what are you reading now?

Mr. Tea, have you played 'Amnesia: The Dark Descent'? It's a FPS puzzle game (without weapons) where you wake up in a castle - alone and without any memory of who you are - and get pursued by unspeakable monsters who you can only hide from. It's bloody terrifying, and basically Lovecraftian through-and-through.

Teaser Trailer:

Corpsey, cheers for those audiobook links, I'll check them out tomorrow maybe.

I'm playing A:TDD at the moment, or rather, I've sort of paused at an especially tricky bit (the bastard invisible monster in the bastard flooded section!) while I'm playing the Half-Life 2 episodes. It's pretty good, ambitious and well executed and has heaps of atmosphere. I'm about a quarter of the way through H-L2: Ep2 so I should be able resume Amnesia fairly soon.

I started playing TCoC: Dark Corners of Earth as well recently, but got very frustrated over the save-point system and eventually just gave up on the hotel escape sequence. Maybe I'll go back and have another try and some point, but the game is widely regarded as quite flawed, especially in terms of how difficult it is. I think the developers ran out of time/money and didn't have the resources to have the game adequately play-tested, and it shows a bit to be honest.

And seeing as this is a books thread, I'm off to the pub to read Tristram Shandy. I've been at it almost a year and if I haven't finished it by the time my girlfriend visits me next week, the levels of pisstakery may actually be fatal, so I'd better crack on with it.

Not to further derail, but I'm playing Half Life 2 at the moment myself. I'm stuck on the bit with the bridge where the gunship comes and attacks you. Can't nail the bastard with the RPG at all

Corpsey said:

Lovecraft - I've read 'The Colour Out Of Space' and I agree its very good. I also really like 'The Haunter of the Dark' (which I have listened to, read by the fantastic Wayne June, who has a voice uniquely well suited to saying words like ''hideous'' and ''sinister''), 'The Call of Cthulu', 'The Lurking Fear'... all the big ones.

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Ive vacillated on this down through the years, but I think my favourtie - nay THE BEST EVER Lovecraft story is 'The Case of Charles Dexter Ward'.

It's a cracker, to be sure, but I don't think anything quite matches The Colour for sheer visceral horror and cosmic awe. In every other story, the agent of the protagonist's torment or destruction is at least named, regardless of whether it can be adequately described or understood - be it Cthulhu, Brown Jenkin, the Mi-Go or a long-dead necromancer as in TCoCDW.

But in TCooS, the Gardner family is gradually deranged and consumed alive from the inside by nothing less than material reality itself. The 'Colour' is just a syndrome of the implacable hostility and randomness of the universe at large.

Yeah, it is great, dont get me wrong, but its kinda wishy washy and vague for the same reasons you mention.

Ward (dammit) is brill because it condenses so many facets of his ideas into one story, and also, because its loads of fun and an absolute killer narratively. I think it's the longest thing he wrote as well? Maybe thats a factor here.

EDIT - When I was much younger I briefly thought that 'Get Carter' was an unofficial film sequel. How great would that've been?

Can't remember if we've talked about this before, but is the graphic novel Mountains of Madness worthwhile? I can see how it'd be very good if it captured the atmosphere, or a bit crap if not.

I think my fantasy horror book (so as to speaK) would be MR James re-writing HP Lovecraft - Lovecraft having amazing, ambitious, wide-ranging Ideas but a tendancy to describe anything that's a bit hard to describe as "indescribable", whereas James was amazing at understated, subtly chilling prose but suffered from essentially only having one plot and no grand vision...

There is a collected volume of Lovecraft comics which were actually OK, featured Alan Moore I think. I havent read any full length adaptions, thought there's an absolute ton of Lovecraft inspired comics, most of them shit. There's still plans afoot for a film, hopefully, no longer starring Tom Cruise(!). http://filmonic.com/guillermo-del-toros-make-at-the-mountains-of-madness

Oh, and Breccia's 70's Lovecraft adaptations are probably the peak of the genre. I linked to them here somewhere once, but search doesnt show it up.

Slothrop said:

Can't remember if we've talked about this before, but is the graphic novel Mountains of Madness worthwhile? I can see how it'd be very good if it captured the atmosphere, or a bit crap if not.

