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Pistol_Pete posted:The BBC always gently caress them up, though. They take a perfectly crafted, stand-alone short story, that James spent the best part of a year polishing and say: "Heyyyyy, this story is good, I guess, but what if we add this to it!" Like, they took Whistle and I'll come to You and added in a subplot where the dude's wife had Alzheimers and he was super-conflicted about it and the haunting all somehow fed into that and it sucked balls. It also completely missed the dry, understated humour that's an essential ingredient of an M R James story by making the protagonist a lonely, regretful old guy rather than an earnest young nerd who totally doesn't believe in ghosts... until he's faced with the evidence of his own eyes! An M R James story is already a near-perfect little tale: all they have to do is translate it into a visual medium but no, every time it's "We're updating this for the modern era!" and they poo poo out a high-budget, star-studded, impeccably produced failure. They already did that with the previous BBC adaptation, which is good and which you can watch for free.
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Apr 14, 2019 15:08
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I've now read two collections of Laird Barron and I can safely say I do not like Laird Barron.
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Aug 28, 2019 23:12
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MockingQuantum posted:I was going to say he's an acquired taste, but honestly even that's not really true. I think it's either up your alley, or it isn't, he doesn't seem to be the kind of writer where eventually somebody will stumble on a story that really does it for them. I personally love some aspects of his stories (the settings, the atmosphere, his particular brand of Blackwood inspired nature-as-cosmic-horror themes) but just can't take other aspects seriously (pretty much every protagonist, who could all be the same Jungian consciousness of "grizzled smoking, drinking, knife-wielding, kneecapping badass in over his head") Yeah those are sort of my thoughts but much harsher in general. There's two stories I can think of that I really enjoyed and both felt like major departures from his other stories, which tended to combine my least favourite parts of Lovecraft with my least favourite parts of generic Crime/Noir fiction. For gods sake please stop having your monsters give long winded identical speeches about how they're timeless and unknowable and have such sights to show you, it's the opposite of scary. Also stop using the word occulted every time you mean it became dark. The two I liked btw were The one where the lesbian couple hiding out from the abusive husband find a skinchanger pelt and the one where the tourists in India go to the weird avant-garde artist's piece at a construction site.
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Aug 29, 2019 08:13
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The British Library Tales of the Weird anthologies are generally really good and full of obscure writers who put out like, 3 amazing stories in a periodical in the 30's.
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Aug 30, 2019 20:38
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If he didn't format all his replies in the form of crude, lo-fi videos of puppets speaking in whispers then I'll be very disappointed.
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Feb 12, 2020 10:25
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I'm reading Apple and Knife by Intan Paramaditha. It's more of a dark fairy tale Angela Carter vibe than full horror but the stories are engaging, punchy and it's cool to read stuff in this genre from the perspective of an Indonesian feminist author.
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Mar 3, 2020 16:56
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COOL CORN posted:Imagine the pessimistic societal insignificance of Kafka mixed with the cosmic horrific insignificance of Lovecraft. Ligotti turns this on his audience, causing them to grapple with the brutal reality that they are living a meaningless nightmare, and anyone who feels otherwise is simply acting out an optimistic fallacy. Also spooky puppets
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Mar 12, 2020 13:08
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