Horror Veeky Forums

John Langan is great

Any good books on witches? Nothing spooks me more than a hag.

Ligotti's Songs for a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe are top notch, specially the latter

This was a fantastic read, tremendous voice on Langan on this one. A similarly great one is The Sea of Ash by Scott Thomas.

The Dreams in the Witch House by Lovecraft

laird barron does a really annoying thing where he starts spouting nonsense in rapid fire to create an effect of kaleidoscopic mad images similar to the way Lovecraft's protagonists babbled on in their insanity however I've found that HPL was more measured in its use and didn't go as far as Barron with it. Made me stop reading The Imago Sequence halfway trough the book although I'm thinking of giving Occultation a try.

M.R. James' "The Ash Tree"

Just watch The Witch film that was released last year. The dialogue is of literary quality.

Beautiful Thing is his strongest collection, and Swift to Chase is my favorite collection.
The Croning is a fantastic novel, and I think his writing works better at novel pace than it does in short stories, but know that it builds off of the mythology he establishes in Occultation, Imago, and Beautiful Thing.

Though take my opinion with a grain of salt I guess because I'm a biased fanboy. Barron is my favorite current writer.

I have no mouth, and I must scream

i will give him another try on account of the critical acclaim he's gotten although from the couple or so stories I've read of him his prose seems to be rough around the edges and to the point and I find that I like a little bit of purple on my weird fiction although not as much as Ashton Smith indulged in.

My current favorite is a toss up between Scott Thomas and Langan even though all I've read of him is The Fisherman, it was a super strong entry in the horror canon.

Off Season by Jack Ketchum

what about X's for Eyes? no one seems to talk about that book at all, I'm guessing it wasn't very good.

A lot of times Barron does resort to rapid stream of consciousness, and gets a bit hard to follow. My honest suggestion is to not try too hard to follow; when it gets glossy, gloss. He's trying to invoke a feeling more so than describe a scene when he goes down tangents of weird imagery, imo.

I enjoyed it a lot for what it was, but it doesn't get much mention due to how far-off it is from Barron's normal style and "canon".

He wanted to write a pulpy saturday morning cartoon with his own sense of style and storytelling, and he did exactly that.

It's a good afternoon's read on a cool autumn day.

his first collection "The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants" is what I've read of him and it didn't really impress me. He was trying to be HPL too hard, there's several good stories worth their inclusion to the mythos but overall I'd give it a 6/10.

the description doesn't sound that appealing at all desu and yeah since most of what i read about him comes from places discussing horror literature I guess there's not much place to discuss it.

Everything by Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft.

I read The Thing on the Doorstep recently and was surprised at how heartbreaking some of it was, a rare instance of him focusing on characterization.

>the description doesn't sound that appealing at all desu

Yeah, it's not necessarily for everyone, even if they're fans of his work otherwise.
I, on the other hand, am 100% a part of the target audience for that shit, and I hope Barron does more like it.

Either way, so long as the man keeps writing, I'll keep reading it.

Good choice

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is my favorite work of Lovecraft's, and possibly the farthest off from his normal style.

I think any of the main Cthulhu mythos stories (except the call of cthulhu ironically) is practically flawless: Innsmouth, Dunwich, Shadow, Whisperer, Color, Dreams. All of them major works.

>practically flawless
The reason for that is that Lovecraft absolutely meant every single word, phrase, and piece of punctuation he wrote.

Oftentimes when a piece was rejected for publication and he was asked to edit it, he's send the exact same thing as before with no edits made a couple weeks later.

And it would then be published.

yeah he is so great because he was a scholar of the genre, not a prodigy but someone who through rigorous study of countless stories got to understand the weird tale inside and out, the true nature of what makes something scary AND add to that his great imagination.

Highly recommend Dan Simmons

I hear good things about Matthew M. Bartlett, anyone read any of his work?

Hyperion looks good, is it?

The Corpse Exhibition

Hyperion is amazing, tho I wouden't say is terror.
Its space opera if you ask me.

