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value-brand cereal posted:No Problem. Come under the deck. With us. Dont be afraid. We're are unarmed, and you should be too. The beneath deck is so good and welcome. I've heard rumors that its very cozy and there's lots of books down there. might be worth looking into.
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Jul 3, 2024 10:57
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Speaking of "lots of books", I read A Short Stay in Hell last night. People said it kept them up at night and was one of the scariest things they've ever read. It's a lot of existential dread, which tends to creep in on me and cause me to lose sleep also, but I found it more fun than scary. The plot concerns Hell (or this specific Hell) to be a giant library where you need to find a book about your life in order to escape. The author didn't really sell the "torment" of it, because the main character was constantly discovering new things to do, people to talk to, etc.
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Jul 4, 2024 20:59
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Finished Laird Barron's The Croning and wow it was bad. So much thesaurusing to find 20 different ways to describe night falling, unbelievably clunky writing. And I'm all for Eldritch evil but he brings absolutely nothing new, even the hints at dark family histories are just limbless monsters and witches on repeat. All the darkest Asia/America/Africa race fear is there and he can't even keep his creepy Black child's origin straight switching coasts from Angola to Ethiopia. Playing off white dude fear should be more than "primitive" races and fear of women (man there's a lot of that). Having your evil characters monologue paragraphs about how humans are amusing ants is just rote at this point. The book just felt like an exercise in connecting wasted setpieces.
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Jul 4, 2024 22:04
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Segue posted:Finished Laird Barron's The Croning and wow it was bad. So much thesaurusing to find 20 different ways to describe night falling, unbelievably clunky writing. Have you read any of his short stories? I was never able to get through The Croning, but I think some of his short stories are spectacular.
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Jul 5, 2024 01:50
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value-brand cereal fucked around with this message at 17:04 on Mar 26, 2025 |
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Jul 5, 2024 02:32
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I have read and enjoyed some of Barron's short fiction which is why I found how much I bounced off The Croning so surprising. And I actually remember really like McDowell's The Elementals, mostly because I think McDowell is a much superior writer. I think the southern gothicness also added something and didn't feel like it was just transporting Lovecraft across a century. I remember being a bit leery of the magical Black help character but some twist in it made it work for me, I think I have to reread to see if it holds up from ages back.
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Jul 5, 2024 04:20
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It does
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Jul 5, 2024 17:47
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Yeah I thought there was a twist that changes the nature of the character. I remember getting pissed off and then going "oh, okay..." What was that twist though? It's been a few years since I read it.
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Jul 5, 2024 18:01
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The Croning was absolutely ruined for me from the beginning where I was meant to believe a man in his 80s was doing all that Honestly I think it should’ve been reprinted with the dates fixed
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Jul 6, 2024 14:00
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Cancelled my Bury Your Gays preorder. Bought Bury Your Gays. Read half of Bury Your Gays, and this is fun.
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Jul 6, 2024 16:47
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90s Cringe Rock posted:Cancelled my Bury Your Gays preorder. Was it released a few days early?
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Jul 7, 2024 03:49
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90s Cringe Rock posted:Cancelled my Bury Your Gays preorder. I'd like to hear what you think when you finish. His first horror novel was good but maybe didn't stick the landing and I want to know how this one stacks up.
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Jul 7, 2024 04:44
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I liked it. Bit cheesy, but Tingle's all about proving love is real. The furtive asexual, so easily forgotten… The Amazon release date in the uk is the 16th but Waterstones had it out early.
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Jul 7, 2024 07:38
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Hi thread work was busy this week so I never got to really read the posts until today. Thanks so much for the suggestions! At the library today seeing what’s available.
