19:33
|
|
|
I happened to read Headful of Ghosts pretty recently after I had read We Have Always Live in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. And, well, I don't want to spoil anything for either book, but if you've read both it's pretty obvious that HoG is a direct riff (OK one spoiler because I think it nearly ruined HoG for me was at the end with the family poisoning which is just the end of WHALitC jammed in there pretty much exactly. Would have been nice to see something that wasn't such a near 1:1 trace!). However, I will say the parts of HoG that I liked were the ones that were the ones least related to WHALitC (the purposefully obnoxious blog posts and the reality tv aspect, for example).
|
|
#
¿
Dec 15, 2021 04:45
|
|
|
Chas McGill posted:I pre-ordered a medieval horror anthology with Buehlman, Evenson et al in it. Can anyone recommend horror novels set in the middle ages (or earlier)? Doesn't matter where in the world they are. I'm only about halfway through it myself, but The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart by Jesse Bullington is a medieval horror with supernatural stuff (witches, demons, etc.) in a similar vein to Between To Fires by Buehlman (which I assume you've already read, but if not, definitely read it).
|
|
#
¿
Apr 10, 2022 14:58
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/HOWL_Society/status/1512575944229154817?t=7gp2_z3Kr49ebqsIf9cLXg&s=19 This one I'm pretty sure. Looks like Buehlman is maybe just doing an introduction and not an actual story though?
|
|
#
¿
Apr 11, 2022 01:21
|
|
|
escape artist posted:Wish I could get a copy of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke. It was in my Amazon cart last year for $13 and I never ended up buying it. Now it's selling for $100 on eBay. I was looking to pick it up recently and ran into the same thing. Turns out it's out of print at the moment because it got picked up by a different publisher and is supposed to be getting reprinted soon, so you just need to wait a little while for that new run to come out and the price to go back to normal.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 19, 2022 02:05
|
|
|
Re: That list on Tor Nightfire and ones I've read so far: Manhunt was really good. It's gross and brutal but the characters are written with a lot of empathy. Dead Silence fell really flat for me. The premise of haunted space ship Titanic got my attention, but the execution didn't keep it. I'm only about 1/4 into All the White Spaces but enjoying it so far (Antarctic exploration is an interest of mine and you can tell the author did their homework in that respect). That said, it hasn't really given me any horror vibes yet? I guess/hope it'll be more of a slow burn or something. Not sure why they included Where the Drowned Girls Go on that list since I wouldn't really considered the Wayward Children series horror (it's mostly a sort of meta portal fantasy, though it has some horror elements/themes sometimes). I enjoyed it as much as I've enjoyed other entries in the series, though.
|
|
#
¿
May 3, 2022 16:14
|
|
|
MockingQuantum posted:I haven't read All the White Spaces, but on the subject of Antarctic horror, if you haven't read Michelle Paver's Dark Matter it is excellent. That goes for everyone in the thread, really, it's probably one of the better or best horror novels I've read in the last couple of years. Nothing groundbreaking, just solid and tense and entertaining. It's not even new, I think it came out in the early 2010s, but for whatever reason I never really heard anything about it until the last couple of years. Thanks for the rec, that looks right up my alley! I also saw she has a horror book called Thin Air that's a Himalaya climbing expedition ghost story, and I went ahead and picked that up too. I think the only other mountaineering ghost story I've read so far is The White Road by Sarah Lotz, which also has some great creepy caving sequences. (I love caving horror too, but it seems hard to come by!)
|
|
#
¿
May 4, 2022 14:50
|
|
|
I could see them doing that in the future, but the imprint only just launched so they don't have a huge backlog to do the free ebook thing with yet. (At least with regular Tor, it seems like most of those free giveaways have been stuff like "book 3 in this series comes out in a few months, so here's a free copy of book 1 so get you interested and buy the other two!")
