First off, I would like to say that I’m aware of how loved this book is. I was recommended it multiple times which is what led to me reading it, so I acknowledge that my opinion here is in the minority!

***

I just finished Tender is the Flesh. Going into it, I was prepared for the worst in terms of gore and metaphors. I’m a huge horror fan; in particular I’m a lover of Japanese horror, which I personally find particularly grotesque in both description and context. I love unsettling fiction, so when I picked up this book, I thought I would be in for a treat, but oh how wrong I was!

I thought the language and level of description throughout the book was actually enjoyable, which surprised me since that is the biggest critique I have seen. However, it fell flat in a few areas.
Firstly, I felt that there was little-to-no character development for the main character. I think I understood the angle that the author was going for with this, but I feel it was poorly executed. If you want to make a character whose entire “redemption arc” is actually a projection of their own guilt, the reason for that guilt needs to be, at the very least, implied throughout the story, rather than just thrown in in the last pages.

I thought the relationship with Jasmine especially could’ve been explored in so much more detail. At first, I wondered if perhaps her trying to use her own blood to draw and then being given crayons would lead to some sort of communication, but this never happened. I understand that she was never supposed to be treated or seen as human, but I feel that she should’ve remained unnamed if this was the case (or, alternatively, the reason for her name being chosen should’ve been mentioned).

I also felt that there was an issue with Chekhov’s everything. There was little-to-no detail about why certain people were “broken”, and why the MC was using this term for them when it seemed to be mainly used for the “heads”. The entire plot line following the relationship between the father and the sister felt unexplored, and I finished the book feeling like I had, quite frankly, wasted my time.

I would love to hear people’s interpretations and thoughts on the book, especially those who love it enough to recommend it. I can’t help but feel like maybe I have missed a major part of the story, or misread certain details, and would love to get some new insight!

Anyone else starting this today?

I’m 2 chapters in, hoping the MC gets a little less frustrating.

Im interested in horror stories featuring zombies very well. Zombie Survival Guide is fine, but is there a horror story where the zombies dont feel cinematic like pop culture? Where they slowly rot and fall apart, it's kinda beautiful and sad. Thanks.

I’m getting tired of monster and ghost horror lit please recommend me something new.

I’m really interested in the story, but I know this book would be deeply triggering for me, however i haven’t been able to find any sources where someone just straight up tells everything that happens, so I’d really appreciate if someone would be able to tell me the full plot

Blacktail by Scott Hawkins (author of Library at Mount Char) released today! I am about 35% through the audiobook and loving it so far. Really good story and narrator MacLeod Andrews is putting in a great performance.

I've been looking forward to this one for a while, so glad the day's finally here.

My last three reads were Hex, Incidents Around the House,and Pet Sematary. I knew what I was getting into with Pet Sematary but it’s been on my to read list forever, so I said fuck it after the last two bummers. My kid is the same age as Gage and the whole book just made me sad instead of scaring me, which was the same with the last like 1/4 of Hex lol.

Any really scary recs that aren’t about kids dying or being tormented? I don’t have a preference for supernatural horror, that’s just what I’ve been reading lately.

I am looking for books that feel like Mike Flanagan's adaptation of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. I am not asking for a particular setting like a haunted mansion, supernatural entities or any specific kind of horror. I am looking for a specific narrative alchemy: a story where a highly unusual, intense, bleak external premise is perfectly balanced against a hyper-focused human relationship, so that the two forces constantly fuel each other. If you took away the strange premise, the relationship drama wouldn't work, and if you took away the emotional human dynamic, the premise would be empty. Also, I loved how the supernatural horror was terrifying because I cared so deeply about whether the family survives each other, and not just the ghosts.

Some other books that I loved for the same reason as described above: 1. The Road by Cormac McCarthy (the apocalyptic world is intense, but the crux of the story is the fierce father-son bond) 2. Pet Sematary by Stephen King ( the supernatural horror only works because it weaponizes the father's grief and love) 3. Never let me go by Kazuo Ishiguro (the sci-fi dystopian premise works but the driving force is the tragic love story between the clones)

Basically a story where the premise and the interpersonal tension completely feed into one another, making it feel like a beautiful, dark meditation on human connections.

