/lit/ - Literature

>>16321012
That one.

>>16321012
is it a monster? I don't want to read 500 pages just to find out "the terror" is man's cruelty.

>>16321415
....and it was then, he discovered, that the real terror was the friends he made along the way.
THE END

>>16321415
The Terror is the name of one of the two ships, but yes there is an actual monster.

>>16321421
>but yes there is an actual monster
excellent

>>16321422
I was going to make a joke, but then I realized this was the plot of Hannibal

>>16321415
Two boats go up north to find a passage through ice, get locked in the ice, have to abandon ship and go on foot. There's a monster but the conditions are so shitty that it's not even the scariest thing there.

this just came out but it's a solid selection and mark samuels is a pretty damn good horror writer in the vein of hodgson, ewers, and ligotti

https://www.hippocampuspress.com/other-authors/fiction/the-age-of-decayed-futurity-the-best-of-mark-samuels

>>16321012
I haven't read much horror but I've enjoyed a few short stories I've read or listened to on youtube, so far. I believe this format works nicely for this. I like Clark Ashton Smith's weird short stories particularly, I've read plenty of them in chronological order online. The King in Yellow was another collection with some good ones, it started particularly strong. On the other hand, Lovecraft hasn't done much for me. The Curse of Yig (with Z Bishop) was kinda interesting but his Cthulhu stuff was underwhelming or straight up bad imo, I was more impressed or just enjoyed games influenced by that much more. Maybe his dream cycle but yeah. Oh, and I should mention Poe whose stories will always be among my favourite.
As for other works, I've read Ghost Story by Straub and I can recommend it. Dracula was a tad slow at parts and the writing is of course a bit dated, but it was good on its own right, and not merely as a culture icon or whatever.
The Island of Dr. Moreau is also good, and I could recommend trying some short stories by Guy de Maupassant, not too scary but they're well-written and can get unnerving, in various ways: either by being disturbing on purpose or by being written in a more light-hearted way.
As for my next horror read I have 2 collections which I might save for October: Roarings from Further Out by Blackwood, which has 4 novellas and another collection I have with a few selected stories from around the world.

>>16321471
Add pic related to your chart.

>>16321823
it's just a screenshot of the Horror tags in my Calibre library, but i'll read it if you say so

I really enjoyed reading "Kill Creek" this year

>>16321823
Pretty based, if I do say so myself. Revival was great, had a fucked ending too, so that made it even better.

>>16321471
>>16321841
Have you read Battle Royale yet? it's a masterpiece.

>>16321856
no i haven't, need to
watched the movie years ago

>>16321886
I only read the 'Remastered' version so i'm not sure what the original translated/JP versions are like, but it was a great novel. I enjoyed the manga and movies too

Can anyone recommend me book like Dracula?
Not 6000 pages novel because my English sucks and I lost interest when I can't understand words or meaning

The audiobook of The Terror is fucking great too, the guy has an Irish accent and does all these other accents. You have to be careful to avoid an abridged one floating around though.

My favorite horror books lately are the John Silence stories by Algernon Blackwood, and the Carnacki the Ghost Finder stories.

>>16321965
>Can anyone recommend me book like Dracula?
Are you interested in a similar vampire story or similar difficulty and length anon?

>>16321471
Surely this has to be just intentionally bad, right?

>>16322096
I like vampire theme but only classic vampire(with castles and shit).
I tried to read "let me in" and I just can't read about modern vampires.

So it would be great if you suggest me book with similar language difficulty and similar feeling of loneliness like in Dracula. I just don't know where to start.

>>16322145
Unfortunately I haven't read many vampire stories but I've seen Carmilla mentioned and I'm interested in reading it myself. It's one of the early vampire novels, it actually was written 20-25 years before Dracula and it was an influence on Bram Stoker, so the themes and the language should be similar and not too hard. It's also short so you don't get lost easily. If you could find it I recommend getting it, it should be what you're looking for. I also made this post >>16321635 and some of the short stories I mentioned should be easy enough to read, although there aren't more vampire stories there so far but you could try something else if you want. Poe should be fun to read

>>16322208
<3 thank you

>>16322242
You're welcome anon :3

>>16322098
>>16321841
sure

>>16321471
Nice list.

I prefer Buehlman's Suicide Motor Club to Those Across the River.

It's a fairly kick-ass horror novel. Not many people seem to have heard of it or read it (it never seems to make it on to any vampire novel lists, for example).

>>16322478
>kick-ass horror novel!

>>16322478
i'll check it, thanks
Those Across the River was a recc from a friend

>>16322533
I’ve read Those Across the River it’s pretty good. It’s above-average prose for horror too
That other one he listed sounds pretty gay tho

Is "Songs of a Dead Dreamer" supposed to be mostly shit? I read a few stories from it and I couldn't figure out why anyone cared about ligotti until I started reading Teatro Grottesco

>>16321012
The killing star fucked me up desu

It has to be HoL for me, I get lost in it every time I open it up. IT is also one of my favorites simply because I remember waking up one night and, for no reason at all, found myself terrified that the damn clown was just waiting for me. Horror as a genre really fascinates me though I have not read as much as I would like.

>>16322533
Those Across the River is good, worth a read.

