/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14315129]

Why is horror so fucking bad -in general-? How can I write good horror literature?

[Anonymous No.14315133]

There is nothing creepy about that doll

[Anonymous No.14315138]

>>14315129
Define "horror", for me Babbitt is more scary than anything written by Poe, M.R. James or Clark Ashton Smith.

[Anonymous No.14315140]

>>14315133
the doll has the soul of a girl inside, so the hair grows by itself. it's creepy and you're a pseud.

[Anonymous No.14315143]

>>14315129
Write about reality. Scary enough as it is.

[Anonymous No.14315155]

>>14315138
i think that the point on horror literature is that the writer is actually trying to scare you.

[Anonymous No.14315167]

do people who enjoy horror actually get genuinely scared? if yes, how is that an enjoyable experience?

[Anonymous No.14315185]

>>14315129
It's bad because its purpose is to mechanically elicit a single and meaningless emotion in its audience. It's not art but drugs.

[Anonymous No.14315196]

>>14315185
what do you mean "meaningless emotion"? Is there a point on emotions?

[Anonymous No.14315217]

>>14315167
>>14315185
Being afraid is the byproduct of good horror, not its raison d'etre. Feeling unnerved comes with forgetting yourself and becoming engrossed in a well told story.
That's why I find Joyce Carol Oates and Margaret Atwood better than a lot of "horror" writers. They know how to unsettle you.

[Anonymous No.14315219]

>>14315129
You're not reading the right novels, asshole.

>>14315167
You wouldn't understand.

[Anonymous No.14315246]

>>14315219
I am not going to read a novel by an anglo named "Jack Ketchum" and reviewed by fucking stephen king. sorry but this literature board is for serious people.

[Anonymous No.14315265]

>>14315246
You're already more spooked than anyone who's read Stephen King.

[Anonymous No.14315274]

>>14315246
And you wonder why your fucking taste is pure dog shit.

[Anonymous No.14315276]

1984 should be classified as horror.

[Anonymous No.14315313]

>>14315129
>>14315133
>>14315140
For me? The horror isn’t how it looks, or that the hair grows. The idea that it could be me trapped inside a doll, fully conscious, is what terrifies me. This is a supernatural take on common phenomena like sleep paralysis. If there was some supernatural story about a man losing all his memories slowly that would probably scare me shitless too. Or a story about becoming obese against my will. So OP, take a concept in real life that scares you and amp it up

[Anonymous No.14315317]

>>14315129
You know that story where the father looks under the bed to check for monsters for his kid but then sees his kid under the bed, and his kid says there's a monster on top of his bed? That short story is good horror.

[Anonymous No.14315384]

Horror is just comedy that is too relatable.

[Anonymous No.14315406]

>>14315384
>Horror is just comedy that is too relatable.
develop

[Anonymous No.14315415]

>>14315129
The titular story of Krzhizhanovsky's Autobiography of a Corpse is the only horror story I've read that actually succeeded in scaring

>>14315384
iam14andthisisdeep

[Anonymous No.14315418]

>>14315129
Most supernatural horror only works if you are on some level deist. The horror comes from the idea that supernatural powers might exist that challenge your god. If you're not superstitious it just science fiction.

[Anonymous No.14315452]

>>14315196
In themselves, no, emotions are meaningless. What a good artwork does is offer a synthesis of intellectual and emotional content to produce something truly meaningful (meaning is an intellectual category, while emotion is what drives man to pursue that meaning), and horror lacks the former.

[Anonymous No.14315754]

The problem with literary horror is that most examples of it are dated in terms of the societal issues/paranoia they structure their stories around, rendering their contributions to the literary canon irrelevant or purely historical in relevance. Popular horror authors offer very superficial horrors-- the tropes of a creepy telekinetic child or spooooky monster can only tittilate the reader so many times before it becomes clear they are reading the same useless thing over and over. Horror as a genre is woefully limited when confined in a book. What it needs is someone to set out to write a good novel without pretension of "scaring" people and without the intention of it landing on the cheap horror paperback shelf at the local bookstore, and for that someone to tap into some horrifying truth of the condition of an interesting character or concept. I've said it before, Silent Hill 2 the videogame is (tragically) the best horror novel ever written because while it has all the visual trappings of a hollywood horror film, its characters and setting are purely literary in construction and execution of their arcs.
There has to be a book similar to this out there. Can I get some recs of novels with melancholic and horror elements which are "literary" and not written to appeal to horror movie fans? I aspire to write the best "horror" novel of all time, but I need more inspiration and practice before I set out to do so.

