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i honestly, and i'm not just trying to be contrarian here, do not understand what people like about The Fisherman. i think it's one of the worst horror novels i've ever read. the only good parts were about the dude fishing in the hudson valley - which, for all that the book stresses that it's set in the hudson valley (and speaking as someone who has spent a lot of time in the hudson valley), feels absolutely bland and characterless. it's very clear that langan wanted the hudson valley to be a character in the story but completely lacked the skill necessary to give it any kind of vitality; you could run a find and replace on every instance of "New York" and change it to "Washington" and the book wouldn't be even a little bit different. hex did a way better job of conjuring the feel of the landscape and that book was written about Holland. and good lord, the middle section of the book - the massive exposition dump weakly framed as a story-within-a-story, heralded by the narrator's weak bit about wow it's so mysterious that i remember this word for word, like some other force is moving through me - blew. aside from being paint-by-number predictable, and aside from being written in exactly the same voice as the narrator's (despite purportedly being reported [or better, channeled] speech) - it also failed to give either its physical or temporal setting any life or interest at all. it's just boring. it's boring as hell and i hate it. and then the end of the novel abandons any horror pretensions at all and turns into an out-and-out fantasy romp, complete with a dark wizard battle. gently caress, that book sucks. MOD EDIT: spoiler tags added Somebody fucked around with this message at 09:28 on Jan 9, 2019 |
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Jan 9, 2019 03:45
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i refuse to spoiler tag the bit about the wizard battle (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jan 9, 2019 03:47
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Tertius Oculum posted:Imago Sequence - Grabbed the audiobook, it's pretty cool, I've finished half of the stories in it including the title, like it for the most part so far. quote:Currently reading: Wait for it 
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Jan 9, 2019 07:24
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chernobyl kinsman posted:i honestly, and i'm not just trying to be contrarian here, do not understand what people like about The Fisherman. i think it's one of the worst horror novels i've ever read. the only good parts were about the dude fishing in the hudson valley - which, for all that the book stresses that it's set in the hudson valley (and speaking as someone who has spent a lot of time in the hudson valley), feels absolutely bland and characterless. it's very clear that langan wanted the hudson valley to be a character in the story but completely lacked the skill necessary to give it any kind of vitality; you could run a find and replace on every instance of "New York" and change it to "Washington" and the book wouldn't be even a little bit different. hex did a way better job of conjuring the feel of the landscape and that book was written about Holland. hahaha yeah it owns
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Jan 9, 2019 07:26
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Have you read Bird Box and do you rank it higher than The Fisherman?
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Jan 9, 2019 09:45
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I had not heard of The Sick Land before and read through it last night. It was a lot of fun.
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Jan 9, 2019 14:16
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i discovered that the author of bird box is the singer for a band i used to hang out with as a kid (the high strung,) and when i was a kid he gave me a manuscript for something and it was the most poorly written thing i had ever read. every line ended with twenty ellipses and it was literally all dialogue. so if any of u want to criticize josh malermans prose keep in mind he is an amateur rock star turned horror novelist and he has no formal training whatsoever and is in fact bad at writing
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Jan 9, 2019 14:52
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scary ghost dog posted:i discovered that the author of bird box is the singer for a band i used to hang out with as a kid (the high strung,) and when i was a kid he gave me a manuscript for something and it was the most poorly written thing i had ever read. every line ended with twenty ellipses and it was literally all dialogue. so if any of u want to criticize josh malermans prose keep in mind he is an amateur rock star turned horror novelist and he has no formal training whatsoever and is in fact bad at writing I mean what authors actually get formal training? I didn't care for the Bird Box but I respect a dude who can learn how to go from twenty ellipsis to readable stuff.
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Jan 9, 2019 15:09
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StrixNebulosa posted:I mean what authors actually get formal training? Uhhh well formal training in writing is most definitely a thing, though I'm sure there are plenty of English majors on the forums that could give us detailed opinions on whether or not a college degree translates into actual writing ability. To say no authors get formal training is kind of silly, though, there's hundreds of creative writing degrees and courses all over the place. All that aside, yeah, there are plenty of good writers without formal education, though I'm undecided on wheher Malerman is one of them. Black Mad Wheel was confusing and kind of poorly written, with what was imo a cosmically stupid plot. I'm actually reading Unbury Carol right now, but jury's still out on it for me, it's really not grabbing me despite the concept of the book kind of being right up my alley
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Jan 9, 2019 16:09
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chernobyl kinsman posted:i honestly, and i'm not just trying to be contrarian here, do not understand what people like about The Fisherman. i think it's one of the worst horror novels i've ever read. I wouldn't say it was the worst but I also don't get why people liked it.
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Jan 9, 2019 17:32
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StrixNebulosa posted:I mean what authors actually get formal training? Somewhere between “many” and “most”. MFA programs are a huge thing bud
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Jan 9, 2019 17:44
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StrixNebulosa posted:I mean what authors actually get formal training? yeah he gets props for not giving up, to be sure
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Jan 9, 2019 17:50
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I read as much weird horror as I can get my hands on and loved The Fisherman and especially the story-within-a-story device. If you haven’t read it and enjoy Langan’s short work you will probably like it. It doesn’t overstay its welcome either.
