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MockingQuantum posted:I should read more MR James. I think I've only ever read the two that show up in every collection (Casting the Runes and... Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad or something like that) and they were good, but didn't fire me up to read more of him. Any other standouts? If the BBC adapted it, it's probably good. Regardless, I don't see any point in picking out places to start when you're most likely to be reading any given one of James's ghost stories in a single volume collection. He only wrote 34, and you can get 33 of them for under £1 on Kindle or the main 30 for free.
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Mar 16, 2019 15:16
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When I was little I got a collection of M.R. James stories for Christmas one year and read a whole bunch of them years later (they were initially way beyond me) with no awareness that they were part of any canon of horror literature. Possibly even before I read Lovecraft? They were great in that context--just a littlish kid up late reading these only slightly creepy ghost stories
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Mar 16, 2019 16:16
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Dr. Video Games 0081 posted:By the way, isn't it a bummer that Ligotti's "The Nightmare Network" is such a vivid, accurate representation of our own time? I thought "Our Temporary Supervisor" did a way better job of it 
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Mar 17, 2019 10:41
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Skyscraper posted:I thought "Our Temporary Supervisor" did a way better job of it Respectfully disagree: quote:CLASSIFIED AD I [...] quote:
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Mar 18, 2019 15:11
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Lil Mama Im Sorry posted:CLASSIFIED AD I It's accurate to tech giants today, right up to: quote:Your life need not be a nightmare of failure and resentment. Join us. Outstanding benefits. Which is the part that is no longer true today. I feel like Our Temporary Supervisor probably has the Amazon Fulfillment Center mindset down pretty well. quote:The next morning I returned to the factory along with everyone else. We worked at an even faster rate and were even more productive. Part of this was due to the fact that the bell that signaled the end of the work day rang later than it had the day before. This lengthening of the time we spent at the factory, along with the increasingly fast rate at which we worked, became an established pattern. It wasn’t long before we were allowed only a few hours away from the factory, only a few hours that belonged to us, although the only possible way we could use this time was to gain the rest we needed in order to return to the exhausting labors which the company now demanded of us.
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Mar 18, 2019 16:06
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Jedit posted:If the BBC adapted it, it's probably good. The BBC always gently caress them up, though. They take a perfectly crafted, stand-alone short story, that James spent the best part of a year polishing and say: "Heyyyyy, this story is good, I guess, but what if we add this to it!" Like, they took Whistle and I'll come to You and added in a subplot where the dude's wife had Alzheimers and he was super-conflicted about it and the haunting all somehow fed into that and it sucked balls. It also completely missed the dry, understated humour that's an essential ingredient of an M R James story by making the protagonist a lonely, regretful old guy rather than an earnest young nerd who totally doesn't believe in ghosts... until he's faced with the evidence of his own eyes! An M R James story is already a near-perfect little tale: all they have to do is translate it into a visual medium but no, every time it's "We're updating this for the modern era!" and they poo poo out a high-budget, star-studded, impeccably produced failure. Yeah, I'm mad.
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Mar 18, 2019 22:27
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Skyscraper posted:It's accurate to tech giants today, right up to: I feel like the transition from that first ad to this is pretty perfect too, tho: quote:CLASSIFIED AD II I think I just personally find TNN funnier and so I like it more. They're both great stories tho.
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Mar 18, 2019 22:47
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Anybody read Final Girls? I just finished it not that long ago, and I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, though I'm not sure if I'd say it was better than I expected. It feels like a guilty pleasure horror novel, which is fitting given the gimmick of the book (the main character is the so-called Final Girl of a real life slasher movie-esque killing). Also it's kind of more a mystery novel than a horror novel, in a lot of ways. It doesn't push too many envelopes or anything, but I still liked it a fair bit.
