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LolitaSama posted:Can anyone recommend similar Lovecraftian short stories like King's Crouch End? "N" by King is amazing. "A Study in Emerald" by Gaiman is too.
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Oct 31, 2014 06:51
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rocket_man38 posted:I'm reading through the "New Annotated HP Lovecraft" right now. It's pretty comprehensive, but a bit dry at times. The footnotes are nice, but sometimes don't really add much, or seem to have little relevance to the stories. The appendixes are much the same, some are neat and useful, others seem almost irrelevant (such as the staff list at Miskatonic Univeristy, or Lovecraft in popular culture.) The introduction by Alan Moore is good, as well as the comprehensive background information on Lovecraft by Klinger. Overall, I found it well worth the $25 I paid. It probably is the most thorough anthology of Lovecraft out there, with a mix of academia. Good to know its worth it. There is an interview with the annotator Leslie S Klinger here: http://hppodcraft.com/2014/10/02/episode-227-leslie-s-klinger-interview/
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Oct 31, 2014 08:04
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Helical Nightmares posted:Good to know its worth it. Leslie Klinger is the most tedious annotator alive.
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Oct 31, 2014 09:35
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Has anyone compiled a goon-recommended list of these sort of stories? I read a bit of the thread and there are tons of good suggestions, but having them together in one place would be awesome. I'd be willing to go through the thread and compile everything into a neat list if one doesn't exist. I've just recently gotten into reading some classic weird fiction - Clark Ashton Smith, William Hope Hodgson, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, etc, and I'm absolutely loving all of it. I'm starting to look at post-Lovecraft stuff now (just read my first story by August Derleth, "The Lonesome Place", and it was quite good). Any particular authors I should seek out and/or avoid?
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Oct 31, 2014 22:15
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Daveski posted:Has anyone compiled a goon-recommended list of these sort of stories? I read a bit of the thread and there are tons of good suggestions, but having them together in one place would be awesome. I'd be willing to go through the thread and compile everything into a neat list if one doesn't exist. I don't think there are goon lists, but there are a lot of compilations from old pulp magazines, and they've usually got pretty good selections. There's a collection from Famous Fantastic Mysteries that's my favorite, and it's super cheap on amazon, but there are lots of anthologies produced from these magazines, and they're a good bet.
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Oct 31, 2014 22:27
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a foolish pianist posted:I don't think there are goon lists, but there are a lot of compilations from old pulp magazines, and they've usually got pretty good selections. There's a collection from Famous Fantastic Mysteries that's my favorite, and it's super cheap on amazon, but there are lots of anthologies produced from these magazines, and they're a good bet. Cool, thanks, I'll check that out!
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Oct 31, 2014 22:33
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Daveski posted:Has anyone compiled a goon-recommended list of these sort of stories? This is a good idea. ---- If you are able to tolerate Derleth then you should substantially enjoy Laird Barron. This is not a swipe at Barron. The time when I could somewhat appreciate Derleth was when I was jonesing for anything passably similar to Lovecraft, and for me Barron is the most genuine Lovecraft heir I’ve read. Start with the Imago Sequence and proceed to Occultation. Preferably don’t read them back to back; Barron repeats a lot of themes and they may swim together. If you want more Barron, from there I suggest cherry picking “Hand of Glory”, “The Men from Porlock”, “The Siphon” and “Vastation” from The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. For Thomas Ligotti, I haven’t read all of his work, but I would recommend starting with Grimscribe, where Ligotti is most influenced by Lovecraft, and then immediately going into Teatro Grottesco where Ligotti shows he has truly come into his own terrifying voice. The Red Tower. TheRedTowertheredtowertheredtower. I also heartily recommend American Elsewhere by Robert Jackson Bennett (a goon). Creepy though it is, to me it is less a story of cosmic horror and more a very interesting and intricate supernatural mystery. It’s good. I can’t get over how well written Equoid is by Charles Stross. He can deliver a sucker punch of surprise. And it’s free. The short story There was a short story in some Cthulhu anthology some years back that starred a female protagonist of Appalachian descent exploring Appalachia with an investigator friend to discover the origin of strange lights in the sky. I can’t remember author or title, but it was excellent. If I recall correctly Barron said somewhere that Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” was firmly in the tradition of cosmic horror. It is on my to read list so I can’t speak to Barrron’s argument, but hey reading a classic London story is never time wasted. Edit:  vvvvv Thanks. I continually confuse the titles.