|
|
#
¿
May 10, 2022 16:50
|
|
|
Count Thrashula posted:Finally, I just finished up Tender Is The Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica and... hoo boy. Imagine a mix between Slaughterhouse 5 and ... I dunno, Soylent Green? A Modest Proposal? I'm sure you see where I'm going with this. I'm not sure that it'll be one of my top books of the year, but it was a really quick read and pretty enjoyable, so if the theme strikes you, I can recommend it. I really dug Tender Is The Flesh! Just really gross and nasty but (and I don't know how much of this is due to it being in translation or if it's a pretty 1:1 with the original style) it kept a sort of clinical distance from everything at the same time that I think made it both easer to digest (heh) and in a way more horrifying. A couple other interesting recent reads (all of them novellas incidentally) were: Wingspan of Severed Hands by Joe Koch (though I think the copies currently in print still have his deadname on them), which is a really interesting hallucinatory body horror story mixed with a more scientific horror story reminiscent of an SCP sort of setting (sort of an A and B plot that converge in an interesting way). The body horror sections are really lyric and dreamlike where the science-y parts are more grounded. Since it's short, nothing really overstays its welcome. One Hand to Hold, One Hand to Carve by M. Shaw. It's also a Weird (New Weird? I guess?) story about a corpse that wakes up split in half and each half is its own independent person. A lot of body horror as the background obviously, but it's mostly about the two halves making the most of their new lives together, and it becomes more of an interpersonal/domestic sort of horror. The last chapter (or maybe it was an epilogue?) didn't quite stick the landing for me (I thought it explained too much maybe), but I thought it was really solid overall. Low Kill Shelter by Porpentine Charity Heartscape. A really gross but interesting take on pandemic horror. There's a saliva-transmitted disease that essentially rewires your brain into thinking that you're a animal (and also basically rabid). The main character is trying to find a cure, even though the lab he works for isn't really trying that hard. He ends up secretly keeping his co-worker's rabid boyfriend locked up in a closet in his apartment and ends up using him as a test subject for cure attempts. Definitely not for everyone, but might appeal to the gross-out/transgressive/splatterpunk fans.
|
|
#
¿
May 25, 2022 00:39
|
|
|
day-gas posted:I picked up Tender Is The Flesh and the premise seems....possibly too silly for me to continue. I am fairly certain I am the wrong one here with terminal scifi reader brain but the stacking things that are set up in the first 20 pages for the narrative angle of the novel to exist kept pushing and pushing my silliness boundary. How did ya'll find the way the premise was constructed? Trying to keep an open mind based on how I can personally have very weird sticking points. It mostly stops trying to explain or justify the situation after the very beginning, which I thought was the right move. Honestly I think it probably would have avoided a lot of the "this premise is silly/unrealistic" criticism I've seen it get if it just didn't try to explain things as much at the start? But it's an extreme premise, so it's hard to set it in what is, ostensibly, our world, without some sort of explanation. All that to say, the premise does break down if you think too hard about it being literal (but you could argue that 99% of genre fiction does when you're too literal about it - it just depends on your tolerances). You kinda just have to roll with it. I went into "I am more or less reading magical realism, I don't care if the reason for the premise 'makes sense' because it's really not the point of the story" mode. It's really about how horrifically selfish and exploitative even "good" people can be anyway.
|
|
#
¿
May 25, 2022 23:02
|
|
|
Opopanax posted:I wish Amazon wasn't so...Amazon. I want to read Carrier Wave but near as I can tell it's only available off the kindle store, and while removing DRM and converting is possible, it's such a pain in the rear end I'd really rather not. Such a stupid system if I buy a book I should be able to read it on whatever device I have It looks like it might not have DRM on the US amazon site at least? It has "Simultaneous device usage : Unlimited" in the product description which from some googling seems like it means there's no DRM/you can do whatever you want with the file (though you might still have to convert it though depending on what you plan to put it on of course). I could be wrong though! I haven't really messed around with converting ebook files in 10+ years. (I absolutely agree their proprietary file formats are hot bullshit.)
|
|
#
¿
May 26, 2022 21:17
|
|
|
Opopanax posted:Maybe, but if I try to buy something it'll just redirect me to the Canadian kindle page Ah that sucks it's such a pain even without DRM. Good luck with maybe getting that epub copy, though!
