The Best Horror Literature and the Worst ([syndicated profile] horrorlitreddit_feed) wrote2025-09-23 06:02 am

If you read We Used To Live Here

Posted by /u/Rahalone

Do you think there will be a second book? I have to say I cannot express how much I loved this book. I know there are a lot of people who didn’t like that you are left with a lot of questions, and if this is the only book I am still ok with having questions. However, I’m not going to lie and say I don’t want more.

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The Best Horror Literature and the Worst ([syndicated profile] horrorlitreddit_feed) wrote2025-09-23 05:37 am

Come Closer by Sara Gran

Posted by /u/Puppy_PowPow

I’m halfway through the book and…. does it get better??? It’s my first possession book, but I feel like I’m reading an endless list of events. Yes, the events slowly become more extreme, but the writing style is making me feel like I’m reading the bullet points from someone’s day, not a story. It feels repetitive as well. How did you guys like this book?

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snickfic: Buffy looking over her shoulder (Default)
snickfic ([personal profile] snickfic) wrote2025-09-22 10:22 pm

The Conjuring 4, Him, The Long Walk

The Conjuring 4: Last Rites (2025). Man, this was terrible. Way too long, took forever to get the Warrens to the actual case, the case family got dropped for the entire middle of the movie, unbearably saccharine epilogue. The whole plot turns on the Warrens' daughter Judy having almost died as a baby, being gifted with Lorraine's clairvoyance, and being chased down by the demon(s?) who had her marked for death. However, somehow the characters don't figure that last part out until the climax even though it's blatantly obvious ten minutes in, so the emotional arc of Lorraine mentoring Judy into embracing her gift rather than telling her to hide from it is crammed into like a minute and a half.

Oh and Ed has heart trouble again, which means nothing. He's fine at the end. The bit in the middle where the doctor tells him he can't afford another heart attack is just a red herring.

People said this was something of a return to form after The Conjuring 3, but despite that one's glaring holes, at least it wasn't the draggy self-indulgent mess this one was.

--

Him (2025). A promising college quarterback is invited to train with the greatest professional quarterback of all time (Marlon Wayans) and gets more than he bargained for. This is football as a cult/football as folk horror. It is not, despite the impression I got from the trailer, about a kid making a deal with the devil at the beginning and then having it unravel on him; it took me a solid hour to accept that it had no intention of being that specific movie.

This movie has a lot of really nice shots, and both Wayans and the lead Tyriq Weathers are both great. I'm always here for folk horror and weird ritual shit, which this has elements of. I enjoyed the surreality as Cade questions how much of what he sees is even actually happening. The ending is very fun and my favorite part of the movie, even if the movie gets a bit too much into explaining itself.

That said, I wasn't sure what all the movie was trying to do. Thematically, I don't feel like the movie added much more than what was in the 90-second trailer. I also, as always, had several worldbuilding questions. (My preferred headcanon is that spoilers ))

--

The Long Walk (2025). In an ambiguously 50s-ish alternate America, fifty young men volunteer to go on the annual death march until the last one walking wins.

This is an adaptation of my favorite Stephen King book of all time. I have a bunch of thoughts on it, but tbh they're kind of all praising with faint damns, because they're essentially quibbles. Overall, this captures the essential spirit and theme of the book so well that quibbles are all I have. In fact, in that regard it's probably one of the closest adaptations of a King novel ever, because so many of them go sooooo far off the rails. The emphasis on the relationships between the walkers, the dreary vibe, the body horror, the horrific brutal deaths: it's all here. The movie changes the ending, in keeping with what I felt was a bit of Hollywood dramatization throughout, but the changes still keep to the spirit of the book's ending, I feel.

I keep thinking I'd like to go see it again before it's out of the theater. We'll see if I manage it. In the meantime, I have had a great time watching interviews with the cast and discussions of how it was made. This is one of those movies where the story of the production is as good as or better than the movie itself. Garrett Wareing, who plays Stebbins, says the cast walked 261 miles in the process of making it. 261 miles!!! He talks about how literally the entire production was mobile: makeup, the food, everything. It just rolled along with the actors. It's also kind of amazing to think about these actors having to do basically ALL their acting while moving. I feel like mostly in movies people aren't having big serious conversations and walking around at the same time. And they filmed the movie chronologically, which IMO really makes sense since they were continuously changing locations and let the actors organically develop their characters and chemistry.

