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chernobyl kinsman posted:jeff vandermeer is my Enemy It makes me wonder how his non-horror books are, A Head Full of Ghosts didn't have the strongest ending either, though it was by no means bad. I had kind of blocked out Disappearance's ending, but yeah, it was pretty rough. Seems like a whole lot of horror authors suck at endings though, I guess it can be tough to tie up spooky stuff in a satisfying way. I just read Kill Creek and it had a nice, solid ending. You could see it coming from a mile away, but the author didn't really try to hide it, so it ended up feeling like the self-fulfilling style super-predictable ending that a lot of horror movies do these days.
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Jul 10, 2018 16:31
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chernobyl kinsman posted:i dont care whether an ending is happy or miserable as long as it doesn't suck. salem's lot has a (mostly) happy ending which is very good. needful things has a happy ending which is crap. Salem's Lot is a pretty solid ending all told. I vaguely remember The Shinging and From a Buick 8 having pretty satisfying endings too, which is weird given King is really the master of the aimless, wet-fart horror novel ending
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Jul 10, 2018 23:47
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Len posted:I finally finished Hex today. It started out pretty neat and then it just got bad. So I love Hex, probably more than it deserves, but I'll agree 100% on the ending. Amazingly the original ending kind of sounded even worse to me. I like what he was going for with the ending given that a lot of horror authors seem to back down from everything just loving falling apart and everyone dying horrifically at the end but the delivery wasn't great. But yeah the whole idea of the witch just hanging out in the town and everybody kind of being used to it is a fantastic conceit.
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Jul 30, 2018 20:01
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It is kind of amazing how the book turns on a dime after that moment. It felt like the author had a fantastic idea for a book but got horrific writer's block when it came to how to end it. Which is like, line 3 of horrornovels.txt
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Jul 30, 2018 22:02
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Somebody posted a summary of the original ending in either this or the Cosmic Horror thread, not sure which. I'm phoneposting or I'd do a quick search, otherwise I'm sure someone will pop in and offer it sooner or later.
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Jul 31, 2018 02:11
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I'd have to ponder this for a bit, but I wholeheartedly agree with all of the ones I've read in Franchescanado's list (which is just the last four). And for King being notoriously bad at endings, I remember the endings to The Shining and From a Buick 8 both being pretty satisfying, or at least not deeply disappointing. That said, the "deeply disappointing" endings are by far easier to list. The Terror springs to mind as one that still makes me angry to this day, though I feel like the book prepares the reader for it a bit by getting progressively more awful in the back half.
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Aug 1, 2018 16:13
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this broken hill posted:i did, i started skimming after 100 pages but got the gist of it all and honestly it wasn't worth it. the whole novel felt like a second-rate creepypasta that had been filled out to book size with the most bloated, turgid, dead-bland narration i've ever experienced in my drat life. that's just my opinion though and i may be feeling unusually vicious because i actually paid for it lol. it had good reviews! it had good reviews!! I wanted to be skeptical, because I really like the idea of the book and have heard good things about it, but honestly my experience with Langan's short stories is that they swing wildly between well-executed, fairly decent ideas to "bloated, turgid, dead-bland narration", sometimes within the same story. Thankfully I just requested it at the library and apparently they now approve purchase of any horror novels I suggest because this is like the sixth book I've asked for through ILL and had the library email to say "nah we'll buy it instead". Which I feel bad about, since a couple of the books they've bought have turned out to be either mediocre or outright bad. Also while I agree the knockout books have been sort of infrequent lately, I think a lot of it is that the best stuff is coming from lesser known authors or smaller publishers so they don't always get the reach they deserve. I'd think with the mini-renaissance horror is getting in the movie world right now, horror novels will start to come back in vogue outside us silly, hopeful genre diehards. Anecdotally I have a lot more of my friends asking me for recommendations based on movies they've liked in the last year than I have since I was in high school a decade ago.
