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Assfax:

 

I haven't read all of their offerings, but I know the writers and their work and there's really nothing on the deadite site that likely isn't a fun read. Oh, I noticed that we've all failed to mention Simon Clark and Stephen Laws in this thread... Both are highly recommended, both guys started at a really high level (Clark with Nailed by the Heart and Laws with Ghost Train) and they went up from there.

 

Also, (since it's what I'm reading now), let me suggest John Blackburn... You can get a copy of his first book for like a dollar or so on abebooks.com it's entitled A Scent of New-mown Hay and it's the perfect place to start... Blackburn uses recurring characters throughout his entire output, though all of the novels stand perfectly fine on their own with minimal references to previous books (and those references are not significant). What makes his stuff really cool is that he started at the height of the Cold War, so the books combine espionage, horror, science fiction, and the supernatural. If only JFK had picked up a Blackburn book instead of an Ian Fleming, the world might have been a very different place (for those that didn't know, the whole Bond popularity came about because Kennedy referenced the books in an interview as his favorite beach reading.)

 

Some of the best Blackburns are: For Fear of Little Men, Bury Him Darkly, Our Lady of Pain, A Beastly Business, Children of the Night, and Devil Daddy; but you can't really go wrong with any Blackburn. Oh, while the espionage genre tends to have bloated books thanks to certain authors (Tom Clancy, I'm looking at you!), Blackburn keeps his stuff very tight, pacing is excellent and he generally wraps things up in around 220 pages or thereabouts. You can really read one at a single sitting and in these days of 1000 page tomes or multi-volume stories, that's sort of refreshing.

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Well since it's Halloween, as soon as I'm done watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show for the millionth time I'll treat myself to a novella by my late pal, Rick Hautala. It's called The Wildman and in true Hautala fashion looks to be plenty creepy. Rick never quite hit the Stephen King / Dean Koontz level, but he was on the very next tier and a major force from the 1980s until his untimely death last year (64 is too young to go...)

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Jingus:

 

I didn't mention this earlier, but with regards to what puts Edward Lee beyond the pale... Let me put it this way, Lee and I collaborated on a bunch of stories, and a couple of novels. At the World Horror Convention on Friday Nights they have a "Gross-out Contest" where a writer reads a section of his work that should gross-out even the jaded fans that are gathered for the event. In the novella Goon using three different sections, we won three years in a row and retired to become judges of the event. When Lee and I wrote Family Tradition he was living at my house in Seattle, so we had a blast playing "can you top this" being just as vulgar and disgusting as possible. Some folks say that I toned things down in my solo career and that's probably true, I took the graphic as far as one could possibly take it and there was really nothing left for me to do. It's to Lee's credit that he keeps finding new ways to be disgusting. ;-)

 

I think that the notorious "corn-on-the-cob" scene from Goon may be on line somewhere. That one's 80% Lee and what makes it worse is that it's based on a true story related to him by a friend. Seek it out, if you dare...

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Well, it is in trade paperback now and you can get one for $15 including shipping on abebooks.com. I'd send you a pdf, but I no longer have the files (consider that we wrote this in 1995, that's many hard-drives ago). I know that $15 sounds like a lot, and I don't know what all might be available on an ebook that would be cheaper as I'm not a fan of the medium. I'll tell you what, buy one and if you don't like it, I'll shoot you the $15 bucks on PayPal. (Note: this offer is only for Jingus). You might also poke around on abebooks.com and see what is available for cheap by Lee. Actually, I just checked, there's a ton of Lee novels for $3.50 with free shipping, including two of his classics, Creekers and Succubi. If you haven't used abebooks before, all you need is a debit card or even one of those pre-paid credit cards and you're good to go. abebooks.com is essentially like having access to a used bookstore the size of a small city, it's an aggregate of thousands of used book dealers from all over the world.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I'm knee-deep in The Strain trilogy (Chuck Hogan and Guillermo Del Toro). Modern vampire apocalypse stuff and really good.

 

What book are you on? I've read all three but will hold off on thoughts until you finish.

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I'm knee-deep in The Strain trilogy (Chuck Hogan and Guillermo Del Toro). Modern vampire apocalypse stuff and really good.

 

What book are you on? I've read all three but will hold off on thoughts until you finish.

 

 

Halfway through The Fall. There's even an expy for El Santo in case any of you want/need some lucha in your vampire horror.

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Edward Lee, Monstrosity.  This thing hemmed and hawed until the last 20 pages and then went exactly where I didn't want it to go.  It went from "alright" to "fucking stupid" like a whoopee cushion.  The cover has like, four monsters on it and that shit sure as hell didn't happen.

 

I read that Triage book with Lee, Ketchum and Laymon and thought his futuristic story was okay.