I'm not that guy, but yeah. Hyperion has kinda a space Canterbury Tales thing going on with travelers telling their tales. Lots of neat world-building. There's a good amount of weird shit that goes unexplained in the first book, and the meta-narrative is kinda hard to care about until shit actually starts going down in the sequel. So it's a lot more satisfying reading the sequel as well.

This is a spanish author but those who can read it are gonna get a great and fresh experience from the best of the contemporary horror.

No love for Brian Everson?

His specialty is short-form minimalist horror, pretty much the polar opposite of the "kaleidoscopic mad images" mentioned earlier. He leaves out all the madness and gore and exposition.

Instead he just guides your brain down a creepy hill in the dark and abandons you there to wander around in it to find the madness and gore you already know is waiting there. Total creepy genius which really sticks with you.

It's on my amazon wishlist, what should i read first?

A Collapse of Horses is really good. He's consistent, though, so you can't go wrong with any of the short story collections.

I read his first collection and half of his second one and it was ok, it's a bunch of short stories building a mythos around a witchcult who uses the radio to spread their message. He is very into graphic horror so you're gonna find a lot of comparisons to stuff with blood, innards, tumors, pus and gross stuff like that, after a while it becomes a little tiresome because you already expect it. As for the quality i'd say he's more often than not good although some of it just ends up being weird/nonsensical without being scary.

damn never read any horror in spanish, will definitely check it out.

Can we agree this isn't horror?

never heard of him but i like how that minimalist horror sounds, like a condensation of dread.

Fucking great, i will check it out man, thanks

one of his more recent works. You can make the case for Lovecraft and others as the greats and I would agree, yet one of the few stories I felt genuinely scared from is in this collection.

I don't want to spoil the rest, but the story that stabbed me where I lived was one about a guy with an anxiety disorder in a shithole town, working in a factory making bits he never understood, using what cash he makes to pay for anti-anxiety medication, but not enough to save up to leave.

Eventually, a new supervisor arrives, and suddenly the work hours are being subtly increased every day. A man that entered into the new office to protest the change dies of fright, the medication getting more expensive, and the story ends with the main character in a death spiral, literally sleeping on the floor while the workers are working around the clock at feverish pace, compelled to an ever increasing rate of productivity, incapable of ever leaving, endlessly toiling until they all eventually burn out.

tell yah, I don't have anxiety problems, but the prospect of living in that kind of poverty, that idea of useless toil that you can never escape from, the way Ligotti tells it, the story genuinely unsettled me :l

...

that, and I gagged a little when he described a fat woman in a separate story eating raw hot-dogs while dipping them into a mayonnaise jar while living in a dilapidated house where people shit in the cellar.

Isn't that more dark fantasy/thriller? And the story takes place around Christmas?

i've decided to devote this next october to horror. my reading list is as follows:

conrad- heart of darkness
ccru collected writings
negarestani- cyclonopedia
chambers- king in yellow
ligotti- songs of a dead dreamer

waddaya think Veeky Forums?

I've read Bullet through your face by Edward Lee, more "gore" type than classic horror but fun. Also I have judt finished "Ring" by Koji Suzuki. Has anyone read Spiral or Loop??

You should try some of Campbell's later stuff. Alone with the Horrors has a good smattering. My own recommendation to OP would be Klein's Ceremonies or Ligotti's Teatro Grottesco.

By the way, Veeky Forums, this is a really solid horror thread. This is what I come here for

I've never read any horror in spanish. Thanks amigo, will check this out.

Chambers and Ligotti are great picks don't know about the rest

I've read Lee's "Dunwich Romance" and "Ipswich Horror" both very entertaining with lots of gore and depravity. Don't know if i'd read his non lovecraftian stuff tho, not really into splatterpunk.

I started Alone with the horrors and read the first 3 stories, seemed better already so I should get to finish that.

I'd say skip everything but salt diviner of that collection, not really "lovecraftian" but it is mind blowingly horryfing imho

I'd swap Phyl-Undhu or Cyclonopedia for the CCRU tome

His capitalism stories are great. I actually prefer My Work Is Not Yet Done to the collections of shorter pieces.

