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Negative Space hosed me up good and proper. Anybody got any recommendations for bleak, existential horror like that and Blindsight?
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Mar 10, 2024 09:37
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| # ¿ Dec 12, 2025 18:34 |
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Just finished North American Lake Monsters and I'm struck by in how every single story the real monster or ghost is male failure, inadequacy, and neglect: - The absence of the waitress's abusive husband is filled by Alex, a sort of parasite who exists by co-opting the identities of other men. He didn't make the skins he wears, he just chanced upon them. - The construction worker is haunted by his failure to defend his colleagues from the werewolves, and, later, to avenge them. - The doctor's hesitance and sentiment towards the dog, contrasted with the gruff pragmatism of his colleagues, nearly wipes the whole expedition, and is karmically punished by a shoggoth infecting his charge. - The aspirant neo-Nazi is groomed into nearly committing a hate crime by bigger Nazis with bigger dicks. - The father in the angel story is haunted by his own negligence, becomes impotent, and is cuckolded by a guy who beats the poo poo out of him. - The absence of the kid's abusive father is filled by the vampire. - The abusive ex-con infected by the lake monster is cuckolded, and haunted by his disconnection with his daughter. - The homeless father is literally haunted by his disconnection from his daughter. - The Good Husband fails to react to save his wife, fails to accept her zombification, fails to protect his daughter from it all. They're all good stories but taken one after another they really did feel like the author working through some poo poo.
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Mar 12, 2024 00:38
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I'm 100% reading Wounds soon. I'll take well-written horror that retreads similar themes over garbage every time. I want to read some Laird Barron too. I've only read one short story in that Jeff Vandermeer Weird anthology. Is there a good place to start? Imago Sequence?
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Mar 12, 2024 08:56
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Franchescanado posted:Weird question, but when does this get into the Ghost part of the Ghost Story? I read the first chapter last weekend on a whim trying to find something new to read and it was seemingly a kidnapping story? I liked it, but it was not at all what I was expecting with the title and blurb. Pretty quickly, and it does a real good job of building an overwhelming sense of dread. Book-ruining spoilers: Sadly it goes off the rails a bit. By the end the seventy-year-old protagonist is chopping up shapeshifters with an axe in a cinema playing Night of the Living Dead and I kind of switched off
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Mar 14, 2024 20:53
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value-brand cereal posted:Arithmophobia: An Anthology of Mathematical Horror by Robert Lewis This was not good. Opens with three decent ones and the rest is pretty much drivel, e.g.: Real Numbers, by Liz Kaufman posted:Numbers are real. And they are watching us very, very closely. lol
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Mar 23, 2024 02:03
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Between Two Fires loving RULED! Hell yeah!!!!
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Mar 26, 2024 17:16
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It reminded me of Glen Cook's trilogy that begins with The Black Company (I forget what it's called), but Fires is more polished. I found both by searching for "books that feel like Soulsbornes" and they both fit the bill of underequipped protagonists battling unimaginable evil and despair
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Mar 26, 2024 19:22
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Hell House loving sucked. Hell no.
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May 4, 2024 11:12
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Jedit posted:Matheson's Hell House, and not some other book with the same name? Yeah, Matheson. The prose is bad to the point of incoherence. The word "no" is used as an exclamation about 2,000 times, giving every character a stilted, robotic voice, and those characters are wafer-thin. The book is named for a location which is then given no sense of place whatsoever. This is a personal quibble of mine, but the back-and-forth between Professor Sceptic von Hubris and the beatific spiritualist over whether the source of her very real magic powers is "residual energy" (serious science) or ghosts (preposterous nonsense) is interminable and consumes most of the plot. This was also my least favourite part of The Exorcist (the book, I mean - the movie adaptation wisely downplayed this aspect). It's like one character scoffing about another character's belief in unicorns while expounding their own theory of leprechauns. But the icing on the cake - and what makes it read like a screenplay for a lost episode of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace - is that they eventually defeat the big bad ghost by discovering he was short in real life and insulting him. It's an exorcism by mogging. It was all just pretty risible from start to finish.
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May 5, 2024 23:54
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Drunkboxer posted:Have you read The Haunting of Hill House? Yep, one of my favourites.
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May 6, 2024 13:06
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I really enjoyed All The Fiends Of Hell, mainly because you're no wiser to the nature of the invasion at the end of the book than you were at the beginning. Never explain horror to me. Also the modus operandi of the aliens/demons/things is much creepier than eviscerating them, or devouring them, or dissolving them into goop. They really really need to kill all humans, but apparently just to turn them into ornaments?? Baffling. I love it!
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May 22, 2024 09:37
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Kestral posted:Peter Watts did a story called The Things that is John Carpenter’s The Thing from the perspective of the alien, and it’s great. Owns
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May 25, 2024 16:21
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Are there any good horror/gumshoe noir crossovers? Dashiell Hammett meets Lovecraft?