[Anonymous No.14315789]

>>14315754
Forgive the rambling and lack of elucidation on some of my claims, I typed this shit out on my tiny phone screen (inb4 fuck you phoneposter). Basically I'm saying many of our classic horror novels are actually scifi or speculative novels that reflect some kind of ephemeral contemporary paranoia, which for my money does not a mind-bending, introspective, and timeless novel make. There must be literary fiction classics out there that have never landed in the horror section that are dread-inducing and terrifying to the thinking man/woman, and if there aren't then there will be some day.

[Anonymous No.14315840]

I feel like writing a short story with some horror themes. Should I write about:
>An Inuit man married to a wendigo in modern-day Nunavut.
>A man who blesses his village with immortality by giving his father to a demon during the Kamakura period.
>A man who falls in love with a suicide victim that rode his morning train in modern-day Tokyo.
>A teenage girl in an incestual relationship with her elder brother while he's dying from cancer.

[Anonymous No.14317028]

>>14315754
>The problem with literary horror is that most examples of it are dated in terms of the societal issues/paranoia they structure their stories around, rendering their contributions to the literary canon irrelevant or purely historical in relevance. Popular horror authors offer very superficial horrors-- the tropes of a creepy telekinetic child or spooooky monster can only tittilate the reader so many times before it becomes clear they are reading the same useless thing over and over. Horror as a genre is woefully limited when confined in a book. What it needs is someone to set out to write a good novel without pretension of "scaring" people and without the intention of it landing on the cheap horror paperback shelf at the local bookstore, and for that someone to tap into some horrifying truth of the condition of an interesting character or concept. I've said it before, Silent Hill 2 the videogame is (tragically) the best horror novel ever written because while it has all the visual trappings of a hollywood horror film, its characters and setting are purely literary in construction and execution of their arcs.
>>14315789
>Forgive the rambling and lack of elucidation on some of my claims, I typed this shit out on my tiny phone screen (inb4 fuck you phoneposter). Basically I'm saying many of our classic horror novels are actually scifi or speculative novels that reflect some kind of ephemeral contemporary paranoia, which for my money does not a mind-bending, introspective, and timeless novel make. There must be literary fiction classics out there that have never landed in the horror section that are dread-inducing and terrifying to the thinking man/woman, and if there aren't then there will be some day.
Good posts.

Unfortunately, I have nothing to recommend you.

[Anonymous No.14317407]

Because something impactful is spontaneously found. To choose before hand what your story is gonna be about is to enforce your creativity.
AKA
>there's no good genre fiction

[Anonymous No.14317437]

>>14315140

It's lame anime-tier sp00py

[Anonymous No.14317491]

>>14315754
>>14315789
what ur missing is the fact that behind most horror you would call outdated is the concept of racism, this is so if you read early Nick Land in a lot of other base structures, Houellebecq gets it right in his book on Lovecraft, his racism isnt just some random biographical oddity its the kernel of his work

[Anonymous No.14317514]

>>14315418
Not really, because instead of god, you highly value the laws of physics. If you're someplace where they don't seem to...apply as much, it's unsettling. You begin to doubt your rationality.

[Anonymous No.14317614]

>14315840
>An Inuit man married to a wendigo in modern-day Nunavut.
I dont know much about either the inuits or wendigos so this might be an interesting read.

>A man who blesses his village with immortality by giving his father to a demon during the Kamakura period.
Maybe have the people be trapped in the village after a century or two since the blessing only counts within the confines of the village.

>A man who falls in love with a suicide victim that rode his morning train in modern-day Tokyo.
I think this kind of trope is overused in japan centered media but it might be a good read as to why she wants to kill herself.

>A teenage girl in an incestual relationship with her elder brother while he's dying from cancer.
This feels more like a drama than a horror but might be a fun read, be sure to be as descriptive as possible during the sex scenes.

[Anonymous No.14317647]

>>14315840

>>/qst/

[Anonymous No.14317702]

The real horror is that i just had a 25 min train ride and feeling the onset of rapid diarrea, being too much of a prude to take the train toilet as an old dame is sitting just besides it.
At the station my clenched anus really started pressing, but running down the escalator i can see one of the station toilets (paid) being out of order, and the second just occupied by a woman - with another waiting in line.
I decide to briskly walk towards the nearby library, where I know there are quality toilets, but arriving there it showed the library closed ten minutes ago.
In panic I run to the distant cafe district, rushing in and stammering where the toilet is. I had to run up a stairs where i found a place to do my dark deed, causing an explosive ejection of 1 milisecond that I am sure the guests below the stairs have heard

Im still there, frightened to leave. But the longer I wait, the worse their accusatory eyes will be.

