/lit/ - Literature

>>14242323
The Bible

>>14242323

animorphs

>>14242323
1984

>>14242323
My diary, desu.

the only true fear is the fear of fear, fears themselves aren't actually real

Books can't have jumpscares but they evoke a deeper fear. Try reading sheafs of existentially disconsolate depression porn all at once, like Ecclesiastes and Leopardi and Ligotti and Schopenhauer and Melville and Lovecraft.

I think a book could be disconcerting or anxiety inducing, i think books can induce dread. But maybe the defining feature that keeps a book from having the same psychological impact as a movie is that you are totally in control of the pace and whether you continue to read or not. You need to be actively reading and moving forward in the book or else nothing happens. With a movie you have to take action (just hitting pause) in order for things not to keep progressing.

Then again I haven’t read much horror.

Horror is shallow and utterly boring.

>>14244055
This leads to the question of what types of art are best at conveying or processing different emotions and ideas, what makes an emotion suited for one medium but not another

>>14242323
The ideas are what make the book horrifying. It’s different than movie horror. It’s horror that lingers with you in a way that undermines your value structure, your previously held beliefs, your conception of humanity or the world. Of what is and what could be.

I read lots of true survival literature and POW diaries and I can list plenty of examples which have made my skin crawl reading about the horrible, shitty things people have to do to stay alive. But I guess what you're getting at is that the medium lacks the immediacy to cause real pupil-dilating fear. It's an interesting point.
I'm afraid to read The Sixth Extinction because I don't want to know what it contains; I guess you could say that's a case of a book inducing fear.

I have received a violent jump-scare from a book; I think it was one of Avi's books about the mice, when Poppy's boyfriend gets suddenly eaten by an owl.
I was a kid at the time and I grant you kids are stupid, but that's proof that it's possible.

>>14244076
This post is making me want to read horror. Does anyone in this thread have recs for books that have this effect?

>>14244060
Wouldn't it be easy to argue that music is always most effective regardless of what emotion? It's a centuries-old theory.

>>14244123
I’m not familiar with the arguments but this is not intuitively true for me. Music probably can evoke the most intense emotions most quickly, but since it’s abstract it can’t get to the nooks and crannies of the human experience the same way something less abstract could. Idk how to explain but sometimes I feel like I have specific “music versions” of emotions, if the feeling is based solely on the music and associations I’ve already formed from hearing it before.

>>14244100
I can think of lots of nonfiction that has had that effect on me. The Andes plane crash survivors turning their friends into jerky, the nightmare fuel of what neighbors can do to each other during civil wars. But I almost doubt such a thing is possible in fiction; if it were I'd be fascinated to read it.

>>14244182
Ok yeah from these examples it makes a lot of sense. I feel this has to be possible in fiction but it must be difficult to pull off

>>14244152
I think I understand what you mean about music-exclusive emotions. Personally, I wouldn't frame it like that. For me music allows my memories and preconceived beliefs to open up and all kinds of new and unexplored feelings evaporate out of those apertures, stuff that can't ever be put into words.
To take a random example, since it's snowing outside my window, I'll pit Tchaikovsky's 'Waltz of the Snowflakes' against Patrick Leigh Fermor's 'A Time of Gifts'. Both depict comfy wintery feels; one does so in complete abstraction, the other spends entire chapters talking about what it's like to stand ankle-deep in snow admiring Gothic architecture. That book is among the most beautiful prose I've read, but it's only with a vicarious enjoyment that I feel the comfy feels; they're only as effective as the author can make them. The music, on the other hand, gives me the lucidity to appreciate the theme in my own context, based on my own experiences, but in new and refreshing modes of expression. It's unfortunate that nonverbal expression is fleeting and the feeling doesn't last once the music is done. The book, on the other hand, sticks with me.
I'm actually drunk, I don't know if I'm at all coherent.

>>14244233
I'll be bold enough to say that the closer fiction comes to 'pulling it off', the more it intersects with reality. Heart of Darkness is Conrad's actual lived experience with a dusting of fiction on top. Kurtz himself was based on one or two real, very evil, people who Conrad met.

>>14244100
It’s going to be subjective. When I was a teenager my mom (good ol’ mom) would just grab me stuff off the shelf at random grocery stores and bring it home. One of these was titled “The Boy Who Couldn’t Die”. It sounded so cliche, but the novel gripped me in a way that had my heart pounding. Voodoo, shamanism, souls as items... it scared me, to use the simple term. Looking it up, the author is William Sleator who seems to be Koontz or Patterson tier as a career author. I don’t mean that in a complimentary way.

Another one that got me was Ryme of the Ancient Mariner, but I’m all about oceanic horror.

>>14244273
No I understand what you’re saying, this is a good post. Most of the time this holds true for me as well. But it also got me thinking that many of my most intense aesthetic and emotional responses to when reading have been caused by literature that’s very abstract. I read The Waves by Virginia Woolf a few days ago, which is like halfway between poetry and prose, and by the end I had the sort of response I can usually only get with music but combined with the insight of literature. But almost always what you say about literature seeming like a “vicarious experience” feels true.

>>14244285
I’ll buy this, for it to be horrifying it has to evoke something so real that it hits even when readers know it’s fictionalized.

H.P. lovecraft if scary in written form, its pretty gay in any other media.

>>14242628
fpbp

>>14242323
house of leaves

>>14242323
The only thing I fear is my future