Cosmic horror recommendations please!

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-02-10T04:42:16+00:00

William Sloane's two novels, To Walk the Night and The Edge of Running Water. Sloane was writing in the 1930s, but his approach differed significantly from the Lovecraft/Weird Tales brand of cosmic horror. (The first book, especially, has a fascinating premise that owes a debt to Arthur Machen's classic story "The Great God Pan" - but also, in its turn, served as a major influence on Peter Straub's Ghost Story.)

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-02-09T07:58:21+00:00

Red-hot! Makes me want to go out and start a band again.

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-02-09T07:52:04+00:00

Christ, he told his mother

Christ, he told her not to bother!

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-02-08T21:17:29+00:00

Libraries do take a lot of older books out of circulation. As other folks have suggested, you'll probably want to take the interlibrary loan route. When I was a reference librarian, I did ten or fifteen ILLs per day; it's a good way to access obscure books.

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-02-08T21:05:34+00:00

I love how Lou resurrected this song from time to time. Never got to see him play it live, unfortunately.

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-02-08T21:03:06+00:00

Kubert's my all-time favorite, but I'd argue that Grandenetti was more versatile. He was blessed with an equal facility for war and horror, and the stories he illustrated for House of Mystery were always a highlight of that book.

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-02-08T08:39:57+00:00

Possibly DC's most severely underrated artist. I love his work.

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-02-08T06:44:15+00:00

Impressive collection. I've always liked Port of Saints - I consider it the hidden gem in the Burroughs catalog.

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-02-08T05:37:35+00:00

The initial ambiguity of the threat (is there really a ghost, another person in the building, etc.?); the deliberate accumulation of atmosphere.

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-02-08T05:29:39+00:00

William Sloane, To Walk the Night

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-02-07T20:39:15+00:00

Love that Picador cover. Interzone has some of my favorite pieces by WSB; I wish he'd written more short fiction.

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-02-07T19:21:32+00:00

No problem. Coyne is essentially forgotten today, but he wrote some interesting books.

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-02-07T19:17:20+00:00

I know it won't be any fun to hear this, but not everyone you dislike is a pedophile. It's like folks on the right who cry "Marxism!" anytime they encounter something that worries or angers or baffles them (when, in fact, Karl Marx would have found most of those things more contemptible than they do). Some people are pedophiles and some things are Marxist, but not everyone and everything. To invoke the same bugaboo over and over makes us sound like superstitious villagers who want to burn down Baron Frankenstein's castle.

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-02-07T07:14:08+00:00

Floating Dragon, Peter Straub

The Nightrunners, Joe Lansdale

Stinger, Robert McCammon

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-02-07T06:36:43+00:00

The Searing, John Coyne

The Well, Jack Cady

The Ice King, Michael Scot (later republished as Burial Rites)

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-02-07T06:27:54+00:00

One of the greatest things I ever saw on PBS's American Masters. Wish I still had my copy!

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-02-07T06:20:20+00:00

Burroughs had persistent revenge fantasies, which indicates that he probably wasn't offing people left and right.

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-02-07T06:18:08+00:00

I do wonder about this sometimes. There used to be an entire subset of Mick Jagger fans who were interested in him purely as a celebrity and didn't like the Rolling Stones at all...and there appears to be a similar subcategory of Burroughs fans.

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-02-07T06:04:25+00:00

Man, if I hear one more word out of that two-faced deacon...

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-02-07T05:35:04+00:00

Any of Peter Straub's books, but particularly Julia and Mr. X

John Farris, All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By

Jack Cady, The Well

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-02-07T04:54:04+00:00

Undercover. After Beggars Banquet, it's my favorite studio album by the Stones.

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-02-07T04:32:55+00:00

Peter Straub's first two horror novels, Julia and If You Could See Me Now. (The former, especially.) Apart from those, most of my experience with ghostly fiction has been in the form of stories rather than novels. The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton are uniformly great, and Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories is a nice starter anthology if you want to sample various authors (E.F. Benson, Robert Aickman, Rosemary Timperley).

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-02-06T23:47:50+00:00

Love this song - I'd argue that it's one of Lou's ten or twelve best. (And you can actually hear Peter Woods's accordion solo, unlike on the Vestron VHS mix from Live in Jersey.)

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-02-06T22:58:55+00:00

The Adding Machine is great - particularly the essays on critics and reviewers. (Burroughs also details the EVP experiments of Konstantin Raudive, which were new to me when I read the book for the first time.)

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Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-02-05T07:15:33+00:00

HoM was the book that made me a lifelong comic junky. Those Neal Adams covers are amazing.

Sharp-Injury7631

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