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Jul 7, 2024 22:44
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LifeLynx posted:Speaking of "lots of books", I read A Short Stay in Hell last night. People said it kept them up at night and was one of the scariest things they've ever read. It's a lot of existential dread, which tends to creep in on me and cause me to lose sleep also, but I found it more fun than scary. The plot concerns Hell (or this specific Hell) to be a giant library where you need to find a book about your life in order to escape. The author didn't really sell the "torment" of it, because the main character was constantly discovering new things to do, people to talk to, etc. I've thought about doing the maths on how many light-years deep it would be
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Jul 8, 2024 02:09
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Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero. This is going to be a controversial opinion, I know from searching around, but I really enjoyed it. It's a book about a group of mystery-solving teenagers from the late 70s who grow up and are brought back to the town that was the site of their last and most famous case. Yeah it's Scooby-Doo meets Lovecraft, but the group isn't lifted as directly from Scooby-Doo as you'd think from the synopsis. When they go into waxing nostalgic about their old cases, it's treated in a grounded way, like not as ridiculous as even the tamest Scooby-Doo mysteries. Many people had gripes with the dialog. Sometimes the book will launch into film script-like writing stage direction, like: quote:Kerri: (Leaves the pen on the notepad.) Someone talking to me while I'm trying to concentrate. It was jarring at first, but I enjoyed it later, especially when a lot of characters were talking. It's a neat way to write a scene with a bunch of dialog where people are talking back and forth. There were some mid-action quips that I could have lived without. I had some complaints about the action scenes being hard to follow. As a Lovecraft/weird fiction fan, I loved the peppering of Lovecraft references throughout. It's not as heavy-handed as some Lovecraft-inspired stories, but certain elements do take center stage. There are two ways a Lovecraftian story can go, either pulpy or horror, and this definitely goes pulpy. I enjoy Arkham Horror, so I enjoyed this book. Not serious trigger warning: The author's barely disguised fetish for redheads
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Jul 8, 2024 20:18
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I really liked Meddling Kids as well. I'm a huge Scooby Doo fan, so take that for what it's worth. I recall reading an interview with Cantero where he said it was equal parts Mystery Inc but also Enid Blyton's The Famous Five, which explains a lot of the discrepancies while still feeling like an homage. It's quippy for sure, but it was one of those times I didn't mind it at all. It's also by far his best work. The Supernatural Enhancements was doing a mixed media thing that didn't work in ebook very well while feeling like it was aping House of Leaves. Story wasn't bad, just not particularly great either. This Body's Not Big Enough for Both of Us was terrible, with cringy dialogue and too much of a lol-random protagonist. I barely made it through that one.
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Jul 8, 2024 20:40
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Slyphic posted:I really liked Meddling Kids as well. I'm a huge Scooby Doo fan, so take that for what it's worth. I recall reading an interview with Cantero where he said it was equal parts Mystery Inc but also Enid Blyton's The Famous Five, which explains a lot of the discrepancies while still feeling like an homage. It's quippy for sure, but it was one of those times I didn't mind it at all. I haven't read any interviews, but I've seen multiple people say that Cantero based it on Enid Blyton, but his editor suggested throwing in more Scooby-Doo references to attract the American audience. Looking up The Famous Five on Wikipedia, it's very obvious the characters and locations in Meddling Kids are directly lifted from those books, renamed and sometimes gender-swapped. American readers like me probably never heard of The Famous Five, which explains why some poor reviews mention it not being what they expected. If they went into it expecting a gritty fan-fiction follow-up to Scooby-Doo, they're going to be disappointed.
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Jul 9, 2024 01:04
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I remember tracking down the original source article, but damned if I could find it now. I think it was actually in Catalan, and I had to translate it. It was originally mostly FF, but he was encouraged to play up the SD elements and didn't exactly object at all; it was more 'that's a good idea editor man, thanks'.
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Jul 9, 2024 02:41
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I recently finished Avram Davidson's The Boss in the Wall: A Treatise on the House Devil, and I'm in love with this man's writing style, and I wish he'd done more horror. I've seen some people call Boss in the Wall terrifying, and while it didn't hit me that way at all, it scratches an itch for that particular subgenre of "academics stumble on something awful just beneath the skin of the sane world" in a way that I quite enjoyed. I have a very limited tolerance for gore, body horror, and horror that is basically a metaphor for relationships, and Boss in the Wall neatly avoids all of those and just says, "What if there was something deeply supernaturally wrong happening, all the time, just out of sight, and people desperately do not want to believe in it but it lives on through folklore anyway? Ok go."
