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Rain Brain posted:Ah crap I was preaching to the choir! No shade intended, just welcome to the club! One of my favorite authors, period. I just finished The Amulet for spooky season and I’m currently making my way through Blood Rubies.
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Oct 28, 2025 21:42
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Oh no worries! I’ve been reading more horror lately as I’ve gotten kind of burnt out on sci-fi/fantasy and it’s been a mixed bag - McDowell has def been the high point by far, hence my very excited post. I’ve read horror sporadically in the past, but this current run started w/ Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula, which are horror insofar as there are all the vampires, but which aren’t actually scary. I enjoy looking up the references and those led me to Nancy Collins’ Sunglasses at Night and JS Russell’s Celestial Dogs, both of which had more sexual grotesquerie then I personally care for (esp the former). Moved on to more recent stuff with Tingle’s Bury Your Gays and Cherie Priest’s It Was Her House First, they were Fine but I wouldn’t go out of my way to recommend. I’m waiting on Sarah Gailey’s Just Like Home to be free at the library as a friend with good taste loves it, and I figure I’m gonna have to bite the bullet and read Between Two Fires sooner rather then later. Has anyone read Elizabeth Hand’s A Haunting on the Hill? I deeply love Shirley Jackson, and while I think Hand’s Cass Neary books are great (I’m all for a shithead protagonist), and her Wylding Hall has some effective moments, those are pretty big shoes to fill.
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Oct 29, 2025 01:40
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Conrad_Birdie posted:Starving Saints was really hard to read. Like. The way the author wrote it. I’d read a page, and then go “wait I didn’t process any of that.” And that’s not really a problem I usually have reading. Lots of words on the page without seemingly saying anything. My god you weren’t kidding. My attention keeps just gliding off the page. Really bad writing and impossible to give a poo poo about what should be a brutally intense situation
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Nov 2, 2025 22:31
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Kestral posted:All of which reminds me of something I've been meaning to ask. I'm sure there's at least a couple folks in this thread who are Cultist Sim / Book of Hours fans, with its elaborate and excellently-written take on cosmic horror that is less about nihilistic despair and more about obsession, longing, and transformation. I've always wondered what its literary influences are, which is surprisingly hard to search up since Influences are a mechanical term there. For those of you who've played those games, have you run across any horror lit that feels like it might have been an influence on them? You should watch Penda's Fen Here's a webpage of influences: https://weatherfactory.biz/influences/ There's a podcast about influences as well: https://soundcloud.com/alexis-kennedy-3652487 Names I found here: https://www.eurogamer.net/authors/alexis-kennedy James George Frazer Ramon Llull Jorge Luis Borges Names I found here: https://weatherfactory.biz/blog/ "inspirations include: Dunsany, Lovecraft, CS Lewis, the Seeking storyline from FL, Lost Highway, F Scott Fitzgerald, the Secret Knots" "READING: Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography; Nate Crowley, The Sea Hates a Coward; Edmund Crispin, The Moving Toyshop; big collection of Lovecraft shorts" Ramsey Campbell, The Hungry Moon fez_machine fucked around with this message at 23:18 on Nov 2, 2025 |
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Nov 2, 2025 23:10
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Hey horror readers! The thread for this year's Secret Santa book exchange is now live! Sign-ups are open til December 1st! Send someone your favourite blood-soaked gorefest! Request a chilling tome of yore! Join today!
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Nov 2, 2025 23:38
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fez_machine posted:You should watch Penda's Fen Ah-hah, thank you! I'd somehow never heard of Penda's Fen, that's going on the to-watch list for sure. Time to dig into that influences list, there are things in there I've never heard of, and others that I've seen mentioned but never read. Deeply pleased to see A Night in the Lonesome October on there. Still going along through The Weird, skipping big chunks because it's enormous and grazing across the stories recommended earlier and ones by authors I'm interested in. This collection is unbelievably good. I'm up to the mid-80s now and have yet to encounter a dud, with the worst being merely "just pretty solid". That said, out of all the ones I've listened to, the highlight might have come at the beginning: Algernon Blackwood's The Willows (1907) had been on my reading list for years and years, but I never quite got around to it, and that was a mistake. Are any of his other stories on that level? If so, I have to get my hands on them.
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Nov 3, 2025 02:34
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Blackwood is very good overall. His stories can be a bit slow, but that's just because they're busy dripping with atmosphere, and most are worth reading just for that. That said he never reaches the heights of The Willows again, because The Willows is the best horror short story ever written. Anyway his stories are all(?) public domain so you can find them online free. The Wendigo is another great if you want a suggestion.
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Nov 3, 2025 03:00
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I mentioned earlier ITT I got into Knifepoint Horror (podcast) and boy is it good. I've gotten through several stories thinking this dude must have a team of writers, but I found he's the sole writer and that just blows me away. Not only does guy have an impressively broad imagination, he seems to understand human suffering and nuanced emotions better than some published writers out there. His prose is just okay tho.
