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Len posted:I just got a kindle and I’m looking for things to read. I like haunted house movies but haven’t read a whole lot in the way of books. I have Haunting of Hill House on my to read list but i need some more good books than that. Preferably things that are more creeping sense of dread than blood and viscera Non-fiction but Paperbacks From Hell is a really great book Also more on topic of what you're asking for, while they are overall more other genres the following three books all have aspects of the Haunted House genre to them; House of Leaves House On The Borderland Blackwater series(was originally published as 6 books back in the early 80s, but got an combined release as a single book a couple years ago)
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May 12, 2018 05:55
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Ornamented Death posted:This is an outstanding book, and if you're thinking about getting it, I cannot stress enough that you NEED to get the paperback edition because a huge part of what makes it such a great book are all the full-color photos and scans of insane horror paperback covers and you lose a lot of that on a Kindle. On the other hand it gives a great excuse to trawl through thrift store book shelves, and some of the better books brought up in it have been reprinted in more recent years and/or made available electronically, like for example Blackwater which I had mentioned in that post as well(and gets brought up multiple times in PBFH as one of the better books in it)
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May 14, 2018 08:14
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Ornamented Death posted:Blackwater confuses the hell out of me because even on eBay you can find first editions of all the paperbacks for pretty cheap. The only editions that are going to cost any serious money is the set put out by Centipede a few years ago and, well....it's Centipede. True, also I'm honestly kinda amazed that no one has ever tried adapting Blackwater, it would make an amazing HBO or Netflix series, it's even season formatted due to originally being released as six books
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May 15, 2018 01:50
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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. That reminds me that I found a copy of that book a month or two ago at my local Savers, and I still need to get around to reading it
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May 22, 2018 18:02
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avshalemon posted:horror authors seem to have the same drive toward a happy ending as non-horror authors, but horror is a genre where unqualified happy endings just don't work. usually the whole narrative loses its thrust if the protagonist group doesn't end up 95% dead/dying/mad/suffering eternal torment and damnation. there can be one or two survivors who learnt to make the right choices and were rewarded with relative good fortune, but that's it. That's definitely one area where I heavily disagree on, but then I'm one of those people who can't stand bad endings
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Aug 2, 2018 02:18
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avshalemon posted:what are some happy endings in horror that you've been satisfied by? (genuine question!) That's unfortunately an issue I have with Horror as a genre, very few of them have endings I like
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Aug 2, 2018 02:34
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this broken hill posted:i feel guilty about my harsh words now, so here is some actual measured criticism. if you know, or are, the dude who wrote the fisherman - i was being facetious, it's far from the worst book i've ever read and there was probably a really good 20k-word novella in it so my initial reaction was more from disappointment than anything else. but there just wasn't enough material there to sustain a book of that length. please, please resist the urge to pad the narration in future. i know lovecraft did it, but lovecraft's strength wasn't actually his writing, it was that he was an insane autistic racist with a phobia of shellfish and that gave rise to a unique worldview. there was some genuine good horror spots and ominous tension in the fisherman, but the general verbosity messed with the pacing and sparked a "get on with it already" response from me until eventually i just couldn't wade through anymore waiting for a pay-off that may or may not come. character voice is also not the writer's greatest strength. it got to the point where i was like three characters deep into nested flashbacks, but i was losing track of whose story was being told because all the voices sounded the same. I know it's very likely that Lovecraft would have been diagnosed with some form of autism if he was alive today, but please don't be using it in the same context as calling him insane or racist
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Aug 12, 2018 00:51
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(but if the next book is bad i'll be mean again)