Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Loud Whispers]

I'm interested in seeing what people come out with.
Do stories involving no real supernatural elements, but which elicit a lot of fear in the reader, count?

Sure. Some of Lovecraft's best stuff were the ones with no overt supernatural elements....just crazy people. (thinking of The Picture in the House here

The rats in the walls is my favourite and one of his best stories in part to the stunning ending where

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The main character goes mad with the narrative voice changing incredibly quickly through the ages of ritual sacrifice and cannibalism. It works so well and leaves a deep impression.

[nenjin]

Favorite Lovecraft story is probably "The Tomb." It was the first one I ever read, but kind of underscored how weird and lonely HP Lovecraft's life must have been, and how much of it was lived inside his own head. The Tomb is kind of the epitome of that experience.

[SalmonGod]

The Rats in the Walls was my favorite as well, keeping in mind that I haven't read a few of his longer stories... because I also found that I didn't have the patience for them.  His style just gets less effective the longer the story is.  Objectively, he's very unique.  Internally, the way he describes things gets very repetitive.  So you want him to describe his idea, have the crazy thing happen, and be done.

Honestly... I can't think of any literature that has really horrified me right now.  I can think of some that has elicited extreme tension.  Roadside Picnic (the story that inspired the Stalker games) is one great example.  But horrified?... I think horror is too rooted in the senses.  Especially audio.  All the best horror I can think of made great use of sounds that can still produce a reaction in me when I hear something similar to them (that croak of the woman from Ju-On... *shudder*).

[DeKaFu]

While not exactly books, I've greatly enjoyed the horror manga of Junji Ito. It turns out that after years of reading horror, adding pictures added a lot to the effectiveness.

I greatly enjoyed Uzumaki, and The Enigma of Amigara Fault seriously messed me up when I first read it in university. Most of his work consists of short stories, and even most of the longer works (Uzumaki, Tomie) are sort of collections of related short stories within a larger setting.

As with all horror it's somewhat hit-or-miss, but there's some good stuff in there. Also, lots of body horror.

[XXSockXX]

I'm interested in seeing what people come out with.
Do stories involving no real supernatural elements, but which elicit a lot of fear in the reader, count?
I haven't read that many Horror novels either way. I've had a few books of short horror stories, some of which have been good, but a short story is always, well, short. It'd be nice (well, maybe kinda scary) to read some full stories, heh.

Well, short stories are generally where it's at in horror. Horror is mostly about a crazy idea / bizarre occurrence, and that works better in short fiction. For longer fiction you need fleshed out characters and a longer plot, that often doesn't work so well and/or takes away from the horror and becomes something else. King's The Shining is as much about a family destroyed by alcoholism as it is about a haunted hotel. Lovecraft couldn't really write characters well, but he didn't have to, because they were all just devices in his short stories.

Also supernatural elements are not really necessary. You can do a great horror story about a simple murder, psychological horror, stuff like that. What I like about horror has more to do with evocative writing and atmosphere I think than with suspense and shock. I don't like it when supernatural phenomena are explained in too much detail, like King occasionally does. I'm not really interested in graphic body horror or gory stuff, I rather like bizarre writings about madness, the unknown and incomprehensible.

-snip-

Also I agree with the assessment of King, some of his short stories are pretty good and they're all well crafted, didn't like the Dark Tower that much, none of his writing is scary, but then nothing really is.

[nenjin]

Lovecraft couldn't write dialog. And he ended up with stilted characters because of it. Partly I think that's due to his times; letters were big back then so correspondence was much more readily used form of expression in fiction. But I think it also speaks the distance he felt from people, that he generally wasn't good at relating to others. There's a few examples of people talking to each other in his works, but it's very brief. And there's almost none of the sort of quick-fire rapid dialog (" " he said. " " she said. " " he replied, ect...) that is common today in how people write fiction.

[XXSockXX]

Well, yeah maybe. But then dialog isn't necessary in short fiction and it isn't the only way to characterize. I'd rather say that Lovecraft's protagonists are very interchangeable and all his characters are pretty blank. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing, the stories are not about the characters after all, but it would have made a hypothetical 400 page novel pretty difficult.

[RedKing]

Well, part of that was that most of his protagonists didn't survive enough stories (or survive mentally intact) to become strong characters.

Possible exception being Randolph Carter (who was sort of a Mary Sue for Lovecraft himself).

[Xantalos]

Well, part of that was that most of his protagonists didn't survive enough stories (or survive mentally intact) to become strong characters.

Possible exception being Randolph Carter (who was sort of a Mary Sue for Lovecraft himself).

Most badass self-insert I've seen, though.

[Shakerag]

As long as we're throwing around favorite Lovecraft stories, mine has always been From Beyond.  Short, but kind of fucks with your mind.

Anything with the dreamlands is more fascinating than horror, but I like reading about them anyway.

[Neonivek]

Anything with the dreamlands is more fascinating than horror, but I like reading about them anyway.

In all fairness not all the Lovecraft books were outright horror. A few read more like mythologies.

[nenjin]

The Silver Key and Through the Gates of the Silver Key are also two of my favorite Lovecraft stories that aren't about horror.

[Yoink]

I like how this entire thread has mostly been about Lovecraft, with Poe and Stephen King getting but brief mentions.
If I still had that old compendium of short stories from various authors I'd name a few of the good ones, but I have no idea where it is.

[RedKing]

As long as we're throwing around favorite Lovecraft stories, mine has always been From Beyond.  Short, but kind of fucks with your mind.

Yeah, that is a good one. Especially if you think of the Androsynth and Orz. 

[nenjin]

I like how this entire thread has mostly been about Lovecraft, with Poe and Stephen King getting but brief mentions.
If I still had that old compendium of short stories from various authors I'd name a few of the good ones, but I have no idea where it is.

Well, Lovecraft built an entire world of fiction. Poe and King (with the exception of Dark Tower) stories tend to exist in their own bubbles. It's easy to place all Lovecraft stories sort of within the same world. Also, he's a lot easier to criticize than King or Poe. But yeah, of the three, I've re-read Lovecraft far more times than either Poe or King.