The director is Francis Lawrence, who got started directing Constantine (2005) and has since directed every Hunger Games film except the first one, so he is a big budget guy. This is the lowest-budget movie he's ever directed ($20M). Several people involved have commented it was a passion project for him, and it really shows. His love for the novel might also explain how he ended up directing so many movies for Death Games: The Franchise??

This series of interviews is my favorite I've seen so far, but this interview by the Dead Meat folks has fun stuff too, especially in the second half when everyone has found their footing.

I think this movie is the one I've had the most fun thinking about in a long time.
fanweeklymod: (Default)
FandomWeekly Mod ([personal profile] fanweeklymod) wrote in [community profile] fandomweekly2025-09-23 12:05 am

[#274 | Near-Death Experience] Voting Post

Here are the entries for this week's challenge:

List of entries )

In order to vote, please reply to this post using the form provided. All comments are screened, and entries are listed in the order they were submitted. For your vote to qualify, you must fill out your entire voting card (all three spots) in order to be counted. First place votes are worth 3 points, second place votes are worth 2 points, and third place votes are worth 1 point. Meeting the bonus goal on an entry gets an extra point for that submission.

When voting, please copy/paste the ENTRY NUMBER and the FIC TITLE from the list above into the spot you're voting for (this prevents accidentally mis-numbering a vote and casting it for the wrong entry). It should look like this:

First Place: 61. Fic Title Here
Second Place: 88. Another Fic Title
Third Place: 47. Finally a third fic title goes here

Please note that you cannot vote for your own entry, and that votes cannot be made anonymously. You do not have to be a member of the community in order to vote, nor have submitted an entry for this week; everyone is welcome to participate in the voting. IP addresses are logged to prevent duplicate voting.



Voting closes Wednesday, September 24, at 9:00PM EST.
nineweaving: (Default)
nineweaving ([personal profile] nineweaving) wrote2025-09-22 11:59 pm

Balance

I like that the New Year and the equinox are in balance. May this year bring peace.







Nine
stargrey: photo of a smiling gingerbread cookie (Default)
stargrey ([personal profile] stargrey) wrote in [community profile] fandomweekly2025-09-22 07:42 pm

[#274] The Rotting (Mexican Gothic)

Theme Prompt: #274 – Near-Death Experience
Title: The Rotting
Fandom: Mexican Gothic
Rating/Warnings: PG-13 / Vomiting, fungal body horror, violent illness
Bonus: Yes
Word Count: 692
Summary: Noemí struggles to recover from the assimilation with the gloom.

Read more! )
donutsweeper: (Default)
donutsweeper ([personal profile] donutsweeper) wrote2025-09-22 08:48 pm
Entry tags:

Rug of a different sort and recs

So many, many years after we probably should have we finally went out and bought a new bed to replace the 20 yr old futon (do not be me, that was *far* too long to keep that cheap thing) and when taking apart the bedframe I found an old braided rugs I'd stored between the board and the slats in an attempt to flatten it *ages* ago.

And when I say ages, I mean ages. As I vaguely remembered posting about it, I search through my livejournal and found a mention of pulling out the rug to work on (while watching an episode of due South, good taste past!me) in a post from December 2007 (2007!! who knows when I actually started it) and included a picture of the rug then:



The rug I pulled out only had two more color rounds completed so wasn't all that much further along but was left with a long section of braid unattached and needing new strips sewn on. I never quite mastered the technique of sewing on the new strips properly so that the seam didn't show and always found lacing the braid to the rug was frustrating, fiddly and hard to do for any length of time without hurting my back so it's not surprising I just gave up at some point. Tension was always a perpetual problem so I must have shoved the rug there in an attempt to flatten it. (Something that mostly, but not completely, succeeded). Deciding to just figure out some way to finish it (unfortunately, that's a part I had never really mastered either) I eventually finagled something and TADA:

35” x 20” braided rug

(Do I need another rug? No. Do I have a place for the rug? Also no. Am I also in the process of making a knotted rug that I took a break from to finish this guy off? Yes. Do I have a place for that rug? Bwhahaha, no.)