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Mar 21, 2019 21:09
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i'm reading songs of a dead dreamer and its good but not as good as teatro grottesco. i dont really know how to describe the difference but there's something qualitatively different in where the horror comes from between the two, which is a thing i am enjoying thinking about
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Mar 21, 2019 21:19
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Pistol_Pete posted:The BBC always gently caress them up, though. They take a perfectly crafted, stand-alone short story, that James spent the best part of a year polishing and say: "Heyyyyy, this story is good, I guess, but what if we add this to it!" Like, they took Whistle and I'll come to You and added in a subplot where the dude's wife had Alzheimers and he was super-conflicted about it and the haunting all somehow fed into that and it sucked balls. It also completely missed the dry, understated humour that's an essential ingredient of an M R James story by making the protagonist a lonely, regretful old guy rather than an earnest young nerd who totally doesn't believe in ghosts... until he's faced with the evidence of his own eyes! An M R James story is already a near-perfect little tale: all they have to do is translate it into a visual medium but no, every time it's "We're updating this for the modern era!" and they poo poo out a high-budget, star-studded, impeccably produced failure. Yeah, but there would be no point in them just doing another straight adaptation of OW&ICTYML; they already broadcast the definitive, 1961 (iirc) Jonathan Miller version. Any new version is inevitably going to suffer by comparison to that one, unless it tries to do something completely different. Personally, I'd rather they just re-broadcast the Miller one or adapt something else, but the new one wasn't terrible by any means. Just very different to the source material, and didn't really need to be tied to it to tell the story it clearly wanted to. I really like the 1970s, ITV version of Casting The Runes, which moved it to a contemporary setting, too: more interesting to do that than just try to re-film Night Of The Demon. (And adaptation is never just a matter of 'translate it into a visual medium'. There are always trade offs and editorial decisions involved. You can't just turn written dialogue into spoken, point a camera at it, and assume it will work. You need to find ways to convey, visually, things which can just be stated as fact in print, such as what a character is thinking and why. When scripts try to stick too closely to a prose original, the story telling can get very messy. You should respect the source material, of course, but part of that is accepting that you are working in a completely different medium and need to make accommodations for that.)
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Mar 22, 2019 11:51
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I just got done reading Kill Creek by Scott Thomas. Fun quick read, and it was well written. If your looking for something up that alley I would say this is the perfect book for it.
Flaggy fucked around with this message at 15:43 on Mar 22, 2019 |
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Mar 22, 2019 14:50
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CestMoi posted:i'm reading songs of a dead dreamer and its good but not as good as teatro grottesco. i dont really know how to describe the difference but there's something qualitatively different in where the horror comes from between the two, which is a thing i am enjoying thinking about There are some stories I really love in Songs of a Dead Dreamer: "Alice's Last Adventure," "Dreams of a Manikin," "The Chymist," "Notes on the Writing...," "Professor Nobody's..." and "The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise." But I don't think it's really an accident that those stories all have fairly similar themes, or that their themes and subject matter lend them to a certain amount of formal playfulness. But most of the stories in Songs of a Dead Dreamer strike me as being still fairly straightforwardly supernatural stories of supernatural horror, whereas by Teatro Grottesco the supernatural elements are often extremely opaque and downplayed, and with much less action overall ("The Red Tower" representing a kind of extreme point of absence of character and action, and functioning as a companion piece to the playfulness of "The Nightmare Network.") Although there's good stuff in there, My Work Is Not Yet Done itself, the novella and not the collection, is probably my least favorite Ligotti story I've read: it's just too much focused on incident and character, and those aren't the things I like in Ligotti's work. I do have to modify that though, especially if you're reading the Penguin collection that has Grimscribe in it too, because "The Last Feast of Harlequin" is a perfectly coherent, traditionalish short story driven by character and plot, and that's another one of my favorite Ligotti stories. When I was growing up I was reading a lot of Donald Barthelme, and I always think of Ligotti as being like a horror Barthelme at his best. For instance, from Barthelme's "Departures": quote:ARMY PLANS TO FREEZE Or I know even more Ligotti gets compared to a Borges or a Kafka. I always think about the Kafka story "Odradek"/"Cares of a Family Man": quote:«Some say the word Odradek is of Slavonic origin, and try to account for it on that basis. (from here: https://livelongday.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/odradek.pdf)
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Mar 22, 2019 15:51
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MockingQuantum posted:Anybody read Final Girls? I just finished it not that long ago, and I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, though I'm not sure if I'd say it was better than I expected. It feels like a guilty pleasure horror novel, which is fitting given the gimmick of the book (the main character is the so-called Final Girl of a real life slasher movie-esque killing). Also it's kind of more a mystery novel than a horror novel, in a lot of ways. It doesn't push too many envelopes or anything, but I still liked it a fair bit. I though it was fun. The flashback scenes did a good job of feeling exactly like slasher film, both in the buildup of going to the camp and typical characters and the chaotic attacks. Sort of similarly (though much better) I really liked My Sister, the Serial Killer, about a woman coming to terms with her much prettier and more popular younger sister being a killer, and what to do about it. I don't think it fully classifies as horror, but the book is a pretty perfect blend of dark comedy.
