Let's Talk About Horror Fiction and Film

Horns by Joe Hill. Not really a straight "horror" novel, but one of the best novels in the genre that I've read recently.

The concept is a bit like Stephen King meets Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis. A young man wakes up, after blacking out during a night of drunken grieving over his murdered girlfriend, to discover that he has grown a pair of horns from his forehead.

Then things begin to get really weird, as people begin to confess their ugliest, most shameful thoughts to him, and he discovers that he has the power to make people act on these dark desires.

Highly recommended.

Lucifer's Lottery by Edward Lee is good too, and may be of interest to Lovecraft fans. It's part of Lee's "City Infernal" series. A seminarian is informed that he has won an infernal lottery: if he gives his soul to the Devil, he will receive not only whatever he wants on earth, but a privileged place in the hierachy of Hell after death. The damned soul who is assigned to guide him on his tour of Edward Lee's version of Hell is none other than H. P. Lovecraft.

 

^^ Both of those sound like good ideas, especially the first one. But I'm curious as to how Lovecraft ended up damned.

Yeah, they're really great. I wish I could afford more of their stuff. But I've gotten both of their movies and all of their radio shows and none have been less than excellent. I've also given a a couple of their radio shows as gifts. I wish they would do more.

 

You mean, aside from being a strong and antireligious atheist?

 

Oh, right. That.

 

Some classic Cthulhu fiction

 

That looks great.

Has anybody seen this one?

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOHJUrcVdJk[/yt]

 

How the mighty have fallen!

 

The series I read features an enemy of no name which resembles a massive black serpent miles long, seems a little Lovecraftian now I think about it.

 

Love Cthulhu menacing the little Lego people.

Here he is again.

 

Hello Cthulhu is amusing. http://www.hello-cthulhu.com/?date=2003-12-01

On another Cthulhu topic, has anyone picked up the Barnes and Noble hardcover complete collection of HP Lovecraft? They have it here in Seoul at a local bookstore. They tend to plastic wrap things that customers may over handle to keep up the resale so I couldn't peek inside to see for myself.

 

I haven't seen it. I have a complete Lovecraft collection that I bought in the early 80s, but it's not all in one volume.

 

Looking at Amazon, it's supposed to be fairly complete. It doesn't have works he co-wrote with others according to one of the reviews, but has all his own written works. I may pick it up today. I've wanted a good complete collection of his stuff for some time.

 

It's good to have a complete collection of Lovecraft, just don't read it straight through.

 

We just got MeTV recently here, too (used to be RetroTV or something). They've got a great lineup, but unfortunately the local affiliate still pads their programming with a ton of infomercials so we're not getting everything. No Svengoolie (or Love, American Style for that matter, but that's kind of off-topic ). I'm hoping they expand their coverage as time goes on.

 

Love, American Style, I miss that silly show.

 

Same here. I used to watch it faithfully back in the day. Sadly, only the first season has been released on DVD.

 

Yeah, they just go off the air at 10pm every night, come back on for a couple of hours in the middle of the night, then go off again until mid morning. I checked their schedule on their website, so I know what's supposed to be on, but so far there's been nothing but infomercials. I usually tape the Sciffy movie anyway, but I'd like to be able to see Svengoolie every so often. I like the whole Horror Host tradition. We actually have a local one around here who is shown on one of our cable access stations, by the name of Penny Dreadful. My mother works part-time at the station that serves as her home base, but has not yet actually done any work for that show.