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I'm reading The House Next Door and the book is fine, but somehow the author's writing style just ... bugs me, in some way that's hard to put to words. Maybe it's that there's this weird almost pseudo smug undercurrent of late 70s middle upperclass white lifestyle bullshit everywhere, including dropping brand names, talking about dressing casually in slacks, talking about "having money", name-dropping job titles and roles etc. I'm interested in seeing where it goes, though. The second couple just moved into the titular House Next Door and things are about to go from bad to worse, probably.
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May 8, 2021 14:13
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 00:59 |
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nate fisher posted:Is that the Siddons’ book (the title has been used a lot)? Yeah sorry, should have clarified. The Siddons one yes.
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May 8, 2021 21:04
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I recently finished Quiet Houses (very good), and I'm about done with the Elementals. I'm in the mood for more good ghost stories, haunted house or otherwise. I've read the Haunting of Hill House, Hell House, Amityville Horror, Summer of Night, Ghost Story and a few others but largely you can assume I ain't read poo poo.
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Nov 24, 2021 18:33
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Some recent horror books I read: QUIET HOUSES Fantastic. A nice anthology of small horror stories, none of which outstay their welcome. The author set out to write small stories in places he actually knew, and that was a great decision, because he's able to inject a ton of little detail and texture into the world. GRAVEYARD APARTMENT Intensely Japanese. Sometimes to its credit, sometimes detriment. I enjoy reading non-western horror, and Graveyard Apartment definitely serves up some Japanese style horror, but the book kind of feels like it's stuck in first gear until it suddenly jumps to a climax that feels unearned. Some of the concepts in the book also feel extremely alien to me from a western perspective. I'm not talking about base level stuff like "living next to a graveyard is something most people wouldn't do if you paid them to", but concepts like "weasel winds", which are apparently winds that can suddenly flare up and toss sharp objects into you with enough force to cut you. Is that really a thing? Also the book's attitudes towards women are often downright regressive which was a huge bummer. THE ELEMENTALS A big letdown. Part Tennessee Williams play, part horror story. The horror itself is spooky enough, and I do appreciate character building, but it feels like the book does way too much of not character building but character going over the exact ground for the 6th time... ing. The book wasn't terrible or anything, but I seriously don't understand why the book is so highly rated. DISAPPEARANCE AT DEVIL'S ROCK Fantastic. A melancholy story of a young teen's disappearance, and the effect it has on his friends and family. I loved the central theme of "how do others see us". The teen himself never appears as a point of view character in the book and we only see him through the eyes of others, coloured by their expectations and perceptions. What is the real version? Wonderfully written with very realistic and natural sounding dialogue. A HEAD FULL OF GHOSTS After Devil's Rock this was a big disappointment. The basic premise is great; a young adult woman recounts a childhood memory of her older sister becoming possessed. Or was she? Was she making it up? Or was she suffering from a mental illness? That's all great, and the possession stuff is spooky and disturbing, but my big problem was that the main character is supposed to be an 8 year old girl but never feels remotely like it. Instead the book reads like an adult who has forgotten what it was like to be a child trying to imagine it, and not doing a great job. OBviously the waters a bit muddied by the narrative device of an adult remembering their childhood, but honestly it feels almost like a parody of an adult trying to write a child character. "I saw a sign saying 'god hates fags', I didn't know what that word meant but I got the idea that it was real bad" that kind of stuff.
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Dec 14, 2021 09:47
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MockingQuantum posted:A HEAD FULL OF GHOSTS SPOILERS Whoa. Really? That flew completely past my head. Can you elaborate on this? And my personal reading on the situation was that Marjorie had undiagnosed mental illnesses compounded by her awful parents, and those issues were then exploited for monetary gains and made worse. And thanks for the recommendation, added Cosmology of Monsters to my list. Shaman Tank Spec fucked around with this message at 09:17 on Dec 15, 2021 |
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Dec 15, 2021 09:14
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No that's all right, don't apologize. I'll go googling and see if I can find more thoughts on this interpretation, it's definitely at the very least a very fascinating one and could give the book a whole new perspective.
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Dec 15, 2021 21:39
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Finished The Haunting of Ashburn House last night, and I super liked it. Went out and bought a bunch of Darcy Coates books immediately afterwards. A young woman inherits a house from her great aunt, whom she had barely interacted with during her life. She moves in to the secluded and dilapidated house, with spooky consequences. I love this kind of gothic horror where the spooky goings on build up and the focus is more on ratcheting up the tension than gross-out poo poo or ... what's the book version of a jump scare? It's also a fun mystery, where you could piece together what's going on before the book reveals all the cards, which is something I always enjoy. Very much recommended!
