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MockingQuantum posted:Also, I'd love to have at least some recommendations for non-American/UK/Western Europe horror novels, just to show what's out there. I'm aware of some Japanese horror novels, though I haven't read any, but beyond that I'm pretty unfamiliar with horror from the rest of the world. John Ajvide Lindqvist is your number 1 stop. He's most famous for Let The Right One In, as adapted twice to movies (and the movies are better, which I won't say often), but everything he's written is worth your time. Handling the Undead is a very different take on zombies, and both it and LTROI are sequelised in the short story collection Let The Old Dreams Die. Harbour (aka Human Harbour) is a classic ghost story in a way. His most complete book, though, is Little Star. I'll also push Sergei Lukyanenko's six book Watch series, although technically they're urban fantasy.
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May 16, 2018 10:46
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Cymoril posted:There was a recent sale on Robert McCammon’s novels in Kindle format so I’m currently reading Swan Song for the first time in twenty years. I’m about halfway through and enjoying it, although the moments where characters suffer from situational stupidity are jarring. I read a few of his other books as a teenager but don’t remember them. Of the ones I've read: Stinger is a classic B-movie in novel form. There's nothing on the page that you can't imagine on the screen. The Wolf's Hour isn't strictly horror, but it has elements of horror. High concept: what if James Bond fought in World War 2, and was a werewolf? Usher's Passing is a glorious mishmash of American Gothic and Poe-esque horror wrapped around the conceit that the House of Usher didn't die out and instead became massive arms dealers who settled in North Carolina and built the Winchester Mystery House. Baal, Bethany's Sin and They Thirst I wouldn't really bother hunting for. They're serviceable novels of their type, but pedestrian. Lastly there's the short story collection Blue World, which like all such collections is variable. When it's good it's really good, though.
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May 25, 2018 17:31
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chernobyl kinsman posted:jesus christ, man Is that positive or negative?
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May 25, 2018 21:37
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chernobyl kinsman posted:i dont care whether an ending is happy or miserable as long as it doesn't suck. salem's lot has a (mostly) happy ending which is very good. needful things has a happy ending which is crap. Salem's Lot does not have a happy ending. A potentially hopeful ending, yes, but it was previously acknowledged that no matter how good the deed was you need to be a psychopath to kill vampires without it getting to you. On which note, I'd like to recommend the Pat Cadigan short story The Power and the Passion, which is about a psychopath who hunts vampires.
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Jul 11, 2018 00:03
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Interesting list. The inclusion of Infidel surprised me - it's only just finished. Worth reading though.
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Aug 21, 2018 12:20
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Franchescanado posted:Are there any good horror books/stories with about people forced into a survival-of-the-fittest/kill-or-be-killed anarchy game? The Long Walk by King isn't quite what you're looking for. If you want a movie, Series 7: The Contenders is your man. It's massively better than Battle Royale and stars the girl from the pit in Silence of the Lambs.
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Aug 30, 2018 15:03
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C2C - 2.0 posted:Wrong If you read Books of Blood volume 1, you'll find some fairly definitive evidence that Barker sucks.
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Oct 31, 2018 23:48
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Ornamented Death posted:The first one is bad in an entertaining sort of way, but they get real stupid, real fast after that. I would say the original trilogy is worth reading. If you liked 3, read 4 and 5 - they were initially meant to be one book, but the story had too much compression that way. If you're still enjoying yourself the Vampire World trilogy has some good ideas and individual beats but it's starting to get repetitive. Don't bother with the Jake Cutter books or The Lost Years. Ultimately, your tolerance of Necroscope will be determined by your threshold for the use of ellipsis followed by an exclamation mark and, later, extremely weird sex.
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Nov 11, 2018 22:49
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MockingQuantum posted:I should read more MR James. I think I've only ever read the two that show up in every collection (Casting the Runes and... Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad or something like that) and they were good, but didn't fire me up to read more of him. Any other standouts? If the BBC adapted it, it's probably good. Regardless, I don't see any point in picking out places to start when you're most likely to be reading any given one of James's ghost stories in a single volume collection. He only wrote 34, and you can get 33 of them for under £1 on Kindle or the main 30 for free.
