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ravenkult posted:
I thought at first that this was going to be too cute about the conceit but it works, good stuff.
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Oct 4, 2022 07:48
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It’s so good. The ‘sick house syndrome’ imagery applied to a Britain where everything is damp and angry and slowly falling apart was spot on.
GhastlyBizness fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Jul 25, 2023 |
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Jul 25, 2023 10:54
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Started in on The Cipher by Kathe Koja and already it's brilliant. Real creepiness - the Fun Hole itself but also the creepy sex - and awful relationships between awful people. Love the embittered, self-pitying, former english student prose-turned-crustpunk voice of the narrator, I think this is what I wanted from the Johnny Truant bits in House of Leaves.
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Oct 1, 2023 19:11
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Just finished Adam Nevill's The Reddening and holy poo poo it was good. Excellent deep time prehistoric horror, all red-stained creeps with flint hand axes, and some excellent evocation of an eerie Devon landscape. I quite liked his Wyrd and Other Derelictions, which is all odd little dialogue-free static vignettes, like little camera surveys of a horror scene while the blood is still cooling. Anyone read any of his other work? Heard mixed things about the film version of The Ritual.
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Nov 7, 2023 00:09
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Slyphic posted:I've got Ritual in my short pile of horror stuff. Cool, the Nevill Last Days looks good. Agreed on the Evenson one, though I thought the novella version was better. It felt like a skit that turned from absurd and funny - a murder mystery set in a cult of amputees, with two blokey amputee kidnappers! - to deeply uncomfortable and Kafkaesque as it went on. The Elder Sign podcast did a good two parter on it recently.
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Nov 8, 2023 09:28
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FPyat posted:His thing with puppets (which is a common enough fear, I guess, but he takes it to the next level) is what prompted me to ask the question. I love when he’s like “puppets are similar to clowns because you think they’re living humans but they’re not”
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Nov 9, 2023 13:10
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Pretzel Rod Serling posted:from what I’ve seen it’s more getting mad if you talk about racism. but I don’t really hang around HPL-type places, I’ve just seen folks taking shots at S.T. Joshi on discussion boards lol ST Joshi does seem to have a knack for feuding with other folks in the scene in general, even apart from his big thing about Lovecraft 100% Not Being Racist Actually. Didn’t read the Mamatas story but I was under the impression from discussion at the time that it was more of a playful in-joke sort of swipe? Feel like I’ve seen similar elsewhere. Like all the quips when a story’s protagonist is a horror author.
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Nov 12, 2023 22:56
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value-brand cereal posted:Not to start poo poo, but do you have more on this? I only have some anthologies he edited so I'm curious if I should expect stupid racist poo poo instead of the usual stupid not intentionally racist poo poo. I mean, it is lovecraft based lore, after all. If you search "ST Joshi racism" you'll find a lot of stuff, much of it centred around a meltdown he had when the World Fantasy Award changed its physical trophy from a bust of Lovecraft to something more abstract. He tried to start a boycott, one of a few he's tried, but it didn't take. Otherwise, here's a piece on Joshi flipping out at Brian Keene: https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/s-t-joshi-is-feuding-over-lovecraft-and-racism-again I've come across similar rants on his blog but also he tends to go after his 'enemies' in a weirdly personal way in his reviews. Nick Mamatas, Brian Lumley. Jeff Vandermeer, Joe Hill, Laird Barron, Paul Tremblay... Those are the authors I can remember off the top of my head but as I understand it, he's even harsher to other editors and anthologisers, as well as anyone who writes on Lovecraft without his approval. It's all a bit 'in-scene' kind of stuff among folks who see each other at cons but tbh he just seems like a nasty old rear end in a top hat. Obviously he's a prolific figure in Lovecraft scholarship and I should say that the only critical work of his I've read (besides reviews) was his stuff in the penguin edition of Machen's The White People. It wasn't very impressive, just lots of superficial biographical annotations and fan minutiae.
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Nov 13, 2023 20:28
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It’s way more accessible, I couldn’t get through The Night Land but House on the Borderland was grand. I think there was some very mild romance but it was like some astral projection stuff where the protagonist thinks of his long lost love. Don’t recall it being a significant part at all. Would strongly recommend though. It manages to combine cosmic horror with “there’s a horrible man thing looking in the window” horror.
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Nov 18, 2023 10:54
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value-brand cereal posted:Hilariously that was the book I was complain about having racist antiblack misogynistic poo poo. I'm still reading it, for some reason. For how dumb the plot is to me, it's one of the better written or more competent plots I've seen so far. And the action scenes are pretty great. It's not quite Dan Brown levels of illuminati poo poo but it's compelling enough that I want to know what the point of this is. Then again, I dare anyone to invoke the Shroud of Turin with a straight face. The Descent is a weird book, somehow tremendously compelling in that gonzo airport thriller way, really original high-concept plot, and yeah, some well written eerie deep time/geological stuff… alongside casual racism in exactly the way you’d expect from an airport thriller. The sequel is almost worse for misogyny because it has this caricatured OTT post-9/11 fundie woman as a villain. Real Michael Moore “she’s so dumb and crazy!!!” stuff.
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Jan 21, 2024 17:49
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value-brand cereal posted:There is not a sequel. Oh my god there's a sequel. I refuse to put myself through more of it, I'm certainly not its audience. But man, that's unsurprising. Iirc from what I read off and on, the main woman character in The Descent seems fairly competent and fleshed out. A nun that's conflicted with religion, agrees to try to save the world anyways, mostly self reliant as far as the plot allows, realistically. It is indeed more of the same but with a lot of bad, self-indulgent Milton-sequels philosophising by the villain and associated torture making up about about a third of the book. Other than that it’s not worse than the first one - the politics take on a cynical War on Terror slant - but no real reason to go hunting for it.
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Jan 22, 2024 14:28
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Pistol_Pete posted: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. I can’t even imagine places like Dorset and the Jurassic coast untouched by folk horror now, they just lend themselves so well to that sort of geological creepiness. Listening to PJ Harvey’s White Chalk album helped too. Would second Veins of the Earth, it was actually reading Stuart wrote about The Descent as an inspiration that got me interested in it.
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Jan 28, 2024 13:21
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| # ¿ May 8, 2024 09:34 |
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Blackwater is surprisingly easy reading for something so big, to the point where sticking to the individual novels it was published as would feel weird to me. Maybe it’s the rhythms of the family saga aspect.
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Mar 16, 2024 10:49
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