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Post by weirdmonger on Dec 8, 2022 20:42:01 GMT
What is the most horrific story you have ever read?
I think I have just found it! That glimpse of truth.
Outdoes anything in Pan Book of Horror Stories!
A REAL DOLL by A.M. Homes
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Post by Shrink Proof on Dec 9, 2022 8:22:30 GMT
What is the most horrific story you have ever read? Depends how you define horrific? Scary? Gruesome? Troubling? |
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Post by weirdmonger on Dec 9, 2022 10:21:23 GMT
What is the most horrific story you have ever read? Depends how you define horrific? Scary? Gruesome? Troubling? A good question. I suggest a story most worthy, for you personally, of the epithet ‘Horror Story.’ |
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Post by PeterC on Dec 9, 2022 12:41:50 GMT
A couple of suggestions:
A Foreign Dignitary by Bernard MacLaverty
The Tower by Marghanita Laski
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Post by weirdmonger on Dec 9, 2022 12:47:40 GMT
A couple of suggestions: A Foreign Dignitary by Bernard MacLaverty The Tower by Marghanita Laski That’s amazing! I have very recently fallen in love with the work of Bernard MacLaverty! I must seek out that particular story without any delay! Thanks! ! |
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Post by Shrink Proof on Dec 9, 2022 13:57:13 GMT
A couple of suggestions: A Foreign Dignitary by Bernard MacLaverty The Tower by Marghanita Laski The Tower is in a class of its own. Very unsettling without a drop of blood or a monster. |
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Post by weirdmonger on Dec 9, 2022 15:10:33 GMT
A Foreign Dignitary by Bernard MacLaverty A FOREIGN DIGNITARY by Bernard MacLaverty “…and even though there is no hope of a reply I inquire after our daughter, Elgiva. She is a young woman who is ill with a skin complaint which makes her avoid the company of all but her closest female friends.” This is story of a colonial dignitary from the British Isles who thus writes home to his wife not expecting a reply because of postal logistics. And it is somehow a short work that truly creeps under our own skin, not only ELGIVA’s. It is genuinely oblique in an Aickman fashion, but even more horrific, with a similar brinkmanship of absurdity and disarming strangeness. Kafkaesque, too, when he is invited to a prison and he sees all the containers the prisoners are kept in, containers like claustrophobic cuboid bells, ‘bells’ that if they are naughty are thumped with a sledgehammer relentlessly, or so I recall, without somehow daring to re-check. One of them holds a girl prisoner. The night before, a pubescent girl performs a salacious dance for him at a ceremony to which he is invited and he is offered her for overnight pleasure which he politely declines. I think the word VAGILE actually covers the impression of both the above scenes as a singularity, by this word’s straightforward meaning of agile freedom as well as by its askew implication. Not a fable or parable, I sense, but simply a work that is what it is. A great horror story. |
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enoch
Devils Coach Horse
Posts: 120
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Post by enoch on Dec 9, 2022 16:23:05 GMT
"The Emperor's Old Bones" by Gemma Files.
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Post by ripper on Dec 9, 2022 17:54:57 GMT
A story that disturbs me every time I read it is 'His Beautiful Hands' by Oscar Cook. It's just nasty in so many ways, and the glee in which it is narrated is the cherry on top.
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Post by weirdmonger on Dec 16, 2022 9:12:49 GMT
A couple of suggestions: A Foreign Dignitary by Bernard MacLaverty The Tower by Marghanita Laski The Tower is in a class of its own. Very unsettling without a drop of blood or a monster. Just managed to read THE TOWER. When I watched and listened to Marghanita Laski as a media panellist during the fifties, sixties, and seventies, I had no idea she had written or would write one of the greatest horror stories ever. This lonely tower of 470 steps near Florence, is worth climbing alongside Caroline — exercising her personal rights on a day when her husband Neville (Marghanita’s father was called Neville) had released her by dint of his business commitments elsewhere that day when they were both touring Italy — and as she climbs its internal precarious spirals in the dusk, we realise it is a self-enforced task on her part to prove herself if only towards severe psychological vertigo, with the terrifying prospect of anxious descent. With the tower’s backstory, no wonder! And the story’s ending holds an unaccountable threat…. The reader is within their own such tower, from birth up into life and then back down toward death, from brain toward bottom? |
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ralfy
New Face In Hell
Posts: 2
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Post by ralfy on Dec 16, 2022 14:07:50 GMT
Kafka's Metamorphosis, and not because of the metamorphosis.
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Post by weirdmonger on Dec 16, 2022 18:56:07 GMT
Kafka's Metamorphosis, and not because of the metamorphosis. His sister’s violin playing? |
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Post by helrunar on Dec 16, 2022 20:09:13 GMT
"The Tower" was interesting to me because it did absolutely nothing for me. I think I know what she was doing in the story but all I thought at the end was "that's 15 minutes of my life I'll never get back."
Several folks on this forum have proclaimed it to be one of the most terrifying stories they've ever read. De gustibus, etc.
H.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Dec 16, 2022 20:22:04 GMT
Several folks on this forum have proclaimed it to be one of the most terrifying stories they've ever read. Brr! |
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Post by Swampirella on Dec 16, 2022 20:39:07 GMT
"The Tower" was interesting to me because it did absolutely nothing for me. I think I know what she was doing in the story but all I thought at the end was "that's 15 minutes of my life I'll never get back." Several folks on this forum have proclaimed it to be one of the most terrifying stories they've ever read. De gustibus, etc. H. If I recall correctly, it did nothing for me either. So you're not alone! |
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