Horror Book Recommendations

Discussion in 'The Lounge - Off Topic' started by JK2447, Oct 8, 2014.

  1. JK2447
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    JK2447 Petabyte Poster Administrator Premium Member

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    Oct 8, 2014 #1
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    Hi All

    I'm going to "try" to follow in Dawn's foot steps and write my first horror novel. I've been threatening to do this for some time but a job change in work should allow me the time and flexibility I need to put my money where my mouth is. I've read Great Bitten obviously, loved that, but what else can I read. I'm particularly interested in the Horror genre, always have been, so I'm going to focus my efforts there. A very smart lady / published author (I wonder who :) has advised me that to aid my writing, I need to up my reading, so that's exactly what I intend to do. Any recommendations?

    Cheers
    James
     
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  2. Coupe2T

    Coupe2T Megabyte Poster

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    I'm not much of a reader myself, but I would make sure yo get a good grounding in some of the classics.

    Stephen King is an obvious one that springs to mind, as well as the original books of things like Silence of the Lambs and so on.

    Sure you must be able to google best horro novel of all time or something and find plenty of reading lists and so forth?
     
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  3. JK2447
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    JK2447 Petabyte Poster Administrator Premium Member

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    Yeah course but I prefer word of mouth to avoid the obvious choices that have become movies over the years. I was hoping someone was really into the same genre as me and would know of a few gems.
     
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  4. dmarsh
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    dmarsh Petabyte Poster

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    I used to like Clive Barker for Horror, Weaveworld and Cabal (Nightbreed) mostly, not read horror for decades.

    I find Steven King a bit workman like, kind of writing by numbers.
     
    Last edited: Oct 8, 2014
  5. Coupe2T

    Coupe2T Megabyte Poster

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    Yeah he can be a bit, but still some classics so if you were going to write Horror, I would still say good to read some of them.

    In general I would also say good to read some awful horror books too, so you see what to avoid, you will read certain things and your internal monologue will be shouting at how bad things are, help you to avoid making the same mistakes, as I find when writing any sort of fiction it can be easy to fall into similar traps without realising.
     
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  6. JK2447
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    JK2447 Petabyte Poster Administrator Premium Member

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    Cheers Coup thats a really good idea. I might have a little look on amazon for books that get slated, read a chapter or two, see if I can figure out why. Over the years I've read a ton of our Stephens work (my name is King), Koontz etc. I was in a book club as a youngster, something like the mystery and thriller guild rings a bell ha ha
     
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  7. Coupe2T

    Coupe2T Megabyte Poster

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    Yeah just good to give yourself a grounding but of both good and bad, so you really get a feel for the differences, and then hopefully avoid the bad side of it yourself! lol.

    Me and afriend have written a few scripts for tv shows before now, as a hobby, nothing on TV obviously, but when we started what we wrote we though was great, then we read bad scripts, and yeah, pretty close to the same! lol.

    Needless to say a lot of editing went on to make it better based not on the good that we had seen or read, but on the bad.
     
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  8. Arroryn

    Arroryn we're all dooooooomed Moderator

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    I'll reply to this when I have a little more time. However, it depends on which subset of the genre you want to try. Look up Dead Meat by the Williams brothers. Stephen King is like the Tolkien of the horror world - very verbose.
     
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  9. JK2447
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    JK2447 Petabyte Poster Administrator Premium Member

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    Cheers all, I've had a few good recommendations here, some PMs etc. Enough for me to go on right now. Work is sending me to Paris this weekend for a few days so after my meetings I'll be throwing down a few words. Let you know how I get on. Might end up on the vino, we'll see :)
     
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  10. ivorylies

    ivorylies New Member

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    Oct 11, 2014 #10
    IT by Stephen King and Piercing by Ryu Murakami. Try reading these. They are really scary!
     
  11. Arroryn

    Arroryn we're all dooooooomed Moderator

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    Oct 15, 2014 #11
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