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Dec 30, 2021 21:33
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Franchescanado posted:I'm curious to read a follow-up about another book of hers. I saw Ashburn House at a book store and thought it sounded good. I looked her up, and she has almost a dozen books that are "The Haunting of (house/person name)", and I couldn't imagine someone writing so many haunted house books without being redundant. I'm interested in figuring out her deal without spending the time reading them all. Well here you go because I just finished The Haunting of Blackwood House last night and Ghost Camera earlier. They were both really good! Ghost Camera is a ~100 page novella about a young woman who finds a camera that can take pictures of ghosts, but with unintended and dangerous consequences. Blackwood House is an old school haunted house book that was precisely what I want from the genre: spooky goings on, things ramping up nicely towards the climax and good writing. It seems like a lot of her books are shorter novellas she wrote for collections / e-publishing. I've got a ton of them on my Kindle and I'll keep going through them because they're precisely the type of old school classic haunted house stuff I love and occasionally still get nightmares from. They don't really play with genre conventions or do the meta things that get books nominations these days, but they're good solid horror stories.
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Jan 8, 2022 10:46
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I read some horror books recently! Gallows Hill - Darcy Coates Darcy Coates writes so many god drat horror novels that I'm halfway convinced it's a shared pen name for a bunch of authors. The downside of being so prolific is that you can become formulaic, and that's definitely the case for many of her books. Gallows Hill is a bit different, though. For about half of the book it's a very by the numbers haunted house story, but then it kind of shifts focus. Not a plot twist or anything, but just some non-coatesian elements. It worked fairly well! Not a banger or anything, but a perfectly serviceable spooky book.  ,5 / 5Home Before Dark - Riley Sager I didn't know anything about this book prior to going in, except that it was highly regarded. Now I get why. It's one of the best meta style horror novels I've read, largely because it manages to be meta without jumping up its own rear end like so many other books do. It's kind of a retelling of the Amityville Horror phenomenon. The narrator of the book is a woman who had an Amityville experience as a child, and is forced to confront it again as an adult. The book jumps back and forth between the book the woman's father wrote about the events, and current day. This is a really fun mechanic because it allows the author to foreshadow things and give them new context in a natural way. Very spooky, very well written. / 5What Moves the Dead? - T. Kingfisher Another retelling, this time of the Fall of the House of Usher, and this time without any pretense. The author says in their notes that they read the Fall of the House of Usher, liked the story, but felt it needed more backstory and a more thorough exploration of the topic, and decided to write it. The result is wonderful. Even though What Moves the Dead? is a fairly short book at ~200 pages, Kingfisher still manages to cram in a ton of really fun and cool world building. The book is set in a slightly altered version of early 20th century Europe. Our main character comes from a fictional country where military service gives people exclusive pronouns, that sort of thing. It all feels really organic and sets up a world I'd love to explore in a bunch more books. The story itself is extremely well told and creepy as gently caress. What Moves the Dead? also manages to be the rare horror book that naturally mixes in a bit of comedy to occasionally alleviate the tension before ratcheting it up again. / 5Ring Shout - P. Djčlí Clark Ring Shout is a pulpy African American horror story about a world where the Ku Klux Klan consists of literal supernatural monsters, and the determined African American warriors who hunt them. It's all one liners, explosions and magical swords that channel the anguish of African slaves. It draws in elements from various African American traditions and sub cultures and manages to mix them all up into a unique and really fun story. Also a fairly short book at 200 pages and change, but definitely left me wanting more in the same universe. / 5Chasing the Boogeyman - Richard Chizmar If you want to talk meta, it doesn't get much more meta than this. Chasing the Boogeyman is Richard Chizmar's personal recollection of a series of gruesome murders that shocked a small Midwestern town in the early 80s. Having recently graduated from college and returned home until his impending marriage, Chizmar finds himself connected to the killings and in desperate need for answers and explanations of any kind. That's pretty much all I'm going to say about the book, because this is one of those where the less you know, the better it will turn out. If you enjoy things like Zodiac and other true crime books, then this is definitely one to read. / 5
Shaman Tank Spec fucked around with this message at 09:16 on Oct 31, 2022 |
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Oct 31, 2022 09:13
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 00:59 |
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Read The Grip of It and I can't remember the last time I disliked a book as much as this. Very minimal horror elements, the increasingly stream of consciousness writing style was annoying and the main characters were both flat as hell. Did anyone read it? Have a positive opinion on it?
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Nov 4, 2022 11:20
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