Helical Nightmares fucked around with this message at 01:34 on Nov 1, 2014 |
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Oct 31, 2014 23:00
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The King story is Jerusalem's Lot.
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Nov 1, 2014 00:33
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Helical Nightmares posted:This is a good idea.  Be aware that this is THE opinion of a whole bunch of people who post in this thread, and it's mainly low taste trash (Ligotti is good). I probably need to work on a new OP but in short, the first thing you want to get is The Weird the most comprehensive overview of the field available edited by Jeff and Anne Vandermeer, and make up your mind from there, any writer (including Barron but then only grudgingly) anybody will mention in this thread is included, except for Sticks by Karl Edward Wagner which is the anthology's only really notable omission. I always recommend Brian Evenson as the best of modern weird, as his stuff is extremely well written but retains a smidgen of the pulps, check out his collection Windeye.
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Nov 1, 2014 00:42
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fez_machine posted:
While I agree that The Weird is an excellent place to start, I don't think you could have been more dickish with your response if you tried.
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Nov 1, 2014 00:54
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Speaking of vandermeer, I just finished the ambergris books and loved them. Anyone know anything similar? I read the southern reach books first and was really only into the first one.
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Nov 1, 2014 01:14
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Ornamented Death posted:
Read my posts, I HATE the constant repetition of Laird Barron as a recommendation in this thread, it shows a lack of imagination and investigation into the genre as he's the current nerd king of horror and I will be a dick to anyone who mentions him as their go-to author. It's like some people just stop with him and never read anything else. By the way have you read George R.R. Martin's A Song Of Fire and Ice? You might like it.
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Nov 1, 2014 01:15
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Dyscrasia posted:Speaking of vandermeer, I just finished the ambergris books and loved them. Anyone know anything similar? I read the southern reach books first and was really only into the first one. Perdido Street Station is fairly similar.
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Nov 1, 2014 01:15
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fez_machine posted:Read my posts, I HATE the constant repetition of Laird Barron as a recommendation in this thread, it shows a lack of imagination and investigation into the genre as he's the current nerd king of horror and I will be a dick to anyone who mentions him as their go-to author. It's like some people just stop with him and never read anything else.
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Nov 1, 2014 01:17
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Dyscrasia posted:Speaking of vandermeer, I just finished the ambergris books and loved them. Anyone know anything similar? I read the southern reach books first and was really only into the first one. Ambergris is very heavily influenced by M. John Harrion's Viriconium sequence and has not a little bit of Fritz's Leiber's Lankhmar of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and The San Francisco of Our Lady of Darkness. Maybe Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, but that is set in a castle, not a city, until the last book.
