I’m thinking if reading The Only One Left by Riley Sager, is worth it? Because the last book I read was not very good, it pissed me off and ruined my mood. I don’t want it to be the same again. Also, this is my 1st time reading Riley Sager book so would it be a good next read for me?
*Mods, please remove this if this is not the place for a thread like this.
Hello! Recently, I've gotten back into reading and, since I am a big consumer of the horror genre in every other media aspect, I would love recommendations from some more knowledgeable sources.
Currently, I am reading We Used To Live Here by Marcus Kliewer and am loving it, though (without spoiling too much) I am beginning to believe it's leaning too heavily into supernatural aspects for my liking. I started this book after seeing many people online suggest it due to it being "terrifying" and "so upsetting they had to put the book down" but I'm really not feeling that way with it. Either way, I will be finishing it, lol.
That being said, does anyone have recommendations for any horror novels that also lean into the psychological subgenre, or others that are just overall disturbing, shocking, and meant to make the reader extremely uncomfortable? This is the type of horror I tend to appreciate more. Supernatural and spiritual stuff just never really hold my grasp. I like stuff that feels a little bit more real.
Genuinely, if you think it is too disturbing, I will probably beg to differ. And if I read it and DO get genuinely upset or disturbed by it, I consider that a five-star read. Thanks again so much I hope to see what everyone recommends!!
I have been reading a lot of haunted house and horror novels and I am tired of grief/Trauma angle in these books. So tell me your best haunted house novels where the ghost/entity is real and not a manifestation
I recently watched *Backrooms*. I loved the movie, and a couple scenes hit me harder with dread than a movie has in quite some time. There is something about being trapped in an endless maze that I find particularly horrifying.
What books would you recommend based on this movie?
(I've already read *A Short Stay in Hell*, and I have unread copies of *Cipher* and *House of Leaves* on my tbr)
The New York Public Library just released their Best of Horror list for the year tonight!
UPDATE!
Since this has gained so much traction it’s hard to file everyone in! If you haven’t been added yet please add me on discord(username in comments) and message me with ur username on here so I know who is who!! TY!
As the title says, I run a virtual horror book club and want some fresh blood! 🩸 bahaha
We are currently reading The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward
We have meetings on Discord and a Facebook group/group chat for the club!
Books are chosen based on member recommendations, so everyone gets a chance to suggest what we read!! We choose our read together during our monthly live book club meetings.
We recently had author Mike Salt join us for our meeting when we read No One Was Ever Really In This Place by him! And we are hoping with his help we can get more authors involved for discussions and Q&A :)
Our next meeting is the 17th of this month!
We have members from all over the world and would love to have more people join our group!
Let me know if you’re interested 👻🦇✨🐈⬛
I just finished Come Closer as the title states but I can’t help but feel completely tricked. I’ve been hearing rave reviews about it online and against my better judgment I wanted to see what the hype was about.
The book had no solid foundation for the characters or relationships (which might’ve been the point). It was also short which I don’t mind but it became so repetitive by the end that it was impossible to be even slightly scared. By the end I just didn’t care anymore due to the writing being pretty elementary.
The book aside, I’m so confused by all the books that are booming on TikTok specifically that always end up falling flat. Are people easily impressed, is literacy lacking so people are happy with simple writing? Someone help me understand!!
Also let me know if you’ve read this book and your thoughts!
Edit: thanks everyone for your awesome thoughts! The differing opinions are what keep reading and this community so fun
Hi there.
Brand new to this thread and can’t quite believe how busy it is. Crikey!
I’m a writer that’s only relatively recently turned to horror - and that’s reading too.
Been hoovering up short stories, a couple of novels but I’ve yet to find the thing that scratches the same itch as when I watch The Wicker Man.
I’ve written some absolutely honking folk shorts myself so I reckon that reading some good stuff can only help?
Thanks so much!
Unsettling horror is by far my favorite. I really like stories where there are people or animals that are not quite right either by how they look or how they act as they’re trying to blend in. Some quick examples being “Incidents Around the House”, “What Moves the Dead”, “Another”, “We Used to Live Here.” Trying to be a little vague so I don’t give spoilers but the point being I like the uncomfortable nature of “something is just off”. Happy to take any other recommendations that fall into that unsettling & uncomfortable category too. Happy October! Thank you!
It’s just starting to get chilly here in Canada so naturally I want to read about someone who’s colder than I‘m about to be.
