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Stick Figure Mafia posted:I just finished Last Days by Adam Nevill and I can't believe I'm gonna read another book about a cult that cuts parts of their bodies off to get closer to god. If you want to go for the trifecta, Katherine Dunn's Geek Love fits on your Very Specific Reading List, although it's not quite horror (just magical realism with body-horror themes).
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Jul 24, 2018 17:34
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Ulio posted:I will check out Horrorstor, the setting sounds really unique and from the looks of it there is some satirical stuff in it as well. Horrorstor is a decent read, but the satire is pretty toothless. The setting is diegetically an American Ikea knockoff, and there are several explicit references to how it's a lovely knockoff and Ikea is better, presumably as lawsuit shielding.
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Oct 5, 2018 18:41
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chernobyl kinsman posted:i taught a couple of robert aickman stories in class this week and one of my students said it was "the weirdest poo poo ive ever read in college and i didnt understand it at all" I'm glad I'm not the only one who had that reaction to Aickman. Dark Entries owned and I want to read more of his stuff, but so many of the stories in there ranged from "requires thought" to "totally opaque (but still effective)."
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Mar 1, 2019 17:12
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I like James a lot, but if you didn't particularly dig what you read, I'm not sure I'd recommend you search more out. His stories are very consistent in tone, in my experience -- not repetitive, but similar enough to one another that if the big hits didn't click with you, the others won't either.
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Mar 15, 2019 11:24
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Just read I'm Thinking of Ending Things in the course of two sittings tonight. Pretty good! It's clearly just a light thriller, but I think it's very well-crafted for what it does. I'm particularly impressed by the narrative voice; it does an excellent job foreshadowing the twist, which I picked up on fairly early on, just with the degree to which the narrator is a cipher vs. Jake being described in agonizing detail. The narrator is conspicuously nameless, has only sketchily-described "friends" and "work," and has next to no inner life or biographical details until the boundaries begin breaking down. She's a pitch-perfect fantasy girlfriend for a guy like Jake: smart enough to follow his conversations and find his work fascinating, but not smart enough to threaten him or have her own ideas that might contradict his. Like I think someone pointed out earlier in the thread, the detail where she needs him to gloss "smart" vocabulary words for him is spot-on, but so is the extended lab description sequences, where she just loves listening to his descriptions of his work and how smart he is by proxy. She's such a classic Manic Pixie Dream Girl, written with full awareness of how empty those characters are.
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Oct 14, 2019 11:13
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nankeen posted:i hoard physical books like a dragon, but also give them generously to friends and family, neither of which is quite as ceremonial with e-books I believe this is technically classified as hobbit behavior
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Jan 11, 2020 01:05
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Read most of North American Lake Monsters on a plane yesterday. Boy, this is well-crafted stuff, but I'm definitely not "enjoying" it -- it actually made me reflect on how so much horror fiction makes me sad and uncomfortable instead of afraid, and NALM is mashing that button with a vengeance. Good stuff, but tough stuff.
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Jan 21, 2020 22:32
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GrandpaPants posted:I had to stop reading and take a walk after Wild Acre. gently caress that's a good story. What I found really interesting about it is that the werewolf is almost superfluous; it adds a layer of unreality, but a sufficiently weird industrial accident could probably take its place. It's a horror story about the aftermath of a traditional horror story, and that's kind of genius.
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Jan 21, 2020 23:05
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hallelujah posted:he also loves vampires and child neglect stories (tragic past) so sunbleached should be right up his alley This is immaculate story-reader synergy and I hope it pays off Honestly, this makes me want to recommend NALM to my dad, except his horror taste runs to the schlocky, so I think most of it wouldn't land. Maybe it just makes me wish I had a dad with better taste?
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Feb 3, 2020 02:32
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Big Goosebumps energy
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Feb 6, 2020 04:16
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Big Mad Drongo posted:I would pay very good money for a Ligotti commentary track for any Muppet movie/Muppet Show episode. The Mummenschanz episode of the Muppet Show is the correct subject for this
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Mar 7, 2020 01:04
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Yeah, the formatting on Horrorstor is fun, although it's not extensive -- you get the catalog form factor, one catalog blurb per chapter, and a few in-universe ads, but most of it is just a novel. I was a little disappointed by that, but overall it's a decent book, if a bit light and basic.
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Mar 13, 2021 04:07
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Just read You've Lost A Lot of Blood in a single sitting (it's a pretty quick read), and... I'm not sure how I feel about this? It all feels a little half-baked, maybe a touch first-draft-y. Maybe I'm just not inherently interested in serial killers? I feel like the thing that's most interesting about it -- the concept that (huge ending spoilers) the "artistic" serial killer is a rampant plagiarist who's never created anything and kills the men whose art he steals, and that the various convoluted explanations he provides for his crimes are just excuses -- is kind of intriguing, but it goes by really fast, and there's not really a cohesive through-line to the whole thing. I'm also not sure LaRocca's prose is quite good enough for all the weight he's putting on prose and voice over plot and character. Maybe the language being slightly janky is character voice stuff? I dunno. Don't regret reading it, but I'm not sure I'm going to go hunting for other LaRocca.
