The Horror Literature Thread!

Sredni Vashtar

Since 'tis the season to be scary, I have taken it upon myself to start a thread on my favourite of all non-musical disciplines: Horror fiction, particularly of what might be called a "literary" bent, as pretentious as that sounds. What I mean is fiction that is, at once, thoughtful and disturbing; the thrills and chills are more intellectual than simple shocks, or are at least artfully and cleverly built to. The literature of terror is where good and consciously bad taste are asked to perform the most elegant of dances, neither stepping on the others toes, and I, for one, love to watch a good display.

So!

At the time of this writing, I am making my way through the seminal anthology Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, compiled in 1943 by Phyllis Cerf Wagner and Herbert A. Wise. The compilation marked the first anthology appearance of any of H.P. Lovecraft's work, as well as one of the first milestones in the differentiation of horror as a genre from mystery, fantasy and early science fiction. There really is not a dud tale in this collection, although I will admit to preferring some tales to others: Wilkie Collins' "A Terribly Strange Bed" from the section devoted to tales of "pure terror"—that is, in a realistic style—while amusing and clever with some rather sinister twists, seems a bit predictable in this day and age; contrast this Honoré de Balzac's "La Grande Bretêche" which opens the collection, which manages to elicit its cries of "I should have known!" only after the dreadful climax, or Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan", which is constructed with almost clockwork precision (and to my mind is basically perfect).

Sredni Vashtar

An odd proposal: Laird Barron and Thomas Ligotti are the Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft of the modern era, but more technically skilled and not total racists.

Miss Miko Mayonegg

Edgar Allan Poe <3

Mr. Darcy

Sredni Vashtar said:

Honoré de Balzac's "La Grande Bretêche" which opens the collection, which manages to elicit its cries of "I should have known!" only after the dreadful climax, or Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan", which is constructed with almost clockwork precision (and to my mind is basically perfect).

Agreed on these.

If you love horror, Barnes & Noble's leatherbound classics line has the most affordable collected works of Lovecraft I've seen, and the only collected works of Bram Stoker I've noticed.

Imipolex G

I feel like I should try reading more horror.

I have little experience with it outside of some of Lovecraft's stories.

Sredni Vashtar

^^ I have both Lovecraft and Saki's complete prose works in hardback from Barnes & Noble, complete with annotations. They are nice to have. B&N also have several volumes of Machen's work that I seek to purchase at the nearest opportunity.

^ Try the volume that I mention in the OP and Douglas E. Winter's anthology Prime Evil if you want to get a nice broad sampling of different styles without risking a wallow in the mire. Kirby McCauley's Dark Forces is pretty sublime as well, what with T.E.D Klein's "Children of the Kingdom" among its contents—although I think that "Black Man with a Horn" is scarier. (The latter is in the Ramsey Campbell-curated New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, which I do not own but, hey, Ramsey Campbell.)

Obā-san

THIS IS THE STORY OF A DAY WHERE THERE WAS ALL THIS BLOOD. A MAN WAS WALKING AROUND AND BLOOD STARTED COMING OUT OF HIM EVERYWHERE. THERE WAS SO MUCH BLOOD THAT IT FILLED UP AN ELEVATOR. HE WENT TO THE STORE AND THERE WAS JUST BLOOD ALL OVER THE PLACE! PEOPLE WERE SLIPPING IN IT AND THEY WERE ALL GROSSED OUT. HE TRIED TO GO SWIMMING AND ALL OF THE SHARKS WENT NUTS AND BITTENED EVERYBODY. HE GOT CHASED BY ALL THE VAMPIRES EVER. ONE TIME THE BLOOD GOT A KID AND A DOG. AT THE END OF THE DAY EVERYONE DECIDED THEY WOULD SEND HIM TO SPACE SO THAT HE WOULD STOP GETTING BLOOD EVERY WHERE. THE SCARIEST PART IS THAT THE MAN WAS YOU!!! (OR HE WAS A LADY IF YOU ARE A LADY) AND YOU FORGOT THAT THIS HAPPENED.

Imipolex G

^^I will make a note of those.

^that is the best story

Sredni Vashtar

Holy hell, there's a second T.E.D. Klein collection. It actually exists. And apparently some people in England have bought the film rights for "Children of the Kingdom".

Huh.

Odradek

Hey would it fit the thread's purpose if I linked some horror/weird fiction comics available online I recently discovered.?

Sredni Vashtar

Sure!

Odradek

Okay, so today I discovered that Hirohiko Araki, the guy who does the acclaimed Shonen/Seinen series Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, has been doing a series of short one-shot mangas starring Kishibe Rohan, a character from Part 4 of the as-yet 8 part manga.