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Mar 22, 2019 16:10
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Flopstick posted:You should respect the source material, of course, but part of that is accepting that you are working in a completely different medium and need to make accommodations for that.) Yes, I'm aware of the technical issues in translating a printed story into a visual one. Conveying something through film is quite different to achieving the same thing in a written story. My issue is that the directors of MR James adaptions (doing an annual Xmas adaption has become a bit of a tradition at the BBC) invariably start adding in fresh and incongruous elements to the stories, just so they can boast that they've "made their mark" on an established classic. Invariably, it fails to work and detracts from the story, rather than making it more comprehensible for a contemporary audience.
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Mar 22, 2019 21:21
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Dr. Video Games 0081 posted:Although there's good stuff in there, My Work Is Not Yet Done itself, the novella and not the collection, is probably my least favorite Ligotti story I've read: it's just too much focused on incident and character, and those aren't the things I like in Ligotti's work. That Barthelme comparison is really fascinating, and I completely agree about the experimentation and influences in TG that make it feel like so much more of a unique work. I re-read My Work Is Not Yet Done recently and I enjoyed it much more on the second go, but I don't think there's any doubt that the longer form exposes Ligotti's weaknesses by forcing him to work with a more action-driven plot and a bigger cast of characters, which he doesn't particularly seem to enjoy. The first third of the book is this brilliant little sketch of office politics and social paranoia as 20th century horror, focusing on the narrator's Underground Man fantasies that everyone around him is out to get him, undermining him, cheating him...but then there's nowhere for the plot to go afterwards at that kind of length, other than the office workers actually being a parade of deliberate villains, who he then kills off one by one in a slightly weary succession of Ligotti's Greatest Thematic Hits.
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Mar 23, 2019 13:23
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I do think there's some real great stuff at the end of that story, too. It just sags in the middle. Kind of interesting to see a revenge narrative that eschews a lot of the things that I find gross about revenge narratives, but the pattern still isn't super interesting to read. I haven't read the The Spectral Link yet though it's available for not that much as an ebook last I checked. I think those are novellas too? So I'd be interesting to see how Ligotti works in the longer form there.
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Mar 23, 2019 17:05
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A book I edited years ago is a featured deal on Bookbub and I thought it might be of interest here. It's a 50's USA themed collection that I would describe as kind of old school in terms of stories. Not very gory or violent but not really new wave of weird either. https://www.bookbub.com/books/american-nightmare-by-max-booth-iii-and-tim-marquitz?ebook_deal 
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Mar 24, 2019 15:08
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ravenkult posted:A book I edited years ago is a featured deal on Bookbub and I thought it might be of interest here. Nice!
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Mar 24, 2019 15:32
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grobbo posted:That Barthelme comparison is really fascinating, and I completely agree about the experimentation and influences in TG that make it feel like so much more of a unique work. Suddenly hit again today about the relationship of Barthelme to contemporary horror when I was flipping through the first few pages of Annhilation and it reminded me of how much Barthelme's story "Game" (the first I ever read by him) resembles the split between the rational and abstract language of the narrator in Annihilation and the absurd and weird situation they're in: quote:In the beginning I took care to behave normally. So did Shotwell. Our behavior was painfully normal. Norms of politeness, consideration, speech and personal habits were scrupulously observed. But then it became apparent that an error had been made, that our relief was not going to arrive. Owing to an oversight. Owing to an oversight we have been here for one hundred thirty-three days. When it became clear that an error had been made, that we were not to be relieved, the norms were relaxed. Definitions of normality were redrawn in the agreement of January 1, called by us, The Agreement. Uniform regulations were relaxed, and mealtimes are no longer rigorously scheduled. We eat when we are hungry and sleep when we are tired. Considerations of rank and precedence were temporarily put aside, a handsome concession on the part of Shotwell, who is a captain, whereas I am only a first lieutenant. One of us watches the console at all times rather than two of us watching the console at all times, except when we are both on our feet. One of us watches the console at all times and if the bird flies then that one wakes the other and we turn our keys in the locks simultaneously and the bird flies. Our system involves a delay of perhaps twelve seconds but I do not care because I am not well, and Shotwell does not care because he is not himself. After the agreement was signed Shotwell produced the jacks and the rubber ball from his attaché case, and I began to write a series of descriptions of forms occurring in nature, such as a shell, a leaf, a stone, an animal. On the walls. I don't know if horror fans normally have Barthelme on his radar as most of his work isn't particularly horror-y, but "Game" could easily be a straight up horror story and aspects of The Dead Father would be of real interest to fans of weird fictin.