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Apr 20, 2022 07:41
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Is there anyone out there who fits in the same niche as Aickman -- the mundane evolving into unnerving off-kilter situations and mounting dread, usually without any monsters/violence, just... deep discomfort? (I don't really know how to sum up Aickman, but you know how it goes.) I find his writing uniquely compelling and want more stuff that feels like it.
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Jul 1, 2022 03:16
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I've been trying to get into A Head Full of Ghosts, and does this pick up at all? I'm about ten chapters in, right after the dad has confessed to taking Marjorie to a priest instead of her psych appointment, and it's not bad but I'm not gripped. The sibling stuff isn't clicking with me -- all I can think is that this is very watered-down We Have Always Lived In The Castle, which may just be because of the younger sister being named Merry, IDK
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Jul 6, 2022 23:55
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Yeah, WHALITC really only works because the characterization is so drat good (and generally because Shirley Jackson's writing is a treasure), and especially that the kid voices feel real. These kid voices don't quite work for me? I dunno, I'm not to the DNF point, but this might be a "finish it and send it straight to Half-Price" book for me.
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Jul 7, 2022 01:55
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grobbo posted:Probably an odd hill to die on particularly as it's from the last page, but I think both Hill House and We Have Always Lived In The Castle have perfectly good and fine plotting for what they're trying to achieve. Yeah, I agree with this. I can see how Hill House might be a disappointment for people looking for an explicitly supernatural haunted-house story (I would argue that what we see qualifies, just in a subtle way, but I can see a reasonable reader decide otherwise), but the character work is superb and powerful.
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Jul 21, 2022 04:27
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Finished The Hellbound Heart last night, which was my first time reading Clive Barker, and I enjoyed it pretty well! All I knew about it going in was some cultural osmosis about Hellraiser, so I was pleasantly surprised by how sparingly the Cenobites were used here, and particularly how mundane their speech patterns were -- there's something much more unnerving about their just talking to humans in an almost casual tone, and asking things like "what city is this?", instead of being full-tilt Eldritch. Could have probably done without the "female character becomes romantically obsessed after joyless dubiously-consensual sex" trope -- if we have to keep doing this, can the sex at least be really good? -- but y'know, gotta get the plot going somehow.
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Aug 24, 2022 01:47
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It's been a while since I read Matheson's short work but I recall it being great, so I say go for it.
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Aug 24, 2022 22:02
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Just read Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke last night, and I'm echoing a lot of the same disappointment as other people in this thread. The pacing is janky -- I get that the idea is that the main characters are lonely people moving way too fast, but it still feels like this should all take more time, with maybe some elided time to imply a "normal" borderline-abusive power-exchange relationship happening before things start getting gory -- and the character voices read much too much alike and much too "writerly" for this setup, IMHO. I think there are good bones here (Agnes's history of generational family violence creating warped expectations of intimacy, and Zoe constantly testing Agnes's boundaries and being simultaneously horrified and fascinated that those boundaries don't really exist), but it all needed more time and space and more distinct voices. About halfway through the next story in this edition, "The Enchantment," and it's... okay, I guess? LaRocca keeps doing this thing where we get huge ideas with minimal exploration, and it bothers me even though I know being evocative is the point. I just feel like "science has disproven the afterlife" is a big thing to just throw out there! Why? How? Maybe there's going to be some payoff for this, but I'm not sure, because LaRocca doesn't seem to do payoff worth half a drat.
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Dec 14, 2022 00:29
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If I had to guess, the deal with that story is that it's a metaphor for the destructive power of festering grief and resentment, the idea that the pain these people feel for the loss of their son can only be satisfied by the destruction of something pure and beautiful, but it felt like it really went into the weeds with the adultery stuff. In general, NALM had a fixation on male sexual jealousy that made a lot of it not click for me.
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Feb 8, 2023 10:00
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On the subject of style, I'm trying to take a whack at Ligotti again since I got a few more in the mail yesterday (thanks to SA poster escape artist), and... does his prose style ever get less affected? I read the first few stories in Songs of a Dead Dreamer last night ("The Frolic," "Les Fleurs," and "Alice's Last Adventure"), and I can't tell if they aged badly or if I just find his style really trite. "The Frolic" in particular felt uncomfortably like Pointless Psychologist Exposition In Vintage Horror Film: the Story, without enough punch in the payoff. I'm guessing I should just keep on trucking?
