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Just finished Your Body is not Your Body, a collection of body horror from trans and gender nonconforming writers. It was, like all anthologies with multiple writers tend to be, a mixed bag, but there were definitely more hits than misses. The big thing that struck me was that it felt very zine-y, with many of the stories seeming very raw and/or from inexperienced writers (apologies if this isn't the case; but I'm not familiar with individual writers outside established names). On one hand this was good, because even the stories that didn't grip me were at least interesting, whereas bad stories from established writers tend to feel bland. On the other hand, a lot of the stories struggled with establishing a sense of stakes and tone, which is something I've seen from a lot of writers still finding their stride; many felt like they were going for a weird vibe but just didn't provide enough solid ground to draw you in, while others felt like they had to beat you over the head with the point or twist. The hands down best story was High Maintenance, told from the POV of a sex android that gets repeatedly altered by its owner. A great example of less is more, because there weren't any faces oozing off bodies or extra limbs exploding out of stomachs or anything, but there's an intense sense of violation as you learn more about the robot and his owner. I'm a sucker for relationship horror and this hit all the right notes. Lost in Reincarnation, a bit of flash fiction about a man who learns why he's in intense pain, and Stench, which I can only summarize with the wonderful but mildly spoiler-y line "The gender is bones!" cried the many women, stained with blood and fat and viscera, were the other two standouts. There's a bunch more decent-to-good ones in there but too many to mention. A solid read.
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Sep 15, 2022 21:06
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Xiahou Dun posted:Well you hooked me on Stench with that line. I was basically doing that old Vince McMahon meme over the course of the story and reaching the last frame when that line hits. My big complaint for a lot of the book was stories that toss you into the deep end of weird without setting up the characters or stakes, but this one does a great job introducing a fairly mundane character in a fairly normal setting and then steadily progressing things until that happens.
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Sep 17, 2022 01:05
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MeatwadIsGod posted:I bailed on A Lush and Seething Hell about five chapters into the first novella because it's just not clicking with me. Maybe it gets better later on and I can try again later, but something about Jacobs' writing style isn't working for me. I'm gonna read The Elementals by Michael McDowell instead. As someone who liked A Lush and Seething Hell part of my appreciation was how even the first novella was from start to finish. No spending a hundred pages on pointless backstory before it gets interesting, no story-defining twist, no stumbling just before the finish line, just solid throughout. If you didn't like it now you're not going to like it more later. The second novella has more ups and downs (in particular, the modern day side of the story felt clunky and ham-handed compared to the past portions), but the writing style is largely the same. Might be worth picking up again at a later time because it's an overall solid pair of works but I doubt it will click if you slog through it.
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Oct 18, 2022 21:56
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Xiahou Dun posted:Is it any good? I remember kind of liking it ages ago when the blog format was novel, but the writing wasn"t great even then and I imagine it reads like a primitive, overly long exploration-based SCP these days.
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Nov 26, 2022 12:55
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Kestral posted:Funny you should mention WXXT, I've had Gateways to Abomination in my to-read list for a while now. Is that a good place to start, or is there a better entry point? I actually read Gateways to Abomination recently and recently enjoyed it, despite never having read anything else by him. It's more of a collection of glimpses from nightmares rather than fleshed out short stories outside a couple exceptions.
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Apr 15, 2023 02:21
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General Battuta posted:The Stand (long) or the rerelease (even longer) I like The Stand but for the love of god do not go for the rerelease. The original is already a doorstopper and the stuff that was cut was cut for good reason.
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Jun 15, 2023 20:40
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anilEhilated posted:The nominations for this years Shirley Jackson Awards are out and I honestly haven't heard of any of these books. Anyone read them? I've read Your Body is Not Your Body and it's solid. Has its ups and downs like any anthology, but while there were a few stories that I feel didn't quite work there weren't any I actively disliked. Which is all you can really ask for in a big collection like that. Brother Maternitas was definitely one of the standouts.