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Mar 16, 2019 15:16
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anilEhilated posted:Tangentially related to the Klein talk - where would you folks recommend starting with Ramsey Campbell? Going back a little: Cold Print if you like Lovecraft, The Doll Who Ate His Mother if you don't.
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Feb 8, 2020 16:20
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MockingQuantum posted:One of his most famous stories, "The Caterpillar," is about a veteran who is turned into a quadriplegic after getting his limbs blown off, also he can't talk due to his injuries, and honestly I can't remember where the story goes from there Onto Metallica's fourth album?
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Mar 25, 2020 19:45
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anilEhilated posted:I wouldn't classify McCammon's werewolf books as horror, to be honest; they're basically James Bond pastiches. Plural? I didn't know there was a sequel to The Wolf's Hour.
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May 28, 2020 09:38
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Kestral posted: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. Sorry, only just catching up with the thread. If you want to read Campbell's entries into the Cthulhu Mythos, begin with Cold Print. If you're more interested in his original novels, you can't go wrong with The Doll Who Ate His Mother.
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Oct 4, 2020 00:46
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Opopanax posted:Answering my own questions again and read Darkly Dreaming Dexter, the first Dexter book. It was good, but plays out quite differently from the show. It's also kind of oddly paced, the Ice Truck Killer doesn't actually show up until about 20 pages to the end and the ending itself is pretty abrupt, but I'm interested to move to the next one and see this new status quo. That "always on" thing is an important part of Dexter's personality. Code or no code, he's still a high functioning psychopath and everything has to be all about him. The books do play out extremely differently to the show, usually for the better (especially after Scott Buck wrecked it). The first two are probably the best, but Dexter's Final Cut is very nearly as good. At the other end of the quality scale: Jeff Lindsay has profusely apologised for Dexter in the Dark on many occasions. With the sole exception of Cody killing for the first time the entire book was jettisoned from future continuity, so you can skip it if you want.
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Jan 24, 2022 19:04
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Shitstorm Trooper posted:So I guess I could talk about Necroscope here instead of the What Did You Just Finish thread. I finished the first one today and started the second and I said to myself "These are fun. How many of them are there?" I just answered this in that thread because I haven't read this one in a while, but to copy myself: it's like Dune. Read in chronological order till you hit one you think is bad then stop. For me personally that was The Lost Years volume 1; the decline is steep from there. But the original five and the Vampire World trilogy all have some good stuff in. And yes, Lumley likes immuring as a punishment for immortal regenerating creatures. Let's face it, though, it's about the only way to deal with a creature like that if you want it put in a position where you don't want it dead.
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Apr 10, 2022 08:54
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nate fisher posted:While as I said above I didn't enjoy THGWSWLS, I am still tempted to pick these up based on the covers. Just amazing artwork. Funny, I feel the exact opposite: any desire I have to read those books has been killed by the covers. They're so utterly unappealing.
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Apr 19, 2022 14:06
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a foolish pianist posted:I think that was 4ball’s mom that did that? It was, yes. It's also called out by the characters as being seriously loving weird, so it's not a candidate for the Bad Sex Awards or anything. Koontz has done a few other good books that I've read as well. Twilight Eyes is another hidden world narrative, although it feels like the first book in a series that was never written. And The Face of Fear is a solid thriller about a mountaineer who developed a phobia of heights after an accident on the slopes and finds himself trapped in a skyscraper at night with a psychopathic killer. That one got made into a decent TV movie as well, which is worth checking out just to see Kevin "Batman" Conroy in a live action role. The thing with Koontz is that people often muddle him up with Richard Laymon, who is the guy you go to if you want dubious hetero sex in your horror. I believe they had the same publisher in a lot of markets in the 1990s, and said publisher used a very similar format for the covers.