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Aug 8, 2018 23:03
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Not that I want to interrupt the self-emasculation chat, but I just finished Immaculate Void and it is quite good. It's my first real exposure to Hodge and I didn't really know what to expect (I didn't read any marketing anything on the book, so I actually expected it to be a little more sci-fi based on the name) but it was a very satisfying read and had a couple of really cool ideas in it. Also one of the few cosmic horror books I've read that actually features the "cosmic" part front and center.
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Aug 9, 2018 18:42
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Ornamented Death posted:Read more Hodge my friend. I've got Worlds of Hurt and Whom the Gods Would Destroy hanging out on my Kindle now, I'll likely jump on them soon. ...after I quit reading Amityville Horror because it's not very well written. Seriously, I wonder what this book would be like if it were written now, by someone competent, and not under the steam of the supposed "true story" origins. There's some interesting scares that happen in it but at this point I'm about ready to be done with it.
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Aug 9, 2018 21:19
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Stick Figure Mafia posted:Where did you find an ebook of Worlds of Hurt and where can I find a copy? What OD said, I got it at least a few years ago now, along with Whom the Gods Would Destroy. It's one of few times my impulsive book buying has paid off, though now that I've said that they'll probably show up again in a few months.
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Aug 19, 2018 18:33
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Yeah seems like they took a pretty broad view of horror. It's more of a horror/dark fantasy/gothic/vampire/thriller/halloween list. Even with that in mind there's some pretty bland choices in there. And although I agree that Interview doesn't spring immediately to mind when people ask me for horror novel recommendations, it shows up on "best horror" lists all the time. Vampires are horror even when they aren't, I guess.
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Aug 20, 2018 21:19
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Franchescanado posted:It was a reader write-in, so people could put any answer they wanted. Yeah, I put in five choices for it myself. I guess I had higher hopes for it because usually when they do write-ins with a "panel of experts" the panel does a better job of stripping stuff off the list that doesn't really make sense. I can't remember what I wrote on my entry but at least three or four books on the list were in my five. The idea of The Cipher being on the same list as an LA Banks book is kind of funny to me though, I admit.
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Aug 20, 2018 21:28
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GrandpaPants posted:Has anyone heard of the judges before? I'm not as well read as my Tinder profile says I am. I've heard of all four, though I haven't read by Ruthanna Emrys, I don't know of anything she's written that's made any waves yet. Grady Hendrix wrote Paperbacks from Hell, which kind of makes him a natural choice as a curator for this kind of list, and Stephen Graham Jones is a fairly prolific short story writer who has edited a bunch of collections of horror. I haven't read anything by Tananarive Due but she's been around for a while. Emrys is really the only one of the four that doesn't make much sense to me. edit: Yeah, what Franchescanado said, that's kind of all Emrys has done that I've heard of. I would have greatly preferred if they got someone like Cassandra Khaw, who has some established writing chops. MockingQuantum fucked around with this message at 16:02 on Aug 21, 2018 |
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Aug 21, 2018 15:59
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What's the thread opinion on Rosemary's Baby? I just finished it a few days ago and I was pretty unimpressed. I haven't seen the movie (which I've been led to believe is sort of a better incarnation of the story than the book) but knew the "twist" so a lot of the lead-up to it in the book was kind of uninteresting. It was a quick read, at least, but didn't do anything that unique. I guess maybe this is one of those "classics" of the genre that is still touted today mostly on name recognition and the fact that at the time of publishing it was really unique but has since been usurped by other books it inspired.
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Aug 29, 2018 16:05
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Drunken Baker posted:I think going into the second half of The Ritual expecting the Blood Frenzy twist made me enjoy it more than I would have done going in blind. Plus I'm a sucker for Black Metal shenanigans anyway. Best I can offer is that I liked House of Small Shadows a whole lot more than The Ritual, so that one at least is worth reading.