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Nov 3, 2025 03:22
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Big Mad Drongo posted:Blackwood is very good overall. His stories can be a bit slow, but that's just because they're busy dripping with atmosphere, and most are worth reading just for that. I think I've posted about my love for The Willows ITT (or maybe the cosmic horror thread?) before, but yeah I completely agree that its the best horror short ever written. It's just so incredibly evocative and strange. I don't think i've ever felt more transported to the setting of a story than I was the first time I read it, it's just this incredible combination of something so real and grounded that you can practically smell and touch it and then peeling it back with this completely bizarre, awe inspiring, frightening series of events
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Nov 3, 2025 17:59
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Going through all these horror anthologies, I've noticed a pretty common premise is "whoa...imagine if you like wanted to kill your own kid, wouldn't that be hosed up or what man?? IM BLOWIN MY OWN FRICKIN MIND RN"
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Nov 7, 2025 19:22
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Just finished The Deep by Nick Cutter. I've heard that he is pretty divisive, but I actually really liked The Troop and love a deep sea setting. The book has a cool premise, and until about the two thirds mark I couldn't put it down, but man does it get to be a little much in the final stretch. It's interesting to me that an author could spend so much time lovingly crafting a protagonist only to throw that much suffering at them. He doesn't quite lose the plot, but the plot is almost irrelevant by the end of the book as it just goes full tilt into body horror (which was admittedly pretty good) and mentally torturing his protagonist (which got pretty tedious). mild spoiler Also, what is this guy's problem with multi page descriptions of animal torture? gently caress you Nick. LB deserved better.
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Nov 10, 2025 20:05
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Paddyo posted:Also, what is this guy's problem with multi page descriptions of animal torture? gently caress you Nick. LB deserved better.
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Nov 10, 2025 20:15
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To the author's credit he drops the cheap animal torture bit for The Queen, a book that surprisingly ends up coming off kinda sweet I totally skipped that section of The Troop and I think that's the only time I've ever done that in my reading career
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Nov 10, 2025 20:34
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Has anybody else been duped by Stephen R. King? I was browsing late night for some horror and was recommended Infested by Stephen R. King and it was absolutely terrible until some additional googling informed me of how often this occurs
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Nov 10, 2025 20:55
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Paddyo posted:
Yeah that extremely sucked and I'm not reading any more of his books because he's two for two on that for me and that was so much worse than The Troop
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Nov 10, 2025 23:05
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Fallom posted:To the author's credit he drops the cheap animal torture bit for The Queen, a book that surprisingly ends up coming off kinda sweet Oh, didn't know he had come out with something semi recently! I liked The Troop and The Deep, didn't love Little Heaven as much at first.
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Nov 11, 2025 03:17
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Big Mad Drongo posted:Blackwood is very good overall. His stories can be a bit slow, but that's just because they're busy dripping with atmosphere, and most are worth reading just for that. I just read The Willows for the first time last week and now I have to go find The Wendigo.
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Nov 19, 2025 20:04
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cupids shoe tree posted:I just read The Willows for the first time last week and now I have to go find The Wendigo. Just to temper expectations, I personally think you've already read the stronger of the two by some stretch, but The Wendigo is still worth reading.
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Nov 19, 2025 21:04
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Just finished a re-read of Usher's Passing by Robert McCammon. Very much a Southern gothic with 80s sensibilities. Someone reprint this thing, my pb is 40 years old and starting to fall apart.
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Nov 20, 2025 10:41
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The Willows and The Wendigo are some of the best horror I've read, thank you thread for putting them on my radar. One is better than the other but they're both so good. The Wendigo, even though I grew up in the woodsy wintery Canadian north my imagination took in the descriptions of the limitless primeval insensate forest-- Canada as the cosmic unknown. The only real obstacle to suspension of disbelief is the obvious one, the pervasive cultural stereotyping. It wouldn't be so difficult if the narrator were a person, like in The Willows and much of Lovecraft, rather than sort-of omniscient/all-knowing "well that's how them people be, just stating facts here". I read the story in its context but still, can't help being knocked out of the flow.
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Nov 20, 2025 15:36
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indiscriminately posted:The Willows and The Wendigo are some of the best horror I've read, thank you thread for putting them on my radar. One is better than the other but they're both so good. Yeah your spoiler is honestly why I say it's the weaker of the two. I think in 2025, The Willows hangs together much better for those reasons. They're both excellent but there are a few things that make The Wendigo harder to recommend without qualifications. I still like it quite a bit.
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Nov 20, 2025 16:16
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I bought Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones for a few bucks over the weekend. A friend read it when it was new and it's nice and short so I'll give it a try.
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Nov 25, 2025 00:21
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BOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Now I have your attention: Reminder: this year's Book Barn Secret Santa is open for sign-ups until Monday! Send someone your favourite bone-chilling short stories, or a brutally festive tale of inhuman cruelty!