I love a good ghost story set in a wintery wilderness (e.g. Dark Matter by Michele Paver), but I’m open to anything. Bonus points for the arctic or dark forests.
edit: thanks so much for the responses everyone! Loads of great recs
Hella spoilers, sailors beware.
First off, this felt like a very personal and relatable book to me. Growing up in a coastal fishing/tourist/diving town, the environment felt tangible. My father was also a complex man of deep conviction, similarly publicly lauded but unstable and brutal behind closed doors. He also died during COVID of workplace/lifestyle related lung failure and left a lot of unresolved pain for his distanced children to soft through. For this reason I loved Mitt being a complex character, not a comical 2-dimensional portrayal of an angry abusive psychopath. I adore a multi-faceted antagonist and Mitt felt so deeply human and flawed. You could tell he wanted to have a relationship but just couldn't find a way to relate to his son who was so fundamentally different to him. Again, heartbreakingly relatable to me personally. Hard disagree with one take I saw that said Jay was misremembering his interactions with Mitt and that was the reckoning at hand. I think that repaints Mitt as a one-dimensional benevolent figure, and puts the onus of recasting abusers as good people onto victims. Mitt can be simultaneously abusive towards Jay and a mythical hero figure in his community. I also think there's small background tidbits that the rest of the family was not as uncritically fawning over Mitt as Jay assumed they were. TL;DR I love difficult people and complex family dynamics
Anyways, aside from the relatability of the background and characters, I actually was pretty intrigued by the premise. I'm a big fan of survival horror and this worked for me. I had to suspend a lot of disbelief, of course, but I was very forgiving because I loved the premise and the setup. The internal descriptions and physical punishment Jay goes through were visceral and brutal. I appreciate the author didn't hold back on actually hurting our main character. By the end he's basically a shattered pulpy skeleton. There were a couple of scenes that actually made me cringe, even as a seasoned horror and gore fan. RIP Beaky, what a real one🙏
As for the prose and timeline jumps, it took me a quick chapter or two to get accustomed but it felt natural very early on, and I realized some way through the book I adored the writing style. It felt vivid and cerebral for what is inarguably a very metaphorical experience. Gorgeous writing. The time jumps for me were necessary and didn't detract from the tension of the situation at hand. It just felt like reading two stories I was deeply invested in side by side, and they feed into each other. I can understand criticisms of it but for me it was genuinely so beautiful.
Any of my criticisms are mostly negligible (giant squid bioluminescence?? This whale having the busiest day of its cetacean life between squid fights and orca battles and dying?), I think the biggest issue for me was understanding all the equipment. It comes up a lot and it feels as though the reader is supposed to have an innate understanding of how it all works. And even having grown up around world famous scuba and dive sites, there was a lot that went over my head. But other than that this was a solid 10/10. Visceral, emotional, metaphorical. Resonated hard with me. Also excited for the movie but a little apprehensive about how all of it will translate to screen. Im thinking the whale parts will be visually interesting, hoping we get some brutal physical scenes, but I'm a little anxious about how well the complexities of a fraught father-son relationship can translate in a constrained time slot. TBD.
In the meantime I need to hear other peoples thoughts, opinions, criticisms I missed.
So hi, I have been a ito fan since June (kinda new) and I read some of his works like Soichi (my favorite) classroom dissolving, Yon and, Gyo, alley, tombs, uzumkai, tomie and mimics tale of horror. Currently I'm looking for more suggestions and books of him that I can read. If you are an ito fan, PLEASE suggest me some of his work!!
“The whole world hurts, you bite it. Don't you?”
The Only Good Indians is my second Stephen Graham Jones novel, with the first being The Buffalo Hunter Hunter which is perhaps my favorite vampire novel ever. So coming into this I was pretty excited, firstly because it’s by an author I really respect and second because the premise; a bunch of men being hunted down 10 years after massacring a group of elk, was very intriguing to me. I will admit though that this one didn’t quite hit like TBHH, but it’s still good.
To start the character work is pretty good despite this being a pretty short novel. Each of the four male characters who work as the victims to this folklore style horror monster are given enough personality and likability to make you invested in them, despite the fact that you don’t really spend much time with any of them in particular besides Lewis. Watching them die over the course of this novel because of their mistakes was heat wrenching at times, and I felt like you could feel for all of them. The writing of course really helps in this regard and I love SGJ ‘s very unique writing style which blends post modern elements with native oral tradition. It really pops off the page as you read it and makes the story or interesting imo. Finally the horror elements, when they happen are pretty damn well done. There’s a decent in the first section of this novel which is basically Murphy’s Law times ten and it’s absolutely horrific to read. I do wish SGJ leaned more into the ambience and general sense of dread throughout this novel , but that’s really personal preference.