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Sep 20, 2018 19:29
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Ulio posted:Any horror books where the setting is just one place? Ala Haunting Of Hill House. Hell House all takes place in a hellish house. Opinions vary wildly on it in this thread, though I like it well enough. House of Leaves, sort of. The Shining doesn't take place entirely in the hotel but the majority of the book does. Horrorstor is about a haunted Definitely-Not-IKEA House of Small Shadows is pretty much all within one building, only with a couple of exceptions. I'm only like halfway through it but so far The Supernatural Enhancements is mostly about one house There's more that I can't think of at the moment, I'll edit if I can remember what they are.
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Oct 5, 2018 01:34
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oh hell yes, The Elementals is a great suggestionUlio posted:I have already read Hell House, ya that was really spooky although the backstory of all the hauntings was a bit too much The Shining novel is different enough from the movie to send some people into meltdowns over which is better, but not actually substantially different enough to feel like you've missed anything by not reading it. Little stylistic things and a few plot points are different enough that I'm glad I read it. Just a heads-up on Horrorstor, I enjoyed it, but it's the very definition of Big Mac horror. It revels in a lot of well-established tropes and doesn't do anything wildly unique (beyond the book design) but doesn't stick around long enough that you're gonna feel like it's dragging, IMO. And yeah, a lot of the cooler touches are in the book design. I originally got it as an ebook from the library but I think it loses something in the presentation, so if you have access to a physical copy it's probably the better bet.
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Oct 5, 2018 01:51
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Len posted:I listened to Horrorstor as an audiobook what does the physical book do? It's presented as an IKEA style catalog that gets increasingly weirder over the course of the book. It's mostly stuff at the end and start of chapters, plus an insert here or there. It's not huge, but adds some nice flavor that the book benefits from.
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Oct 5, 2018 02:14
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Antivehicular posted: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. Unfortunately "toothless satire" can accurately describe Grady Hendrix's fiction in general. My Best Friend's Exorcism was enjoyable but aggressively by-the-numbers, and despite seeming like it really wanted to make a statement on social ostracization and the dangers of gossip in teenagers lives or something like that, it never actually gets around to making it matter. It's a weird book. I'm pretty skeptical of We Sold Our Souls too. Ultimately Horrorstor and Exorcism are fine as time-killer horror that is successful enough at being entertaining, but not much beyond that. I guess I read the references to Ikea as less lawsuit shielding than half-hearted attempts at tongue-in-cheek humor. Either way, they do stick out as a little on-the-nose and unnecessary.
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Oct 5, 2018 19:20
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It's worth clarifying that Ballad of Black Tom isn't just "inspired by" or contextually related to Horror at Red Hook, it's a direct and explicit response to it and the overt racism in it. I think you lose a lot of the effect of that response if you don't read Red Hook beforehand. Not to say that Black Tom isn't worth reading in that case, it totally is, but refusing to read Red Hook beforehand because you want to avoid the racist overtones is kind of undercutting a lot of what Black Tom does. Calling it a "companion piece" to Red Hook isn't really an accurate descriptor. Still, Red Hook is indeed a bad story on purely literary merits, racism aside, so I can get skipping it on those grounds.
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Oct 9, 2018 23:30
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Drunken Baker posted:Just started watching the expanse and was thinking about picking up the books as well. I was told it delves into cosmic horror in the second season(second book?) and the first scene of the first episode had an Event Horizon warp drive consuming someone, which sold me. But here's my question... is it Cosmic Horror in the fact that the expanse drives people bonkers, or are there any aliens/higher beings knocking around in there? I havent watched the show so I cant comment on that, but I've read the first four or five books, and it's really inaccurate to call them cosmic horror (unless the idea that there's something in space besides humans is disproportionately terrifying to you). I never got the impression the books were trying to be horror in any way, and I think if you go in expecting horror, especially as a horror fan, you're going to be very disappointed. They're also aggressively mediocre imo, not a lot of interest happened in the last couple of books I read, and they're absolutely packed full of A Good Man Making Tough Decisions tropes that are neither innovative nor well-written. I'd avoid the books unless you literally have nothing to read or re-read. It's entirely possible the later books veer deeper into horror and I never got to them, but I doubt it'd be worth slogging through thousands of pages of flat characters and tired plots to get to it if they did.