>The company that employed me strived only to serve up the cheapest fare that the customer would tolerate, churn it out as fast as possible, and charge as much as they could get away with. If it were possible to do so, the company would sell what all businesses of its kind dream about selling, creating that which all of our efforts were tacitly supposed to achieve: the ultimate product -- Nothing. And for this product they would command the ultimate price -- Everything.

It is indeed, but almost everyone call this a masterpiece of modern horror.

Michael McDowell's Blackwater Series and The Elementals are both worth a read.

goodreads.com/book/show/22223860-michael-mcdowell-s-blackwater-series-books-i-vi

goodreads.com/book/show/22461751-the-elementals

I think Books of Blood is the best Clive Barker

King books

Really wish they just make a one volume omnibus of these.

Here's a question for this thread, what term to you prefer for the genre authors like Lovecraft and his like write?

>Weird fiction
>Cosmic horror
>Lovecraftian horror

For me, I prefer Cosmic horror, i think it's the perfect descriptor.

Lovecraftian just makes think the author is going to reuse the Cthulhu Mythos. Also, I think both Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood are better at this type of writing (Lovecraft I think wouldn't argue, he seems to think so too), so I don't think we should go with Lovecraftian.

Absolutely agreed, although Imajica is also one favourite of his full length works.

Such a thing does exist, it's just hard to find at a decent price,I think it goes for about £50 on his official website.

Weird fiction i think can really mean any story that is weird, not even in a Lovecraftian way.

Pic related is a good anthology, but many of the stories don't follow Lovecraft's definition in his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature."

Forgot the pic related

This is Lovecraft's definition for the Weird:

>The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.

So yeah, I think Cosmic horror is the best description and I think it means any sort of horror tale that makes a human question there place in the universe and seeing the hidden forces of it at play. It's a very existential type of horror.

I had his class for a little bit. He teaches Creative Writing at SUNY New Paltz. Really funny guy, he made all the students say something they did before coming the class, wouldn't let us say nothing. He also ragged on the True Detective writer one time, which is funny cause I think the True Detective writer praised his stories.

Yeah it's pretty much anything that makes you question the true nature of reality, knowing that what we percieve and know is not really how things are and that the truth is horrible.

Charles Beaumont's stories are always good reads. Not exactly the scariest stuff you'll ever read and sometimes more straight up science fiction than horror, also he was a writer for the old Twilight Zone TV show. The Howling Man is a must-read IMO.

This book is the greatest, but it is so fucking cumbersome to read. The stories in it are a great introduction not only to classic weird fiction but also to absurdity, irreal, surreal, gothic, post-cyberpunk and more. I go back to this book every once and while to find some new author to search for and it only overwhelms me. Love these types of anthologies. Anyone know of a good horror one like this?

The Hunger is good as well.

That's the thing, this anthology used the word "weird" in the literal sense, so some of these stories aren't really horror (There's a funny one where some guy gets seduced by a pretty women who turns out to be able to grow her hand to gigantic proportions).

Not saying the stories aren't good, I just wouldn't consider this a horror anthology.

But to answer your question, I think "Dark Forces" is probably the best horror anthology ever. All original stories for it, some pretty literate authors (including a Nobel Prize winner), and it was the debut of Stephen King's "The Mist".

The Obscene Bird of Night

Here's the Table of Contents:

>Introduction by Kirby McCauley
>"The Mist" by Stephen King
>"The Late Shift" by Dennis Etchison
>"The Enemy" by Isaac Bashevis Singer
>"Dark Angel" by Edward Bryant
>"The Crest of Thirty-six" by Davis Grubb
>"Mark Ingestre: The Customer's Tale" by Robert Aickman
>"Where the Summer Ends" by Karl Edward Wagner
>"The Bingo Master" by Joyce Carol Oates
>"Children of the Kingdom" by T. E. D. Klein
>"The Detective of Dreams" by Gene Wolfe
>"Vengeance Is." by Theodore Sturgeon
>"The Brood" by Ramsey Campbell
>"The Whistling Well" by Clifford D. Simak
>"The Peculiar Demesne" by Russell Kirk
>"Where the Stones Grow" by Lisa Tuttle
>"The Night Before Christmas" by Robert Bloch
>"The Stupid Joke" by Edward Gorey
>"A Touch of Petulance" by Ray Bradbury
>"Lindsay and the Red City Blues" by Joe Haldeman
>"A Garden of Blackred Roses" by Charles L. Grant
>"Owls Hoot in the Daytime" by Manly Wade Wellman
>"Where There's a Will" by Richard Matheson and Richard Christian Matheson
>"Traps" by Gahan Wilson

It's basically the horror version of "Dangerous Visions". It got all the greats during that time period.