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Apr 19, 2022 22:29
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Dr.D-O posted:How do people feel about Clive Barker's The Great and Secret Show? TGASS has a lot of interesting ideas in it, but it could have stood to be shorter. It's also the first book in a never-completed series and the second book is awful.
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Apr 26, 2022 14:14
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Ornamented Death posted:You should read better books That depends on how big the bottom tier is. I've re-read Lumley, but there's some authors that I wouldn't even want to finish their books once.
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Apr 28, 2022 16:17
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MockingQuantum posted:Since we're on the subject, which Koontz books are actually worth reading if you're not already a Koontz fan? My in-laws really pushed me to read some Koontz a few years back since they knew I was a big King fan and I only read one, but it was dumb enough that I had very little desire to read any more. I'm sure there are some that are probably worth reading though, right? The Face of Fear might be the one you read, and it's one of the better ones. Retired mountaineer being pursued through a skyscraper by a serial killer - ring a bell? Beyond that the only Koontz that stuck with me was Twilight Eyes, which is set in and around a carnival in the early 60s and was a big influence on They Live.
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May 17, 2022 18:34
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Franchescanado posted:I thought you liked The Funhouse, his novelization from the Hooper film? Oh, no, and neither does he. Koontz quite bluntly states in the preface that he did it for the money and that there was so little actual plot in the movie that he basically ended up getting paid adaptation rates to write an original novel.
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May 17, 2022 19:13
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FPyat posted:I'm on the hunt for body horror in the mode of The Thing. Strange body plans, twisted appendages, surreal appearances, different creatures being morphed together, the works. Both people being mutated into weird forms and monsters that are just naturally that way are of interest to me. The further you go into Necroscope the more of that you'll get. Cabal and The Great and Secret Show by Clive Barker have some as well. Sidebar suggestion: Converts by Ian Watson. It's about a mega wealthy industrialist who hires scientists to find a way to create genetically modified supermen. It isn't really horror, but it's still close enough to what you want.
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May 27, 2022 10:43
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Shitstorm Trooper posted:The Tzimisce (praying I spelled that right) are based on the vampires from Necroscope. It's body horror as all hell in places. Did you ever finish Necroscope V or start the Vampire World trilogy? I've been wondering.
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May 27, 2022 16:29
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Flopstick posted:Don't forget Dracula, the OG epistolary horror. Frankenstein is epistolary and predates Dracula by a good 80 years. And I don't think even that was the first epistolary horror novel; the form goes well back into the 18th century.
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Jun 8, 2022 15:31
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sephiRoth IRA posted:Just finished Necroscope. It wasn't terrible, almost enjoyable with the weird Mary Sue protag in Harry and OTT villain with Dragosani. Dragosani isn't even close to being the most OTT villain in the Necroscope series. It's also a series that escalates pretty drat quick on every level, and is extremely horny. I'd treat it like Dune - read in publication order and stop when you think "that's poo poo" because it won't really get better. For me that was the first E-Branch novel, which is book 11 in the series, but I skipped 9 and 10. There's seven more past that point.
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Jun 17, 2022 01:09
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Siivola posted:Twee bullshit. The first Anno Dracula is a book about a sad middle-aged widower who bumbles around meeting public domain characters and falls in love with Newman's 900-year-old vampire OC from his Warhammer novels. Ahead of his time, then? Despite looking like he was a hipster before it was cool and is hiding his steampunk fetish gear just out of frame, Kim Newman is actually a legitimate authority on horror and SF and his opinions are highly regarded. (His fiction less so, but then he's writing what he loves and what he loves is trash.)
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Jul 3, 2022 10:48
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Untrustable posted:I recently signed up for Scribd (it fuckin whips, by the by) and I now have so many books to read that I'm dealing with some choice paralysis. <snip> I'd start with Let The Right One In. If you like it, move on to most of the rest of Lindqvist starting with Handling the Undead and Little Star then probably the Himmelstrand trilogy. It's easy to look at his work as the horror equivalent of those Swedish novels starring sweater-wearing detectives, but the more consistent theme is slotting horror into a world that determinedly remains normal.