He also has another vampire novel, The Lesser Dead, which is also well done, although, tbqh, I didn't finish it; it just didn't grab me. But based on amazon's sales numbers, it appears to be more popular than Suicide Motor Club (which is the literary equivalent of the Hot Wheels Octoblast track set and a hip-flask of Motor Whiskey, pure post-apocalyptic, ultra-violent muscle-car madness. Think Death Race 2000 meets Mad Max by way of William S. Burroughs' The Place of Dead Roads on the way to H. P. Lovecraft's R'lyeh) (jk, that's a description of Tentacle Death Trip).

>>16321415
thats basically what it is but its pretty well executed

>>16321012
it is impossible for fiction to be scary

>>16322504
if you let yourself get distracted by blurbs, you won't be able to read anything
just ignore them. they're white noise.

Hyperion is great.

Rarely mentioned on /lit/ are works from the very popular zombie genre.

Flesh Eaters by Joe McKinney may be the finest such book I have read (and I have read more of these titles than I'd care to admit).

McKinney's Dead City is also very good.

>>16323260
>it is impossible for fiction to be scary
Not true.

"For sale: baby shoes, never worn," Anon typed on Facebook Marketplace. He was in his 60s now, yet still hadn't known the touch of a woman.

>>16323382
And it's terrible. The second book should have been the end of the series.

>>16321471
Wow, that a lot of hot garbage.

Southern Gothic horror is pretty comfy.

>>16323945
http://www.centipedepress.com/horror/elementals.html

>>16321471
>King
>King's son
>Simmons
>Laymon
>Levin
>Brooks
>fucking Kootz
>Straub
>Moore
>Wong
>Rice
>Vandermeer
>Cantero and Garcia probably suck ass too

You sure do like to waste time reading trash.

>>16322098
>>16323915
>>16324000
lol pseuds in a horror thread, amazing
post some reccs or shut the fuck up

>>16324114
>charts
>horror
Imagine reading these things and calling others pseuds

>>16324114
>You can’t just not congratulate someone for recommending Joe Hill!
Lol, you sound like such a cultivated connoisseur anon

Robert Aickman, Laird Barron, E. F. Benson, Algernon Blackwood, Ramsey Campbell, Robert W. Chambers, August Derleth, William Hope Hodgson, M. R. James, T. E. D. Klein, Thomas Ligotti, H. P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Edgar Allan Poe, Clark Ashton Smith.

>>16324249
what chart?
>>16324260
>>16324249
post reccs or fuck off

>>16324268
>Laird Barron

There are a couple of VERY good Laird Barron stories that are available free (authorized) online, here:
>https://www.freesfonline.net/authors/Laird_Barron.html

Includes two of my favorites:

- Old Virginia
- Blackwood's Baby

Frontier Death Song is also good.

>>16321012
The movie was fantastic as well. Would recommend Jack Ketchum for anyone looking for serious horror

Excellent collection of Lovecraftian horror all somehow related to Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth. The problem with all non-Lovecraft related "Lovecraft" stories and novels is that they are either pastiches or they just don't measure up to the Master. Even Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth, and Robert Bloch etc. never quite got it. The sad truth is there will never be another Lovecraft story as good or as ground-breaking as what Lovecraft wrote. In this I have to agree with Kenneth Hite.

That said, most of the stories in this book fall outside the pastiche arena, and most are very good on their own as long as you don't expect a real Lovecraft story. From a literary standpoint the stories are well written and don't all fall into the "pulp" mode if that's not your thing. Fortunately The Shadow Over Innsmouth is included so you don't have to have read any Lovecraft stories to appreciate the other stories.

>>16325331
what the hell is that image anon

>>16323945
>Original book price: $95.
what the fuck

The Red Laugh.

>>16323408
>zombie books
do genre fiction readers really

>>16321012
The first half of the book is great and genuinely scary, Simmons did a good job. The second half wasn't that scary, the actual nature of the monster (and its physical form) disappointed me, and when the crew leaves the boat its always walking behind them, just walking.
Anyhow, this book is an autistic love letter to boats (featuring a monster).

>>16321012
I've tried a lot of Simmons books but The Song of Kali was the only one I really liked. He does that edgy boomer thing where his self insert repeatedly has unbelievably passionate sex scenes with the Madonna female abstraction that's just sort of there to be a mcguffin at some point.

>>16327339
Post-Asimov sci-fi and horror writers were almost all guilty of this. taking a novel idea or genuinely being a good writer but injecting reddit-tier waifu stuff or autistic sex stuff about fucking your 14yo granddaughter.

>>16326526
Smith was way better than Lovecraft. The Abominations of Yondo, The Coming of the White Worm and The Last Incantation (among many other tales), surpass anything written by Lovecraft. I even think that Hodgson and Machen, and Chambers when he wasn't writing love stories, are better than Lovecraft.

>>16327380
Lovecraft was proto-reddit. I don't mean the big ooga booga monster stuff that no Lovecraft fans actually like, I mean the dreamy, prose-heavy stuff about being a chosen introvert. The guy was kind of kitsch when he wasn't dropping hate facts about women and mulattoes.

>>16326526
>pastiche Lovecraft

Has anybody read Ramsey Campbell's Lovecraft pastiche stories, that he cut his writing teeth on? They look intriguing, but I've never tracked them down.

>>16327397
Not really, other than the Silver Key stories

>>16326526
There are a ton of these Lovecraft/Cthulu anthologies, and they're hit-and-miss, but I've found some great stories scattered throughout such volumes. I'd love to see a discerning anon who's read through this ever-expanding corpus put together a list of the very best such tales.

>>16327265
The zombie apocalypse is a *great* genre.