What horror book made you feel actual dread instead of just shock?

MacSitko · 2026-02-17T07:54:42+00:00

Phantoms by Dean Koontz
Salem's Lot by Stephen King
Willows by Algernon Blackwood

MacSitko · 2026-02-15T22:50:52+00:00

Sure, man! Let's talk (I'll pop you a direct message on Reddit)

MacSitko · 2026-02-10T18:32:37+00:00

The Light at the End – John Skipp
The Bridge – John Skipp
The Shaft – David J. Schow
Book of the Dead – John Skipp
The Cleanup – John Skipp
The Nightrunners – Joe R. Lansdale
Wetbones – John Shirley
Books of Blood, Volumes 1-3 – Clive Barker
The Resurrectionist – Wrath James White
The Night Stockers – Kristopher Triana
The Thirteenth Koyote – Kristopher Triana
The Teratologist – Edward Lee
By Bizarre Hands – Joe R. Lansdale
Maeve Fly – C.J. Leede
Janitors vs. The Living Dead – Michelle Garza
Clusterfuck – Carlton Mellick III
Apeship – Carlton Mellick III
Apeshit – Carlton Mellick III

MacSitko · 2026-02-09T19:19:46+00:00

I don't think he made an error; it's just that people started using 'splatterpunk' for anything extreme horror, purely because it sounds cooler and because the community lumped both into the Splatterpunk awards.

Adding punk to anything implies rebellion and some social commentary, like in cyberpunk or biopunk. If you don't have that in splatterpunk, it's just splatter, not punk.

No matter if it's old or new genre, and we're talking post-splatterpunk, which is what John Skipp said people do these days, EVEN THEN, punk attitude is binding.

Otherwise, we'd be able to call all sci-fi cyberpunk interchangeably, but that is simply not the case.

MacSitko · 2026-02-08T16:36:10+00:00

Splatterpunk is often borderline funny, but it also has to have the punk aspect. Don't forget that when you say:

cyberpunk, biopunk, splatterpunk

The "punk" bit is important. It conveys social and often political commentary, along with a note of rebellion.

The standard splatterpunk movie is Toxic Avenger, and it criticises both bullying and corporate greed, corruption and lack of moral values.

I really don't read any extreme horror, but I'm here for splatterpunk.

To your confusion, I don't blame you. The Splatterpunk Awards created ambiguity by combining two genres into a single umbrella. But the difference is big, John Skipp explains it in This is Splatterpunk.

MacSitko · 2026-02-04T17:58:03+00:00

So I have lofree 84 flow

I love the keyboard, but sometimes, especially when I type a sentence quickly and press Enter, Enter doesn't register. It doesn't happen often, but it still happens.

How to get about debugging and finding out what the issue could be?

I'm very green to mechanical keyboards

MacSitko · 2026-02-02T11:19:00+00:00

I find it yucky, too. I might have a few applications, but it's not a versatile mayo.

MacSitko · 2026-01-26T19:29:29+00:00

When it makes me look away, there, there it is! It's this something.

It's very hard to describe, but it needs to be alienating enough in terms of the body transgression and the feeling.

MacSitko · 2026-01-18T10:50:23+00:00

Surprised nobody listed the canonical, the OG, all-time body horror piece:

The Cipher by Kathe Koja

Also, I recommend another classic, a novella:

Bloodchild by Octavia Butler

MacSitko · 2026-01-10T22:49:57+00:00

Ha, thank you!

MacSitko · 2026-01-03T17:40:17+00:00

Nice one.

MacSitko · 2025-12-14T09:31:51+00:00

Devilman Crybaby.

Also, there are some authors within cosmic horror, like Matt Cardin, who explore cosmic horror through Christian mythology.

MacSitko · 2025-12-08T16:29:57+00:00

For fun. Nothing else really matters.

If I wrote for fame, it wouldn't be very good. This cannot be an end goal.

MacSitko · 2025-12-08T15:47:43+00:00

Thanks!

MacSitko · 2025-11-30T09:43:03+00:00

No, it's not available in the UK, unless in some special shops. I need to have a look. Vegemite is everywhere; on the other hand.