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Mar 28, 2019 17:49
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https://subterraneanpress.com/hellraiser-the-tollquote:Hellraiser: The Toll tells the story of what happened between Clive Barker’s iconic works The Hellbound Heart and its follow up, The Scarlet Gospels. So apparently Clive Barker is having Hellraiser fanfiction ghost-written now, I guess Tom Clancy style. Sounds like they're treating the Scarlet Gospels as canon and now bringing that back to all the previous work that was actually good.
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Apr 14, 2019 11:15
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Pistol_Pete posted:The BBC always gently caress them up, though. They take a perfectly crafted, stand-alone short story, that James spent the best part of a year polishing and say: "Heyyyyy, this story is good, I guess, but what if we add this to it!" Like, they took Whistle and I'll come to You and added in a subplot where the dude's wife had Alzheimers and he was super-conflicted about it and the haunting all somehow fed into that and it sucked balls. It also completely missed the dry, understated humour that's an essential ingredient of an M R James story by making the protagonist a lonely, regretful old guy rather than an earnest young nerd who totally doesn't believe in ghosts... until he's faced with the evidence of his own eyes! An M R James story is already a near-perfect little tale: all they have to do is translate it into a visual medium but no, every time it's "We're updating this for the modern era!" and they poo poo out a high-budget, star-studded, impeccably produced failure. They already did that with the previous BBC adaptation, which is good and which you can watch for free.
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Apr 14, 2019 15:08
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Skyscraper posted:https://subterraneanpress.com/hellraiser-the-toll Two things: 1.) This was published over a year ago and announced well before that, so you're a bit behind the times. 2.) Why wouldn't Clive Barker want his "collaborator" to consider the stuff Clive Barker wrote for Clive Barker's setting as canon? In other news, Nathan Ballingrud's new collection is out.
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Apr 14, 2019 22:38
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Ornamented Death posted:Two things: 1) It wasn't mentioned here, which was why I mentioned it here. Did I imply that this was new? 2) Because it was bad.
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Apr 15, 2019 17:49
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just finished Floating Dragon. notes: - glad i read it after Niceville trilogy. i would have been pretty pissed off at how derivative Niceville is if i hadnt - big tommyknockers mood from the degradation of the town - DRG was a really neat antagonistic force, but i think the gideon winter stuff went too far in personifying it as a malevolent dragon man. it mightve been more tense if it didnt have a weird grudge - the “team” of protagonists was, in my opinion, extremely boring - best scene: movie night with the police department - best character: bobo farnsworth. generally dislike cops and honorable cop characters (the one from niceville was especially egregious) but bobo was very believable as a young public servant overall i liked it but probably wont read more straub. my favorite parts where the sterile after-the-fact narrations about the effects of DRG as a natural disaster, like the segments about the foamy man and his doctor, or the interviews with the cops after movie night. 7/10
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Apr 16, 2019 01:19
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Skyscraper posted:2) Because it was bad. Not going to bother with The Toll. Apparently Millar wrote Scarlet Gospels after the first chapter too and that was dreadful in ways I find hard to articulate. I said this in another thread but my love for Hellraiser is a paradox. I consider myself a massive, massive fan but I hate pretty much everything about the franchise from nearly all the films to the comics to the books. (And other fans... mostly.)
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Apr 16, 2019 12:46
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Drunken Baker posted:Apparently Millar wrote Scarlet Gospels after the first chapter too and that was dreadful in ways I find hard to articulate. Oh, that explains that book, I guess. Drunken Baker posted:I said this in another thread but my love for Hellraiser is a paradox. I consider myself a massive, massive fan but I hate pretty much everything about the franchise from nearly all the films to the comics to the books. (And other fans... mostly.) I feel the same about a lot of Lovecraft. Maybe there are just some universally good ideas that are poorly conveyed by a lot of the actual content?