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Edward Lee, Monstrosity.  This thing hemmed and hawed until the last 20 pages and then went exactly where I didn't want it to go.  It went from "alright" to "fucking stupid" like a whoopee cushion.  The cover has like, four monsters on it and that shit sure as hell didn't happen.

 

I read that Triage book with Lee, Ketchum and Laymon and thought his futuristic story was okay.

 

 

The twist at the end of Lee's novella in Triage was good. I just found my copy of Lee's Black Train. Might re-read it later on this month.

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I just found my copy of Lee's Black Train. Might re-read it later on this month.

Hey, weird coincidence, I just picked that one up.  Seems like Amazon and used book stores are the only places that stock Lee.  There were half-a-dozen random secondhand novels at this one shop, that book's plot sounded most interesting.  

 

 

I'm currently stuck deep in two mediocre horror novels, though one fits that word way better than the other.  The better half of the lot is Tobe Hooper's Midnight Movie; yeah, Mr. Texas Chainsaw Massacre wrote a book, I had no idea either.  (Or rather co-wrote it; though I have no idea if his credited cowriter Alan Goldsher was a partner, a ghostwriter, or what.)  The book starts out in really fascinating fashion, setting up a mysterious screening of a fictional movie that playing-himself-in-the-book Tobe supposedly made when he was a teenage rookie..  and everyone who went to this screening has their life fall apart, in increasingly spoilerrrific ways... but also increasingly generic ways.  It's not terrible (although this one nymphomaniac character reads less like a human being and more like a "boy, you do gotta throw in a teenage girl with blonde hair, huge tits, and then her entire plot service is being a contagious sex zombie if you want "  I didn't buy the dialogue between the sisters, and it's annoying because I can tell it's a guy writing a girl and not covering his tracks.) but the novel's initial appeal has worn off.  It's like a late-eigthies Dario Argento movie, people just randomly start doing crazy violent things for no reason.  Maybe this is going somewhere, but John Carpenter (who ironically gave his buddy Tobe a glowing blurb) already covered this territory in like half his non-Halloween movies and did it with more style.  

 

The other one is an Alien franchise novel, Out of the shadows.  I know, I know, franchise novels are ground out by writers for the money; but, dude, so far this does absolutely nothing beyond the same old crap, leaning on the beaten-beyond-death.  Recycling the stories that Dark Horse Comics had already run into the ground, and retconning all over the place.  Oh, I guess that Ripley just accidentally got a rooffie when she was looking for a sleeping pill, that's the way things go in the fifty-seven years which now apparently include Ripley's shuttlecraft being picked up by another spaceship which also JUST SO HAPPENED to of course have a problem with facehuggers outta nowhere.  

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  • 4 weeks later...

 

 

I'm knee-deep in The Strain trilogy (Chuck Hogan and Guillermo Del Toro). Modern vampire apocalypse stuff and really good.

 

What book are you on? I've read all three but will hold off on thoughts until you finish.

 

 

Halfway through The Fall. There's even an expy for El Santo in case any of you want/need some lucha in your vampire horror.

 

 

And done. I dug the hell out of this although certain plot points were a little too deux ex machiney even for that particular genre.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Reading this Tim Curran Blood, Bones & Bullets book that was on kindle unlimited.  Only read the first one so far.  He made an evil ventriloquist dummy story that wasn't stupid or lame.   Give this guy a billion Bram Stoker awards.

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i don't know if this counts as horror or not, but i just started reading "the Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu", which is the first appearance of this famous character. i had no idea he started in a series of novels. makes sense, and just sounded like an interesting thing to read. i'm maybe a quarter of the way in, and i gotta say i'm enjoying it. it was free digitally on Amazon, BTW, since it's public domain.

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Oh fucking hell, I meant to write this weeks ago: a horror novel set in the world of indy wrasslin' entitled Goon, cowritten by Edward Lee and none other than our own OSJ.  It was written almost two decades ago so some of the jokes and general setup are a wee bit obsolete for modern indy terms, but it makes enough sense if you pretend these are ROH shows or something else with a relatively big audience.  The whole novella (a bit less than 200 pages) is stuffed full of in-jokes about wrestling in general, with Ric Flair suffering the lion's share of the mockery.  Heck, the book would probably make very little sense at all if you weren't a smark; but for guys like us, it's a goldmine of "we're the only people on the planet who understand this shit" camaraderie.  It's the story of a mysterious indy worker named Goon, a masked seven-foot-tall monstrosity who is like a shoot version of Kane, leaving a horrifying trail of carnage and destruction in his path all across the southeast.  

 

If I had to reduce this book down to a three-word description, it would be "really, REALLY gross".  I mean, my GOD, the "corn on the cob" story?  Fucking puke-inducing, maybe worse than anything Chuck Palanhiuk's ever written.  There's several other points where the book is fairly nauseating (real early, it smacks you in the balls with a full-page illustration of a guy's weiner pissing on the floor of a motel room, while behind him a woman is sitting on the bed spread-legged with cum oozing out her coochie) just to let you know what you're getting into here, but it was indeed the corn-on-the-cob bit which just went beyond the fuckin' pale for me.  