Would love your recommendations and a short note on why you think it fits.

Thanks.

Looking for a good horror story involving camping in the Appalachian mountains. My husband and I will be camping the the Great Smoky Mountains National Park this Halloween and we wanted something spooky to listen to while we're there.

I mostly stick to psychological thrillers so horror is a new territory for me. TIA!

I’m looking to see if anyone has a recommendation of a book where there’s a war being waged between heaven and hell but behind the scenes? Where there’s like tactical kill teams hunting down demonic cult sleeper cells? I listened to a recent NoSleep podcast episode about something like that and I just need more of it please and thank you. (I’ve also already read Between Two Fires)

I thought Brother was a great read, gritty and suspenseful. I just finished Seed and although I liked the creepy elements, I thought the storyline didn't go deep enough, but it's her first book after all. Which of her other books should I try next or which did you enjoy most?

Since it’s September and coming up to spooky season i’d like some really scary book recs. i’m really into Stephen king but haven’t read anything that kept me up at night. i’m down for any author

I enjoyed this book, mainly because of the relationship of the core characters of Juan and Gaspar… so many poignant scenes.

but what’s with or whose hand was it who kept on grabbing Pablo? it wasn’t explained in the book, could it be Adela, or Eddie?

Hey Forum!

I have read this subreddit is a good place to attempt to locate a half-forgotten story or book and have a couple of titles in mind I have been trying to run down. I wonder if anyone might be able to help me?

The first I recall was a very good, if also really quite brutal short I read in the late 1980's. The overview I can recall is the main character received a legacy of some kind, perhaps along with a large country house. He goes there, discovers his relative was deeply consumed by the occult and eventually goes to bed. There he has a waking dream of descending to the Christian hell and being subjected to a series of highly grotesque torments. I particular recall the scene where he had to walk barefoot through a muddy or marshy area, crushing large maggots or worms beneath his feet. As he did so the worms slithered up his legs and began to burrow into his calves, laying eggs which almost at once hatched and burst out of his skin, repeating the cycle... There were other nasty events but that is the section that has stayed with me. He eventually wakes up, glad to know it was a dream but then as he goes on to explore his new house he finds a plaque somewhere--it could have been on the tomb of his benefactress--that says something about her paying for or designing a private hell for her and all her family to follow. Writhing worms and representations of the other torments have been carved into the stone or metal of the plaque. I think he leaves post-haste at that point!

Sadly that is as much as I can remember and likely it is very muddied by time as well. I read it on the Friday night of the weekend before Christmas in 1987 and have been looking for it, off and on over the last thirty-five years. Oddly enough, while the short itself was solid, if perhaps unnecessarily gruesome it is actually the anthology it appeared in that I would like to trace. That held some amazingly good stories from classic writers, for instance Lovecraft represented by one of his most narrative complete works 'Cool Air'.

If this rings a bell with any of you chaps I would be very glad to hear any suggestions you may have. At first I thought I had found it when buying a complete anthology of all Fritz Leiber's horror shorts including his unparalleled 'Smoke Ghost', but it wasn't the story about a visit to hell that he wrote.

So, again--any ideas will be very gratefully received!

One storytelling device I can’t get enough of is the cursed book, movie, or artwork. The Necronomicon, the tape in The Ring, the film reels in Sinister, the book In The Ninth Gate, you get the idea. I think the reason I love it so much is that it is almost a metaphor for horror fandom.
The protagonist (horror fan), despite knowing that the book or film is dangerous, is compelled to seek it out nonetheless, while most others (non-horror fans) think they are nuts and can’t understand why the protagonist would want to seek out something so dangerous.

I‘m curious about what other people think of this idea.

Does anyone have any recommendations for a book with short stories, possibly around 30 pages for the majority of the stories? I am trying to get my partner back into reading, and I think combining his favorite genre with faster-paced reads will help ease him back into reading.
Some of his favorite shows/movies are Black Mirror, all of the Insidious movies, as well as the original The Exorcist. I personally love psychological horror/spooky ghost stories.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read or suggest anything! ❤️

I'm looking for a book about American Urban Legends. I've tried multiple bookstores, but no joy. The closest anyone seems to have for me are haunted places or ufo's.