The one-shots are, in contrast to most of the JJBA manga, more Tales From The Crypt than Fist Of The North Star. They share the series's idiosyncratic art style and character designs, but aside from that, not much with the main comic. All you really need to know to read most of them is that the protagonist, Kishibe Rohan, is a mangaka with strange abilities who seeks out strange experiences to make his art more "real".

The first two and the most recent stories from the Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan series of stories can be read here. One of the stories, is, for some reason, not on that page, but can be downloaded here.

I'm kind of interested to get some feedback on the stories if anyone here decides to read them, because I'm interested what someone who isn't into the main series will think of them.

Sredni Vashtar

Welp. Ligotti is now mainstream.

And yes, the screenwriter for the series has confirmed this connection:

The work and vision of Thomas Ligotti was very influential for imagining Cohle's overall worldview. I've tried to avoid discussion of Cohle's philosophies because the truth is, the audience cannot yet see the totality of Cohle's character or the story being told. His relationship to the philosophies he espouses in the first three episodes don't encapsulate the entirety of his character. For instance, Cohle can't be a nihilist-- he cares too much; he's too passionate; he yearns too much (so, in his way, he deludes himself as much as Marty does). Who he ultimately is, is not yet clear. Right now, I hope its difficult to tell whose side the writer is on, and I think that's the way it should be. And this might be paranoid, but this early on in the run, I really didn't want people accusing us of pushing some antinatalist or nihilistic agenda: the show's true agenda, and its relationship to those philosophies, won't be clear until the 8th episode finishes. At which point, if anybody still cared, I was hoping to get to discuss these things.  Anyhow: there was a clear line to me from Chambers to Lovecraft to Ligotti, and their fictional visions of cosmic despair were articulating the same things as certain nihilist and pessimist philosophers, but with more poetry and art and vision. And then I found that this level of bleakness went arm-in-arm with the genre of noir, and that aspects of the weird fiction I loved could be used to puncture and punctuate aspects of the noir genre that I loved. I mean, what could be harder, more unforgivingly noir than Thomas Ligotti's vision of what the human race is? But I suppose I've been overly wary of having people define Cohle solely based on the philosophy he espouses in the first three episodes, because the truth is that the whole of his character and his journey is much more complex than that. Having said that, if this leads people to discover and explore Ligotti's work, then I'll be very happy. And for the record; I don't personally share those philosophies, but one of the reasons Ligotti is an important literary writer is because it's important for us to confront the potential of the true abyss, its possibility, and I can't really think of a contemporary writer who can define that abyss as well as Ligotti.

Klinotaxis

i can't take horror seriously at all. people expect me to be a big horror fan because i talk about lovecraft and like how uncooked body parts look but it's just too silly. lovecraft never really scared me, he's of course interesting and all that but i didn't feel directly disturbed. same with most of the rest. in Alien i liked the alien's design, liked the suspense. the only thing that really freaked me out was the thing with the robot, and that's because of a semi-phobia.

maybe i've just intellectualized everything too much. i wonder how the monster's biology works. how does the Thing respirate. what does Pinhead think about Boaz. important questions

it all reads like the day with all the blood to me is what i'm saying

so i don't know how to like horror and that's kind of bad probably since i'm missing out

oh, i was going to read great god pan though. stopped, the gutenberg edition was kind of annoying. maybe i should get a hardcopy, i read two novels in the last two days

Sredni Vashtar

The best horror, I think, isn't scary so much as it is disquieting. It intellectually and emotionally wrong-foots you in a very particular way that makes you dwell on what you read for a long time after you have finished reading it. Better yet is when you cannot be certain what actually happened, so it is up to you to interpret the information, but you realise in time that there are none to satisfaction—or that there any number of possible explanations, each more plausible one being more uncomfortable or perplexing than the last.

One-Winged Eagle

I realized that I do like that kind of horror. The horror that makes you squirm but not jump in your seat.

I hate jumping in my seat.

Imipolex G

I also hate jumping in my seat.

Tachyon

i don't mind things that make me jump, but i feel like it's something that should be done sparingly or it becomes tiresome.  i've never read a book that made me jump, anyway; that's more something i associate with audiovisual media.

i enjoy classic horror (Edgar Allan Poe was a master of the kinds of ambiguous endings Sredni described) but it's not a genre i read all that much

Imipolex G

Honestly, I think that's one reason I prefer reading over movies: books have to actually try to be authentically scary, whereas movies often just give you those stupid jump scares.

Sredni Vashtar

There is such a thing as trying too hard, though. Stephen King does that a lot. I think that I am one of the few people who thinks that his prose is fine but his sense of "scary" is generally out of whack. He's gotten a lot better at it in recent years, but I think that's because he doesn't think that he has to try any more—which leads to stories like "Harvey's Dream", which are basically perfect.