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Nov 1, 2014 01:22
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So people are assholes on the internet. Its not a big deal. Intelligent readers will always be able evaluate opinions based on their merit alone. And every person has their intrinsic taste and biases. Normal people know this intrinsically. I'm almost done with Teatro Grottesco and I've read Grimscribe. I intend on reading all of Ligotti at some point, but what is his best work that I should read next? Also I'm really not sold on Clark Ashton Smith as a good author. What should I be reading. Since it is the season, relevant podcasts: Clark Ashton Smith podcast: The Double Shadow http://thedoubleshadow.com/ Currently at its end but there are some interesting episodes in there. Robert E Howard podcast, focusing of course on Conan: http://thecromcast.blogspot.com/ Evidently he wrote boxing stories too. I enjoyed their analysis of the 1982 Conan movie. Since it has been many years since I have seen it, I found their analysis of the movie from the perspective of paternalism to be interesting. http://thecromcast.blogspot.com/2014/06/episode-24-conan-barbarian-1982-or.html Edit: I was going to quote myself about the Lovecraft podcast, HP Podcraft but I can't find it. If you want to hear two dudes and occasional guests discuss Lovecraft's stories then check it out. After they finished Lovecraft's body of work, they go into the stories Lovecraft referenced in Supernatural Horror and Literature. Also readings of HPL's stories for this evening: http://hppodcraft.com/ http://lovecraftzine.com/audio/ Helical Nightmares fucked around with this message at 02:24 on Nov 1, 2014 |
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Nov 1, 2014 01:47
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fez_machine posted:Read my posts, I HATE the constant repetition of Laird Barron as a recommendation in this thread, it shows a lack of imagination and investigation into the genre as he's the current nerd king of horror and I will be a dick to anyone who mentions him as their go-to author. It's like some people just stop with him and never read anything else. Laird Barron owns a whole lot though and hating on him just because he's currently popular in this niche subgenre is really really dumb. There's a ton of good stuff aside from him obviously, and The Weird is probably the best collection both in terms of scope and content, but getting mad because people are recommending a good and popular author is pretty dumb.
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Nov 1, 2014 01:49
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If you hate Laird Barron, or any other author, TELL US WHY IN DETAIL. Basic critical analysis. It makes for an interesting discussion and it highlights weaknesses and strengths of the author.
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Nov 1, 2014 01:53
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EDIT: 
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Nov 1, 2014 01:55
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The only thing I don't like about Barron is that most of his protagonists are mary sues to the point where they're all literally him IRL (Big Manly Men from the Pacific Northwest), but I think other than that he's really great. It probably helps that I grew up in Washington so all the places he's writing about really strike home.
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Nov 1, 2014 02:04
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fez_machine posted:Ambergris is very heavily influenced by M. John Harrion's Viriconium sequence and has not a little bit of Fritz's Leiber's Lankhmar of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and The San Francisco of Our Lady of Darkness. Maybe Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, but that is set in a castle, not a city, until the last book. Cool, I'll check these out. Not so much the based in a city or setting, but the writing style and the strangeness that I love. Thats not to say the world building isn't excellent. I've read the mieville books already and those were great. I've gone through a ton of the horror mentioned in this thread and am starting to get into the "weird" fiction. Dyscrasia fucked around with this message at 02:14 on Nov 1, 2014 |
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Nov 1, 2014 02:05
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quote:Also I'm really not sold on Clark Ashton Smith as a good author. What should I be reading. I find CAS to be an alright author, but much like Lovecraft, his staying power is in how amazingly creative he was, not his technical prowess (though he is miles beyond HPL for what it's worth). This is a pretty good sampling of his works. Beyond that, if you find one particular setting of his appealing, I think Chaosium has collections dedicated to each (though they may be annoying to track down). Helical Nightmares posted:If you hate Laird Barron, or any other author, TELL US WHY IN DETAIL. Basic critical analysis. It makes for an interesting discussion and it highlights weaknesses and strengths of the author. The most common complaint tends to be that he rehashes a lot of themes, which is true. So do a lot of authors that write predominantly in the short form. If you binge through everything Barron wrote in the span of a few weeks, you are probably going to get tired of him, but honestly I think that holds true for just about any author (or any form of entertainment, really).
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Nov 1, 2014 02:13
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Good Clark Ashton Smith story here: http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/2/the-abominations-of-yondo
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Nov 1, 2014 05:32
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I like Barron a lot, I didn't like Ligotti very much even though I can see why some might do. The nameless protagonist overcome with nameless dread in a nameless place thing just doesn't really do it for me. I think horror as a genre lends itself better to fairly straightforward writing, which is not to say that you can't write well, but that the emotional punch required is harder to achieve through layers of literary gimmickry.