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Jul 10, 2022 14:11
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Xiahou Dun posted:No worries. It was 30% wanting to be helpful and 70% an excuse to draw some draculas. Klinger seems to have annotated everything. I know they annotated The Sandman, presumably why the Gaiman foreword to that Dracula.
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Jul 13, 2022 12:03
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Shitstorm Trooper posted:Get the gently caress out of here, Harry. I need more vampire warfare. You're moving on to the Vampire World trilogy, then?
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Aug 4, 2022 16:39
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Whale Vomit posted:What's a good place to start with Straub? I know he did that thing with King. Ghost Story, Koko or Julia, in that order. Koko isn't strictly horror, but if The Silence of the Lambs can get called horror then Koko can too.
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Sep 8, 2022 09:46
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Xiahou Dun posted:I haven’t read enough King to personally go to bat for the reputation or its causes, I’m 100% going on that being just reported. In terms of his novels I’ve finished maybe a half a dozen or so out of like 70 or whatever insane number he has. The ending of IT is not thematically appropriate, and it's terribly sad. It's stated that the reason the Losers forgot Derry is because It had made them do so. There's simply no reason for them to forget again. It's one of the best written parts of the book, but I hate it.
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Sep 17, 2022 01:15
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Franchescanado posted:I've got Boy's Life and Wolf's Hour on kindle, but have not read him yet. Would either of those fit the bill? I know Boy's Life is supposed to be a coming-of-age novel with supernatural elements. My library has a bunch, so if there's a specific one you're thinking of, I'd like to know. McCammon is one of the most cinematic writers I've ever encountered. You can picture everything being on film. The Wolf's Hour, Swan Song, Stinger are all great and I really need to replace my copy of Usher's Passing that I got in 1987 because it's falling apart.
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Oct 19, 2022 10:08
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escape artist posted:I have the audiobooks of Mine, Gone South and Usher's Passing. Which one should I start next? Depends how the Southern accents are, but Usher's Passing.
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Oct 20, 2022 12:32
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ShutteredIn posted:I went back to Gemma Files’s first collection and it leads off with extremely detailed necrophilia. It’s…. a lot. Well I'm glad I didn't go in cold.
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Dec 12, 2022 11:06
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Ornamented Death posted:Tom Monteleone is nuking his legacy over on Facebook. He's gone fully hood-off. Having read one of Monteleone's novels years ago, I can't imagine that there's much legacy to nuke.
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Jan 31, 2023 01:42
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UwUnabomber posted:I just found a bunch of Alien comics. Anyone got any hot tips on which series are good? There's a lot of Alien comics. I'll definitely recommend the current Marvel series, though. The art on the first run was dubious, but the stories are good.
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Mar 6, 2023 00:18
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After 14 loving years, Mike Carey is finally releasing a new Felix Castor book in July.
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Apr 21, 2023 10:18
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SniperWoreConverse posted:i remember some chick not knowing what a dick was while about to get hosed, the magician purposefully hyperventilating to avoid dying while cooking the magic allegory for meth or w/e, and the prince escaping by climbing a rope made of his own hair (maybe?) which broke That's because it's a trophy mounted on the wall. The sex scene in Eyes of the Dragon is decidedly weird because King wrote the book for his daughter so she'd have a book of his that she could enjoy. But that's the Cocaine Years for you.
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Apr 24, 2023 10:31
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Count Thrashula posted:Are there's any vampire books out there that still have the regal aloof distinguished feeling of Dracula but with more blood and guts and zombies and stuff like that? On the one hand, Necroscope. On the other, Fevre Dream by GRRM. If you alternate chapters you should get exactly what you want!
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May 18, 2023 12:57
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MockingQuantum posted:I've never made it more than about a quarter of the way through Carrion Comfort and I doubt I'll ever try to again, something about that book is just the opposite of engaging for me. Carrion Comfort started out as a novella before Simmons expanded it to bloat length. I wouldn't be shocked if people get as far as where the novella ended.
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May 22, 2023 17:19
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