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Mr.48 posted:A Colder War by Charles Stross is a pretty much a must read for Lovecraft fans. You can read it for free here: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm If you're going to mention A Colder War then you also have to mention the Laundry novels - The Atrocity Archives, The Jennifer Morgue and The Fuller Memorandum. They're equal parts of Lovecraft, John le Carre and second line helpdesk support. EDIT: Also dig out William Hope Hodgson. Well worth it.
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Jan 21, 2012 01:42
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Would it be completely outlandish to suggest Mignola's Hellboy? It's more Titus Crow than HPL, to be sure, but it's fun to look at it from the perspective of a lead character who is himself an agent of Extradimensional Tentacular Evil.
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Jan 22, 2012 01:04
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MyNameIsAlex posted:C'mon guys no love for House Of Leaves? It is kinda subjective though on that but still its a bloody ace read. I have no idea how anyone has ever managed to read House of Leaves. I've tried three times and failed to get more than five pages in before wanting to gouge my own eyes out. Horrible, terrible book.
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Jan 25, 2012 09:30
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CornHolio posted:C'mon, you stupid poo poo, the Great Old Ones have no need for relations - they always have been, and always will be. I don't know, I hear Yog-Sothoth had a couple of kids. (Derleth can still go fhtagn himself, though.)
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Feb 18, 2012 12:01
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Mr.48 posted:Check out the Adversary Cycle by F. Paul Wilson. You could probably just jump right into the last book, Nightworld, that has an awesome Lovecraftian Apocalypse. "The sun will set at 2.37pm on Friday and it will not rise again." One of the creepiest lines in fiction. However, I wouldn't advise you to dive right in with the last. Wilson used the Adversary Cycle to tie a number of other books together, so it's not quite as stand-alone as Mr 48 suggests. The correct reading order is: The Keep The Touch The Tomb Reborn Reprisal Nightworld After that, if you're still not tired you can read the rest of Wilson's Repairman Jack novels. They're good fun.
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Jul 6, 2012 08:30
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This is going to surprise a few people, but you may want to look into HG Wells. His best known short story is The Truth About Pyecraft, which is hilariously cynical more than weird, but he also wrote a few good ghost stories and tales of the weird - some of which, like Into The Abyss and The Story of the Late Mr Elvesham, are decidedly Lovecraftian. There's a folio-style omnibus of all Wells's short fiction in print at a very reasonable price. I recommend you indulge.
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Aug 16, 2012 23:54
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Zola posted:I just read "The Star" and "The Country of the Blind". Although "The Star" more properly fits into the sci-fi genre, it was pretty creepy, and "The Country of the Blind" also had its moments. Which version of The Country of the Blind did you read? Wells revised the story in the 1930s and had the Country of the Blind destroyed by a natural disaster that the inhabitants would not flee because they didn't believe Nunez could see it coming.
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Aug 18, 2012 13:18
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Zola posted:It was the unrevised version, where he found a way out of the valley on the eve of having his eyes removed I wouldn't say the 1939 revision was heavy-handed or patronising; it just makes it more obvious that there are none so blind as those who will not see, which was a part of the original. Unfortunately I can't find it anywhere on the net. See if you can find the Omnibus in a brick-and-mortar bookstore; the only significant change to the text is to replace everything after the third from last paragraph with the new ending.
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Aug 19, 2012 00:12
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ravenkult posted:Classy. The House Next Door, Anne Rivers Siddons. If you can tolerate comics, you may also want to check out Lot 13 by Steve Niles and Glenn Fabry.
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Jan 8, 2013 14:05
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Ornamented Death posted:Richard Matheson passed away last night drat. He must have been over 80, though, so a good run.
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Jun 25, 2013 07:38
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Ninja fetus posted:I like all of this stuff, except for vampires and serial killers I guess. Gore is okay, as long as it's part of the story. I don't really like gory horror movies either, but I don't mind seeing gore as part of a bigger picture. Zombies are great, although I've never finished World war Z. I found it to be a little boring. I really dig the vibe of empty cities. I like videogames like STALKER, Doom II and Day Z. Post apocalyptic stuff interests me. Especially if it has something to do with demons, creatures that come out at night, etc. Not sure if that helps. Anyway. Great recommendations. Thanks. I'll look into these this weekend. It sounds to me like you might enjoy the Watch series by Sergei Lukyanenko. That series very much fits the horror-as-action vibe, with the interesting fillip that the stories aren't all told from the side of the good guys.