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Apr 15, 2023 03:19
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I was gonna say, the real horror is the phenomenon of random middle-aged men suddenly delivering Humbert Humbert's nymphet speech about a TV teenager, but with complete conviction of moral superiority
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Apr 16, 2023 02:45
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PsychedelicWarlord posted:Teattro Grotesco has that scene with the woman dipping hot dogs into mayo which literally makes me nauseous when I think about it That scene stopped me dead when I attempted to read TG -- just visceral disgust, which sounds dumb as hell, but so it goes. I should try again and just... skim that bit. Anyway, I posted about this a bit ago, but I also read the first few stories in SoaDD and wasn't all that impressed. "Frolic," honestly, reads kind of juvenilia-ish to me? Lots of sort of half-baked ideas that don't go anywhere, a tone that's too limp to be satirical without being realistic either, and extremely predictable action for the most part. The comparison to King is apt, but King is much better at creating instantly better-rounded and sympathetic characters, so the horror actually hits. By about halfway through "Frolic" I was just waiting for the punchline.
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Apr 26, 2023 22:43
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Tiny Timbs posted:I read Ghost Story for the first time this year and thought it was fantastic. It was like a soberly-written King story. Vintage Straub is a lot like sober King and, in my experience, a good time; his later work is more spotty IMHO, but generally still worth a shot. His short work is also quite good, although unlike King, it's not much better than his novels -- just of comparable quality.
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Jun 17, 2023 01:06
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Vargatron posted:The books are scary, yeah, but there's this emotional authenticity there. I think that's why I like King's books so much. Yeah, King is exceptionally good at character and emotion, which salvages a lot of very silly plots. Even the bad novels will usually have good character work -- I can't recommend Dreamcatcher on any level (and mostly finished it because I was on a school trip pre-smartphones and didn't have a lot of options), but the relationship between the four core friends resonated with me even as a bored teenager.
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Jul 10, 2023 00:33
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FPyat posted:I like it when authors with odd phobias are able to convey their fear in their writing. Interesting to see something innocuous described in monstrous terms. Any good examples I could look at? I feel like whatever's going on with Laird Barron and older women (particularly fat ones) might qualify here
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Nov 11, 2023 01:47
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Bilirubin posted:
I'm just saying, I read two Barron short stories and both of them involved descriptions of large naked old ladies that sounded like Lovecraft describing a penguin. Maybe that was a coincidence? The vibes were weird.
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Nov 12, 2023 00:31
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PROCEDE WITH CAUTION! 
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NGL, putting your "swipe at some guys I know on Twitter in my tiny subculture circle" story in a mass-market collection feels like a weird move. Maybe some things can stay on your Twitter.
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Nov 12, 2023 05:03
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Seconding Robert Aickman. Some of his stories are more conventionally horror-fiction-shaped than others, but all of them are weird as hell. I think he may be the world's reigning champion of "nothing actually horrific happened in that story but I'm still deeply unnerved" writing.
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Jan 24, 2024 02:16
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I read most of NALM in one sitting on a plane, and I think it didn't do the book a lot of favors. I really wish the angel story in particular hadn't spent so much time on the cheating subplot -- it felt like the most stock way to depict a disintegrating marriage, and also felt like a weird invocation of the idea that the worst possible horror is female infidelity? I found that to be an offputting running theme in the whole collection, tbh, with the teen skinhead story where the big reveal is that the girl is loving him on orders, and of course the title story and the wife's questionable fidelity while the MC was in prison.
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Feb 16, 2024 00:37
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If you liked Hill House, you'll probably like WHALITC, but it's a different kind of horror -- more straightforwardly psychological. The setting is the main characters living in isolation in their once-stately family home now fading into decay, so it might hit some of the Hill House buttons or it might not, and I'm not sure I'd call it setting-based horror.
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Feb 23, 2024 02:16
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DurianGray posted:Lol yeah the blog sections are almost too successful at capturing that extremely grating mid-aughts style of blogging. It's a pretty good style parody, but that ended up just throwing me out of the story -- it made no sense as a blogging style for a twenty-something in the near future, particularly one doing media criticism. It felt more like Tremblay just wanting to do the riff than sensible character development. I ended up DNF'ing Head Full of Ghosts, because I felt like the character work wasn't adequate for the story Tremblay was trying to tell, especially given how consciously it was a Shirley Jackson homage. I may have said this before in this thread, but I'll say it again: if you want me to remind me of Shirley Jackson in the middle of your novel, you had better be loving sharp.
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Feb 24, 2024 03:27
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value-brand cereal posted:Arithmophobia: An Anthology of Mathematical Horror by Robert Lewis All I can think of is the SCP article about an equation that, when solved, manifests a grizzly bear at your location. Not as a magic ritual or anything, just because the mathematically correct answer is somehow "grizzly bear."
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Mar 19, 2024 23:50
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Wachter posted:This was not good. Opens with three decent ones and the rest is pretty much drivel, e.g.: Reading this in the Ralph Wiggum "and I saw the baby and the baby looked at me" cadence
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Mar 23, 2024 04:05
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