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alf_pogs posted:the dark tower, rules and I was late picking it up despite reading a lot of King. super recommend it, even if some of the later books aren't quite as good as the first 1-4 Also I just finished Dark Harvest by Norman Patridge. Liked it! Kinda reminded me of The Lottery but the prose is unique and I think it is saying something about being trapped in systems not of your own making, the sins of our fathers etc.
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Oct 3, 2024 17:41
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Good Citizen posted:Misery is pretty good and one of the last of the cocaine-era Stephen King stories. It's also a good middle ground between his short story collections and his mega doorstoppers like It and The Stand. I don't consider myself a huge King fan at this point but fully most of us here started our adult horror reading career on cocaine-era King. Misery was originally meant to be the sixth Richard Bachman novel. King was a little bit peeved that the secret broke shortly after Thinner was published, as he thought that Misery would be the one that actually did put his alter ego on the best seller lists. Since his whole motive for Bachman was to see if him becoming a major author was a matter of talent or chance, I can understand that.
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Oct 3, 2024 21:16
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alf_pogs posted:enjoy! aside from his chonkers famous tomes like IT and the dark tower, his short story collections are also really great, heaps of fun ideas in one little book. I plan on watching it after I finish! I’m a slow reader so hopefully I’ll finished before Halloween so I can add it to my holiday watch list. Good Citizen posted:Misery is pretty good and one of the last of the cocaine-era Stephen King stories. It's also a good middle ground between his short story collections and his mega doorstoppers like It and The Stand. I don't consider myself a huge King fan at this point but fully most of us here started our adult horror reading career on cocaine-era King. Appreciate the spectrum framing. If I were to read more of his stuff I’d go the short story route. I’ve heard he really shines there. I was reading his Wikipedia page earlier and saw a quote from him describing Misery as a book about his addictions. I probably wouldn’t have picked up on that honestly, now I’m more interested in seeing where it goes.
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Oct 3, 2024 23:47
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MNIMWA posted:Also I just finished Dark Harvest by Norman Patridge. Liked it! Kinda reminded me of The Lottery but the prose is unique and I think it is saying something about being trapped in systems not of your own making, the sins of our fathers etc. I had voted for this in the October poll bc I was expecting the twist to be rather dumb or silly and thought the reactions to it would be amusing. Can't say for sure how long it will take me to finish it bc my head's been a mess lately but I do have it on my reading list along with The King in Yellow (just started), Serious Weakness (about 1/4 to 1/3 into it), and the VN Umineko (4/8 episodes completed)
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Oct 4, 2024 02:04
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value-brand cereal fucked around with this message at 17:31 on Mar 26, 2025 |
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Oct 4, 2024 05:17
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value-brand cereal posted:Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt Hey I picked this up based on your rec but, uh, does this loving shithead precocious kid feature prominently throughout the book? Edit: huh, might have to put this one down… 
tuyop fucked around with this message at 14:11 on Oct 4, 2024 |
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Oct 4, 2024 14:00
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fez_machine posted:New comers read Brian Evenson Hell yeah the guy who wrote The Brotherhood of Mutilation? And he turned it into a novel (Last Days)? This is going to be good.
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Oct 4, 2024 14:44
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value-brand cereal fucked around with this message at 17:19 on Mar 26, 2025 |
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Oct 4, 2024 15:10
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value-brand cereal posted:The familial love and lack of love which leads to socially acceptable child abuse [literal torture, if we're honest] and so forth is quite literally the plot of the book. So yes, the child character(s) does feature a lot in the book. See, that does sound interesting and relevant to the conversation that opens the book. I’m definitely willing to attribute my feelings to taste. The screenshot is a comment on this review here.