|
|
#
¿
May 26, 2022 21:58
|
|
And then yeah it's still going to be in the amazon format so that only saves me one step (although granted it's the most difficult one)
|
SSJ_naruto_2003 posted:What age are these kids because lmao JDatE is not very kid appropriate If the kid can handle Doki Doki Literature Club, they can probably handle John Dies at the End. Like it had one of the more unsettling depictions of self harm and suicide that I've come across, probably mostly because the ~kawaii anime~ aesthetics sort of throw you off expecting it. IDK, I also started reading Stephen King when I was 12, so I might have a bad sense of what bothers most kids or not. For a suggestion, I haven't read it in a long time but I know I liked World War Z when I was a teen and found the oral history format really cool.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 5, 2022 16:45
|
|
|
Opopanax posted:Eehhhhhh Yeah, that article screenshotted is about how the lawsuit was thrown out for lack of evidence (even after the ex was given a chance to actually submit some evidence, he never did). I dunno how much stock I'd put in TMZ articles, but another one said that the ex was apparently seeking a cut of Barker's profits saying he was owed them for being involved in his businesses and that was the reason for the suit. Seems like the sex and HIV stuff was just mentioned to sensationalize things? (again, just going off of what's in some 10~ year old celeb gossip articles)
|
|
#
¿
Sep 17, 2022 21:39
|
|
|
OhAreThey posted:Currently reading Dead Silence by S.A. Barnes and, ugh, it's not good. The premise is really intriguing: in 2149 AD, a repair crew in space stumble upon a luxury space vessel (basically a cruise ship, but in space) that disappeared two decades prior. They decide to investigate and things go south real quick. I read the whole thing around when it came out and wish I hadn't. If you're not liking it so far, it honestly only gets worse. The reveals to the mysteries are all pretty cheesy or just deflate what interesting parts did exist, imo. I had really wanted it to be good (maybe my expectations were too high), but was left really disappointed. I did like Mexican Gothic a lot, though! It's maybe not a 5/5 but it's really solid and has some good Shirley-Jackson-esque (but more outwardly paranormal) spooky bits.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 18, 2022 20:27
|
|
|
PsychedelicWarlord posted:Alison Rumfitt's Tell Me I'm Worthless is finally out in the US! Gonna snag a copy this week. It's really good! I got the UK version back when, and find it really funny that the eyes are blocked out on the UK cover, and everything BUT the eyes is blocked on the US one.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 16, 2023 18:39
|
|
|
RoboCicero posted:I really enjoyed it too! It's a viscerally churning read and one that makes no bones about the influence Haunting of Hill House had on it and the ways that TMIW turns its attention to the present moment. I love the ways in which fascist violence as the antagonist becomes an infection with The House acting as an active source, but one which has already served its purpose in an social environment that has become threaded through with fascist allure. I just had to flip through my copy. What exactly do you mean by it having a split ending? Just like the last chapter and then the epilogue? I read it as the house (fascism) not necessarily always having as much control as it thinks it does, but that doesn't mean it's not still a threat. Even when you 'win' against it, you still have to stay vigilant since it's always there as background radiation. I think there's also the sort of note of hope with the line of the award-winning photograph, (it also says "They don't know that yet." which implies they lived), something came out of it that hopefully moved people.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 20, 2023 02:51
|
|
|
ScootsMcSkirt posted:any good longer horror novels that anyone would recommend? If almost 400 pages counts as "longer" (I am realizing most of the horror I've been reading lately is novellas), I recently read and really liked The Gone World by Tom Sweterlisch. It's sort of a thriller at its bones, but the meat is sci-fi/horror (sort of Event Horizon with time travel).
|
|
#
¿
Jun 15, 2023 16:41
|
|
|
anilEhilated posted:The nominations for this years Shirley Jackson Awards are out and I honestly haven't heard of any of these books. Anyone read them? Only 2. Lure (novella) I finished recently and liked it. It's a sort of dark fantasy (in that it's a secondary world medieval-ish setting) about a far north fishing town where a creepy mermaid creature shows up and it throws off the normal happenings of the hyper-patriarchal village. It's definitely a feminist-leaning narrative, but the POV character is a guy who doesn't really get it so it doesn't feel didactic or anything. We Are Here To Hurt Each Other (single author collection) is also really good. It's a bit more into the 'extreme horror' side of things, so a lot of gross stuff and awful people. The most extreme one I can think of off hand is a story where a woman has sex with her dead sister's body. They aren't all like that, but that's the kind of book you're getting into, it's really nasty and brutal with a faint line of cosmic horror sort of threading through it. Worth checking out if you like really nasty horror from time to time. I also own the Your Body is Not Your Body collection (it was a fundraiser to benefit trans kids in Texas when that was just the first state to start on the anti-trans legislation bandwagon) but I haven't read it yet.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 23, 2023 12:38
|
|
|
Idle Amalgam posted:After it failed to grab me initially a few years back, I have given Between Two Fires another go and it was great. Any recommendations for more Medieval cosmic horror? Are Christopher Buehlman's other books pretty decent? Hollow by Brian Catling is the closest thing I've read to BTF. There's also The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart by Jesse Bullington, which some people enjoy (I thought it meandered a little too much, but it's also a stylistic choice that I get for what it's going for).
