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the_enduser
May 1, 2006

They say the user lives outside the net.



ravenkult posted:

Let me know what you think of Darkhorse Actual.

Thought it was really cool, but short. I wanted way more info on what was going on. Made me want to find some longer Miltary/Supernatural stuff to read.

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ravenkult
Feb 3, 2011


That's cool, he's accepting stories for a new anthology now called Lost Contact that's kinda similar.

escape artist
Sep 24, 2005

Slow train coming

the_enduser posted:

Nothing new but I recently got a copy of an anthology book called Lost Signals edited by Max Booth III I guess. Deals with spooky radios and signals. Not all gold but some really good ones in here. I think I just dig the creepy signal stuff. I'm only a third way through so it all may end up poo poo but so far not terrible. Some decent cosmic spookies.

Matthew M. Bartlett, who has the first story in Lost Signals, has several collections of short stories that revolve around this strange radio station in Leeds, Massachusetts. If you dug his story you should definitely check out more of his stuff.

SniperWoreConverse
Mar 20, 2010



Gun Saliva
CSPAM was joking about the New American Gothic aesthetic. Got anything that matches?

Big Mad Drongo
Nov 10, 2006

...we're joking?

But North American Lake Monsters, if you somehow read this thread but haven't read that book, fits the bill. A lot of Brian Evenson's stuff works too, but it's more things falling apart under the veneer of normalcy in general rather than U.S.-specific.

Oxxidation
Jul 22, 2007
blake butler's newest novel alice knott came out recently

it came off as a more approachable take on his previous novel three hundred million but with the concept of unstoppable memetic violence instead applied to the human imagination and memory instead of the flesh. there's a lot in there about the treacherous nature of perceived reality, which is a favorite of his (and ligotti too, as you'd see in "gas station carnivals")

butler can be infuriating to read but he's probably the author who's been most influential on me personally so i give this latest book a thumbs-up. it lacks the striking visceral imagery and epistolary delivery of THM but it also doesn't dissolve into an incoherently abstract acid trip halfway through

Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 19:07 on Sep 9, 2020

Count Thrashula
Jun 1, 2003

Peak Performance.

Buglord
Ffffffffffff GIVE IT TO ME NOW

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kgtaf-KxeA

Edit-- after tweeting back and forth with Nathan, these 3 are confirmed:

- You Go Where It Takes You
- The Monsters From Heaven
- The Good Husband

I assumed the fourth was "The Way Station" but he said that's not it.

Count Thrashula fucked around with this message at 23:05 on Sep 10, 2020

immolationsex
Sep 16, 2002
ASK ME ABOUT HOW I ENJOY RUINING STEAK LIKE A GODDAMN BARBARIAN
One of you beautiful bastards recommended The Last Days of Jack Sparks by Jason Arnopp and drat did it tickle me in all the right ways. I can't remember the last time I saw classic devices of horror storytelling used this effectively. I'm usually annoyed by the Unreliable narrator for example, which feels to me like a cheap way to insert a twist towards the end. I won't spoil it, but let's just say there's a bit more nous in evidence here. Same for the occasional use of epistolary format, which I admire, because it's a very effective tool but only in the right hands.

I also have to applaud Arnopp's sheer audacity in combining so many familiar tropes (I use the term with respect) of the genre. I won't go into specifics because honestly, I think this book is best experienced going in completely blind. In hindsight, I'm not sure the story had any right to work as well as it did instead of devolving into an incoherent mess, but he pulled it off with aplomb, and made me get emotionally invested with the protagonists in the bargain.

I second the recommendation for all you suckers who fell in love with the found footage genre of horror like I did.

Oh and while I'm here, I can confirm that Experimental Film by Gemma Files, mentioned earlier in this thread, is another solid entry in the subgenre.

SniperWoreConverse
Mar 20, 2010



Gun Saliva

Big Mad Drongo posted:

...we're joking?

But North American Lake Monsters, if you somehow read this thread but haven't read that book, fits the bill. A lot of Brian Evenson's stuff works too, but it's more things falling apart under the veneer of normalcy in general rather than U.S.-specific.

the good jokes are the real ones

those pics are insanely new gothic. Next level poo poo.

Good Citizen
Aug 12, 2008

trump trump trump trump trump trump trump trump trump trump
Any good splatterpunk recommendations? I've been in a bit of a splatterpunk mood lately but would prefer to avoid the poop-heavy side of the subgenre (so maybe no Edward Lee, etc)

Ornamented Death
Jan 25, 2006

Pew pew!

You can't really go wrong with anything Skipp and Spector wrote together. Same for books by David J. Schow from the same timeframe.