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Nov 1, 2014 10:54
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Helical Nightmares posted:
I thoroughly enjoyed My Work Is Not Yet Done.
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Nov 1, 2014 13:15
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Helical Nightmares posted:There was a short story in some Cthulhu anthology some years back that starred a female protagonist of Appalachian descent exploring Appalachia with an investigator friend to discover the origin of strange lights in the sky. I can’t remember author or title, but it was excellent. This has to be The Barrens by F. Paul Wilson.
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Nov 1, 2014 15:26
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I'm very much enjoying Barron and Ligotti and Clark Ashton Smith, whose books I'm reading on my Kindle. Also, The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolf features much cosmic horror.
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Nov 1, 2014 17:18
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Barron is a great Weird writer for people who've never read Weird before. I mean if you've read the classics like Lovecraft, Machen, CAS, Algernon Blackwood or whatever else you wanna count as classic, you'll be in familiar ground with 99% of Barron's output. Don't get me wrong, he's a good writer, but I'll never understand the praise. No hatin', just my 2 cents.
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Nov 1, 2014 19:04
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I just finished up The Madness of Cthulhu, edited by S.T. Joshi. I recommend skipping it. Only about half the stories are any good, and even then they aren't much better than average. Probably the best story, in my opinion, is J.C. Koch's "Little Lady" but that's chiefly because it reads like Barron-lite. Caitlin Kiernan's story would be a close second, but compared to the quality story she usually writes, it's obvious she just phoned this one in. I don't know if the middling quality of this anthology is the result of poor choices by Joshi, or just a paucity of available stories that fit the theme. The folks writing good cosmic horror have, by and large, abandoned Lovecraft's mythos in favor of setting up their own, or just writing one-off stories that don't require any connections to anything else.
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Nov 1, 2014 19:25
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Helical Nightmares posted:If you are able to tolerate Derleth then you should substantially enjoy Laird Barron. This is not a swipe at Barron. The time when I could somewhat appreciate Derleth was when I was jonesing for anything passably similar to Lovecraft, and for me Barron is the most genuine Lovecraft heir I’ve read. Thanks for the recommendations! I've only read the one story by Derleth, I understand he doesn't have a great reputation but I liked it well enough to at least try some of his other work. The only thing I've read so far by Laird Barron is "The Imago Sequence" (the story/novella, not the whole collection), but I thought it was really good. I have the collection on my kindle but haven't gotten around to reading the rest of the stories yet.
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Nov 2, 2014 01:28
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fez_machine posted:I probably need to work on a new OP but in short, the first thing you want to get is The Weird the most comprehensive overview of the field available edited by Jeff and Anne Vandermeer, and make up your mind from there, any writer (including Barron but then only grudgingly) anybody will mention in this thread is included, except for Sticks by Karl Edward Wagner which is the anthology's only really notable omission. That looks like a great collection, thanks for the suggestion. A few weeks ago I also picked up a bunch of $1 kindle "megapacks", like this one: The Weird Fiction Megapack. There are tons of them in almost every genre, but they seem to mostly focus on old pulp/sci-fi/horror stuff. Each one has ~30 stories, many of which are crap, but there enough good ones in there make them more than worth the $1. It's also been a cheap way to sample various authors that I probably wouldn't bother with normally.
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Nov 2, 2014 01:40
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Daveski posted:Thanks for the recommendations! I've only read the one story by Derleth, I understand he doesn't have a great reputation but I liked it well enough to at least try some of his other work. When Derleth is writing entirely within his own creations, he's fine. The backlash from fans of cosmic horror stems from his complete and utter lack of understanding of what Lovecraft was doing. A fair number of writers that do stories within Lovecraft's Mythos use the crap Derleth introduced because they don't necessarily know any better, though this is less of a problem since the advent of the internet and Joshi's ascendancy as the go-to Lovecraft scholar.