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Oct 15, 2018 14:46
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GreyjoyBastard posted:I got this on your recommendation (and because it was on discount) and while it was pretty cool I wanted considerably more. Speaking as someone who felt the same way as you, I feel obliged to warn you that despite the attempts of whoever handled marketing on it, Black Helicopters is almost certainly not the "more" that you want here.
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Oct 23, 2018 16:50
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The Elementals is shortish, creepy as hell, and criminally underrated and obscure. Fake edit: maybe I should refresh the thread before posting. Both of the other books suggested are great as well.
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Oct 24, 2018 18:37
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Oh hey speaking of McDowell, anybody read Cold Moon Over Babylon? I assume that since I loving loved The Elementals and Blackwater, it's probably a safe bet for me, but just curious if anybody's got an opinion on it.
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Oct 24, 2018 19:07
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chernobyl kinsman posted:come on At the very least it's acknowledged as being pretty ridiculous in context too.
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Oct 27, 2018 03:42
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I enjoyed the book well enough, even in the face of a couple of very silly moments. For any other faults the book may have, it does the "cosmic" part of cosmic horror pretty well.
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Oct 29, 2018 19:38
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a foolish pianist posted:I like it as a kind of insane fairy tale. They're both horror writers who had a disproportionate influence on horror in the 80s, are kind of consistently overrated, have weirdly dedicated fans for the quality of their writing, and have been coasting on a small handful of good books for most of their careers? I say this with love. For King, at least. He's goofy and dumb and his writing is often not great, but I love him anyway. I've tried Books of Blood a few times and found it tedious enough to not get very far, I'm still planning to give it a fair shake though so I don't feel like I actually have a well-formed opinion of Barker. Undying was fun, though.
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Nov 1, 2018 18:38
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a foolish pianist posted:I guess I'm the opposite. Nothing King writes holds my attention - it all seems tedious and hackneyed. Barker is at least novel, mostly of the time. It doesn't help that two of my friends that are big Barker fans are also way into the cheesiest edgelord horror stuff imaginable. One has at least one skull, one ridiculous looking decorative knife, and one Todd McFarlane figurine in every room of his house. Intentionally. That's what I associate with Barker as a result.
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Nov 1, 2018 19:40
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chernobyl kinsman posted:king is without a doubt going to garner increasing attention from academics over the next ~50 years; barker is going to remain the weird cult figure that he is today, if even that. i mean legitimately, the guy wrote at best two books worth reading, both 30 years ago, and even those are saturated with barker's trademark gross-out sex-and-torture poo poo. hes just not good. If we do, I feel bad for you. People were not meant to discuss cenobite lore as much as these two do
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Nov 1, 2018 20:10
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Lovecraft is one of those authors where I really love the idea of a lot of his stories, while really not enjoying the execution. That's why I tend to steer people either to a small handful of Lovecraft stories or towards more modern authors that are just significantly better writers. MoM is a classic example of that, to me. I loving love the idea of MoM but I didn't really enjoy it either time I've read it, and one of those was when I was a dumb high schooler. I'd kill for a good cosmic horror novel like MoM. On another note, if you liked Blackwood, you may like some of Laird Barron's stuff. He's kind of divisive among horror goons, but a lot of his stories feel a bit like high-octane modern Blackwood stories, plus he makes pretty overt reference to Blackwood or his stories in more than one instance. MockingQuantum fucked around with this message at 22:30 on Jan 5, 2019 |
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Jan 5, 2019 22:24
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I'm with you on Bird Box, it's one of those odd books that I enjoyed a lot when I read it, but it seems much weaker in retrospect. Actually, my wife and I just watched the movie, and I was describing to her what was different in the book, and as I was recalling it, I kinda went "y'know, that book wasn't as good as I thought". It does some cool things, and overall was a pretty engaging read, but I do agree that there were a lot of interesting avenues that the story didn't take. That said, I feel like there is such a fine line in horror when it comes to what's worth describing and probing. Some books, I feel like I get way too little, others hand you too much. I feel like Area X really walks that line pretty well-- the Area itself is so bizarre and the books capture that well, without an exposition dump of "here's why everything is weird, let us discuss our 40 different experiments we performed." I'm reading The Gone World right now (which could arguably be called horror) and I feel like it occasionally dips too deep into exposition dump territory. I'd also be interested to hear recommendations for x-files-like books. I'm big on books where there's an expedition sent to figure out what the hell some weird thing is, but I haven't found many books that scratch that itch very well. Honestly The Sick Land is one of the better examples, if you're willing to read it in the blog format.