Anyway... Just a few more days left for Yuletide nominations! We get 5 slots, it's so exciting! (I really need to make an actual decision on my last slot, I've been waffling for ages about it)

And, last but not least, [community profile] recthething tumblr art recs (whoops, I've been forgetting to crosspost these here, sorry!)

Batman
- images that came to me in a vision. i just needed to see him in a nice cottage kitchen. (this vision of Batman made me laugh)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer
- buffy summers more like buffy snork mimimi <3333

Guardian
- boop the snoot (Adorable cat!da qing booping Zhao Yunlan)

Merlin
- [Dragonlord merlin - 2]: Magic returning slowly. (subtle but sweet)

MDZS/The Untamed
- His love language is being a menace (WWX has the best expression on his face when teasing LWJ)
- I have drawn many, many pictures of Jiujiu Holding A-Ling! Yet somehow, not enough. So I present to you all: Another One (adorable grumpy jin ling!)
- Emotional support hug (aww sweet)

Supernatural
- lazarus rising as a paperback (there's a whole series of these linked on the post and all are amazing)

Under the Skin
- Not sure if they should drink this… (Late night Shen Yi/Du Cheng and a very judgy but adorable cat)
- Cat Cuddles "Because everyone need a little sweetness in september I decided to make a fluffy little animation of DuCheng being adopted by the 2 cats of the house" (absolutely adorable)


Tomorrow is Rosh Hashanah, L'Shana Tova everyone! May your new year be sweet!
marginaliana: Buddy the dog carries Bobo the toy (Default)
Gummo Bergman's "Silent Strawberries" ([personal profile] marginaliana) wrote2025-09-16 07:45 pm

:dusty-stick:

Various:

--Currently reading Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke, which is a silly epistolary novel told via slack messages at a PR company in which one of the characters has had his consciousness mysteriously uploaded into the company's slack channels and all his coworkers think it's a bit. Also Slackbot is having an existential crisis. Also the gentlest of satires of a PR business carries on around it all. I have actually read this before but did not retain it (as discovered when I checked out the ebook and it opened to the last page) but that just means I get to enjoy it fresh. Do recommend as very light reading.

--The makers of the game Shovel Knight wanted the characters to be body and pronoun swappable - this is a great article about their process of designing the system

--The Book of Love by Kelly Link - DNF. I don't even know any teenagers but I know this is not what teenagers are like, even if they've just come back from the dead. Contains: stereotypical teen sister drama with zero nuance, mysterious authority figure knows things but doesn't reveal any of them and speaks only in the most cryptic of ways because reasons, etc. There was one interesting/creepy bit of worldbuilding but I couldn't be bothered to see if anything came of it because I was so annoyed by everything else. It doesn't seem like it was sold as YA but god it felt desperately 2004-YA. And jagged, in that way modern pop literature uses jaggedness to mean reality. Anyway, unsurprisingly this got rave reviews and I hated it violently.

--Reread Jonathan Livingston Seagull which I believe I last encountered in my teen years and the only reaction I can manage is disdain. But why? Has western society passed out of the time of fable? Am I too close-minded for metaphor? Or is the book just fundamentally not very good? Honestly, I really don't think it's very good. I'm prepared to accept it conceptually but the different sections just don't go. It's cramming five different concepts into a seagull-shaped trenchcoat, and three of those concepts are trying to bite each other's faces off.

--Everyone should tell me their yuletide nominations just so I can be delighted about things I'm probably not going to write.
The Best Horror Literature and the Worst ([syndicated profile] horrorlitreddit_feed) wrote2025-09-23 12:53 am

Who would you consider the “S.A. Cosby of horror”?

Posted by /u/Able_Zebra_476

Besides horror, I enjoy crime thrillers and feel like the author S.A. Cosby is one of a kind. The gritty-ness and intensity, both high but not over-the-top, the vividness in his description of the characters and geography, and overall tone make him a “master of the genre”. Who would you consider this in the horror genre, outside the big guys like King, Simmons, etc.? Just curious to hear what other people think.