FPyat
Jan 17, 2020
Is "I'm Thinking of Ending Things" any good?

Oxxidation
Jul 22, 2007

FPyat posted:

Is "I'm Thinking of Ending Things" any good?

it's pretty decent, yeah. slow start but it plays with unconventional perspective/narration in an interesting way and it doesn't outwear its welcome. you should get it. what are you waiting for?

Kestral
Nov 24, 2000

Forum Veteran
Where should I start with Ramsey Campbell? Heard a description of his work recently and was instantly sold, but it didn't include a "start here with Campbell" recommendation.

Muninn
Dec 29, 2008

Kestral posted:

Where should I start with Ramsey Campbell? Heard a description of his work recently and was instantly sold, but it didn't include a "start here with Campbell" recommendation.

I enjoyed his collection Alone With The Horrors, it seems like a sort of greatest hits. I don’t think it has any of his mythos fiction though.

alf_pogs
Feb 15, 2012


Kestral posted:

Where should I start with Ramsey Campbell? Heard a description of his work recently and was instantly sold, but it didn't include a "start here with Campbell" recommendation.

i started with Ancient Images and then Midnight Sun and The Nameless. those are all pretty good stuff I think? his short stories are fun too - the Cthulhu mythos collection of his "The Inhabitant of the Lake and less welcome tenants" is a good one

also, an artist collaborator of Ramsey's posted heaps of his teenage sketchbook doodles. really great horror imagery and ideas hahaha

https://jkpotter.com/the-art-of-ramsey-campbell/

StrixNebulosa
Feb 14, 2012

You cheated not only the game, but yourself.
But most of all, you cheated BABA

I am halfway through Home Before Dark by Riley Sager and either I'm a bigger weenie than I thought or it's genuinely scary. It really captures the sense of something being in a house even though it should be safe and goddd.

I also love the dual narrative of the book written by the father that might be a lie and the "main" story of the daughter investigating the truth years later.

fauna
Dec 6, 2018


Caught between two worlds...
lugubrious tom

FastestGunAlive
Apr 7, 2010

Dancing palm tree.
Adding Lost Signals to my list just having learned about it from last page. That, plus the collection To Rouse Leviathan, will probably be my reads for October.

StrixNebulosa
Feb 14, 2012

You cheated not only the game, but yourself.
But most of all, you cheated BABA

Finished Home Before Dark, here's my review cross-posted from goodreads.

Clever, clever! What a good book!

The premise: a family buys a haunted house, has an awful experience there and escapes, and the father writes a book about it and becomes famous. Years later, the daughter returns to the house in order to debunk the book, because she doesn't remember any ghosts.

The structure: a chapter of the book by the father, then a chapter from the daughter's first person pov as she investigates.

This book excelled at capturing the subtle horror of ghosts - or, rather, home invasion. The sense of someone being in your home when they shouldn't be was palpable, and more than once I regretted reading it late at night. It also captures the parental "must protect child!" urge very well, which contrasts nicely with the adult daughter's cynical pov.

I felt it lost some of the steam near the end of the book as you began to get answers, but the plot tied together nicely with some real awful reveals and scares, and overall I had a great time reading this! Well, except for the night where I was so spooked I had to hide under the covers. I know, I know, I'm a weenie.

Four stars for this one, and I highly recommend it to basically anyone who thinks the premise is cool. It's scary but not traumatizing, and there's nothing I have to warn for if you can handle violence and way too many snakes.

remigious
May 13, 2009

Destruction comes inevitably :rip:

Hell Gem

FastestGunAlive posted:

Adding Lost Signals to my list just having learned about it from last page. That, plus the collection To Rouse Leviathan, will probably be my reads for October.

I just received Lost Signals in the mail today! I’m excited to read it, but good lord the interior is atrocious and overdone.

MockingQuantum
Jan 20, 2012



StrixNebulosa posted:

Finished Home Before Dark, here's my review cross-posted from goodreads.

Clever, clever! What a good book!

The premise: a family buys a haunted house, has an awful experience there and escapes, and the father writes a book about it and becomes famous. Years later, the daughter returns to the house in order to debunk the book, because she doesn't remember any ghosts.

The structure: a chapter of the book by the father, then a chapter from the daughter's first person pov as she investigates.

This book excelled at capturing the subtle horror of ghosts - or, rather, home invasion. The sense of someone being in your home when they shouldn't be was palpable, and more than once I regretted reading it late at night. It also captures the parental "must protect child!" urge very well, which contrasts nicely with the adult daughter's cynical pov.

