It's almost time for spooky season, what are you reading to get festive? Horror is a genre saturated with shit but there are some nuggets of gold to be found.
Last October I read House of Leaves and The Fisherman and enjoyed both. Currently reading Dark Gods by T.E.D. Klein, but the first story (Children of the Kingdom) didn't live up to the hype for me, hoping the rest is better.
Pic related is coming in the mail, I'm excited.
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>what are you reading to get festive?
Brian Evenson's new collection of short stories I've been mostly happy with his stuff so far.
Looks interesting. What kind of horror is it?
Is Ballingrud's new book worth reading?
Robert Aickman, Algernon Blackwood, Ramsey Campbell, Robert W. Chambers, William Hope Hodgson, M. R. James, Thomas Ligotti, H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Clark Ashton Smith, etc.
He likes writing about paranoia and existential alienation, a lot of characters catching glimpses of the unknown just out of clear sight.
Here is a snip from NPR that sums it up rather nicely:
>This book could have been called Collected Paranoias. Every narrative manages to disturb the reader, to instill a sense of danger, a permeating feeling of confused anxiety. Nothing is what it seems, and there's always either something missing that should be there, or something where there should be nothing. In "Born Stillborn," a man deals with two therapists who may or may not be brothers — and may or may not be real. In "Leaking Out," a creature that shouldn't be absorbs a man. And in "The Second Door," language mutates imperceptibly as a brother and sister in an impossible place drift apart and morph into something new, capturing the sense of strangeness that unifies the collection:
>After a while — we had by then lost track of not only the day but also what month exactly it was — I realized that my sister had begun to speak in a language I could not understand. I cannot mark a moment when this change occurred. There must have been a period when she'd spoken it, or some mélange of English and this new tongue, and I, somehow, didn't notice, responding instead to her gestures or to what I thought she must have been saying. But then something, some sound, a clatter of metal falling, caught my attention and I looked for the tin or the pan that had been dropped and realized the sound was proceeding from her mouth.
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>The Fisherman
You should try Langan's new book. Some parts are pretty fucking weird but I still really got into them.
Don't get your hopes up
For Dark Gods or for Lake Monsters?
LM
Damn, I'd heard mostly good reviews from Yea Forums and goodreads, that's too bad.
I have this in reserve for October
I also have Gormenghast on my shelf (not horror per se but has some spooky gothic elements)
Might read Dracula for the week of Halloween
What am I in for?
Great beginning. Meh middle. Picks up again at the end.
Come back in october to let us know how Gormenghast is, been wanting to read that one for a while.
What's a good publication for Dante's inferno?
Personally the writing felt like it had too much of a frat boy voice to it in one of the stories. Mercenary/detective in finding a gateway to hell and sounding like Whedon Tony Stark, goons being dumb as cartoons. I've not read the whole thing but it seemed straight out of a creative writing class
Any with illustrations by Gustave Dore.
agreed
I love Laird Barron's stuff and I know he likes to shill Langans stuff but I thought The Fisherman was complete fucking garbage.
Today I received these, I'm waiting for more.
I'm particularly obsessed with anything remotely gothic.
The problem with all these books is that the weird fiction scene is insular and the authors treat it as a networking scheme and give each other great reviews regardless of quality.
Anybody read this before? I've had it on my list and plan on reading it for Halloween
>It's almost time for spooky season, what are you reading to get festive?
Rereading the petty demon by sologub
I love a good ghost story.
Really fantastic if you want maximum grandiloquence and minimum plot in a gothic and subtly grotesque setting. Third book is kind of a let down but the first two are definitely worth it.
Read this a few years ago innadawoods and was pretty good.
Anyone have any historical horror recs?
You are absolutely right about that, not to mention the majority of them are rabid sjws. I think their insular nature is extremely shallow.
lacking arthur machen
I've heard it was his best from a trusted source, plus I've read the novella, The Visible Filth and it's one of the best things I have read this year
it's easily his best. lacks some of the emotional weight of 'north american lake monsters' but is much better as a horror/weird fiction collection. the first and last stories in particular are incredible.
It's very bizarre. Don't let the cover fool you, it's not scary at all but the story is good.
Neat thread lads, have a bump
Looking for something that messes with your head. Like, a book that is not just about telling a neat story, but also about the reader and breaking the fourth wall and stuff or I dunno, using psychology in some kinda way, I know it's kinda vague but I don't really have a book example of this because I haven't read much horror besides Lovecraft/Poe and that's pretty much why I'm asking for recs. Something like if Stanley Parable was a book.
Yeah, I've noticed that too.
big ups for the king in yellow my man.
A great read.
hm I don't usually do "seasonal" reading but maybe I'll open my Lovecraft anthology this October.
The monk by Lewis? That's what I'm going to be reading
Seconded, The Fisherman is amazing.
No. It's shit. Fuck your shit taste.
Great book
Good choice; the rape scene was based.
I’m also going to recommend this book. I haven’t read it, but it looks good.
The ending was spectacular.
Great reading of one of my favorite short ghost stories:
youtube.com
any other Hodgson fans here?
>He likes writing about paranoia and existential alienation
Can't stand this trend in modern horror writing, trying too hard to be "Kafkaesque" where the line between subjective and objective is ambiguous and everything is an allegory for something.
The Victorians and Edwardians wrote charming stories about real ghosts, as a sublimation of their concerns about disenchantment and their anxiety about the techno-rationalized future. Post-post-modernists write overwrought and overly self-conscious "look at me, I'm writing an allegory about disenchantment!!" stories, while being completely unself-conscious about their own snobbishly bourgeois disenchanted view of stories about actual ghosts as necessarily kitsch.
The only thing I disliked about the book was the Lewis’s strange comma placement, which made parts of it difficult to read.
You're in for a treat, NALM is one of my favorite short story collections ever, not just horror
Haunting of Hill House
Good thread.