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Feb 13, 2014 00:56
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Neurosis posted:Where to start with Ramsey Campbell? I picked up The Hungry Moon and so far the book is not impressing me. The Doll Who Ate His Mother for his horror work, and Cold Print for his Mythos stuff.
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Feb 20, 2014 17:12
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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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Pththya-lyi posted:He was a staunch Prohibitionist and even wrote a story about a friend, Alfred Galpin, turning into a hopeless drunk called "Old Bugs." It is set in the far-flung future of 1950 and ends with Bugs saving his ex-fiancee's son from trying whiskey before collapsing and dying on a barroom floor. Lovecraft sent the story to Galpin and wrote "Now will you be good?" at the bottom. All because Galpin wanted to try alcohol before Prohibition went into effect! Lovecraft would probably be horrified to learn that people were using his name and likeness to sell beer! And even more horrified that the can was black. By the way, one of the best things about this thread is seeing it in my bookmarks with you listed as the last poster.
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Feb 3, 2015 10:24
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Thomas F Monteleone wrote Night Train, which is a really bad book. Not the worst I've ever read, but it's everything you ever recall about 1980's sub-King horror wrapped up in a package with an awful cover.
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Mar 29, 2015 00:52
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fez_machine posted:Since we're talking about Cosmic Horror and Eskimos. I'm going to recommend Midnight Sun by Ramsey Campbell. Just recommend everything by Ramsey Campbell. He's spent 50 years writing the Mythos, among other things. Start with Cold Print and Demons By Daylight for the cosmic, then move on to The Parasite and The Doll Who Ate His Mother and go from there.
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Nov 14, 2015 18:43
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MockingQuantum posted:I'm sure you'd get multiple different answers on what is or is not worth reading in the Lovecraft bibliography. I personally think most of his stuff is pretty dated or really just not that great, and you can especially skip pretty much everything he wrote before 1923, with a couple of exceptions. (The Outsider & The Music of Erich Zann). Besides that, all of the mythos stories are pretty decent. I would recommend not starting with any of the longer novellas or with Call of Cthulhu. Why not with The Call of Cthulhu?
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Feb 28, 2016 16:56
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Helical Nightmares posted:Also someone made a board game? https://www.treefroggames.com/a-study-in-emerald Just a note: that's the highly complex 1st Edition. 2nd Edition is much more streamlined and faster. Very much worth playing, although you won't get much of a cosmic horror vibe from it. Instead you get to blow up the eldritch Queen of London with dynamite.
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Mar 21, 2016 19:51
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General Battuta posted:Nick gets a mini-funhole in his hand. The dream of every 14 year old boy.
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Apr 4, 2016 17:00
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MockingQuantum posted:Anybody have a burning need to write a good OP, or part of one, for general horror books? I could do one but hell if I know when I'll actually get around to finishing it. I wouldn't do the whole OP, but it should be divided into three sections - Classical 1816-1920, Pulp 1921-1973 and Modern 1974- with brief bios for a number of the most important authors and lists of others to look at. I could probably give a starting point for Classical and some British authors you might miss, at least.
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Jul 25, 2016 12:15
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Xotl posted:That's an odd cutoff for your Pulp era, seeing as how the Pulps were dead by '55. Is there any reason you picked '73? Horror was in the doldrums during the 1960s thanks to a combination of the death of the pulps, the optimism of the hippy era and a looming threat of Armageddon that trivialised fictional boogeymen. There were a few people writing good horror in the 60s - Bradbury and Ira Levin, for example - but the modern era of horror novels didn't begin until the publication of Carrie in 1974. It's the same reason I ended Classical at 1920 instead of, say, 1923 when Weird Tales first came out: Lovecraft in many ways defined the Pulp era, and 1920 was the first publication of The Statement of Randolph Carter, his first major mythos work.
