/lit/ - Literature

>>17673108
I haven't read a scary book in my life. Music and movies, yes, but literature? Fuck no.

>>17673108
Horror is a genre better fit for shorter formats than the novel. I enjoy reading Horror anthologies and novellas from time to time.

>>17673126
Do you have any recommendations?

No one thinks horror is actually scary.

>>17673121
What do you mean by scary music?

>>17673108
The horror genre was built irredeemable; a nonplussed, adolescent blueprint laid down on the cheapest of paper for the idyllic youth to seek metaphor inside an ambivalent panopticon. Much to the chagrin of all who have somehow been trapped inside a horror novel in one way or another, eventually make it out on their own not through epilogue, but a sheer forceful realization that this shit is fucking dumb and they need to read a real book.

>>17673142
So why do people read it? I mean pic related is arguably the most successful pop fiction writer of all time and is mainly a horror writer.

>>17673108
>Frankenstein and Dracula
>Horror

>>17673108
Salem's Lot was decent.
I find horror more interesting when it serves as an allegory for very real anxieties. I'm not a chud, but that is why I like Lovecraft. You can feel the stress he was under while writing his stuff, and where that stress and fears came from.

>>17673159
The twiddlydums and the bandersnatch expandicatuoused the quntillionth Eisenhower.

>>17673149
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bql5JIqpt5g

>>17673159
did you write like that to make some kinda point, to give me a migraine or are you inscure?

>>17673159
god I hate /lit/.

>>17673166
Because they're more like thrillers than anything else. A lot of contemporary horror (specially in the movie industry) are basically moral dramas in disguise, since Hollywood doesn't produce this type of movie anymore. Horror can be quite kino if you stop looking at it as if it were trying to be spooky.

>>17673159
Indubitably, my dear. Alas, it...insists upon itself. An inexorably dishonest genre, forsooth.

>>17673159
gotta earn the purple anon

>I pretended to like reading horror for many of my formative years.
???
Why did you do that? No seriously why did you read something you never enjoyed?
Of course you are shitting on something thats not for you.
I don't like western novels or romance novels. But I'm also not reading them or claiming it's the wrong medium.

>>17673108
Frankenstein and Dracula are both not 'horror' in the way american cinema/culture uses it, although they definitely have been apropriated by it. they're gothic novels, the gothic genre got its own pretty interesting background and philosophy behind it and theres a good amount of academic scholarship on the genre. Try going back to them and reading them for its ideas instead of reading them as a horror story trying to scare you. maybe even look up a few papers on gothic fiction on google scholar if youre curious.

>>17673108
You just weren't reading good horror. Weird horror lit has had an uptick in quality the past decade. My recommendations for actual disturbing horror that makes you think about life in a different way are as follows

The Man Who Collected Machen & Other Stories by Mark Samuels

anything by Laird Barron but specifically his Occultation collection

anything by Lovecraft (yes, he is pulpy and purple but still holds up compared to most shit today

The Willows by Algernon Blackwood

The Ritual and Some Will Not Sleep by Adam Nevill (there is a film adaption of the forner on netflix which is actually quite good)

Alone With the Horrors by Ramsey Campbell (he is highly praised in the horror lit world but I usually find most of his work rather lackluster & pretentious)

The Terror by Dan Simmons (also adapted into a TV series)

The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen

anything by M.R. James (absolutely the master of British ghost stories)

anything by Reggie Oliver (sort of modern spiritual successor to M.R James

>>17673108
You read 5 horror books and decided the entire genre was shit? Sad case dude.

>>17673108
I've really only read one horror book and it was a compilation of HP Lovecraft short stories called "Dreams of Terror and Death"

It was genuinely unnerving. He has this uncanny ability for world building and weirdness

Point of horror isn’t to be scared, it’s for the aesthetic experience of something dark, it can be a delicate and delicious aesthetic flavor when constructed very well. I find them incredibly cozy. Example lovecraft is very comfortable. As for why they’re so popular? Everyone’s a bit edgy OP. Better to express that in fiction than acting edgy in real life. Besides if you’re reading good horror there’s a refined aspect, the supernatural and pessimistic lend themselves well to horror as does highly aristocratic stuff which people normally would feel too low class to normally consume. Consider bloodborne, no ones scared of the bloodborne games but they love the aesthetic.

>>17673108
Try Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft.

>>17673149
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_qbGJuxCYY&ab_channel=NickRodgers

>>17673403
Based recs

A few more I would rec:

Naomi's room by Jonathan Aycliffe

Last Days by Adam Nevill (I liked the Ritual a lot but found it more thrilling and suspenseful, whereas Last Days really scared me)

Jack Ketchum's Off Season (of course his most famous The Girl Next Door is really great too, but it's not really scary to me, just horrific)

I also thought The Exorcist was really scary, though that one is pretty hit or miss for people I guess.

I like Stephen King, but I don't really find his books scary except for moments here and there.

>>17673140
Not him, but I like this one.

What do you guys think of Splatter-punk like Edward Lee?

Are there any good horror books about encountering things that you never would've realized were actually extremely terrifying?

Being given a time machine and feeling the weight of all reality on your shoulders and knowing that anything you do could mean annihilation,

Being given immortality and realizing that after the earth is destroyed you'll drift through the vaccuum of space until you get pulled into the core of a star to burn alive for eons, and eventually it'll explode and hurl you elsewhere in space,

Being given the ability to speak with animals and discovering forbidden knowledge that humankind was never meant to know,

things of that nature.

>>17676664
Lovecraft

>>17673277
Me too, anon.

>>17673159
Never has a poster on this board been more deserving of the moniker "pseud" than you.

>>17673192
>>17673403
>>17674636
>>17674643
>>17674650
>>17673192
>Lovecraft but no Ligotti
Seriously /lit/?

But scary is subjective tho

>>17677380
Yes, seriously. Ligotti sucks

>>17678178
Faggot.

>>17673108
I mean, I've read good "horror" books, but they weren't scary at all.

>>17673192
Of course you not a Ch*d because no self respecting black man will ever read lovecraft

>>17673192
Spoken like someone who's read more about the author than what the author actually wrote.

>>17673159
In a previous life you were a Byzantine emperor, because your prose is born in the purple.

>>17673108
shock is essentially impossible in literature
"horror" in this context usually refers to dread or disgust
the shining the book is disturbing, but not thrilling
the film is both
most of poe's work follows the same track - disturbing and disgusting, with characters worthy of contempt
it's essentially gory, graphic imagery used in metaphors for nihilistic judgement.
Very different from the horror film genre.

>>17673108
>all those horror monsters and also just Johnny Depo
subtle

>>17673159
Your post unironically made me to audible kek

>>17674864
What is it about Naomi's Room that you consider scary ? It had a good unsettling atmosphere at the beginning but it didn't last long, and the ending was pretty bad.

>>17678196
Homophobe.

>>17673108
Horror is a subgenre of comedy

>>17673403
What the fuck does purple mean?

>>17681436
purple prose -- overly ornate or flowery prose

>>17681240
I liked the ending

>>17681436
>What does purple mean?
Purple prose is prose that is excessively detailed or elaborate for the purposes of creating a sense of grandeur that is unearned/undeserved.

T. E. D. Klein is pretty good but he’s far from prolific

>>17681322
Homophobephobe

>>17681489
now this is a horror story I would read

"Horror novels" always reminds me of this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CERCm-Qhf-g