/lit/ - Literature

Hey guys, you all are a bunch of swell chaps, care to point me in the direction of some good horror books? I prefer anthologies, but any contemporary or classic horror recs would be much appreciated.
I’m familiar with most of the classics, but would love to hear of some new innovations in the genre.

>>11922779
>>11922875
the thing about spinoza i have come to understand - it applies to schelling too - is that Deus Sive Natura really will fuck you up. it fucked up leibniz and it fucked up hegel also, those well-intentioned germans of the enlightenment courts or university systems who like to have a concept of the divine compatible with well-to-do, rational-ish, optimistic, government-led systems. *and it's not like these are bad things.* i love to play EU3 now and again and when i do i play it because i want to make France or w/ev awesome and draped in glory. i like the idea of a baroque enlightenment world very much, and part of me wishes we had it in reality also.

but a spinozan god necessarily includes things in nature that we don't like to associate with the divine - like tapeworms, for instance. and yet, deleuze would be well within his rights to ask: what's your problem with tapeworms? not in a purely medicinal or biological sense, but because on some level the *squirminess* of things unsettles us, because we like order, hygiene, cleanliness, and all the rest. and we should have them, to a degree. it's just that those kinds of things aren't inscribed on the order of nature, and when we try to force nature to act the way we want it to in that sense things usually go pear-shaped.

so land is okay with Lovecraft, perhaps, because Lovecraftian stuff is in a sense right next door to spinozan stuff. and because horror really does cut the rug out from any kind of sense of bourgeois propriety that, by his time, only becomes synonymous with a kind of perverse critique of normativity for its own sake that has entirely lost the plot: he calls it Transcendental Miserabilism. and he starts to wonder if anything can make the Transcendental Miserabilists happy because, rather like Ernst Junger coming back from the war and saying, you know, it was pretty intense but i have to admit there were parts of it that i liked, land takes a hard look at capital and decides that it's *culture* that is the problem. by 1990 this was academic heresy, but in a sense it's because the nature of marxism had been completely taken over by literary theory. he became the notorious Right Marxist that he is as a result.

anyways, that's a long post and rather roundabout, but i think you understand what i mean. there might be a more appropriate Lovecraft-related text on xenosystems somewhere. i'm sure there is. but maybe that helps somewhat. basically, Cthulhu is a true libidinal monster. it desires. it desires to desire, and its desires really are deathless and infinite, much as in some sense the psychoanalysts agree the id or WtP is: blind, undead, hungry, and unkillable. That Which Consumes. he does have a kind of charming grain of Victorian horror about the Deeps.