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Jun 23, 2023 14:53
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Raw Shark Texts starts off in the tone of weird horror, but it explains/the narrator discovers what's going on very early on at which point it becomes a weird adventure with some neat formatting instead. Not a complaint, the book absolutely does this on purpose. I thought it was pretty good if not mindblowing. e: Though if someone took a stab at the same concept as a pure horror it could work pretty well. Would require the protagonist spending most if not all of the novel not sure what the hell is happening to him, so it would likely work better as short story or novella, but the main idea of there's a metaphysical predator eating your memories that normal walls don't work against, but certain kinds of media act like barriers against for reasons you don't quite understand, forcing you to act like an insane person to survive could definitely be spun off it a scarier direction. Big Mad Drongo fucked around with this message at 22:04 on Jul 5, 2023 |
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Jul 5, 2023 22:00
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Recently finished The Fisherman and it's one of the best horror books I've read in years. It's got allegory, it's got gribbly horror for the sake of gribbly horror, and despite what the title and description make it sound like the Fisherman for which the story is named isn't, like, fishing for souls or sorrow or anything abstract at all. It absolutely rules. Now I'm about halfway through the latest McSweeney's Quarterly, which is dedicated to horror and guest edited by Brian Evenson, and I am absolutely confused. Every story so far has ranged from "pretty good" to "absolute banger" except the third in the collection, Heartwood, which reads like an edgy teenager workshopping ideas for this totally brutal, nihilistic apocalypse story that he hasn't actually gotten around to writing yet. It's just the narrator vaguely describing maybe kind of spooky things that happened to characters we never met or were given any reason to care about after [mundane everyday thing mutated worldwide and decided to murder all of humanity] and then it ends by assuring us that humanity is even more doomed than he made it sound like  . It's very short, so maybe it was going for a Gateways to Abomination style of fever-dream flash fiction and just failing utterly? I feel like I must be missing something, because the rest of the stories have been so lush and thoughtful that this absolute turd stands out more than any of them.
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Oct 10, 2023 21:52
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Good Citizen posted:If you consider deep undersea science facility to be nautical there’s always The Deep by Nick Cutter I don't think The Deep is a particularly good book, but even if you're into what it's serving up the plot is nothing like The Butcher's Table or The Other Side of the Mountain. It's cramped and claustrophobic throughout as opposed to being about (horrific) seafaring adventures.
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Oct 19, 2023 21:27
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Thom and the Heads posted:I finished The Stand last month... Neat book but too long. Discovering this is a time-honored horror reader rite of passage.
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Nov 2, 2023 20:35
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value-brand cereal posted:Hi thread it me. I've been making two bookshelves themed around similar, niche themes and was wondering if anyone had suggestions. The video in The Cipher by Kathe Koja isn't the impetus for or focus of the story, but it's very cursed and very memorable.
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Nov 6, 2023 22:27
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House of Leaves is solid found footage horror with a fun if goofy gimmick and an overwritten framing device glued onto it. Like, the idea of Johnny Truant isn't bad but it spends too much time beating you over the head with the fact that he is an incredibly unreliable narrator, particularly early on. You could cut his early interjections by about half and still get what they're going for.
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Feb 23, 2024 16:20
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I've been reading horror! A Guest in the House by Emily Carroll. I've been a fan of Emily Caroll's comics for over a decade (many are free online and well worth your time) and this graphic novel might be her magnum opus. It's a tightly paced piece about a young woman with pretty much no self-esteem and vivid dreams who enters an unhappy marriage just because the guy paid some measure of attention to her. She learns some nasty rumors about why her new husband suddenly left his wife and fled to the other side of the country, which is bad enough. Then she starts seeing his former wife's ghost. Then things get worse, though it's hard to say more without getting into spoiler territory. The art is gorgeous, the story is fantastic, and the whole thing is gut-wrenchingly beautiful and awful. A must-read. I'm Thinking of Ending Things by Paul Tremblay Eh? Eh. I got this one because I've heard so much about it, good and bad, and I wanted to see what the fuss was about. In the end, it's... fine. The book isn't half as clever as it thinks it is, but there are some properly spooky passages, and I'm always a fan of stories about decaying relationships and uncomfortable visits to weird people and places. My bigger disappointment was that I don't know why it's sparked either the love or hate I've seen, because it's just kind of average. She Said Destroy by Nadia Bulkin This collection was nominated for a Shirley Jackson, and it is deserving of the accolades. Very modern, occasionally political, always interesting, this is just a solid collection through and through. There's no overarching theme, with stories running the gamut from Lovecraft pastiche (I particularly enjoyed her retelling of The Colour Out of Space) to modern (one is about a last girl just thinking about things as she drags the mostly-dead monster to town). The collection has a gift for putting you into the world and neatly inserting little details that point to the horror you're seeing being just a slice of a reality where things have gone very, very wrong. Solid, memorable horror from start to finish.
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Apr 15, 2024 18:37
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escape artist posted:You mean Iain Reid right? Not Paul Tremblay Whoops, you're right, I must've read your post while typing mine and me brain slipped.
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Apr 16, 2024 22:47
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