|
|
#
¿
Jun 29, 2023 21:41
|
|
|
anilEhilated posted:It's really good but not exactly horror. I guess it depends on the definition of horror being used, but it has more than enough gross creatures, deaths, and creepy setpieces that I'd call it horror at least.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 29, 2023 22:21
|
|
|
escape artist posted:I just got Scribd and am looking for audio recommendations available on there.... Howls from the Dark Ages : Medieval Horror, with Christopher Buehlman, is what I am looking at now... Just FYI, Buehlman just did the introduction to that collection, he doesn't have a story in it. It's a solid enough anthology, but it doesn't really touch Between Two Fires if that's what you're hoping for.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 30, 2023 04:33
|
|
|
Yeah, that framing thing with the spooky museum curator(?) introducing each story is a bit cheesy. I didn't hate it, but I didn't feel like it needed to be there either.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 30, 2023 12:49
|
|
|
Bilirubin posted:going to read the novelette Everything is Blackened Teeth before jumping into this month's BotM, I think some of you have read this before? I have! I thought it was a fine novella (might have been better if it was either a little shorter or a little longer), but I do like what I've read of Khaw's other work better. e: I assume you mean Nothing But Blackened Teeth
|
|
#
¿
Jul 3, 2023 20:43
|
|
|
Quote is not edit oops
|
|
#
¿
Jul 3, 2023 20:44
|
|
|
Chill la Chill posted:I've been reading House of Leaves (courtesy of being reminded it exists after watching MyHouse.wad explanations) and I really enjoy the format. Are there other horror books that are in a similar format like a documentary? Doesn't have to be about a house, but I like the interactive layout between the various appendices and character that seems to be reading alongside you. It's sort of a rare subgenre, most of the other similar things I can think of aren't really horror but if you like the format generally try: S. (or Ship of Theseus) by J J Abrams and Doug Dorst. Sort of a low-key thriller with a spooky/weird novel at the center. The gimmick is that it's a 1950s~ novel in a college library and 2 students use the margins to pass notes to each other and investigate a mystery about the author. It also has some ephemera tucked into the pages like ticket and postcards. It's neat conceptually and as an experience but I thought the plot with the students was bland in the end. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. A novel told in the footnotes to a lovely poem. It's not really horror but iirc it was not exactly uplifting either (the main POV character is basically a stalker iirc). I can think of a few other things that rely on footnotes (Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell, The Adventures of Eovaii) but really aren't horror at all or don't feel the same, not like you're reading someone's investigative notes. "Ergodic literature" is a phrase that's been used to describe that sort of book, though, so you might have some luck searching that up. I love it and am always on the lookout for it, but it can be hard to find, especially if you want it to also be horror (or any other specific genre).
|
|
#
¿
Jul 5, 2023 21:51
|
|
|
Whale Vomit posted:Thank you, yes. I liked Page Fire fine but I was really struck by how navel gazing and uninteresting the poem was. I actually wondered if that was maybe a layer of satire. (Oh yeah, the poem is definitely supposed to be terrible, it's part of the joke.) Unfortunately, I haven't been actually scared by a boook since I was 9 or 10. I haven't been able to figure out what the book was, but from what I remember, in the first half it was a bunch of "facts" about spooky stuff, like what ghost ectoplasm is, that vampires get distracted and have to count stuff if you leave it at their graves, etc. Not too scary. But the second half or so was just an abridged but pretty detailed retelling of the Amityville Horror and it scared the poo poo out of me (this was a book intended for children by the way). I had to put it down a few times before I could finish it because it was freaking me out. Since then though, fiction (movies, books, etc.) never really "scares" me (I guess maybe with the exception of the movie "Skinamarink," but that was more intense dread than fear?). And I really wish it did! I love horror, but sometimes it feels like I'm having a very good meal, but there's an extra flavor in it that other people can taste and I can't.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 10, 2023 13:01
|
|
|
Opopanax posted:New Nick Cutter book dropped! It's co-written by Andrew Sullivan, anyone read any of his stuff? Yup! I just finished The Handyman Method yesterday. It's really good, a neat take on a haunted house that has some vividly gross stuff that reminded me of the sort of golden age of 80s slimy wet puppet special effects. It also uses Youtube as a horror concept in a way that I really liked. Sullivan's other book that came out this year, The Marigold, I would also highly recommend. It's horror about a near-future Toronto that's literally rotting into the ground in large part thanks to corrupt building management/builders, and imo, manages to pull off having a lot of POV characters really well.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 15, 2023 16:47