I felt it lost some of the steam near the end of the book as you began to get answers, but the plot tied together nicely with some real awful reveals and scares, and overall I had a great time reading this! Well, except for the night where I was so spooked I had to hide under the covers. I know, I know, I'm a weenie.

Four stars for this one, and I highly recommend it to basically anyone who thinks the premise is cool. It's scary but not traumatizing, and there's nothing I have to warn for if you can handle violence and way too many snakes.

I haven't read this one, but it is kind of funny to me that Todd Ritter's whole schtick under the Riley Sager pen name seems to be "person goes back to a place of trauma, based on a common horror trope, and tries to figure out what really happened." In Final Girls the MC is the only survivor of a string of Halloween-esque killings that come back to haunt her, and in The Last Time I Lied the MC goes back to what is basically Camp Crystal Lake to solve the mystery of some girls disappearing when she was a camper there. I'm not saying it's a bad gimmick really, just an interesting one, in that I think if you've read one Sager novel you probably know what you're going to get out of the rest, but they're not necessarily going to be retreads of each other in the way that usually means.

No idea if Lock Every Door does the same sort of thing, though.

Untrustable
Mar 17, 2009





I looked at The Only Good Indians on Amazon so many times that Amazon sent me a half off credit. I hear good things though.

I keep meaning to buy that one anthology that everyone suggests but it's always put to me in such a way that I think it would gently caress up my already distressed mind. North American Lake Monsters? Is that what it's called?

Fire Safety Doug
Sep 3, 2006

99 % caffeine free is 99 % not my kinda thing

Untrustable posted:

I looked at The Only Good Indians on Amazon so many times that Amazon sent me a half off credit. I hear good things though.

I keep meaning to buy that one anthology that everyone suggests but it's always put to me in such a way that I think it would gently caress up my already distressed mind. North American Lake Monsters? Is that what it's called?

NALM is a short story collection by Nathan Ballingrud rather than an anthology. It’s good tho.

Untrustable
Mar 17, 2009





I heard it's exceptionally good but touches on issues much deeper than "spooky scary monsters" and I don't wanna think that hard. I started The Only Good Indians, and the writing is weird. I'ma stick it out, but the writing is weird.

leftist heap
Feb 28, 2013

Fun Shoe
I just finished NOS4A2 and enjoyed it a lot. Picked up the show only to find that it's quite the departure from the book (even by TV adaptation standards) and the first episode isn't really doing much for me so far. Is it worth sticking with?

Big Mad Drongo
Nov 10, 2006

Untrustable posted:

I heard it's exceptionally good but touches on issues much deeper than "spooky scary monsters" and I don't wanna think that hard. I started The Only Good Indians, and the writing is weird. I'ma stick it out, but the writing is weird.

NALM does get real grim, it's pretty much Capitalism Is The Real Monster: The Book. Here is a series of spoilers for the second story, Wild Acre, which is a good representative of the rest of the book:

The main character owns a small construction firm. Someone has been making GBS threads inside of and causing property damage to a stalled development he's working on, so he and his two friends/employees stake out the place expecting rude teens.

Surprise, it's actually a werewolf! It murders the hell out of the employees, but the main character runs to their truck and escapes.

The rest of the story is about how the development never resumes construction, the main character's business goes under and he can't afford to pay the families of the friends he got killed or even his own mortgage. He lamely pretends it was a wolf that killed his buddies as his life unravels.

The piece ends with him returning to the site and demanding the werewolf come back and either he will shoot it or it will kill him too, but it never shows.

Big Mad Drongo
Nov 10, 2006

Also if you want a lighter Ballingrud check out Wounds, it's still real good but it's very straightforward if weird stories about hell without the underlying messages of NALM. The last story in particular is a swashbuckling novella about a ship full of pirates, cannibals and satanists sailing to the far shores of Hell and evading Hell's navy while being chased by transdimensional parasite-angels. Good times.

StrixNebulosa
Feb 14, 2012

You cheated not only the game, but yourself.
But most of all, you cheated BABA

The Woods are Dark by Richard Laymon: this would be a good book about cannibals hunting people in the woods if the author weren't terminally horny. Jesus why did we need so much examination of boobs in this one.

C2C - 2.0
May 14, 2006

Dubs In The Key Of Life


Lipstick Apathy
Don't know how I feel about Monsterland, the adaptation of NALM on Hulu, after checking out the first episode last night.

Don't terribly mind the actor choices even though the male protagonist/antagonist(?) doesn't really fit the description in the story. No one can get a south Louisiana accent or the grammar correct, though that's a small nitpick since I'm from the area. I was really digging it up into the "reveal". I need to look at NALM on my Kindle, but I don't remember that part in the book being as fleshed out in terms of an explanation. I seem to remember a bit of it was left to the reader's imagination.