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Jul 9, 2024 03:03
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Kestral posted:I recently finished Avram Davidson's The Boss in the Wall: A Treatise on the House Devil, and I'm in love with this man's writing style, and I wish he'd done more horror. I've seen some people call Boss in the Wall terrifying, and while it didn't hit me that way at all, it scratches an itch for that particular subgenre of "academics stumble on something awful just beneath the skin of the sane world" in a way that I quite enjoyed. I have a very limited tolerance for gore, body horror, and horror that is basically a metaphor for relationships, and Boss in the Wall neatly avoids all of those and just says, "What if there was something deeply supernaturally wrong happening, all the time, just out of sight, and people desperately do not want to believe in it but it lives on through folklore anyway? Ok go." I love Boss in the Wall. It has such a great vibe, and was weird and kind of chilling in a lot of weird, unique ways.
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Jul 9, 2024 03:28
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Kestral posted:I recently finished Avram Davidson's The Boss in the Wall: A Treatise on the House Devil, and I'm in love with this man's writing style, and I wish he'd done more horror.
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Jul 9, 2024 11:50
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Seconding Limekiller, they're great stories because much of the horror comes from an outsider minding their own business slowly, inexorably drawn into something outside their understanding. Whispers of terror coming out over weeks and months of time that they can only mishear and miscomprehended.
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Jul 9, 2024 12:11
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Meddling Kids had maybe the worst, cringiest, try-hard first ten pages I had ever read. I asked for it for Christmas, got it, read that first chapter, put it down and just eventually stuck it in a free library. Absolutely unreadable dreck.
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Jul 9, 2024 20:14
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Conrad_Birdie posted:Meddling Kids had maybe the worst, cringiest, try-hard first ten pages I had ever read. I asked for it for Christmas, got it, read that first chapter, put it down and just eventually stuck it in a free library. Absolutely unreadable dreck. I totally understand wanting to bounce off it, the intro involving the lesbian character was every description you gave it. She gets a lot better written after the bar scene, as does the rest of the book.
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Jul 10, 2024 02:16
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Opopanax posted:I have to assume you've read Roadside Picnic but better throw it out there Yeah I finished it prior to posting in this thread. The last book I physically read (as opposed to listen) was an epub of some Stalker book. It kinda read like professional fanfic, because it was professional fanfic. It was decent but not at all impactful the way Roadside Picnic was. Red is a bastard, through and through. Him sacrificing that kid in order to get the wish granter artifact was one of the least surprising things to me. I thought he'd hesitate or do something else, but nope. I think my favorite part of the book had to be the scene where Dick visits Red's apartment and Monkey has somehow become less human over time. Like, she just kind of hangs around the family, not really verbal but just sulking in the background the way a cat would. And then Red's unearthed dad, with somehow less agency and drive than a zombie and just some weird reanimated corpse hanging out around familiar places. That was a pretty powerful, especially creepy, but mostly sad scene, since Red was acting like half the tenants of the household weren't freaks. Despite the book having less in common with proper Stalker than the Stalker fanbooks, it actually nailed the eeriness and danger of the Zone in a way the fanbooks didnt. Navigating the Zone in that book felt similar to mountain climbing or cave diving where there's all sorts of hidden ways to die instantly, painfully, or excruciatingly, or all 3 at the same time. I think I read the wrong edition of the book though, because the translation was powerfully rough. But speaking of mountain climbing, Lotz's The White Road is good so far, real engaging. Id say im halfway through. I wouldn't call any part of it scary in the leave-the-lights-on sense, but the intro with Simon, Creepy Ed and the Welsh nutty-putty caves was horrifying in the mortal and phobic sense. Simon really should have died there, and hes the biggest idiot on earth to not take his miracle rescue as a sign to cut it out. Juliet is interesting too. She also seems a tad bit unlikeable, but much more sympathetic than idiot Si. Her visitor is someone I feel like should be more interesting but I think im far more interested seeing Simon getting way out of his element and being another corpse on the mountain he wishes so hard to film for his gore site.
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Jul 10, 2024 05:12
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LifeLynx posted:I totally understand wanting to bounce off it, the intro involving the lesbian character was every description you gave it. She gets a lot better written after the bar scene, as does the rest of the book. They should lead with a better written first chapter imo
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Jul 10, 2024 19:39
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I read Meddling Kids and honestly can't remember much about it other than being vaguely bored most of the time.