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Oct 4, 2024 15:44
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I’m only like 25% through hex but it’s appropriately silly and serious in equal quantities so far. The thing hasn’t happened yet but the build up is good Also regarding the screenshot, I just reached the ‘pate’ chapter and that word count checks out
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Oct 4, 2024 15:55
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value-brand cereal fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Mar 26, 2025 |
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Oct 4, 2024 19:05
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Finished Hex and liked it but didn't love it. It leans a little hard into the common 'man is the real monster' theme and didn't quite wrap up the story of a couple of side characters I would have liked to see, but overall the story was just high quality. I'd almost put it more horror-adjacent until the last 30 pages or so. Was at a loss at what to pick next so I scrolled up to value-brand cereal's recent big list o' books and decided I was in the mood for space horror so I picked up Ghost Station S.A. Barnes. The summary sounded interesting and I have a decent track record with VBC recommends so looking forward to it
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Oct 9, 2024 15:13
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Finished Evenson's Last Days a day ago. Pretty cool premise and it was a page-turner, but I wasn't as impressed as others have been. I'm currently reading Tiger by John Vaillant, a non-fiction account of amur tigers and just how deadly and dangerous they are in Russia's far east (and also how the Russian Empire, then the USSR and its collapse have contributed to the relationship between people and animals in that geographic area). Liking it a lot and it'll definitely horrify ya if you're spooked at all by the idea of a large animal stalking and murdering you.
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Oct 9, 2024 18:47
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tore through Between Two Fires b/c of this thread title, had never heard of it or the author before god drat, it's a god-damningly good time. really reminded me of GRRM's writing but instead of insanely long-winded, discursive fake histories it had character development and cool rear end demon action. 
UltraShame fucked around with this message at 01:25 on Oct 11, 2024 |
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Oct 10, 2024 04:44
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It took me forever to finish it cause life slowed down my reading but The House Next Door was good! I’m kinda bummed it’s over and now I have to come bug you guys again. Prolly give myself another few stories from Wounds before tackling a novel again. Edit: I wanna read another McDowell and haven’t read Cold Moon Over Babylon, is it good? Rolo fucked around with this message at 17:28 on Oct 10, 2024 |
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Oct 10, 2024 16:51
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Is there scary scifi books? Like Alien or Event Horizon but book?
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Oct 12, 2024 00:32
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Papa Was A Video Toaster posted:Is there scary scifi books? Like Alien or Event Horizon but book? Blindsight by Peter Watts is probably the gold standard. It’s less gore and body horror and more a kind of horror I can’t describe without spoiling it, but it’s truly excellent. He also wrote a great version of The Thing from the perspective of, well, the Thing. It is perhaps unsurprisingly called The Things. Blindsight and The Things are also available for free, so you can sample them and see if they work for you. I hear there’s at least one good Aliens novel, though I can’t remember the name - anyone able to conjure that up? Some people enjoy Ship of Fools, I’m not one of them but the Catholicism angle does nothing for me. Beyond that, the sci-fi horror space is kind of thin, at least in novels. There are a ton of excellent SF horror short stories though!
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Oct 12, 2024 00:42
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Papa Was A Video Toaster posted:Is there scary scifi books? Like Alien or Event Horizon but book? Yeah. Blindsight even has vampires. The Voyage of the Space Beagle isn’t really horror but it is sci fi and the inspiration for Alien. I Am Legend is much better than any of its movies. Solaris is a very thinky incomprehensible alien horror kind of thing. Roadside Picnic is excellent and quite horrific and even a little gory.
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Oct 12, 2024 00:50
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Papa Was A Video Toaster posted:Is there scary scifi books? Like Alien or Event Horizon but book? Parasite by Darcy Coates Salvation Day by Kali Wallace The Hematophages by Stephen Kozeniewski Brian Evenson (as B.K Evenson) wrote two books set in the Dead Space universe that are pretty good
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Oct 12, 2024 01:00
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Kestral posted:I hear there’s at least one good Aliens novel, though I can’t remember the name - anyone able to conjure that up? Alien Cold Forge
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Oct 12, 2024 02:25
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I finally read Between Two Fires. The thread title is accurate. Fantastic from start to finish.
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Oct 12, 2024 11:38
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Decided to go ahead and start Cold Moon Over Babylon but medieval horror sounds rad as hell, went ahead and ordered that one to read next.