[Anonymous No.14317716]

>>14317491
>racism
So yes, outdated. Ephemeral contemporary paranoia. Or do white women in the U.S. still swoon when an Italian surprises them as they walk around a street corner? I had racism in mind when I wrote those posts. Racism doesn't scare me, and I'm not afraid that I'm racist.
Stoker's Dracula is rife with paranoia about invasion by sexually predatory foreigners. While that may remain relevant to this day (I hear New Year's Eve in Germany has been quite fun of late for our guests from Syria and northern Africa), it's still an impersonal and broad social kind of horror. While I enjoy Dracula, I feel there are better novels to be written with a "horror" bent. Ideally, the horror aspect should be incisive on the individual reader, a partial unveiling of some horrific truth they only suspect about themselves or their condition. But I do recognize that racism is timeless and is present in many of our best horror stories. Rooted in fear of the unknown and so on.

[Anonymous No.14317731]

>>14317702
That's terror.

[Anonymous No.14317850]

>>14317731
I think terror would be shitting yourself with an ungodly amount of diarrhea when the train has just left and there is no way to get to the toilet anymore.

[Anonymous No.14318050]

>>14315167
When I was younger it was a way to get an adrenaline rush while telling stories. It's also a way to viscerally connect with history. There is something else about it that I'm not going to inform you of, you basic normie bitch. You don't get to be a tourist in every facet of my fucking existence, you fucking parasite.

[Anonymous No.14319747]

>>14315754
You want a rec: try Peter Straub. Even though he's friends with Stephen King and wrote two books with him, most of his work is actually quite different. More slow and developed. His Trilogy (Koko, Mystery, and The Throat is a kind of metafictional way of looking at similar events from different perspectives (Mystery doesn't even seem like a horror novel-- more like a locked room mystery-- but it echoes the other two in weird ways). His novel Lost Boy Lost Girl is also tangential to the trilogy but can be read on its own. Two things that inform it are a Rene Magritte painting and a poem by John Ashbery (Bataille informs The Throat). Even his "closer to King" flavoured stuff like Ghost Story and Shadowland are much beter than King. (If you like Henry James and MR James, and other older gothic/horror novels you might especially enjoy Ghost Story). So anyway, check out Straub. He's not a scare-per-page writer. He's much more cerebrally spooky.

[Anonymous No.14319772]

>>14318050
>You don't get to be a tourist in every facet of my fucking existence, you fucking parasite.
Unironically a good line

[Anonymous No.14319786]

>>14315317
Wtf??? I wanna read this shit now.

[Anonymous No.14319920]

the only possible horror to be appealing in our current world is what happens when god is dead

[Anonymous No.14320661]

>>14317514
Yes, that is what we call "science fiction".

[Anonymous No.14321197]

>>14315246
NOOOOOO A PERSON I DON'T LIKE READ IT SO I CAN'T READ IT NOW NOOOOOOOOOO HAROLD BLOOM HELP ME PLEASE

[Anonymous No.14321228]

>>14319747
Thanks a million anon, I will check him out!

[Anonymous No.14321314]

>>14315129
I love horror (pretty much just movies, tv, comics, and vidya) but have almost never read any horror stuff, aside from a few Poe and Lovecraft short stories. Rec me some horror stuff.

[Anonymous No.14321342]

>>14315167
Takes your repressed ennui and makes you confront it with pure adrenaline. Can be pretty cathartic and poetic when done right. Honestly surprised there isn't more artistic horror out there

[Anonymous No.14321368]

>>14315246
How do retards like you stay alive? You are retarded enough to forget how to breath.

[Anonymous No.14321379]

>>14315840
Do the wincest one

[Anonymous No.14321399]

>>14317702
I've had this horror where I'm sitting on the last train that will get me to work on time, being late means being fired and I have a wife and kid relying on me, and I need to fucking shit and there's almost an hour left.

God damn that experience is one I never want to live again.

[Anonymous No.14321521]

>>14315265
>>14315274
>>14321197
>>14321368
why do burgers react like that when someone refuses to read their shitty bestsellers?

[Anonymous No.14321887]

>>14315840
second one is the best, others are kind of cliche. although the first does sound wierd

[Anonymous No.14321894]

>>14317702
sounds vaguely like a scene from gravity's rainbow