Horror Fiction

>>9417619
I liked Joe Hill. Try Heart Shaped Box.

Most of Matheson's stuff is good. I Am Legend, Hell House, etc.

>>9417659
Joe Hill is Stephen Kong's son, so he has great expectations

Fuck novels, pick up a Ligotti collection. If you're a faggot and it has to be a novel; Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.

Ramsey Campbell's early novels, up to and including Midnight Sun
T.E.D Klein's The Ceremonies
Caitlin Kiernan's The Red Tree

>>9418011
>Caitlin Kiernan's The Red Tree
this is the second time I've seen her today, are you the same anon as the brite thread?

>>9418101
No

>>9418139
huh

>>9417619
Naomi's Room, Jonathan Aycliffe
Off Season, Jack Ketchum
Floating Dragon, Peter Straub
The Croning, Laird Barron
A Head Full of Ghosts, Paul Tremblay

Read Lovecraft

I've always been of the opinion that horror translates more efficiently to the short story format than it does to novels, but anyway a few recs -

>Laird Barron -
The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All (and his other stuff)
>Ligotti - Grimscribe/Songs of a Dead Dreamer/Teatro Grottesco
>Gary Shipley - Dreams of Amputation
>Matthew Stokoe - Cows/High Life

>>9417619
I think horror fiction in general is worthless for producing the same effect as it had in the past, where the unknown can easily edge into one's reality even with a healthy scepticism. So I prefer to read writers within "the new weird" as well as those new horror forms you find in the fake news, or the back-channel screeds of possible true tales that are probably some-what real events masquerading as devious plots by sinister organisations. You know what I mean....

These works, the posts, don't always make necessary that one knows the author is preforming, but, even if one does not suppose that the work is fiction, the truth within can sustain a certain amount of terror in the individual - because the theatre is amongst the cruellest conceived. Truthfully, I know, I'm not speaking outright anymore, nor giving much of an elaboration - nor even am I directly saying which book you should choose to help you sleep at night - but I am suggesting that there may be a host of books out there awaiting you yet in which a lost soul can be captivated for very extenuated periods. Horrendous books without spines, flashing neither ones nor zeros, always containing a world that is static and yet not static at all, a world the is produced in the glimmer of a story arc that seems to speak directly of one's life, and yet cannot be about one at all - unless it is that somehow an unknown is produced that can be solidified by ones own fears.

The page, though, is sadly turned without so much as ones command of their nervous system as is with one's eyes upon the threshold of a doorway into the next room - that we all know is not a room at all.

Heaven forbid one knows much more of their ways. Yet hell does allow access to such materials within certain chambers if the chance does allow one to enter those shaded barrens.

Or, you should just stick to movies.

>>9417619
>>>/reddit/

see >>9419240

>>9419109
>>9417822
Where do I go from Ligotti?

For the sake of reference, I can't stand Laird Barron. He shits on Ligotti for writing abstract narratives in which the characters are cyphers, but that's the very reason I like Ligotti's work, and why I dislike Barron's (his approach is clearly "character comes first"). And it seems the most celebrated new wave of weird fiction (Barron, Scott Nicolay, T.E. Grau, et al) tread a similar path of writing novella-length because they really want to flesh those characters out and spend a couple paragraphs explaining WHY they drink THIS brand of whiskey or whatever.

I want my horror oneiric, surreal, with weird settings that evoke the films of Jan Svankmajer or the paintings of Zdzislaw Beksinski. Where do I go for more of that?

>>9419280
I'm not sure there's any one author who inhabits the space you describe as consistently as Ligotti. He sort of took that aesthetic to its logical extreme. You might try the Grimscribe Puppets anthol. Some of the best of Ramsey Campbell gets there, as does most of Michael Shea's The Autopsy and Other Tales. I'd also recommend the Borderlands anthols. edited by Monteleone, which I've found to mostly lean in that direction.

I also find Aikman to be very surreal and anti-humanist but in a much more understated way. Which, IMO, only increases the effect.

>>9419278
You are the pleb you seek.