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Oct 12, 2024 11:49
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value-brand cereal fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Mar 26, 2025 |
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Oct 13, 2024 00:56
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of the Alien novels, they are almost universally trashy but can be a lot of fun if you're down for some garbo (I have read almost all of them). The actual good ones are Cold Forge as mentioned and Phalanx - though Phalanx isn't probably what you're after.
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Oct 13, 2024 02:54
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Rolo posted:Decided to go ahead and start Cold Moon Over Babylon Yo this poo poo is dark. drat.
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Oct 13, 2024 23:14
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UltraShame posted:of the Alien novels, they are almost universally trashy but can be a lot of fun if you're down for some garbo (I have read almost all of them). The actual good ones are Cold Forge as mentioned and Phalanx - though Phalanx isn't probably what you're after. Dan Simmons?
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Oct 14, 2024 01:47
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UltraShame posted:of the Alien novels, they are almost universally trashy but can be a lot of fun if you're down for some garbo (I have read almost all of them). The actual good ones are Cold Forge as mentioned and Phalanx - though Phalanx isn't probably what you're after. I have had Pat Cadigan's novelisation of Gibson's unmade Alien 3 script next on my read list since August. (I won't call it a shame pile because at the same time I bought every volume of a 15-book series that I hadn't read and started from the beginning on that. I'm now 60% of the way through the last of those and I couldn't get there faster.)
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Oct 14, 2024 08:00
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value-brand cereal fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Mar 26, 2025 |
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Oct 14, 2024 16:28
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value-brand cereal posted:Stay in the Light by A. M. Shine [white irish man] Oh neat, I read the first one last year and enjoyed it, but I didn't know a sequel had come out.
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Oct 14, 2024 16:44
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value-brand cereal posted:Oh wait, Leech by Hiron Ennes is also scifi horror. Very excellent post future alt history apocalypse novel featuring hivemind parasite poo poo. Major content warning for rape , specifically male on male if that particularly matters. (1) that's a drat fine post you've made (2) I read Leech this year due to the Booklord thread and loved it. I'm not usually down for gothic stuff but it really swings for the fences with its worldbuilding. and yes, there is quite a lot of trauma described, mental and physical. UltraShame fucked around with this message at 04:45 on Oct 15, 2024 |
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Oct 15, 2024 04:43
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value-brand cereal fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Mar 26, 2025 |
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Oct 15, 2024 16:41
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escape artist posted:My first read for October will be A Sunny Place For Shady People, the newest short story collection from Mariana Enriquez. I enjoyed her first story collections a bit (Dangers of Smoking in Bed) and her second short story collection was among my favorites in the past decade. She is an Argentinian writer and that is what appealed to me. I really enjoyed the way she wrote about cartel violence in some of her stories, but she there's way more to her than just that. She has a sprawling novel entitled Our Share of Night that came out in 2023, but I have not read it. Has anybody else read Our Share of Night? Wanted to take a look given how great her short story collections have been received and I'm maybe 100 pages in and looking to probably give up on the prose. It's meandering and impressionistic, but doesn't seem to cohere with any momentum. Especially given I've got about 600 pages left it's looking more likely to DNF and pick up some of the short story collections instead.
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Oct 16, 2024 20:05
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adnam posted:Has anybody else read Our Share of Night? Wanted to take a look given how great her short story collections have been received and I'm maybe 100 pages in and looking to probably give up on the prose. It's meandering and impressionistic, but doesn't seem to cohere with any momentum. Especially given I've got about 600 pages left it's looking more likely to DNF and pick up some of the short story collections instead. I pushed through it, and it does get significantly better in the second half, but I feel if you gotta read 300 pages to get to the good part there's something wrong.
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Oct 16, 2024 20:30
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I'll post in here and also in the Stephen King thread in TBB, but I am reading King's Duma Key, a novel I hadn't heard anything about but am so far really enjoying - it's a very solid post-Dark Tower King, not set in Maine, starring a main character who so far does not have an age-inappropriate relationship with a woman. Spooky Florida happenings mixed with King's telepath/shining themes.