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Jan 9, 2019 18:17
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Skyscraper posted:I wouldn't say it was the worst but I also don't get why people liked it.
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Jan 9, 2019 20:57
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Muninn posted:I read as much weird horror as I can get my hands on and loved The Fisherman and especially the story-within-a-story device. If you haven’t read it and enjoy Langan’s short work you will probably like it. It doesn’t overstay its welcome either. what did you like about it chernobyl kinsman posted:MOD EDIT: spoiler tags added weak
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Jan 9, 2019 21:07
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ruby saltbush posted:my reaction to it was exaggerated because i paid $23 for it lol. that's two reregs and a cappuccino! OK yeah well maybe if I paid that much I'd have some stronger feelings.
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Jan 9, 2019 21:19
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Skyscraper posted:OK yeah well maybe if I paid that much I'd have some stronger feelings.
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Jan 9, 2019 21:52
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chernobyl kinsman posted:what did you like about it The fun nested narrative, the not overly expository allusions to cosmic horrors and general weird occurrences that gave depth to the happenings in the narrative, the deft portrayal of personal loss and obsession, the contrast between the initial groundedness of the protagonist’s situation and the craziness it descends into, the not overly literary but not dumb prose. I thought it was exactly what a cosmic horror novel should be. Edit: what are some horror books you did enjoy, out of curiosity?
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Jan 9, 2019 23:09
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scary ghost dog posted:yeah he gets props for not giving up, to be sure In my copy of Bird Box at the end he basically says he had written like 20 novels that were just sitting around until some producer (agent? something?) friend of his was like ''Send them all over.'' The movie rights were bought before the book was picked up I believe.
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Jan 10, 2019 01:14
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Muninn posted:Edit: what are some horror books you did enjoy, out of curiosity? robert aickman, m. r. james, jackson's haunting of hill house, mcdowell's the elementals and blackwater, most ligotti, much lovecraft, tremblay's head full of ghosts, nathan ballingrud's short stories, jeremy shipp's the atrocities, and recently david mitchell's slade house, off the top of my head
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Jan 10, 2019 04:53
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ravenkult posted:In my copy of Bird Box at the end he basically says he had written like 20 novels that were just sitting around until some producer (agent? something?) friend of his was like ''Send them all over.'' The movie rights were bought before the book was picked up I believe. lol ok that jives with my memory of him
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Jan 10, 2019 07:09
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chernobyl kinsman posted:robert aickman, m. r. james, jackson's haunting of hill house, mcdowell's the elementals and blackwater, most ligotti, much lovecraft, tremblay's head full of ghosts, nathan ballingrud's short stories, jeremy shipp's the atrocities, and recently david mitchell's slade house, off the top of my head Wow, we have shockingly similar tastes. I love all of those that I've read, and the ones I haven't (The Atrocities, Slade House, Ligotti) I've bought and are sitting on my Kindle waiting to be read. Well, I guess I haven't read any MR James besides Casting the Runes and the one about whistling, but I liked both of those a lot.
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Jan 10, 2019 16:46
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MockingQuantum posted:Wow, we have shockingly similar tastes. I love all of those that I've read, and the ones I haven't (The Atrocities, Slade House, Ligotti) I've bought and are sitting on my Kindle waiting to be read. hell yeah. def recommend ligotti. he's got his weaknesses, but all of his stories read like prose-poems about anxiety attacks, and that's fun. atrocities i actually got as a secret santa gift from our own Guy A Person what else do you like? im always looking for recs
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Jan 10, 2019 21:31
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chernobyl kinsman posted:hell yeah. def recommend ligotti. he's got his weaknesses, but all of his stories read like prose-poems about anxiety attacks, and that's fun. atrocities i actually got as a secret santa gift from our own Guy A Person Have you read House of Small Shadows? That's the one book in keeping with the rest of those that leaps to mind, though it's got some of the same issues that Nevill's other books do. I'll look at my Kindle and list of other books I've read, see if there's something else I'm not thinking of. I think you're probably more in the know for that sort of supernatural/psychological horror genre than I am, though. I'd be more likely to tell you a bunch of books that seem like they'd be good but you shouldn't read
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Jan 10, 2019 21:54
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I just read the first story in Hodge's 'Worlds of Hurt' and drat.
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Jan 10, 2019 22:38
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nowadays i treat goon recommendations with extreme suspicion, but i'm liking ligotti
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Jan 11, 2019 00:28
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I found Bird Box to be incredibly tense and effective while reading it. I think it did a great job of making me feel trapped inside a person's head while something is there. The movie didn't have that same level of intensity, and couldn't really.
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Jan 11, 2019 18:45
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graventy posted:I found Bird Box to be incredibly tense and effective while reading it. I think it did a great job of making me feel trapped inside a person's head while something is there. The movie didn't have that same level of intensity, and couldn't really. I think the movie definitely fell down on conveying the same level of alienness and menace surrounding the things as the book managed. I also thought the fallout of people seeing the things wasn't done very well in the movie, I remember it being much more terrifying in the book though I read it long enough ago that I don't remember why specifically.