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Jul 25, 2016 23:43
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MockingQuantum posted:I admit I have yet to find an anthology, even by a single author, to be anything but hit and miss. John Ajvide Lindqvist's Let The Old Dreams Die is very close to 100% quality. You really need to have read some of his books first though, as it has coda stories for both Let The Right One In and Handling the Undead.
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Aug 1, 2016 10:16
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Robot Wendigo posted:Well, there's The Tomb by F. Paul Wilson. That's the first one that popped into my head. It has ancient religions, cults, demons and Repairman Jack punching them. Wilson tied Repairman Jack into some of his other novels, upon which it turns into cosmic horror too.
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Aug 31, 2016 15:30
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Slackerish posted:can y'all recommend me some horror that also has a lot to do with family? also, anything with a good dark sense of humor. Thank. For the former, practically anything by John Ajvide Lindqvist but especially Handling the Undead and Harbour.
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Jan 16, 2017 00:09
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I just finished House on the Borderland as well. I think it's mostly an artifact of its age. Watching the Earth get destroyed by time was probably more horrifying when the idea of entropy on that scale was less well studied.
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Feb 8, 2017 12:10
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Skyscraper posted:Oh, no doubt, I could see he was doing some stuff, but the whole thing came off as an unskippable cutscene, or like when you're playing DnD and the DM talks for like an hour and moves your characters around while bad stuff happens. The main character does nothing other than float in space and watch. You're sitting in the Cosmic Horror thread complaining about the cosmic horror. Just saying.
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Feb 8, 2017 17:25
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GrandpaPants posted:Brubaker also wrote Fatale which is also very much noir meets eldritch horrors. Unlike Black Monday Murders, this one is all done and you can pick it up in a nice complete hardcover. If you want something in the territory that doesn't involve extradimensional tentacular evil as a change in pace, check out Velvet. High concept: Miss Moneypenny is an agent at least as good as James Bond, but she's retired to a desk job. Hijinks ensue.
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Mar 29, 2017 15:18
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fez_machine posted:Clive Barker is on the more acceptable side of Splatterpunk which is why you've heard of him. The quintessential splatterpunk book is The Light at the End by John Skipp and Craig Spector.
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Jul 5, 2017 15:30
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Dr. Video Games 0081 posted:"Do Chinese girls really have sideways vaginas?" "Why, are you a harmonica player?"
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Sep 3, 2017 22:23
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MockingQuantum posted:I'm looking for a good horror novel that kind of captures the same feeling as classic slasher horror (Halloween, Friday the 13, etc). Any recommendations? You could be out of luck there, that's traditionally Richard Laymon country. The Rats by James Herbert might float your boat, though. No slasher killer, just the titular rodents, but it hits the same "nobody's died for 10 pages, have a set piece" beats.
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Jan 15, 2018 17:31
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Ornamented Death posted:I find such dismissals irritating, but at the end of the day I'd rather spend my time reading things I enjoy than arguing with people over whether Ghost Story or We Have Always Lived in the Castle have any literary merit. Who the gently caress is saying that WHALITC lacks literary merit? I've heard far more arguments about whether it's actually horror than people arguing that it is and dismissing it.
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Feb 15, 2018 17:53
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It's weird in a way that people think Pet Sematary is peak King, because he hates it and didn't even want to publish it. The only reason it ever came out is because he was contractually obliged to provide a book to NEL and he hadn't finished It in time.
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Mar 27, 2018 12:08
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The Vosgian Beast posted:Wasn't it too raw and unpleasant for him? Too nihilistic, particularly in its depiction of child death. I believe King has also said the end of Cujo would be different if he was writing it later in his career. I suspect that It was a reaction to those two books and what he didn't like about them - kids are being killed, still, but they have agency to defend themselves and fight back and unlike in the other books the evil is ultimately defeated.
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Mar 27, 2018 13:36
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MockingQuantum posted:What makes a book "extreme" horror? I don't think I've ever read anything that's been labeled as such, it makes me think everybody is grinding some mad rails while chugging surge and listening to nu-metal while running from a guy in a mask. You know more than a couple of complete arsebiscuits.
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May 10, 2018 17:51
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