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Oct 17, 2024 17:55
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Duma Key was my first non-Dark Tower King book and I remember liking it too, at least as much as any of his other post-cocaine one offs
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Oct 17, 2024 17:59
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MNIMWA posted:I'll post in here and also in the Stephen King thread in TBB, but I am reading King's Duma Key, a novel I hadn't heard anything about but am so far really enjoying - it's a very solid post-Dark Tower King, not set in Maine, starring a main character who so far does not have an age-inappropriate relationship with a woman. Spooky Florida happenings mixed with King's telepath/shining themes. I read Duma Key a long time ago and remember it being amazing. Can't remember much of the plot except his descriptions of Key West sunsets were so incredibly vivid and picturesque that I've had a soft spot and would like to visit Key West one of these days. GladRagKraken posted:I pushed through it, and it does get significantly better in the second half, but I feel if you gotta read 300 pages to get to the good part there's something wrong. Yeah I kept tryin and I've DNF'd it at this point. Maybe I'll revisit it later but glad I'm not the only one.
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Oct 17, 2024 22:41
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MNIMWA posted:I'll post in here and also in the Stephen King thread in TBB, but I am reading King's Duma Key, a novel I hadn't heard anything about but am so far really enjoying - it's a very solid post-Dark Tower King, not set in Maine, starring a main character who so far does not have an age-inappropriate relationship with a woman. Spooky Florida happenings mixed with King's telepath/shining themes. I really like Duma Key! The audiobook is narrated by John Slattery of Mad Men fame, he’s great. I picked up an audiobook version of A Farewell To Arms because I liked his performance in Duma Key so much.
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Oct 18, 2024 00:23
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Started a Brian Evenson story collection and it's deeply unsettling
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Oct 19, 2024 17:53
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Finished up The Haunting of Moscow House today. Interesting read. Putting some thoughts in spoilers, though I won't be discussing specific plot points: It wasn't exactly what I was looking for, because it ended up being much more "man is the real monster" than I particularly care for, and the ghosts never feel terribly threatening or even all that unsettling. It's more of a period piece about life in the years immediately following the Russian civil war, and while it could have leaned into the horrors of that period, it declines to do so, and it's much weaker for it. The romance angle I could definitely have done without, and I ended up skimming decent chunks of audiobook chapters because of it, just fast-forwarding until the narrator was no longer talking about someone feeling flushed or having a heat growing between their legs. What I did find interesting was that it's the first piece of genre fiction I've ever encountered - which is not to say it's the only one, just the first that's made it onto my radar - which is explicitly sympathetic to the victims of the October Revolution and sharply critical of the Bolsheviks. It feels as though this is something you could not safely do outside of unsavory right-wing circles for a long time now, but Olesya Salnikova Gilmore is apparently the child of people who fled the horrors of Bolshevik lynch mobs and the Cheka secret police, and she's not shy about calling the dispossessed upper classes of Soviet Russia victims instead of class criminals getting their just desserts. I am... honestly a little surprised this could get published, and I wonder if it would even have been possible prior to 2022. In all, I wish it had been less cozy, less wish-fulfillment, more horrifying, whether that meant leaning into the supernatural or the all-too-real horrors of Soviet Russia in 1921. An author who'd been willing to give this book more teeth could have made something absolutely chilling out of the material here. Still, for what appears to be Gilmore's second novel, it's a solid effort, and just because it didn't match my expectations doesn't mean it's a bad book. Looking forward to seeing what she does next. Enfys posted:Started a Brian Evenson story collection and it's deeply unsettling Which collection? Evenson's one I've been considering looking at for a while now, after running across one of his stories in a collection a while back and being suitably impressed. My only hesitation, other than my distaste for his stance on the Mormon church, is hearing that a lot of his stuff involves mutilation and dismemberment, which nopes me out of a book reeeeaaaal fast.
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Oct 20, 2024 03:02
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Kestral posted:
I’ve read a fair amount of Evenson at this point (I think 2 novels and 4 short story collections - thanks escape artist!) and his novel Last Days is definitely heavy on that, but FWIW I don’t recall that being a recurring thing in his other work. He has written a lot though so maybe there’s some in books I haven’t gotten to yet.
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Oct 20, 2024 03:29
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