I'm off Monday so I'm gonna' sit through a few more episodes. My girlfriend, who hasn't read NALM, told me she felt "weird" after watching the first episode. Which, all things considered, is probably where most people find themselves at the end of a Ballingrud tale.

Jedit
Dec 10, 2011

Proudly supporting vanilla legends 1994-2014

Kestral posted:

Where should I start with Ramsey Campbell? Heard a description of his work recently and was instantly sold, but it didn't include a "start here with Campbell" recommendation.

Sorry, only just catching up with the thread. If you want to read Campbell's entries into the Cthulhu Mythos, begin with Cold Print. If you're more interested in his original novels, you can't go wrong with The Doll Who Ate His Mother.

Bilirubin
Feb 16, 2014

The sanctioned action is to CHUG


Big Mad Drongo posted:

NALM does get real grim, it's pretty much Capitalism Is The Real Monster: The Book. Here is a series of spoilers for the second story, Wild Acre, which is a good representative of the rest of the book:

The main character owns a small construction firm. Someone has been making GBS threads inside of and causing property damage to a stalled development he's working on, so he and his two friends/employees stake out the place expecting rude teens.

Surprise, it's actually a werewolf! It murders the hell out of the employees, but the main character runs to their truck and escapes.

The rest of the story is about how the development never resumes construction, the main character's business goes under and he can't afford to pay the families of the friends he got killed or even his own mortgage. He lamely pretends it was a wolf that killed his buddies as his life unravels.

The piece ends with him returning to the site and demanding the werewolf come back and either he will shoot it or it will kill him too, but it never shows.

I'd agree for that chapter but others, well even that one, its more about the lasting effects upon the human psyche that close brushes with the supernatural can have. There are also the ties between exterior monsters and interior, human, monsters (the titular story, and the final Good Husband) throughout.

Untrustable
Mar 17, 2009





leftist heap posted:

I just finished NOS4A2 and enjoyed it a lot. Picked up the show only to find that it's quite the departure from the book (even by TV adaptation standards) and the first episode isn't really doing much for me so far. Is it worth sticking with?

Really very good. I slumped out of the first episode as well, but picked it back up because my wife started watching it. It never becomes prestige television but is great for what it is. Also has the sense to end after wrapping up the book's storyline. You get two seasons; first and second halves of the book.

The Only Good Indians is ok once you get the writer's style down. I don't know if the writer is native, but drat he writes like he isn't.

ravenkult
Feb 3, 2011


StrixNebulosa posted:

in this one.

I have bad news, friend.

Red Alert 2 Yuris Revenge
May 8, 2006

"My brain is amazing! It's full of wrinkles, and... Uh... Wait... What am I trying to say?"
if you think about it, boobs are the real monster

StrixNebulosa
Feb 14, 2012

You cheated not only the game, but yourself.
But most of all, you cheated BABA

ravenkult posted:

I have bad news, friend.

lmao I'm moving onto other authors, greener pastures

Bilirubin
Feb 16, 2014

The sanctioned action is to CHUG


Untrustable posted:

The Only Good Indians is ok once you get the writer's style down. I don't know if the writer is native, but drat he writes like he isn't.
IIRC he's Blackfeet

Untrustable
Mar 17, 2009





Always pleasantly surprised when an author is using the slang because it's part of their culture.

Edit: Just finished it. It is very good. I understand the constant use of slang now. The story is told through the viewpoints of at least 6 individuals, and the constant slang was inner guilt about leaving the reservation. A way of being more indian. It's a very good book about being a good indian. I can't explain it, just...go read it.

Untrustable fucked around with this message at 12:14 on Oct 4, 2020

Bilirubin
Feb 16, 2014

The sanctioned action is to CHUG


Its on my list to get for sure

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Ben Nevis
Jan 20, 2011

Untrustable posted:

Always pleasantly surprised when an author is using the slang because it's part of their culture.

Edit: Just finished it. It is very good. I understand the constant use of slang now. The story is told through the viewpoints of at least 6 individuals, and the constant slang was inner guilt about leaving the reservation. A way of being more indian. It's a very good book about being a good indian. I can't explain it, just...go read it.

Yeah. I kinda love SGJ. In addition to being Blackfeet, he's also pretty Texan and cites McMurtry and PK Dick as favorites, so I feel like he's speaking my language. Maybe check out Mapping the Interior as well. His new one, Night of the Mannequins, I just finished yesterday, and while I enjoyed it, it didn't have the impact of Only Good Indians or Mapping the Interior. Or Mongrels, which is a good werewolf tale, but perhaps less overtly horror?

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