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Nov 2, 2014 01:48
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It's been a while since T.E.D. Klein was mentioned in this thread. His output wasn't a whole lot, but Dark Gods is a fantastic collection you can find used for cheap.
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Nov 2, 2014 07:10
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Ornamented Death posted:When Derleth is writing entirely within his own creations, he's fine. The backlash from fans of cosmic horror stems from his complete and utter lack of understanding of what Lovecraft was doing. A fair number of writers that do stories within Lovecraft's Mythos use the crap Derleth introduced because they don't necessarily know any better, though this is less of a problem since the advent of the internet and Joshi's ascendancy as the go-to Lovecraft scholar. That said, August Derleth is a huge part of why any of us know who HPL was. He may not have understood Lovecraft's work, but he (along with Donald Wandrei) did most of the heavy lifting in bringing it to the masses.
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Nov 2, 2014 15:19
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Pope Guilty posted:That said, August Derleth is a huge part of why any of us know who HPL was. He may not have understood Lovecraft's work, but he (along with Donald Wandrei) did most of the heavy lifting in bringing it to the masses. Oh no doubt, but even here there's a fair bit of controversy over how he did it. It's likely he completely hosed over Lovecraft's aunt (I think -some relative, anyhow) for the rights to Lovecraft's literary estate.
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Nov 2, 2014 15:30
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Here's a pretty extensive article on the subject.
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Nov 2, 2014 16:13
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On a whim I picked up My Work is Not Yet Done today. I've always been a bit lukewarm on Ligotti. His best stories - such as The Manager - I really, really liked. The rest... I could understand what he was going for, and appreciate it on one level, but it didn't really grab me. This book is totally different. It has the same Ligotti style and themes, but for whatever reason I find it infinitely more absorbing. It might be that coupled with the anti-natalist view of the world there's a current of dry humour, which isn't as prominent in his other stuff. Really good, at any rate, even if it doesn't fit neatly into this thread. It might be something I can sell to my non-horror reading friends who labour with me in the white collar world.
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Nov 2, 2014 20:22
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Barron's stories are flat and predictable, with usually quite dull main characters (agree wholeheartedly about the manlyman thing said above - ugh). It just feels kinda boring and for horror, not creepy/scary/anything at all, really. I gave up on Imago Sequence and might give it a chance later on, but I doubt it. Checked out some story recommendations from this thread and they just fell flat.
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Nov 2, 2014 20:28
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Bolverkur posted:Barron's stories are flat and predictable, with usually quite dull main characters (agree wholeheartedly about the manlyman thing said above - ugh). It just feels kinda boring and for horror, not creepy/scary/anything at all, really. I gave up on Imago Sequence and might give it a chance later on, but I doubt it. Checked out some story recommendations from this thread and they just fell flat. I'm reading the imago sequence right now (on the final story, 'the imago sequence') and some of them are just terrible. What's up with the guy who reads weird stuff in graffitti? I skipped that story. Some of the stories are good (the first one, with the weird witch person and the army guys and scientists) but of the first, I think three stories in the book, two of them basically end with the first-person protagonist saying or at least heavily implying 'and then I died'. I mean, that's playschool-level stuff here. If you're writing it you can't die. On a positive note, I previously read the tales of cthulhu anthology and most of those were pretty great. redreader fucked around with this message at 21:42 on Nov 2, 2014 |
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Nov 2, 2014 21:37
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Helical Nightmares posted:There was a short story in some Cthulhu anthology some years back that starred a female protagonist of Appalachian descent exploring Appalachia with an investigator friend to discover the origin of strange lights in the sky. I can’t remember author or title, but it was excellent. I think it came in the same anthology as David Morrell's "Orange is for anguish, blue for insanity" which I enjoyed a good deal too, but that's here in the rear end-end of Europe. edit: Oh, turns out someone actually beat me to it. I'll keep this here for the mention of what's probably the only good thing ever written by Morrell.
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