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Thread: What Are You Reading?

  1. Quote Originally Posted by A Robot Bit Me View Post
    I have and it rules.
    How about Blood meridian?

    Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk

    Or

    House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski
    look here, upon a sig graveyard.

  2. Quote Originally Posted by sedition View Post
    How about Blood meridian?

    Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk

    Or

    House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski
    Yes on BM, and Survivor is exactly the kind of thing I'm looking to read this summer, thanks!

    Re: House of Leaves, did you ever have that friend growing up who ruined things for you by being way too into them?

  3. I have read 'a classic' and it was good. Treasure Island. Fucking sweet.

  4. And now HP Lovecraft. Jesus Christ. I'd read what I estimate to be about two thirds of his available works a few years ago and now this giant Necronomicon book has showed up over here so I figured I'd give him another go. I totally get that he is the Black Sabbath or Ramones (if you're punky) of horror fiction and I certainly respect his position in his time and what his legacy has meant for a guy like me that digs horror 'n stuff. But still. I swear this dude is the most needlessly verbose, yet dryest motherfucker to ever write fiction. At points I just have to look away and say, "I get it, you're super into the dictionary". I hope he got an A in English or something. He can take a ten page story and make it 30 for no reason I can detect. His badass contemporary Robert E Howard can give you thrice the story in half the words. Which I think is neat. Why use more words than necessary? Especially when you arrive at the shit you just can't know. Nobody can know it. What I mean is in just about every story he ever wrote he's going to hit you with this one: "...a nameless, shapeless abomination which no mind could fully grasp and no pen even partly describe.". Or something just like it. What happened to all your giant, antiquated and/or made up words there HP? I would suggest he give it a try if he hadn't already padded the word count to a near stifling degree. I could go on about what I don't like of course but I'd rather shift gears and say that this book has Charles Dexter Ward in it and I'm looking forward to that one greatly because it's bad as fuck. Certainly the best of his that I've already read.

  5. Charles Dexter Ward was funny to me because I think there is a difference between the readership back than and someone who would be reading it now. The middle part that sets up the twist is so telegraphed that by the time it gets to the end and everything is revealed... I was thinking, "No shit! That's it?"

    I read the Lovecraft complete fiction that someone posted on TNL awhile ago. It's a nice collection. It took forever to read. I didn't really feel like he was overwriting but I did feel some of the stories were pretty bland. I like the Dream Cycle stuff the most. The Dreams in the Witch House, although I think it is critically panned, is one of my favorites.

    Anyway, if anyone is into HP Lovecraft, I recommend checking out Alan Moore's Providence and the prequel Neonomicon. It works in a lot of Lovecraft's tales into a grand story. It's interesting and updates a lot of the more innocent Lovecraft horror with Moore's typical savage view of the world and humanity. The Neonomicon trade came out awhile ago and might be hard to get a hold of... I thought it was readily available until I tried to find the link. The 12 issue run of Providence is already complete but probably pretty hard to find in single issue format. The first four and collected in Providence HC1, with Providence HC2, and Providence HC3 coming out later this year.
    look here, upon a sig graveyard.

  6. #2396
    I read a manga adapted from a dirty book about guy who's family is all gone and he has made a contract with shub-niggurath to be his older sister.

    I'm waiting for her to eat him.

  7. Quote Originally Posted by sedition View Post
    The middle part that sets up the twist is so telegraphed that by the time it gets to the end and everything is revealed...
    He fucking does it every time too. Sometimes he even starts off with "Look. I didn't actually see any horrors..." and because the story is being told in the first person you already know that the protagonist survived whatever happened just fine so what's the incentive to read further? Hoping to observe the usage of words like gibbous, impious and/or hoary in actual print? Which leads me to his whole forced antiquarian style. It is so shitty and needlessly long and wordy. Frankenstein is a good 40 years earlier than anything HP wrote (I think anyway, not googling it) and yet it reads far more modern. I definitely don't get it.

    In addition to making everything that's ever going to happen so fucking obvious before it happens in book time he likes to end his stories with a punchline. "And now I can reveal to you what horror I saw on that easel. IT WAS A DANG REAL PHOTOGRAPH.". Oh brother. Tacking on a punchline is a horrible way to go and it's what put me off Philip K Dick's abysmal short stories. It's even worse when ol' HP does it.

    And then his wimpy fucking protagonists. Good lord they are sad. One dude screams and nearly faints because he saw a painting? A fucking painting. I guess I don't know what life was like before TV and movies but being frightened by a stationary inanimate object that came with a warning regarding its ugliness causing a human being to lose his/her shit? Please. And then the dude that is running downhill through some ruins and has to stop short because there's a gap NEARLY FOUR FEET AT ITS NARROWEST and jumping it is some sort of problem. Fucking hell. Any six foot man could stand with one foot on each side and eat a sandwich while calmly deliberating over which side he wants to step over to.

    I fucking love to read. I read all the fucking time. But this was a chore. That said, I do have more respect fro the man now than I did before I started this reading. Some of the ones I hadn't read really tie some of the other ones together and I think the continuity is neat and fun. There is some genuine near action in Shadow Over Innsmouth and getting some real suspense out of an HP story was cool.

    I recently attempted to read some Han Solo book by AC Crispin. It was called "The Paradise somethingorother" and I kept thinking to myself "this could be a good story if somebody else was the one telling it. That's just how I feel about pretty much everything I've read of Lovecraft.
    Last edited by PaCrappa; 09 Jun 2017 at 01:39 PM.

  8. Quote Originally Posted by PaCrappa View Post
    so what's the incentive to read further?
    Lovecraft's ear for sparkling dialogue, of course!

    He sucks.

  9. If you like Poe or want a less sucky Lovecraft and can deal with verse, I cannot recommend Robert Browning any harder. He wrote alongside Poe, destroys Poe's short stories in terms of psychological complexity of the speaker (who is almost always a despicable person) and exposes Poe's poems as books fit for a babby.

    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poe...s/detail/46313

  10. Evan S. Connell's Mrs Bridge and Mr Bridge. Terrifying. Either book taken on its own is a sometimes too on-the-nose satire of the leisure class. Taken together, they're a horror story about how impenetrable one's own partner and family remains until the very end.

    The bummerdom is tempered by humor, though. Eleven-year-old Douglas's tower of cement and garbage to which he tends all summer is a favorite. Probably the most accurate picture of apathetic, somewhat destructive boyhood I've ever read. Took me back to the days of knocking over dead trees in the woods and combing construction sites for stuff we could whip at each other.

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