 

As for the horror elements... eh, it's serviceable enough.  Look, I'm not gonna lie, it's not like this is The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or The Haunting of Hill House or anything like that.  It ain't great literature; it ain't even trying to be.  It's just a punch-you-in-the-face tale of grisly grindhouse gore, that's its entire ambition.  Being so short might be a bit of a handicap; the story might've worked better if it had more time to breathe, more time to develop its main characters.  The "love interest" Melinda could've especially benefitted from more time, I really wish I'd gotten a closer look inside her head and really saw what made her tick.  But still, the work definitely delivers on the bottom line of horror essentials.  Does it have sex and death?  Oh yeah, oh FUCKING hell yeah, in spades.  And it's got at least one last-act plot twist that I certainly never saw coming, and it all ends with a rather surprising resolution that I found really satisfying in a "most horror tales never end like this" sort of way.  

 

So overall it's definitely recommended.  OSJ and Lee were kind enough to ship my broke ass an authors-signed copy, but the rest of y'all can pick it up right here on Amazon or wherever you usually buy your books online.  

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i don't know if this counts as horror or not, but i just started reading "the Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu", which is the first appearance of this famous character. i had no idea he started in a series of novels. makes sense, and just sounded like an interesting thing to read. i'm maybe a quarter of the way in, and i gotta say i'm enjoying it. it was free digitally on Amazon, BTW, since it's public domain.

Thats interesting as i thought conde nast had a tight control of the character, one reason Marvel did some obfuscation with shang chi and his father in recent years.

There were a series of double novels published last deacde i got that are now OOP i believe.

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i don't know if this counts as horror or not, but i just started reading "the Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu", which is the first appearance of this famous character. i had no idea he started in a series of novels. makes sense, and just sounded like an interesting thing to read. i'm maybe a quarter of the way in, and i gotta say i'm enjoying it. it was free digitally on Amazon, BTW, since it's public domain.

Thats interesting as i thought conde nast had a tight control of the character, one reason Marvel did some obfuscation with shang chi and his father in recent years.

There were a series of double novels published last deacde i got that are now OOP i believe.

 

i believe that it's one of those situations where the book is PD but the character itself is still privately owned.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Not to put too fine a point on it, but it's more of a trademark/copyright thing with the Fu Manchu characters. The characters of Fu Manchu, Nayland Smith, Dr. Petrie, et al are trademarked and thus protected from unauthorized use. Rohmer was a member of the Society of Authors, which is a litigious bunch of wankers at their very least, so one can attempt to use the out-of-copyright argument, (and might even prevail, but the SoA has pretty deep pockets and exists for no other purpose than to handle cases like this). With the occasional movie deal entering into things, it makes it a very untenable prospect to go after Fu Manchu when there are so many knock-offs to choose from... (I'm in that very situation myself on a current book, I'd love to have used the Devil Doctor, but the Eugene Thomas character of Chu-Sheng or Edmund Snell's Chanda-Lung works equally well, and there's no hassle about using either one).

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Even well-known fearless bastard Alan Moore had to step carefully around the Fu Manchu copyright (edit: or trademark).  In the first volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, there's a mysterious Oriental character who is clearly supposed to be the Devil Doctor himself, but nobody ever says his name and we never even get a good look at his face.  

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There's also a lot of good stuff by Rohmer that has nothing to do with the Devil Doctor. If you check on abebooks.com there's a huge set of his stuff published under the imprint of "The Scotland Yard Mystery Library", with most volumes being cheaper than a modern paperback. Tales of Chinatown and Tales of Secret Egypt are both excellent and can be had in hardcover for five or ten bucks. Other good ones include  Bat Wing, Firetongue, & The Yellow Claw. There's also a big omnibus from Centipede Press that S.T. Joshi put together, which is pretty much all the Rohmer you'll ever need, but I imagine that it's kind of spendy... Just checked... Yeah, runs around $100 for fourteen stories plus the novel Brood of the Witch Queen (which is one of his best, but as a collection, this just sort of scrapes the surface. I'd say that this is more along the lines of an introductory sampler than a definitive collection.)

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  • 2 weeks later...

I just started reading The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All by Laird Barron. It's a collection of short stories. I just finished the first one, Blackwood's Baby, and I liked it a lot. Barron's writing is not fancy, nor can I say anything particularly noteworthy about it 'technically', but somehow I was hooked on every sentence. Everything was evocative and atmospheric and intense and interesting and mysterious without resorting to any 'difficult' words or using a 'weird' writing style. It's a joy to read, and I can't wait to get through all the other stories.

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