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Apr 16, 2019 15:53
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Skyscraper posted:I feel the same about a lot of Lovecraft. Maybe there are just some universally good ideas that are poorly conveyed by a lot of the actual content? Nail on the head there, i think mate.
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Apr 17, 2019 11:31
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I finished the Radiant Dawn-Ravenous Dusk pair of novels yesterday, and I'd say they're all right - basically airport thrillers with some Lovecraft mythos crammed in (mostly in the second book). I think I'd gotten them in some humble bundle a while ago? Next up is the new Ballingrud collection, which I'm much more excited about.
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Apr 17, 2019 13:45
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So I just got done reading Kwaidan which is a book of ancient buddhist ghost stories and it owned
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Apr 17, 2019 13:46
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Mel Mudkiper posted:So I just got done reading Kwaidan which is a book of ancient buddhist ghost stories and it owned link that poo poo up my good man
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Apr 17, 2019 15:27
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Mel Mudkiper posted:So I just got done reading Kwaidan which is a book of ancient buddhist ghost stories and it owned Have you seen the movie, and if so how did it stack up?
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Apr 17, 2019 15:34
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Mel Mudkiper posted:So I just got done reading Kwaidan which is a book of ancient buddhist ghost stories and it owned Best one is either "Hoichi the Earless" or "Yuki-Onna," change my mind
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Apr 17, 2019 15:38
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Pththya-lyi posted:Best one is either "Hoichi the Earless" or "Yuki-Onna," change my mind I realized that Gargoyle story in Tales from the Darkside is literally just Yuki-Onna I am a fan of how ridiculous Rokurokobi is and how its basically a story of what would happen if Ash from Evil Dead was a Buddhist Monk. My favorite is probably The Dream of Akinosuke or The Story of Aoyagi Its funny how many of the stories are "I married this hot chick and whoops she's a ghost" I mean, Hoichi the Earless is loving great. I am a fan Bilirubin posted:link that poo poo up my good man http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1210 Skyscraper posted:Have you seen the movie, and if so how did it stack up? I am gonna watch it on Criterion Channel here in a few days so I will let you know
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Apr 17, 2019 15:43
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Its funny how many of the stories are "I married this hot chick and whoops she's a ghost" Dudes in folklore are always marrying supernatural women, and always failing to keep the simple precautions that would let them (or force them to) stay
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Apr 17, 2019 15:51
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I've been meaning to read this forever and it keeps dropping off my radar, thanks for mentioning it. I think I have a copy somewhere at home that has some (modern) ukiyo-e art for each story and it's pretty cool. a foolish pianist posted:Next up is the new Ballingrud collection, which I'm much more excited about. I'm really curious to hear what people think of it-- I'm about three stories in, and it's good, it has a more cohesive theme than Lake Monsters, but I also think the stories don't have the same impact because of it. I'm curious to see if all the stories sort of lead to something, or if they're just kind of variations on a theme. I haven't read Visible Filth yet, though, so I'm looking forward to that.
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Apr 17, 2019 15:52
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I am gonna watch it on Criterion Channel here in a few days so I will let you know Neat! Thanks!
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Apr 17, 2019 15:52
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Pththya-lyi posted:Dudes in folklore are always marrying supernatural women, and always failing to keep the simple precautions that would let them (or force them to) stay The funny thing is that in most of the stories nothing bad even happens to the dude for marrying a ghost. Like Yuki-Onna is the only bad one and even then not really. Its more like "We have been happily married for many years bee tee dubs I am a ghost wooooooo" and she disappears the end
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Apr 17, 2019 15:53
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Mujina is also a really fun story because you can almost envision a bunch of japanese kids telling it around a campfire with flashlights under their faces in the way its paced
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Apr 17, 2019 15:56
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Many thanks, epub transferred to drive, needed a public domain book for the reading challenge
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Apr 17, 2019 18:33
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Interestingly, Tor (or rather, its parent company Tom Doherty Associates) is starting its own horror imprint, Nighfire, in 2021. I'm not sure what that means for the genre but it seems kind of noteworthy that a large publisher is dipping their toes into horror now.
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Apr 18, 2019 18:09
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