/lit/ - Literature

>>18257556
The short story format lends itself to plot better and horror requires elegance and switfness in execution to work. Characters are irrelevant in horror as are all the irrelevant nonsense that happens in novels.

They can work as short novels like the meme books. Otherwise it's best to stick to short stories.

Rec some good horror short stories beyond poe and lovecraft. The only horror i've really fucked with beyond poe is the castle of otranto and awesomely bad shit like that. Also the dramatic monologues of browning, but that's not really horror, it's just horrifying poetry.

>>18257616
Stephen King and Clive Barker write really good short stories for horror.

William Hope Hodgson wrote, "A Voice in the Night" and other horror stories. I only read A Voice in the Night and if you're looking for fungus based body horror. It's alright for a read.

>>18257556
Most horror stories involve one cycle of set up and pay off, where you set up a threat of some sort and then end with some sort of reveal about the threat that changes your perspective on it.

The problem is that if you set up a good horror pay off there really isn’t anywhere you can go that doesn’t make the story less impactful. Imagine that after we learn ‘the call is coming from inside the house’ we then have to read an extended fight scene between the killer and the babysitter.

With most horror, because the threat is something supernatural, you’re reveal is typically going to be something about the nature of the entity causing the trouble. The problem is that the longer you go on the more ‘lore’ you build up about your entity, and you lose the ‘not knowing’ aspect that is at the core of the horror. Authors have two options, try to maintain the mystery and run the risk of the story becoming boring, or continue to reveal more and gradually become a dark fantasy novel.

You see that second option a lot in Clive Barker. His long novels are are fantasy stories, bc their length requires a self-consistent lore to keep the story stable for its duration.

That’s in addition to what >>18257573 said. Character only matters insofar as we can sympathize with them and not want them to come to harm. Who they are as people in regular live doesn’t matter because horror also is an marked by an event that intrude into normal life and puts characters in an exceptional state.

>>18257616
Here’s a top 5 off the top of my head
The Jaunt by Stephen King
The Willows by Algernon Blackwood
The Ammonite Violin by Caitlin R Kiernan
The Hell Bound Heart by Clive Barker (I guess this is really a novella but still)
Born Stillborn by Brian Evenson

Those are at least ones that come to my head right away as all stories that I genuinely felt.

>>18257616
Barker's Books of Blood are excellent

>>18257583
Call of the crocodile is $5 on Amazon. I'm ironically tempted to but it, just so I can put it on my shelf.

>>18257872
lol I did the same.

>>18257872
I ordered crocodile and arcade. He's supposedly pulling them soon so I'm wondering if I'll be able to sell my copies for like 100 bucks later on. If not at least I'll be able to post pics on this board for (you)'s

>>18257616
Buy this book

>>18257902
I heard this too. So, all the paperbacks are going to be discontinued? Why?

>>18257583
I wasn’t expecting Arcade to turn into Shin Megami Tensei. So based.

>>18257556
It benefits the story to be fairly vague, to let the imagination run wild with the premise.

>>18257583
Every fucking thread

>>18257583
I love these books!

>>18257872
>>18257887
>>18257902
>>18257902
>baleeted
LMAO
Fuck off, Gardner.

>>18257556
horror is like jokes. If you over-explain it, it ruins it.

>>18257556
It's harder to maintain suspense over a longer word count

>>18257556
The tension is lost if it is too long to read in one sitting.

>>18257573
Love it when the first reply nails the question.

>>18257556
btw, mister b. gone was really shit lol. wtf was he thinking?

>>18257556
Most of any good horrors story fear generation is in the unsaid, the unexplained, and the unknown. Fear runs rampant in the mind due to these, knowledge reduces fear

>>18257872
>>18257887
>>18257902
you have been visited by the desperate samefag shill of shutting writing
Respond to this post with GO AWAY GARDNER or your dialogue will be terrible forever

>>18257616
Mariana Enríquez has some good horror short stories. I'd recommend you start with the things we lost in the fire, her other story collection while having some really good stories also has some meddling ones imo. She cites Shirley Jackson and Ligotti as influences too, so you could check those out.

> Neddal Ayad: What is it about novels that turns you off? That novels need morals?

>Thomas Ligotti: Something like that. People will accept a short horror story that ends badly. They won’t accept this in a horror novel… not after they’ve read so many hundreds of pages. Horror stories in the short form are like campfire tales or urban legends that are just a way of saying “Boo.” They have nothing to do with the real world in the minds of most readers. Nevertheless, I think there’s a great potential in horror fiction that isn’t easily available to realistic fiction. This is the potential to portray our worst nightmares, both private and public, as we approach death through the decay of our bodies. And then to leave it at that — no happy endings, no apologias, no excuses, no redemption, no escape.

>Some horror writers have done this consistently, but not very many. I’ve been entertained by the works of these writers — it’s all show business after all — and beyond that I’ve felt a momentary satisfaction that someone could be so audacious as to speak ill of the precious gift of life when we’re all brainwashed from childhood never to utter a discouraging word. Of course, it’s not really possible to avoid affirming life, even when you’re writing a horror story defaming it. The act of writing is an affirmation, as is the act of suicide. Both are vital and idealistic gestures. Joseph Conrad said that he shunned the supernatural because it wasn’t necessary to depict the horror of existence. I wish he hadn’t. Because the supernatural is the metaphysical counterpart of insanity — the best possible vehicle for conveying the uncanny nightmare of a conscious mind marooned for a brief while in this haunted house of a world and being slowly driven mad by the ghastliness of it all. Not the man’s-inhumanity-to-man sort of thing, but a necessary derangement, a high order of weirdness and of desolation built in to the system in which we all function. Its emblem is the empty and inexplicable malignity that some of us see in the faces of dolls, manikins, puppets, and the like. The faces of so many effigies of our own shape, made by our own hands and minds, seem to be our way of telling ourselves that we know a secret that is too terrible to tell. The horror writer has the best chance of expressing something of that secret. It’s really a lost opportunity, or perhaps a blessing, that so few take advantage of this potential that lies in horror fiction. Instead, they do the opposite: they discover all the secrets… and how trivial they are. A stake through the heart. A silver bullet. An exorcism. We win. All is well. Nighty-night.

from a ligotti interview

>>18257556
how do you think his compares with nickado's?