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I flipped through it in a bookshop not long ago - I'm not a wide reader of graphic novels but it looked quite good, I thought. It kind of implies that the terrible thing Danforth sees as they leave the plateau is the entire city being overrun by shoggoths or perhaps one colossal super-shoggohth, but that's contradicted by the story which states (IIRC) that he goes mad when he looks back at the even larger mountain range that contained some ancient evil that even the Old Ones were scared of.

Droid, when you say 'Carter' do you mean Randolph Carter and the Silver Key stories? I love those stories, they're probably my favourite ones outside the 'great texts'.

Mr. Tea said:

Droid, when you say 'Carter' do you mean Randolph Carter and the Silver Key stories? I love those stories, they're probably my favourite ones outside the 'great texts'.

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No, just a brain fart in the first para, I meant Ward, but yes for the second reference, I meant Carter ala The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.

im reading that don quixote. i sat in the pub all day reading it but i havent finished yet because it is very long. i like it though. its living up to its reputation. im reading a translation by someone called edith grossman i think.

Just finished a big Kim Stanley Robinson binge. Never really bothered with the 'Mars' series, but read Galileo's dream a few years ago and was very impressed. 'Years of rice and salt' is quote amazing. Alternate history writ large with tons of interesting commentary on Islam and Buddhism as the narrative develops from the 13th century on, after the black plague wipes 99% of Europeans from the map.

The '40 days of rain' trilogy is also worth a look despite the appalling covers. Starts pretty slow but then turns into a bit of a 'Zen and the art of...' except with 'coordinating a worldwide practical scientific, political and biological response to climate change' instead of motorcycle maintenance.

Just finished Simenon's The Hitchhiker (also known as Red Lights) - brilliant short road trip to hell in mid-50 America courtesy of a squabbling couple & a Madison Ave man who thinks drink will alleviate his woes but what awaits is tragedy. All described by Simenon's pinpoint, razor-sharp prose insights into domestic malaise & middle-American psychosis.

i am 60 pages into the massive Bob Spitz Beatles bio.
reading a bit of Tintin.
and various coffee table books about guitars including the excellent (obsessive) Blackguard book about early telecasters

Where Angels Fear to Tread was good - very well crafted and readable. The behaviour of the characters seems a bit mad by today's standards but it was over 100 years ago. Some lovely lines in it, and a few chuckles raised.

Oscar and Lucinda at the mo which is pretty good.

Morley's "Words & Music", which is unintentionally hilarious (The whole section of Kylie and Merzbow engaged in a Ballardian romance...) and the Woebot book of his blog.

Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test. Very readable, and intermittently very funny, but seems wilfully naive at times ("It is initially hard to understand why the CIA would be funding death squads in other countries". Er, really?)

I'm sure most of you have heard about Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding. If you've been to London in the past few years (or probably New York), you'll have seen it plastered all over the walls with quotes saying it's the best debut novel since yadda yadda yadda. So naturally, I was intrigued. Even an endorsement from rent-a-quote Jonathan Franzen couldn't put me off. I had to see what the fuss was all about.

So I'm a third of the way through, and while there are some nice observations about baseball, it's really quite astounding that this is what passes for a masterpiece nowadays. It's just totally unbelievable in its portrayal of a bunch of jocks as enlightened, well-adjusted, sensible, mature, heroic souls. There are hundreds of passages about their dedication and friendship, but none which have so far mentioned spit-roasting chicks in a dorm room. Plenty of passages which note the meat-head backstop at some provincial college's favourite ancient philosophers and how he always makes time to study them even after twelve hours of solid (voluntary) fitness training, but remarkably little talk about booze or boning chicks or questioning his team mates' sexuality. Best of all, there's a character (read: caricature) who is openly gay, and makes his introduction to the team coach by saying "I hope you don't mind having a gay man on the team." And nobody bats an eyelid. Seriously, that actually happens. There is also reams more shit that I've read and thought, does the author seriously believe this has any precedent in the history of college sport? I'm talking about, for instance, that same meat-head stopper going out of his way to get an opposition player into the same college because he admires his style of play; and then driving five hours to take the kid's father out to lunch and convince him that his kid ought to go to college, which of course totally wins him over, o mature college football player (because he plays football too); and then pulling all manner of strings with the president of the college to get this kid, whom he barely knows, a scholarship to his college, all out of philanthropy and pride and responsibility in trying to improve his college's rankings, for this grand noble American vision of a better society, etc. A college douchebag actually does this. It's beyond unbelievable.

I've been devouring Wool and Shift by Hugh Howey over the past couple of weeks.