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Nov 26, 2025 19:39
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Jedit posted:Just finished a re-read of Usher's Passing by Robert McCammon. Very much a Southern gothic with 80s sensibilities. Someone reprint this thing, my pb is 40 years old and starting to fall apart. I'm surprised no one has republished McCammon's 80s run of novels with Stranger Things knock off branding. (Stinger especially is basically latter season Stranger Things but good.)
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Nov 28, 2025 07:47
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High Warlord Zog posted:I'm surprised no one has republished McCammon's 80s run of novels with Stranger Things knock off branding. Stinger is the most cinematic book I've ever read. It's screaming to be adapted into a mini-series and it wouldn't take much adaptation - everything leaps off the page.
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Nov 28, 2025 09:16
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Jedit posted:Stinger is the most cinematic book I've ever read. It's screaming to be adapted into a mini-series and it wouldn't take much adaptation - everything leaps off the page. Apparently it did get adapted back in 2024 but got mixed reviews and was cancelled after one season. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teacup_(TV_series)
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Nov 29, 2025 03:31
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Ccs posted:Apparently it did get adapted back in 2024 but got mixed reviews and was cancelled after one season. heyy i actually watched an episode or two before getting interested in something else and never coming back to it. no idea it was an adaptation. sounds like i should try the book, but the series wasn't super great
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Nov 29, 2025 03:45
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Ccs posted:Apparently it did get adapted back in 2024 but got mixed reviews and was cancelled after one season. I've literally never heard of that. I may have to dig it up and see how "inspired" it actually is.
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Nov 30, 2025 12:58
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I read The Wendigo. I really liked it -- I actually though it was a better (i.e., scarier) horror story than The Willows. I'll admit that the the latter is probably a bit better written, per the quibbles with omniscient narration upthread. It does feel a little like it got one more editing pass than The Wendigo and was tightened up just that much more. Reading them back to back highlights how they're different flavors of the same themes. Both of them feature two men who travel alone into a wild area, and the growing sense that there is grave danger from an unseen, inhuman malice. One man is more experienced and practical; one is more academic. The danger is felt by both men, but one repeatedly tries to deny it to the other. In both cases (minor spoiler), one of the men takes leave of his senses and flees camp to his possible doom. But despite these commonalities, the different settings -- eastern European waterway vs. endless North American forest -- are effective at delivering pretty distinctly different flavors. The repeated denial by one character to another of the reality of their situation -- or maybe of the sense of their situation -- does a good job of ratcheting up the tension, but even more than that it really delivers on the feel of a mind shying away from what is too terrible to fully know. I see why Lovecraft admired these stories. Reading both of them, in fact, I'm also a bit surprised that Lovecraft made so little use of the same technique (expect maybe in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which I think is the last major work of his that I haven't read). He mostly has the single narrator either telling us what is too terrible to know or denying what is obvious to the reader, but he doesn't use the back and forth between characters in-situ to give you "the mind shrinks from this knowledge." I love Lovecraft, but both of these stories beat him at his own game. In terms of effective horror, The Wendigo does push things a bit further than The Willows and, twice, almost falls off the tightrope. The first time is when Simpson loses the Wendio's trail and hears Défago wailing from the air above him: "Oh! oh! This fiery height! Oh, my feet of fire! My burning feet of fire ...!". That, for just a moment, veered into comedy. Too bad, because Défago's cries about his feet of fire when he flees the camp are genuinely horrific. The second time is when it seems that the Wendigo is about to walk into the firelight. I was afraid, not of the Wendigo, but that Blackwood would show the monster and lessen the horror. Fortunately, he does not. A few other things specific to The Wendigo that worked well for me: Défago's feet being pulled out of the tent while they slept; Défago's possessed wails, like I mentioned above, contrasting with his vernacular dialogue; seeing the tracks of the monster but never the monster itself; the "trapped in campfire light" that happens twice; the group immediately realizing that Défago is changed (thanks Simpson), rather than repeating the denials of danger from the first night; the almost offhand comment from changed Défago before he leaves: "And now—that is, unless you kin save me an' prevent—it's 'bout time for—". All in all, a hearty recommend for both tales. cupids shoe tree fucked around with this message at 15:10 on Dec 2, 2025 |
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Dec 2, 2025 14:58
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Anyone here read Jeff Strand? This dude is legitimately funny lmao
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Dec 14, 2025 05:15
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caspergers posted:Anyone here read Jeff Strand? This dude is legitimately funny lmao Yeah man he’s alright. I think he does his best work when he has a co-author that tamps down some of his tendencies but he’s always funny. He has a style though so left to his own devices reading a couple of his books or short stories in a row can feel samey, almost like how some people feel about Joss Whedon
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Dec 14, 2025 05:53
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That's fair, reading this story I thought the narration style would be exhausting as a novel. What I'm gleaning though is he's strong on humor but weak on structure? In which case I'll stick to the shorts Btw it's called "Hold My Beer" and has the cynical treatment of Confederacy of Dunces and the chaotic surrealism of the piano scene in Lolita. Lawled audibly throughout, highly recommend
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Dec 14, 2025 06:06
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