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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Mar 7, 2019 13:03:39 GMT
I want to read THE FAN now. But it is not available in electronic format. Damn! Damn! Damn!
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Post by cauldronbrewer on Mar 7, 2019 13:53:04 GMT
Despite a fondness for horror/ supernatural fiction, it's only very occasionally I hit on a story or novel that scares me. Same here. When I was a teenager, I found some H.P. Lovecraft stories genuinely scary, particularly the oblique parts--like the final, cryptic mirage of At the Mountains of Madness or the fleeting view from Erich Zann's window--but I don't think those would work for me anymore. A few years later, Algernon Blackwood's stories--especially "The Willows"--had the same impact on me, but again I don't think they would now. Some stories I find disturbing, but not scary: for example, Elizabeth Engstrom's "When Darkness Loves Us," or Clive Barker's "In the Hills, the Cities," or Margaret St. Clair's "Brenda." Other stories I find awe-inspiring, transcendent, or just satisfyingly weird--but again, not scary: for example, Arthur Machen's "The White People" or Jean Ray's "The Mainz Psalter," or a number of C. L. Moore's stories. It's tough for me to think of stories or novels that truly creeped me out. Michael McDowell's The Elementals is one. Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House is another. Robert Aickman's "The Inner Room," and some of T.E.D. Klein's stories, too. And then there are stories or novels with one great line that hits me hard (don't read on if you want to be surprised by them): for example, Kelly Link's "The Specialist's Hat" ("She shows them exactly what she means.") or Fritz Leiber's Conjure Wife ("You were a minute too late."). I'd be curious to hear what horror stories or novels other Vault folks found scary.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Mar 7, 2019 14:55:29 GMT
I'd be curious to hear what horror stories or novels other Vault folks found scary. In semi-recent memory, Jonathan Aycliffe's NAOMI'S ROOM. It exhibits a certain lack of restraint on the part of the author that made me genuinely nervous about what might come next.
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Post by Dr Strange on Mar 7, 2019 14:59:12 GMT
Despite a fondness for horror/ supernatural fiction, it's only very occasionally I hit on a story or novel that scares me. Same here... Some stories I find disturbing, but not scary... Other stories I find awe-inspiring, transcendent, or just satisfyingly weirdThat's exactly how I feel too, especially that feeling of weird. I'm sure there were stories that properly scared me when I was younger, but what I seem to be looking for these days is some vague experience of things just not being quite right - maybe that's just part of ageing, you reach a point when the most disturbing possibility is that you've simply been wrong about everything.
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Post by Dr Strange on Mar 7, 2019 15:00:45 GMT
I'd be curious to hear what horror stories or novels other Vault folks found scary. In semi-recent memory, Jonathan Aycliffe's NAOMI'S ROOM. It exhibits a certain lack of restraint on the part of the author that made me genuinely nervous about what might come next. Yes, I'd go along with that - it actually scared/disturbed/creeped me out more than I remembered it doing the first time I read it.
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Post by dem bones on Mar 7, 2019 18:27:15 GMT
Am loathe to revisit the ones that creeped me out. You get older, and the odds are massively stacked against them having the same impact second time around. When I was small, there was a picture in a Thomas The Tank Engine book that so terrified me, my mother taped the pages together so I'd not see it and start screaming again. H. R. Wakefield's The Red Lodge scared me as a teen, now it's just another great story. Same goes for A. M. Burrage's One Who Saw; John Gordon's Never Grow Up (I maybe identified too strongly with the narrator) and, later down the line, Dino Buzzati's The Very Thing They Wanted; Ramsey Campbell's Again, The End of a Summer's Day and The Same In Any Language; Anna Taborska's bereft Bagpuss; Michael Marshall Smith's More Tomorrow; Alison Prince's The Looney; Craig Herbertson's Spanish Suite: Kathleen J. Patterson's The Abbot. All unnerved me at one time or another, not so sure they'd do so today.
C. Birkin's The Happy Dancers, certainly on first reading; Havelock's Farm; the notorious A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts; less celebrated but devastating, The Lesson ...
The Pan Horrors provided a fair few, Alan Temperley's Kowlonga Plaything primary among them (but not his infamously nauseating Love On The Farm: tries too hard, in my opinion). 'Alex White's Never Talk To Strangers (which strikes me as pretty tame these days) and The Clinic; W. Baker-Evans' The Children; Elizabeth Walters' The Island of Regrets. Fay Woolf's Slowly (the crushing inevitability of the outcome).
Bernard Taylor's The Moorstone Sickness scared fifty shades out of then-me and no mistake.
A recent one. Mike Chinn's The Mercy Seat: The return "home," reunion with estranged friend, the girl, the railway line .... even the song it borrows a title from (and who sings it). Reading it was akin to a deja vu experience.