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Jul 10, 2024 19:55
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I finished Incidents Around the House, I thought it was pretty solid. I don't think Malerman quite nailed the voice of the main character, Bela. She is supposed to be 8 years old but sometimes she came across as a 4-5 year old, other times as a precocious 9-10 year old. But I don't spend too much time around kids besides my nieces/nephews so maybe I'm out of touch with what kids that age are really like. Also I've been on a Ronald Malfi kick lately. I don't think anything I've read has been particularly standout, but nothing has been bad either. Just solidly in that above average range. Which is pretty respectable considering how prolific he is.
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Jul 10, 2024 20:39
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 Drakyn posted:Well, we know what strip Stephen King was reading in the paper as a kid.
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Jul 12, 2024 00:26
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buglord posted:But speaking of mountain climbing, Lotz's The White Road is good so far, real engaging. Id say im halfway through. I wouldn't call any part of it scary in the leave-the-lights-on sense, but the intro with Simon, Creepy Ed and the Welsh nutty-putty caves was horrifying in the mortal and phobic sense. Simon really should have died there, and hes the biggest idiot on earth to not take his miracle rescue as a sign to cut it out. Juliet is interesting too. She also seems a tad bit unlikeable, but much more sympathetic than idiot Si. Her visitor is someone I feel like should be more interesting but I think im far more interested seeing Simon getting way out of his element and being another corpse on the mountain he wishes so hard to film for his gore site.
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Jul 14, 2024 06:10
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Just finished David's Sodergren The Haar. A satisfying afternoon read, really short and to the point. Nice Scottish coastal village is besieged by a billionaire real estate dipshit. The one remaining octogenarian inhabitant falls in love with a shape shifting sea vampire, gory hijinks ensue.
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Jul 15, 2024 08:56
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rowkey bilbao posted:Just finished David's Sodergren The Haar. [/spoiler] Really liked this one, too! The creature is great. Not so great, I'm reading Max Brook's Devolution. I'm about 5 or so chapters in, does this get better? The main character sucks, the eco village stuff is really thin, and the interstitial stuff pretty uninteresting.
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Jul 17, 2024 12:20
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MNIMWA posted:Not so great, I'm reading Max Brook's Devolution. I'm about 5 or so chapters in, does this get better? The main character sucks, the eco village stuff is really thin, and the interstitial stuff pretty uninteresting. Sort of? The characters get a little better as they accept the reality of the situation, but it never stops being a Max Brooks book and at no point does his forcing of the Brooks Format (tm) start suddenly adding anything of value.
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Jul 17, 2024 16:03
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MNIMWA posted:Really liked this one, too! The creature is great. No, you've seen the best it has to offer IMO, it's a poorly written book and doesn't do anything interesting with the premise.
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Jul 17, 2024 16:08
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Good Citizen posted:Just finished the new Nevill book All the fiends of hell and it was pretty good. It was a fun take on the invasion/extermination plot and everything was so bleak. The book was maybe a little longer than it needed to be but that was my only real complaint. I finished this a couple weeks ago and thought it was a really good example of a novel that should have just been a short story. There is little-to-no plot here; just a premise and a couple basic characters and some things that happen.
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Jul 17, 2024 16:16
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I read From The Wreck by Jane Rawson recently, having received it as a TBB Secret Santa present. It was really dang good, spooky and unnerving in all the best ways. A story about a shipwreck survivor being haunted by a shapeshifting sea creature, partly told from the creature's perspective. It's set in 1850s colonial Australia, and there are probably a lot of allegorical things going on with it too. Definitely recommended.
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Jul 18, 2024 23:33
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MNIMWA posted:Really liked this one, too! The creature is great. Haha. No it's poo poo and the ending is laughably cliche. Abandon it now.
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Jul 18, 2024 23:50
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I liked it but it's definitely dumb, and if it hasn't won you over yet that's not going to change
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Jul 19, 2024 01:39
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value-brand cereal fucked around with this message at 17:04 on Mar 26, 2025 |
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Jul 19, 2024 16:17
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