Don't get me wrong, both of those are cool and I'd love to dive into them, but I'm specifically looking for Urban Legends.

Anyone jave some good recommendations? I'd especially love a paperback I can just grab when I'm leaving the house and think I might be waiting around a bit

One of the stories was about a scrawny boy who grew into a man over the course of a summer while working at some kind of polluting factory or oil refinery. Lots of the imagery described him as growing/feeding on the evil oozing out of the factory. Any ideas?

I greatly enjoy spooky, haunted, almost magical realism sorts of horror. I absolutely adore Mike Flanagan's work, especially both of his Haunting series, Midnight Mass, and Doctor Sleep.

Last Halloween season I read The Shining and Cold Moon Over Babylon by Michael McDowell. I devoured most of McDowell's oeuvre this year and like him a lot. I also read The Terror recently, and I loved that as well (bonus points for historical fiction).

This season I'm finally going to read The Haunting of Hill House and Doctor Sleep, potentially Rebecca as well, but I'm hoping to add more spooky books to my list. Any suggestions?

I'm wondering if you could recommend any books that have elements in common with the horror movie 'The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane'. Elements like: Very young female protagonist (<15), psychological torture, murder, precocity, and threatening adults but nothing supernatural.

I’m three chapters away from finishing “Horror Movie” by Paul Tremblay. It was a slow start but I’m so hooked! Are there any other books out there that have a similar vibe? Idk if it’s considered analog horror or found footage or something different all together but I NEED MORE.

Thank you!

I've met all the main characters, they're at the house, I've got the whole premise, but it's just...

Does it get better? Currently Eunice is shaming the group of ghost hunters and doing perhaps the most long-winded exposition dump I've seen in a while, and I keep waiting for it to pick up. Does it?

I've truly never DNF'd a book before, but I worry I'm about to.

I've been having trouble getting into horror books so I decided to look into the different horror movies and tv shows I really liked and use those as a springboard for what I find unsettling, scary, whatever and because I'm who I am I made a whole chart to narrow down aspects and yadda yadda yadda.

Point is, for me the common thread seems to be characters losing who they are to someone else or some outside force and not being able to tell what's real and what's not. Like, my favorite horror movie of all time is Smile and two of my favorite shows are Hannibal and Fall of the House of Usher.

With Smile, having this shapeshifting, illusion making, entity slowly drive its victims insane was really unsettling. Same with Fall of the House of Usher to an extent. Although, I think with Usher a lot of it came from how charismatic the thing is (I'm trying to avoid spoilers but if you've seen the show you know what I mean).

Hannibal is similar but its the kind of horrifying corruption arc that Will goes through. The way Hannibal manipulates him and molds his perception of reality even after he knows what's going on was really creepy. The cannibalism is also unsettling to a degree but I think cannibalism doesn't really hit the same through text as it does when you have to look at it. I am reading Starving Saints right now so maybe I'll be proven wrong since through reading the recs on other posts apparently its really good.

I guess what they all have in common is someone's autonomy being progressively taken away by someone or something and no longer being able to trust themselves or what they think is themselves.

As for the length. I've always been more of a short story person than a long novel person and if I do read a novel they're only about 300 pages max and that's if I really like it. I'm not sure why but short stories and smaller novels are just more satisfying for me and I hate when I'm told I have to wait more than 100 pages for the story to actually start. Maybe its a reading stamina thing.

Regardless, TLDR; relatively short psychological and possession horror recs please.

I’m currently on the hunt for horror novels and am unsure where to turn aside from Stephen King. I’m currently reading the ritual by Adam Nevill, and I’ve read the mist, part of the shining (got confused by King’s use of third person with their thoughts), and various nonfiction paranormal books as a preteen. I want your FAVORITE book. Only stipulation is I have a munchkin so I’m looking for 500 word max (obviously flexible) so it can keep my attention in between caring for him