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Jul 28, 2024 16:30
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Good Citizen posted:They should at least try to describe the cosmic horrors Oh man, the cosmic horror I just saw? Indescribable. The least describable thing you can think of and then some. I could spend all day trying to describe it but it would be a waste of time. In fact even calling it "cosmic" is too descriptive.
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Aug 21, 2024 21:07
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zoux posted:How euclidian was the geometry So many angles. Like, leave some for the rest of the entities, man
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Aug 22, 2024 14:51
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I just finished The Imago Sequence. It was great fun. Barron can only write his One Guy but that's mitigated by his icky prose, and the pulpy plots take the edge off the relentless grimdark. I couldn't help but laugh at the realisation that, when you combine the physical nature of the Old One around which the stories revolve with the fact that almost all his protags are alcoholics, it's essentially a collection of stories about guys getting hammered and falling down holes
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Aug 27, 2024 23:41
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Wounds (specifically The Butcher's Table) was incredible. I've been looking for genuinely scary horror fiction for years, and I think I just need to accept that the written format just doesn't scare me (unlike horror films, which scare me far too easily) and seek out this pulpier, more adventure-oriented style. Pirates human trafficking the souls of the damned? Angels possessing giant squids? Hell yeah!!!
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Sep 21, 2024 17:45
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While I can't agree that The Exorcist the novel is better than The Exorcist the movie, the novel adds much, much greater psychological complexity to the battle between Karras and the demon. In the novel, Karras' crisis of faith is much more significant. His eagerness and persistence in proposing (pseudo-)scientific explanations for Regan's behaviour is in service of, rather than a symptom of, his waning belief in God. He wants there to be no demon not for Regan's sake, but because it will further validate his decision that his faith has become obsolete. The demon knows this, immediately, and repeatedly provides credence for Karras' increasingly desperate assertion that Regan is "just" a manipulative ESPer. The demon is telepathic: it mimics the case studies Karras has read, it makes facile attempts to prove its magic powers ("Think of a number between one and one hundred!"), it refuses to divulge Karras' mother's first name, all to feed Karras' desire to professionally absolve himself of his responsibility to Regan... but, like a serial killer returning to a crime scene, it can't resist indulging in it's own desires. It sprinkles just enough hints that something more sinister is happening: “Couldjya help an old altar boy, Faddah?”, or mimicking Karras' mother, or the Herod/fox pun. Where before he had only one crisis of faith (God is not real), now Karras has to contend with a possible second (God is real, because so too is this fallen angel, but He is either powerless or delinquent to intervene). The demon could have just shown what Karras wanted to see, but wants too much to see him suffer and doubt and exhaust himself, even though it knows that exposing itself like this could precipitate an exorcism. The novel demon is much more ancient, inhuman, and implacable, because this ability to worm its way right into the core of Karras' neuroses is way more frightening than simply telling him his mother sucks cocks in hell.
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Oct 2, 2024 23:33
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quote != edit
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Oct 2, 2024 23:36
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The Descent rules. It just nails so many different kinds of horror: gore, jump scares, bereavement, claustrophobia, despair, madness, hen parties
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Feb 15, 2025 16:41
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caspergers posted:I encourage you all to read The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch. Horror-scifi-detective-thriller with the vibes of Twin Peaks. Oh this is sick
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Mar 8, 2025 00:10
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caspergers posted:I should clarify it's got the atmosphere and uncanniness of Twin Peaks the Return and not the humor or whimsy of the first run. Once I saw your reply I felt compelled because I know how serious these things can be. Nah you're good; and you're right, it's obvious from the first two pages that the Twin Peaks influence is way closer to The Return than the original series. Besides True Detective I picked up on other influences which it seems to wear quite proudly on its sleeve: Southern Reach (secret agents vs gradually encroaching supernatural disaster), the Netflix series Dark (time-knot-fuckery), more than a little soupçon of Event Horizon (cursed spaceship with a borked time-drive, zero-g butchery), Hyperion (nightmare visions of the future; the endless crucifixion forest evokes the Shrike), Tenet, the criminally underrated horror movie Triangle, all poo poo I really really like wrapped up in an insane little package. The Libra crew spawn-camping their "echoes" and painting the ship in their blood and fingernails is an image that'll stay with me for a long time. And unless I missed something, I really liked that there was no need or attempt to explain Esperance/the Terminus/the White Hole/QTNs; they really were just Lovecraftian hell aliens that end the world, horribly, just by noticing it. Hell yeah!!!
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Mar 8, 2025 12:39
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Tiny Timbs posted:That's a lot of work. Is there a way to automate it? I dunno, give someone a random title and see what happens
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Mar 27, 2025 15:00
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Finished The Country Under Heaven (very good) and I couldn’t figure out why it kept reminding me of Between Two Fires. And just then it hit me: the episodic format gives both the cadence and style of HBO miniseries, albeit with totally different tone and content. Anyway, read them both
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Aug 28, 2025 22:00
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| # ¿ Dec 12, 2025 18:34 |
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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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