We - Yevgeny Zamyatin

sold

I want to read more Bloch.

Shhh...no one will get why this joke is so true.

Ramsey Campbell
Cilve Barker

If you want some fun pulpy werewolf stories with Nazis read The Wolf's Hour and The Hunter from the Woods by Robert McCammon

Have you read Psycho yet?

is Phyl-Undhu any good? can you talk about it a little bit?

Came here to post Laird Barron. Only modern horror writer that has ever engrossed me in the story enough to give me a spooky tingle.

Reading that part of "The Croning" where they're sitting around telling ghost stories actually managed to spook me a little bit late one night.

Imago Sequence is by far the weakest of his collection IMO. I was introduced to his stuff with Occultation and loved it.

Oddly enough, that being his first collection I read it has a lot of gratuitous homosexual stuff in it and made me think for several years that he was actually gay.

>Though take my opinion with a grain of salt I guess because I'm a biased fanboy. Barron is my favorite current writer.

Are you ME?

To be honest, I've thought Swift To Chase has been the weakest entry thus far.

I will never understand why people give a shit about Lovecraft outside of the fact that he's basically the granddaddy of cosmic horror fiction.

His prose is bland shit the stories are Saturday cartoon tier pulpy which is understandable for the time, sure but I don't think has aged well at all.

Most of his shit ends with "LOL HE WENT INSANE" or "TOO HORRIBLE TO DESCRIBE" or "OH NO I NEED TO FINISH WRITING THIS BEFORE THE MONSTERS GET ME OH NO THERE THEY ARE I'M STILL WRITING ON THE PAGE AS THEY PULL ME AWWWWAA...."

TL;DR: The people who emulate his style write far better stories than he ever could have TBQH.

Who are some of the best cosmic horror writers out there today who do not rely heavily on Lovecraft specific tropes and make their own detailed, interesting universes?

Barker is shit.

This book was shit. Threw it in the trash.

It's him doing his best Lovecraft impression, which as it turns out is pretty good, but suffused with all his own weird-ass obsessions (superintelligence, virtual reality, the Fermi paradox) as the source of the horror rather than just a vague idea of "things man wasn't meant to know". The actual novella's pretty short, and then it comes packed with two essays relating to horror and nihilistic philosophies

Not exactly a book, but The White People by Arthur Machen is best horror short story

This. The more I think of this film, the more I love it. Bound to become a horror classic in 40 years time.

Heart of Darkness is less weird fiction/spooky horror, but more about the horrors of colonialism. It won't spook you but if you appreciate beautiful prose and a short story with a moral that was challenging for its time, you'll love it.

I know it's manga rather than novel but who likes my dude Junji Ito here?

Anyone read Tomie here?

Weird fiction and cosmic horror, lovecraftian really only applies to lovecraft himself and people who take direct influence from him

saying that, i suppose i don't care so much as to what term you use really

NOTHING by Stephen King. I tried reading "It" and laughed my rectum off. Not only can this guy not write, he writes like a five year old. What grown man uses onomatopoeia in his prose? "Ziiing!" "Creeeaaak" "Bzzzzz!" I mean, am I reading a novel or watching some bubblegum Batman '60s fight scene? ("Pow!")

Great Tales of Horror and the Supernatural and The Dark Descent are known to be the best anthologies in the subject. Well, Great Tales used to be, it's an old book and Dark Descent is considered to be it's succesor, but those two along with The Weird are pretty much all you'll need of horror fiction in a long time.

Not yet, but planning on it. Is Uzumaki any good?