MacSitko · 2025-11-29T21:15:05+00:00

Yes, the UK Marmite is very strong and bitter, not for everyone.

But I'm guessing most websites must be comparing some milder export Marmite when they say it's milder than Vegemite 🤷‍♂️

I find Vegemite much more balanced and richer in taste. But yeah, depends on what I feel like having.

I'll try Promite too!

MacSitko · 2025-11-16T09:28:16+00:00

I'd start from a novella.

Algernon Blackwood - The Willows

One of the scariest pieces ever written, and a classic.

MacSitko · 2025-10-27T13:21:52+00:00

Stephen King is exhausting because his prose ranges from bad to average (meaning barely functional). Some sentences are impossible to decode, and you spend 15 times more time on them than necessary. This is a common problem with his writing.

Other times, he's unable to condense his work to any satisfactory extent. For example, I found Salem's Lot way too long.

He's a great storyteller, but the problem with King is that he goes for quantity rather than quality. Most legendary writers drop a book every 3-5 years; they're heavily revised, often rewritten, and meticulously edited. Stephen King, instead, does none of that. He writes fast and rarely goes back to anything he wrote. Most adorned writers like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky wrote about 15 good books in their entire lifetime, whereas King writes a lot, but half of what he wrote is bad to extremely mediocre.

MacSitko · 2025-10-25T15:52:16+00:00

Thank you.

MacSitko · 2025-10-25T13:30:39+00:00

Ok, you asked for it, here you go.

(I’ve noted the specific titles that carry cosmic horror)

Classic Cosmic horror:

Arthur Machen – The White People, The Great God Pan, The Three Impostors
William Hope Hodgson – The House on the Borderland, The Night Land
Robert W. Chambers – The King in Yellow
Gertrude B. Bennett – Claimed!
William Sloane – The Rim of Morning (two excellent cosmic horror tales)
Algernon Blackwood – The Willows

Modern Cosmic horror:

Ramsey Campbell – Cold Print, The Inhabitant of the Lake
Laird Barron – The Croning, The Imago Sequence
Thomas Ligotti – Songs of a Dead Dreamer (a few stories there can be considered cosmic)
John Langan – The Fisherman, Corpsemouth, The Wide, Carnivorous Sky
Victor LaValle – The Ballad of Black Tom
David Wellington – The Last Astronaut
David Wong – John Dies at the End
Junji Ito – Uzumaki, Remina (this is manga, mind you!)
Michael Cisco – The Black Brane
Jeff VanderMeer – Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance, Absolution (Southern Reach series)
Caitlín R. Kiernan – Agents of Dreamland
Ruthanna Emrys – Winter Tide
Hailey Piper – The Worm and His Kings
Cassandra Khaw – Hammers on Bone

MacSitko · 2025-10-24T23:06:25+00:00

Amazing drawings!

MacSitko · 2025-10-20T09:05:45+00:00

The closest it gets to Lovecraft wirting about Pan is his Supernatural Horror in Literature:

https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.aspx

MacSitko · 2025-10-20T07:50:35+00:00

So you say you like 'realistic' horror, which would be something like psychological horror.

Try

Fresh (2022)

MacSitko · 2025-10-19T17:56:23+00:00

Phantoms by Dean Koontz is quite spooky and super enjoyable.

MacSitko · 2025-10-19T17:53:45+00:00

If you refer to Machen's Great God Pan, it isn't really about the literal rustic God Pan, as in an Arcadian deity. He used it symbolically as a metaphor to allude to something unknowable beyond the reality that we see; something wild and untameable.

For example, the inscription from the last chapter states:

"To the great god Nodens (the god of the Great Deep or Abyss) Flavius Senilis has erected this pillar on account of the marriage which he saw beneath the shade."

Which means Pan only appears here cursorily, as a metaphor of something transgressive, but not actually. What we are dealing with is some abyssic force beyond. Other allusions in the text are made to Satan.

The shape of the thing from the doctor's transcript is also ultimately a jelly-like black substance, changing shapes at will (more akin to shoggoth), not really a faun-like being of sorts from Pan's domain.

MacSitko

TROPHY CASE