|
|
|
Siivola posted:Just finished Interview and it was oh-kay, it was nice. Not very horrific really, but the characters were fun to hang out with and I guess I'll have to pick up Lestat at some point to revisit them. It's been a long time since I read Anne Rice, but I remember Vampire Lestat being about 40-50% just rehashing the exact events of Interview but from Lestat's POV. (And a lot of the other books following different POV vampires had a similar trend, with large portions repeating the same events as other books. So just an FYI depending on your patience for that sort of thing.) But if you stick to the "main" storyline beyond Vampire Lestat, you will at least get an increasingly bonkers single narrative.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 16, 2023 12:06
|
|
|
RoboCicero posted:Tried out Brainwyrms by Allison Rumfitt but had to unfortunately dip even before the aforementioned Brain Worms entered the game. I love the theme she explores of just like hurt, broken people finding each other and ripping each other to shreds as they misconstrue what recovery would mean and what sneaks into those gaps, but in Brainwyrms the focus on how that's expressed in abusive sex & abusive relationships was more than I could read in this moment Yeah, I'm about 1/3rd in and it's fantastically written but it is absolutely a ton of rough subject matters all piled on top of each other.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 23, 2023 20:54
|
|
|
Slyphic posted:I'm struggling with that a bit in Thomas Olde Heuvelt's second novel, Echo. I'm only a quarter of the way in, and it's really scattershot with the horror elements; disfigurement, insanity, change of personality, wilderness, heights/falling, ghosts, guilt, and only some of those are resonating with me while the others aren't eliciting much trepidation. And I don't think those are at all spoilery, that's back of the book and the first chapter stuff. It's not gripping me like Hex did, but I'm still reading it (also been super busy with life stuff and barely squeezing in a chapter a day). Yeah, Echo has sort of a slow folk-horror type of build-up if I had to categorize it. I liked it, but it meanders around in a way that Hex definitely did not.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 9, 2023 20:03
|
|
|
Ror posted:I honestly don't know what the proper age range is for Scary Stories to Tell in The Dark but those are the formative horror books from my childhood. They're definitely more in the fully "I want to be scared" type of horror than the kind of weird fantasy of Goosebumps, but it's still a great mix between light and folksy and downright bone-chilling. The first one has a simplified retelling of The Wendigo that terrified me as a kid and is probably single-handledly responsible for my love of horror and weird fiction. I knew that at one point they put new (less scary) illustrations in, but apparently there was so much backlash they went back to the classic Gammell illustrations for all the printings afterward. e: I also remember reading them in my elementary school library if that's an age range indicator.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 13, 2023 23:39
|
|
|
gey muckle mowser posted:I haven't read Hex by the same author yet and I've heard that's excellent, I've already requested it from the library. I liked Echo (but I agree it was trying to do a bit too much sometimes). And Hex is a lot tighter and more focused in comparison, so you'll likely enjoy it! Heuvelt is definitely on my "will absolutely pick up their next book" list of authors currently. (It looks like he has a decent back catalog that hasn't been translated yet, too.)
|
|
#
¿
Dec 4, 2023 21:22
|
|
|
Opopanax posted:Head Full of Ghosts is really good and unique, as long as you can force your way through the blogger sections Lol yeah the blog sections are almost too successful at capturing that extremely grating mid-aughts style of blogging.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 23, 2024 17:28
|
|
|
Hollow by David Catling is really close too.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 26, 2024 21:02
|
|
|
Howls from the Dark Ages had maybe 2-3 stories that were really good and the rest I thought was pretty mid. There's also a cheesy Cryptkeeper-y framing narrative with a museum curator that introduces each story, which isn't to everyone's taste, but is easily skippable at least. Not saying "don't read it" as much as "temper your expectations" (mine were maybe too high going in, so I ended up a bit disappointed).
|
|
#
¿
Mar 27, 2024 13:07
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 9, 2024 20:42 |
|
|
R.L. Stine posted:Almost halfway through Oracle it it's only been getting better. Makes me wonder if his 2019 release, Echo, is as good. I haven't heard much talk about it. I've read it! I liked Echo but it's definitely a lot slower paced and more introspective than Hex was (haven't read Oracle yet so can't speak to that) -- but I still enjoyed it as a piece of mountain/folk horror.
|
|
#
¿
May 6, 2024 02:10
|
|