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Jan 11, 2019 18:53
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The movie kind of sped everything up. The book kind of makes it seems like the things just sort of manifest slowly over time, so each suicide is important and shocking, but we don't really witness most of the apocalypse. In the movie it's like a slightly-crazier black friday suddenly breaks out and pretty much everyone goes crazy all at the same time.
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Jan 11, 2019 19:48
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avshalemon posted:nowadays i treat goon recommendations with extreme suspicion, but i'm liking ligotti do aickman next
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Jan 11, 2019 21:25
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MockingQuantum posted:Lovecraft is one of those authors where I really love the idea of a lot of his stories, while really not enjoying the execution. That's why I tend to steer people either to a small handful of Lovecraft stories or towards more modern authors that are just significantly better writers. MoM is a classic example of that, to me. I loving love the idea of MoM but I didn't really enjoy it either time I've read it, and one of those was when I was a dumb high schooler. I'd kill for a good cosmic horror novel like MoM. I've read a bunch more Lovecraft (Shadow over Innsmouth, Statement of Randolph Carter, Colour out of Space, Dreams in the Witchhouse, The Thing on the Doorstep, Music of Erich Zann, The Outsider, Herbert West-Reanimator, Lurking Fear, Rats in the Walls) since posting in this thread and came to the same conclusion. It's kind of infuriating, he has some great ideas but basically everything he writes is in the form of a long monologue with no real characters or dialogue, and he describes everything in the same " its so horrible! its indescribable!" manner before going into pages of exposition on what exactly it is. His prose is just terrible too, its like he saw authors from the past used a lot of florid language and overly literaryness and tried to cargo cult it by just shoving as many words as possible he could find in his thesaurus into each sentence without any real regard for if they're necessary or flow or add anything. All that said, I enjoyed most of the stories at least somewhat and some in particular I thought were really good (Innsmouth and Colour). The concepts for his stories are all pretty cool and he had quite the imagination, plus the whole "mythos" he built around all his stories is kind of fun to see how they all fit together. I'll probably read the bunch of other stories in the collection I got. Ill check out Barron. I have quite the list of horror authors now but I'll get to it eventually lol
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Jan 11, 2019 22:14
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Tolkien minority posted:I've read a bunch more Lovecraft (Shadow over Innsmouth, Statement of Randolph Carter, Colour out of Space, Dreams in the Witchhouse, The Thing on the Doorstep, Music of Erich Zann, The Outsider, Herbert West-Reanimator, Lurking Fear, Rats in the Walls) since posting in this thread and came to the same conclusion. It's kind of infuriating, he has some great ideas but basically everything he writes is in the form of a long monologue with no real characters or dialogue, and he describes everything in the same " its so horrible! its indescribable!" manner before going into pages of exposition on what exactly it is. His prose is just terrible too, its like he saw authors from the past used a lot of florid language and overly literaryness and tried to cargo cult it by just shoving as many words as possible he could find in his thesaurus into each sentence without any real regard for if they're necessary or flow or add anything. I personally love Barron, I know there are horrorgoons that definitely do not, though. He can be pretty hit and miss too. Imago Sequence is probably his best collection, with Occultation close behind. Don't read The Croning until you're sure you like Barron. Also "Procession of the Black Sloth" is super divisive so make sure that's not his first story you read.
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Jan 11, 2019 22:32
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Ornamented Death posted:I had not heard of The Sick Land before and read through it last night. It was a lot of fun. I just finished The Sick Land today. It was kinda fun, but it suffered really badly from that 'mysterious ominous stuff happens inexplicably' dream logic thing that some bad horror mistakes for depth.
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Jan 13, 2019 01:58
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Bilirubin posted:Opinions on the Black Sloth? I thought the Prossession of the Black Sloth wasn't bad. I liked it. All the different hells were neat and the way he described them with the video footage and everything was cool. Though Imago Sequence overall is pretty decent too. I also started on the Sick Lands (just learned from here) and it's kinda cool, but the format is meh, and definitely want more of a novel format for that story.
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Jan 13, 2019 21:00
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Speaking of Laird Barron, this came in the other day:
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Jan 16, 2019 03:06
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Just how many New Neighbors do you have there?
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Jan 16, 2019 12:44
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Just the two. I got the one on the right some years ago and was later able to get the superior Charnel House edition for a good price. I havent yet decided if I want to sell the other one.
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Jan 16, 2019 14:38
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Never sell books you like
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Jan 16, 2019 15:49
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Ornamented Death posted:Speaking of Laird Barron, this came in the other day: How was Blood Standard? I haven't really heard anything about it, positive or negative
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Jan 16, 2019 16:48
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MockingQuantum posted:How was Blood Standard? I haven't really heard anything about it, positive or negative I'm reading it now. About a quarter of the way through and it's good so far. I'll post my thoughts when I finish it.
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Jan 16, 2019 17:06
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