The thing that hold me back from loving this though, is the somewhat meandering pace of this book mixed with the ending. There are parts of this novel, despite it being so short that just felt like padding or just didn’t really work for me. I also thought the ending just didn’t really work, yes it’s symbolic and thematically sound but it just didn’t make for a very good conclusion in my honest opinion.
Overall I liked The Only Good Indians, but unfortunately it just didn’t blow me away like the Buffalo Hunter Hunter did. I think with some more tension throughout and the monster being more direct this novel would’ve worked better for my personal tastes. I will say that SGJ is one of the writers who I can totally understand why he doesn’t work for everyone, but having said that, I’m interested to see how much I like his other novels because if nothing else they are unique. 8/10
I’m going on a trip to Boston and Portland, Maine in a couple of weeks and want to bring the perfect fall coastal horror book. I know any number of SK would work but is there one that’s particularly good for the fall? Or any other books that I should look into? Thanks!
Hi! I got a $100 bookstore gift card for my birthday and I'm looking for some horror lit recs from the past five years or so. I'm very interested in female-focused and/or authored stories, but will accept anything. Love horror focused on cults and mythical beasts. Thanks!
Every October, I try to read ten books that relate to some horror theme. This year, my theme is “zombies.”
Premise: Melanie is a ten year old who goes to an unusual school. It's unusual in particular because all of the students are bound in place while the lessons are conducted, and sometimes, they are taken outside of their small hall and never seen again. Melanie and her classmates are zombies, part of an experiment to study child zombies and their learning. Most of the people at the base see her as a monster or a test subject, except for one teacher, Miss Justineau. The base is invaded, and Melanie is left with Miss Justineau and a handful of survivors. Together, they must make their way through a world that now belongs more to her than them.
Primary Characters: Melanie. Our protagonist. Unusually gifted intellectually, though she doesn't get much opportunity to learn. She has some control over herself, but if she's too hungry or gets too close to a human, she acts in ways she later regrets. She knows nothing of the outside world, but she wants to stay with Miss Justineau and protect her.
Helen Justineau. A school teacher with a very specific assignment. She's been reprimanded more than once for getting too close to the subjects, but she cares for them, especially Melanie, and doesn't want to see her come to harm.
Sergeant Eddie Parks. In charge of military and security concerns at the research base. He's frequently exasperated at the scientists' and teachers' lack of self-preservation and discpline, as he sees it. The children, to him, are monsters waiting to break free.
Dr. Jean Selkirk.Lead scientist at the base. Selkirk just failed to make the cut for the main scientific effort to understand the zombie outbreak. It's a slight that still rankles, and she is obsessed with finding some discovery that will grant her the acclaim she feels she deserves.
Private Kieran Gallagher. The final known survivor of the base's fall. Gallagher was born after the zombie outbreak, but has had very little in-field experience. He's alive because the Sergeant ran into him as the base was falling apart, and not another private. And he knows it.
Do the undead walk? That is, is the story any good? Yes! I really enjoyed this book. I'm generally a big fan of Carey's, and I'll try out anything he's written. His My Faith in Frankie comic miniseries way back in 2004 was my first adult dip into comics outside of superhero stories, and I've always had a fondness for him as a result. But that bias aside, the book is very good. I really liked the world-building, and the development of the rest of the cast. Melanie is very clearly the lead, but there's enough development of each of the rest of them (even Gallagher) to see them grow and change as they face a new world they've shut themselves away from.
Is it spooky? A little less than most zombie works I've read thus far, to be honest. There's tension when the base falls at a very inopportune (or maybe very opportune) time, and tension at several points during their flight to zombie-infested London and the remaining human populations. Melanie herself is frankly more in danger from Dr. Selkirk than the zombie hordes. But the claustrophobic situations the others are put into do create a sense of dread. The Parks character in particular does this well, as someone who's very used to zombie-related survival; his concern and caution really seeps into the view of the world at large. It intidimates the other characters to a degree, and the reader as well.
Is it Halloween? I would argue that it does, in part because of the de-emphasis of open horror. There's a strain of hope to this story, and humanity, that draws out its stakes a little better than some of the other entries. It's not fun in a traditional sense, per se, but it is compelling, in its world-building, its themes, and its characters.