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nnozomi: (Default)
nnozomi ([personal profile] nnozomi) wrote2025-09-23 09:28 am
Entry tags:

crowdsourcing

So as you may have seen I spent some of my last post grumbling about the (emotional and practical) difficulties of starting to look for a publisher for my original thing (or rather, starting the Rube Goldberg process of finding an agent who... etc.). With helpful advice from qian and others, all much appreciated, I am trying to take some more concrete steps, but right now I'm stuck on finding comparative titles for my query letter. The thing is, a) I don't have access to all the books coming out in English (there are SOME in bookstores, and if I know what I want to read I can order it, but I can't just go down to the store or library and read everything that comes out) and b) I am a very fussy reader and I just don't read that widely among new books! I don't know what there is out there lately!

so please let me know if you have any ideas about books that partake of the following:
Essential:
-- published within the last three to five years (sigh)
-- SFF
Any of the below:
-- AU early 20th-century England or Europe
-- New magical system
-- Multiple protagonists who are friends but not lovers
-- M/M romance which is plot-relevant but not the main focus
-- M/M romance involving strangers/quasi-enemies to lovers
-- Male/female friendship between colleagues
-- Colleagues from wildly different backgrounds who share a passion for their work
-- Political machinations, preferably against a monarchy
-- Get-out-of-jail subplot

...that's all I can think of at the moment. Possibilities I have right now are Freya Marske's The Last Binding series and, although it's older than they're supposed to be, Zen Cho's Sorcerer to the Crown. I want to say Emily Tesh's The Incandescent, because it chimes with my mind so well, but I can't actually think of any directly comparable points, oh dear.
(For the record, don't worry, I am not going to name a book in a query letter without having read it! I can get hold of promising possibilities if I need to, but I have to know what to look for first...).
a_little_apocalypse: (HRA)
a_little_apocalypse ([personal profile] a_little_apocalypse) wrote in [community profile] fandomweekly2025-09-22 08:56 pm

[#274] Silenced (Control)

Theme Prompt: #274 - Near-Death Experience
Title: Silenced
Fandom: Control
Rating/Warnings: PG-13, spoilers
Bonus: No
Word Count: 945
Summary: It's been a week since the expedition, and Trench still isn't talking.

Silenced )
carenejeans: (Default)
carenejeans ([personal profile] carenejeans) wrote2025-09-22 05:33 pm
Entry tags:

Write Every Day September 2025 - Day 22

Sorry this is so late again. Mondays are hopeless...

Also, it's getting near the end of the month. Who will volunteer to host October? Raise your hand!


Quote of the Day:

"The ways creative work gets done are always unpredictable, demanding room to roam, refusing schedules and systems. They cannot be reduced to replicable formulas."

— Rebecca Solnit, "Woolf's Darkness," in Men Explain Things to Me (2014)


Today's Writing:

More words on that thing I thought of that I didn't want to forget. \o/


Tally

Days 1-20 )

Day 21: [personal profile] badly_knitted, [personal profile] brithistorian, [personal profile] callmesandyk, [personal profile] china_shop, [personal profile] carenejeans, [personal profile] cornerofmadness, [personal profile] goddess47, [personal profile] luzula, [personal profile] sanguinity, [personal profile] sylvanwitch, [personal profile] trobadora

Day 22: [personal profile] china_shop


Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!
The Best Horror Literature and the Worst ([syndicated profile] horrorlitreddit_feed) wrote2025-09-22 11:27 pm
The Best Horror Literature and the Worst ([syndicated profile] horrorlitreddit_feed) wrote2025-09-22 11:20 pm

I want to read a Koontz for spooky season, which of these three do you recommend

Posted by /u/Doctor_Pretorius_

What would you recommend?

  1. Twilight Eyes
  2. The Funhouse
  3. Phantoms

After some looking around, i think these 3 sound like they probably have the most “spooky season” feel. If you have others you would recommend, that’s fine too, but kinda leaning towards one of these 3.

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