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Jan 7, 2019 20:18
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StrixNebulosa posted:I mean what authors actually get formal training? Uhhh well formal training in writing is most definitely a thing, though I'm sure there are plenty of English majors on the forums that could give us detailed opinions on whether or not a college degree translates into actual writing ability. To say no authors get formal training is kind of silly, though, there's hundreds of creative writing degrees and courses all over the place. All that aside, yeah, there are plenty of good writers without formal education, though I'm undecided on wheher Malerman is one of them. Black Mad Wheel was confusing and kind of poorly written, with what was imo a cosmically stupid plot. I'm actually reading Unbury Carol right now, but jury's still out on it for me, it's really not grabbing me despite the concept of the book kind of being right up my alley
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Jan 9, 2019 16:09
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chernobyl kinsman posted:robert aickman, m. r. james, jackson's haunting of hill house, mcdowell's the elementals and blackwater, most ligotti, much lovecraft, tremblay's head full of ghosts, nathan ballingrud's short stories, jeremy shipp's the atrocities, and recently david mitchell's slade house, off the top of my head Wow, we have shockingly similar tastes. I love all of those that I've read, and the ones I haven't (The Atrocities, Slade House, Ligotti) I've bought and are sitting on my Kindle waiting to be read. Well, I guess I haven't read any MR James besides Casting the Runes and the one about whistling, but I liked both of those a lot.
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Jan 10, 2019 16:46
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chernobyl kinsman posted:hell yeah. def recommend ligotti. he's got his weaknesses, but all of his stories read like prose-poems about anxiety attacks, and that's fun. atrocities i actually got as a secret santa gift from our own Guy A Person Have you read House of Small Shadows? That's the one book in keeping with the rest of those that leaps to mind, though it's got some of the same issues that Nevill's other books do. I'll look at my Kindle and list of other books I've read, see if there's something else I'm not thinking of. I think you're probably more in the know for that sort of supernatural/psychological horror genre than I am, though. I'd be more likely to tell you a bunch of books that seem like they'd be good but you shouldn't read
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Jan 10, 2019 21:54
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graventy posted:I found Bird Box to be incredibly tense and effective while reading it. I think it did a great job of making me feel trapped inside a person's head while something is there. The movie didn't have that same level of intensity, and couldn't really. I think the movie definitely fell down on conveying the same level of alienness and menace surrounding the things as the book managed. I also thought the fallout of people seeing the things wasn't done very well in the movie, I remember it being much more terrifying in the book though I read it long enough ago that I don't remember why specifically.