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Post by cauldronbrewer on Mar 7, 2019 18:57:32 GMT
H. R. Wakefield's The Red Lodge terrified me as a teen, now it's just another great story. Same goes for A. M. Burrage's One Who Saw. I agree that "The Red Lodge" is great but not especially scary. I read "One Who Saw" just a few years ago and recall it as being quite spooky, however.
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Post by andydecker on Mar 7, 2019 19:07:30 GMT
Fascinating thread.
As I read so many tales when I was older I don't have many memories of stories which really disturbed me. The Haunting of Hill House may be a contender, but I really can't remember if I saw the movie first or read the tale. Same goes for The Turning of the Screw.
Writers who did disturb even jaded older me are surely Charles Birkin. Alex White's The Clinic also made me uncomfortable, when I read it just a few years ago for the first time. But scary? No. Some non-fiction I read in an impressionable age made a lasting impression and instilled fear, but this is another topic.
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Post by jamesdoig on Mar 7, 2019 19:55:51 GMT
In semi-recent memory, Jonathan Aycliffe's NAOMI'S ROOM. It exhibits a certain lack of restraint on the part of the author that made me genuinely nervous about what might come next. Yes, I'd go along with that - it actually scared/disturbed/creeped me out more than I remembered it doing the first time I read it. A few of his books did it for me, eg Whispers in the Dark and The Vanishment, but then, I found The Woman in Black scary. As for disturbing, nothing has really topped Fred Chappell's Dagon.
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Post by mcannon on Mar 8, 2019 1:59:50 GMT
Fascinating thread. It certainly is! One story I can recall terrifying me when I first read it, aged about 11, isn't even generally classified as "horror". It's John W Campbell's "Who Goes There?", which was the basis of "The Thing From Another World" and the later 'Thing" films. At that age I tended to avoid horror but was already reading a lot of science fiction, and the story was cunningly camouflaged in a SF anthology I had borrowed from the local library ("Towards Infinity", edited by Damon Knight; I know the source as I now have a paperback edition of the book). I recall reading the tale in bed, late-ish one night, and actually skipping a few pages as I found the details just too scary to read in full. What a young wimp I was! Mark
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Post by ramseycampbell on Mar 15, 2019 12:31:00 GMT
"I'd be curious to hear what horror stories or novels other Vault folks found scary."
Several of Adam Nevill's novels recently. Beckett's The Unnameable.
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Post by Dr Strange on Mar 15, 2019 13:34:32 GMT
"I'd be curious to hear what horror stories or novels other Vault folks found scary." Several of Adam Nevill's novels recently. I'd second that.
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Post by ripper on Apr 3, 2019 9:06:05 GMT
Misery by Stephen King in which a writer of Victorian romances has an accident and is badly injured. He is rescued by an unstable woman who claims to be his most devoted fan, but is angry because he has killed off the main character of his book series. She proceeds to force him into writing a new novel, torturing and mutilating him when he displeases her.
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Post by dem bones on Apr 24, 2019 7:35:45 GMT
Same here... Some stories I find disturbing, but not scary... Other stories I find awe-inspiring, transcendent, or just satisfyingly weirdThat's exactly how I feel too, especially that feeling of weird. I'm sure there were stories that properly scared me when I was younger, but what I seem to be looking for these days is some vague experience of things just not being quite right - maybe that's just part of ageing, you reach a point when the most disturbing possibility is that you've simply been wrong about everything. ... or that our steps are pre-ordained, so we never had any say in being "right" or "wrong" to begin with. In terms of awe & Co, can't think of anything by Lovecraft or his legion disciples ever particularly troubled me. Same goes for Clive Barker. On the other hand, Elizabeth Janes Howard's Three Miles Up .... James Herbert's The Rats did the job, Lair too, but nothing from his subsequent catalogue came close. For me, The Fog is a tremendous horror novel but can't say I found it frightening. Looking back, I've a relatively shrewd idea why certain stories affected me so at various stages in my life, others, not an inkling. Strange genre altogether. People who like a good cry surely feel cheated if a weepie doesn't have them in tears. Likewise those who favour porn can't be best pleased when an XXX rated title fails to rise to the occasion. "Horror" titles so seldom deliver, but I hardly ever feel swizzed. These days, the vast majority of stories I read - and hugely enjoy - are actually pretty charming.
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Post by cauldronbrewer on Apr 25, 2019 12:53:04 GMT
"Horror" titles so seldom deliver, but I hardly ever feel swizzed. These days, the vast majority of stories I read - and hugely enjoy - are actually pretty charming. Agreed--I feel particularly this way about a lot of pulp-era horror.
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