**Quote:**The cell is small and square. It has a bed, a chair and a table. On the walls, which are painted grey, there are pictures; a big one of the Amazon rainforest and a smaller one of a pussycat drinking from a saucer of milk. Sometimes Sergeant and his people move the children around, so Melanie knows that some of the cells have different pictures in them. She used to have a horse in a meadow and a mountain with snow on the top, which she liked better.
It’s Miss Justineau who puts the pictures up. She cuts them out from the stack of old magazines in the classroom, and she sticks them up with bits of blue sticky stuff at the corners. She hoards the blue sticky stuff like a miser in a story. Whenever she takes a picture down, or puts a new one up, she scrapes up every last bit that’s stuck to the wall and puts it back on the little round ball of the stuff that she keeps in her desk.
When it’s gone, it’s gone, Miss Justineau says.
Random observations:
--This is another book that reminds me very strongly of The Last of Us. In fact, it follows it very closely in a lot of ways, right down to the cordyceps as a primary means of infection. I'm glad I didn't read it when the book first came out, or it would have felt even more derivative. To be fair, I think The Last of Us is really more about surviving in a world where other humans have become vicious and inhuman, and the zombies are sometimes more an environmental hazard than the main issue. In contrast, The Girl With All the Gifts is about our core cast, their relationship to Melanie, to the changed world they encounter, and each other.
--In his discussion of what benefits fantasy is particularly good at, J. R. R. Tolkien lists world-building itself as one of them. His argument is that there is pleasure in creating and encountering a fictional world, and the more complete it feels, the greater the pleasure. I think there's room for debate on this—getting bogged down in detail is possible. But I also think it's a pleasure that a lot of zombie stories get very right. In the previous books I've read thus far, neither goes far enough into the outbreak to really capture this sense. This does, by virtue of taking place at least a generation in. It does so in two ways. First, largely through Parks and Selkirk, there's a lot of discussion of how the world came to be this way, and how to survive in it, which harkens back to Max Brooks' World War Z, the ur-book when it comes to zombie theory-crafting.
--The second way I think deserves its own point. Carey doesn't just capture what this world looks like; he captures what it feels like. There's a sense of loss here, and guilt. (It actually reminds me quite a lot of the narrator's arrival in London at the end of War of the Worlds.) The survivors go into the ruins of London, and see the traces of the civilization they've lost. There's a melancholy that you can draw on in a post-apocalypse story, a sense that we had something better in our grasp, but couldn't manage to keep it. Sometimes, such as in the military-tech zombie story like The Loop, we lose it through our own hubris and neglect. And sometimes, it feels like there was nothing we could do; we could just watch it burn, and live in the ashes. I think that resonates with our current moment—we could have had better, but it's slipping away.
--In a way, this story could be argued to be even more nihilist than The Loop. They're not fighting to stop an outbreak here, as that ship has sailed a long time ago. And the ruins of London suggest that if they manage to make contact with the surviving humans, they may not like what they find. And yet there's a hope here, and a call for a leap of faith that I found kind of touching.
--Technically, I suppose that Melanie's age of 10 means that this isn't really a teen zombie story. You could argue against that, on technicalities: Melanie's kind of permanently ten, yet still growing, in control, in knowledge, and in mastery of the environment around her. And thematically, I'd argue it is a teen st ory. Children's stories are often about conflict with adults, and so are teen stories; I'd argue that what makes teen stories different (besides a frequent focus on romance and sex) is that they are much more about the protagonist becoming, in a state of transition between child and adult. And that's where Melanie is—she's been very sheltered through her imprisonment, but she's learning more about the world she's been kept from, and about the limitations of the adults who she thought were in charge.
--I really like how each cast member symbolizes a different approach to adults failing the next generation. Selkirk sees her more as a test subject and springboard for her own glory. Parks sees her as a monster that needs to be controlled. Even Justineau sees her a child who needs to be sheltered and protected over who Melanie actually is, due to her own baggage. I struggled a bit to figure out where Gallagher fit in, but a chapter from his own point of view makes it clear—he is another child of this new world, and in a different way, he's been as failed by the adults as Melanie has. That's what makes the end really work—ultimately, the adults need to stop struggling in a world they no longer fit into, and let the children seek out a future.
Rating: 9 wild zombie children out of ten
Next up: DC Comics' DCeased
Spoilers follow.
Some of my favorite horror novels as of late have been Bone Mother by David Demchuk which delves into Slavic folklore, Blood Slaves by Markus Redmond which delves into African folklore and The Burial Tide by Neil Sharpson which explores Irish/celtic lore
Thought it might be fun to read a horror short story every day in October. What are some of your favorite stories?