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Jan 11, 2019 18:53
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Tolkien minority posted:I've read a bunch more Lovecraft (Shadow over Innsmouth, Statement of Randolph Carter, Colour out of Space, Dreams in the Witchhouse, The Thing on the Doorstep, Music of Erich Zann, The Outsider, Herbert West-Reanimator, Lurking Fear, Rats in the Walls) since posting in this thread and came to the same conclusion. It's kind of infuriating, he has some great ideas but basically everything he writes is in the form of a long monologue with no real characters or dialogue, and he describes everything in the same " its so horrible! its indescribable!" manner before going into pages of exposition on what exactly it is. His prose is just terrible too, its like he saw authors from the past used a lot of florid language and overly literaryness and tried to cargo cult it by just shoving as many words as possible he could find in his thesaurus into each sentence without any real regard for if they're necessary or flow or add anything. I personally love Barron, I know there are horrorgoons that definitely do not, though. He can be pretty hit and miss too. Imago Sequence is probably his best collection, with Occultation close behind. Don't read The Croning until you're sure you like Barron. Also "Procession of the Black Sloth" is super divisive so make sure that's not his first story you read.
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Jan 11, 2019 22:32
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Ornamented Death posted:Speaking of Laird Barron, this came in the other day: How was Blood Standard? I haven't really heard anything about it, positive or negative
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Jan 16, 2019 16:48
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I've never made any kind of money selling books, but I've also only ever sold crappy mass market paperbacks and the occasional oddball limited hardcover or whatever. I usually just take the random crap into Half Price Books though, so maybe there's a better way to get rid of them. And yeah, what little money I make buys more books. But mostly makes room for books I actually want instead of the crud that accumulates over the years.
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Jan 16, 2019 20:02
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I made the mistake(?) of reading the comic adaptation before reading Wizard & Glass, not realizing they covered the same backstory. I'd say the comic is better, if for no other reason than being short. Also despite really liking Dark Tower, even the crappy parts, I'm not sure I'd call any of them the best thing King's ever written. That said, I'm not sure what I would call the best thing he's written. I'm not sure he's ever managed to write the best thing he theoretically could have written.
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Jan 17, 2019 18:05
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Edmond Dantes posted:I have become retroactively soured on King over the years; I read a lot of his stuff when I was a kid, ate the Dark tower hiatus after Wizard and Glass and the payoff was... not worth it. 5 was not good but not terrible, 6 was rubbish and I could have forgiven 7 (and the series as a whole, even if I still hold 1-4 dear) if he hadn't pulled that loving deus ex machina with the kid and the eraser or hadn't started with the truck bullshit again, and this isn't even getting into the pregnancy poo poo, Jake's death via aforementioned truck or a bunch of other stuff that I'm probably forgetting. It also had that copout in the coda going "you should stop reading now, this is for people who didn't like how the book ended". I haven't read anything he put out after 7 nor gone back to read the stuff that came out before that but I hadn't read. I know I've said this before, probably in this thread, but I'm convinced that King mostly got big early in his career due to being just different enough and just timely enough that there was nobody doing the same thing as him at the moment. And if he hadn't gotten so big, so fast, he might have had publishers who were a little more willing to force him to work with an editor that was up to telling him to cut poo poo instead of letting him write whatever comes to mind. So many of his books that are just okay would probably be very good with some judicious editing, or at the very least someone who was more willing to call him out on poo poo that doesn't make sense. Dark Tower is kind of another layer of that entirely, I think. It's like seeing every internet geek's "dream project" that they craft in their head over decades actually become a reality, and it's plagued with the exact sort of inconsistencies and tonal shifts you'd expect from an author who is too attached to an idea trying to work it out over a matter of decades. That, plus the unnecessary "King Universe" tie-ins to other novels, means it's a highly ambitious, flawed mess. But I'm convinced that had he written it all prior to publishing any of it, and had someone (exceptionally patient) pick it apart with a fine-toothed comb to remove all the cruft and dumb poo poo, it could have been fantastic. As far as Cujo is concerned you can probably blame/thank ample amounts of cocaine for that one, depending on your disposition towards the book.
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Jan 17, 2019 18:30
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