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How fresh in the reader’s mind do the Southern Reach books need to be to ‘get’ Absolution? It’s been years and years since I read them so my recollection is shaky, but adding another three books to my TBR pile just to read Absolution is not thrilling, even if I’m very curious about it.
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Nov 5, 2024 01:50
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| # ¿ Jan 24, 2026 10:51 |
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SecretOfSteel posted:Hey all He might enjoy John Bellairs' The House With The Clock In Its Walls. It took me completely by surprise a few years back after hearing Ken Hite talk about how formative it was for him, a fun read even as an adult. It's not pure horror, more of a... Does the term "Halloween Spooky" resonate with you? The kind of horror that gives you a spine-tingling thrill as a kid, and has the classic trappings of Spooky Stuff? It's that, and a mystery, and a fun kids' book in one, quite well written and accessible, with illustrations by Edward Gorey! If he likes that, there's a whole series of them, though I think Clock is considered the best. Bellairs is great for adults too, I strongly recommend The Face in the Frost, which I've raved about in TBB before but for the life of me I can't find the post. Also: The Graveyard Book, which is The Jungle Book if Mowgli was adopted by the ghosts and spooks of an ancient British graveyard. This might push his reading level a bit, but not by much, and most kids will just put a book down if they're not ready for it yet, no harm no foul. If you're looking specifically for Goosebumps, while I devoured that whole series, the only one that I can remember all these years later is the one with a horrible sponge-creature under the sink. That one terrified me, and I read it while we were looking for houses, so I would sneak off and check under every sink in each house to make sure they didn't have a sponge monster.
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Dec 8, 2024 03:45
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EC posted:After being horrified by the ||wild rear end body horror|| at the very end of Hench, I was looking for more spooks so decided to finally read Annihilation and I'm not very far in and already very spooked. Just a note that you should edit that post, looks like the Discord instincts took over and used the || spoiler || tags instead of <spoiler>  Enfys posted:Going to continue taking movie recs from this thread after watching The Ritual tonight The Color Out of Space is incredible. They filmed what should have been an unfilmable story.
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Feb 19, 2025 20:40
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I picked up VanderMeer's The Weird as my Halloween season audiobook after hearing good things about it, and holy poo poo it's huge  I definitely can't get through this whole thing during October, so I'm curious if there are any standouts I ought to prioritize?
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Oct 3, 2025 17:52
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Belated thanks for The Weird recommendations - I've been going through it just straight through so far, since the early stories were unexpectedly strong, didn't even hit one that felt like it was merely good until The People of the Pit. Now I've skipped ahead and read through Hell Screen and now into Smoke Ghost. This collection is incredible, I may have to get a copy of this in print.
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Oct 10, 2025 05:12
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Funny that The Hospice should come up, I just got to that one in The Weird and it's been excellent so far. I love Aickman's prose and his ability to instill creeping dread in absolutely everything the authorial voice falls upon. Nothing has even really happened yet and my inner voice is screaming at this guy to get back in his goddamn car and drive to literally anywhere but here, up to and including a ditch on the side of the road. Maybe it's because I've been replaying Cultist Simulator and Book of Hours lately, but I get strong Grail cult vibes out of this place. I feel like Aickman is going to be a bit above the obvious cannibalism angle, and not knowing what he's going to do (or what the hell is going on with the "cat bite" is really helping to ramp up the tension. 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?
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Oct 26, 2025 20:30
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| # ¿ Jan 24, 2026 10:51 |
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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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