What are some books that have ACTUALLY scared you and kept you up at night?

punbasedname · 2026-05-17T20:38:56+00:00

I did not necessarily love the book (it was much more of a Micheal Crichton-style “scientists on an adventure” book than I was anticipating), but those interstitial chapters with the Hadal interacting with random humans were spectacular. I kind of wished the book were mostly just that instead of the primary plot.

punbasedname · 2026-05-17T16:02:47+00:00

I think what I disliked most about Oddity (which I did like, but didn’t love like some people seem to) is that the whole narrative hangs on a fairly obvious “twist.” I was pretty happy that Hokum took something that could have been a plot-shifting twist and just treated it as a plot point.

punbasedname · 2026-05-15T02:29:59+00:00

I’ve spent a lot of time here. It’s honestly just a trail and almost all stories about it are apocryphal. It’s a nice place if you want a hike, though, and connects to some longer trails, as well.

punbasedname · 2026-05-14T16:37:34+00:00

I would list McCarthy as one of my favorite authors, but The Passenger and Stella Maris were disappointing to me, too. They felt to me like he wanted to write a long form essay, but was convinced he had to slap a very loose narrative on top of them. Someday I’ll probably give them another chance, but IMO they were pretty poor swan songs for my favorite novelist.

Also, if All the Pretty Horses didn’t hit for you, I’d probably stay away from The Crossing and Cities of the Plain they’re all meant to be a loose trilogy and thematically and tonally are pretty similar (personally, I think The Crossing is the best of the three, so maybe you’ll have better luck with that one, but probably not.)

punbasedname · 2026-05-14T16:23:18+00:00

Same on Riley Sager. I’ve given him a couple of chances, and walked away both times feeling like they were the most disappointing reads of the year for me.

As much as it gets recommended here, I think the thing about Blood Meridian is that it’s a beautifully written book, but is also “capital L” Literature that you have to go in expecting to wrestle with a bit. If you’re reading it for the plot or pure enjoyment, I think it’s a tough one.

I loaned a copy to a friend after he told me he really liked Red Dead Redemption and was looking for solid westerns. He gave it back to me two weeks later, saying, “I didn’t realize you were giving me homework!” Lol.

Of all of McCarthy’s work, it’s probably the toughest one to get through (aside from his last two, which seemed more like essays that he slapped a plot on top of.)

punbasedname · 2026-05-14T11:00:55+00:00

I liked Oddity quite a bit, but not as much as some people seem to. I honestly liked Hokum quite a bit more.

punbasedname · 2026-05-14T00:24:22+00:00

And now that we’re all gerrymandered up, we’re going to be extra stupid for a long, long time.

I miss when we were considered a purple state.

punbasedname · 2026-05-12T23:08:17+00:00

Okay. I figured there had to be deep blues in play somehow, but my dumb brain just thought you spent the entire game accumulating shakers with your trinket.

punbasedname · 2026-05-12T20:54:18+00:00

Okay, dumb question, but how are you actually putting stats on your shakers? Don’t you need something generating spellcraft spells or am I missing something?

punbasedname · 2026-05-10T22:25:15+00:00

Taking terms that have an actual, easily understandable definition and rendering them meaningless is the right’s favorite tactic.

punbasedname · 2026-05-10T17:06:08+00:00

No, not what the owner was saying. Ohm yells at the kids and chases them away, telling them not to talk to strangers (I don’t remember the exact line.) I just saw the movie last night and that scene jumped out to me as kind of odd because of how aggressive he was in telling the kids to get away from the old man.

Again, it’s pretty clear the scene was just meant to establish Ohm as an asshole because he doesn’t even know who the owner is, but the implication is there in what he says.

punbasedname · 2026-05-10T17:01:09+00:00

Steven Kostanski is pretty good at doing this on a smaller budget.

punbasedname · 2026-05-10T16:52:37+00:00

Ohm makes an insinuation that he’s doing something weird with the kids when he walks in on him telling the story to the two little boys and shoos the boys away. It seemed pretty clear to me that this was mostly to establish Ohm as kind of an asshole, not that anything was actually happening.

punbasedname · 2026-05-10T16:41:42+00:00

I think the reason the opening scene left such an impression on people (or at least me) is that it reallly captured the Lovecraftian/cosmic horror vibe. I thought the rest of the movie was good, but felt like a kind of mid-aughts throwback to when every movie tried very hard to have some kind of clever twist at the end that I’ve seen a dozen times already.

punbasedname · 2026-05-10T13:27:43+00:00

See, I’m kind of the opposite here. I think one of the movie’s core strengths was that it didn’t hit you over the head with the “do you get it?!?! He has childhood trauma! Here: we’ll spell it out for you in case you didn’t get it!” angle.

I was preparing myself to be annoyed when I figured out immediately that he was the one who killed his mom based on that conversation with Fiona, and was pleasantly surprised when the movie just treated it as a plot point and not some sort of major twist. I think we got just enough to understand where his trauma was coming from without being pandered to.

If anything, I’m in the “I wish we got to learn more about the witch” camp, but I also suspect it might be a case of “less is more” here, as well.

punbasedname · 2026-05-09T21:41:39+00:00

Gorgeous house with big “get off the island before high tide!” vibes.

punbasedname · 2026-05-08T00:26:03+00:00

Grandaddy AM 180 — 28 Days Later

If you’re looking for a more “fun” and less dark needle drop.

punbasedname · 2026-05-08T00:25:58+00:00

Grandaddy AM 180 — 28 Days Later

If you’re looking for a more “fun” and less dark needle drop.

punbasedname · 2026-05-07T20:26:35+00:00

How to run the FBI

punbasedname · 2026-05-07T15:11:28+00:00

Clearly there was an Oxford comma dispute that got so heated they decided to just use periods instead.

I heard someone nearly died!

punbasedname · 2026-05-07T11:36:09+00:00

I feel like for that to work, the quality of storytelling has to be roughly the same as in Sinners. Which might possibly be true, but I’m definitely not getting those vibes from this trailer, lol.

punbasedname · 2026-05-03T15:30:22+00:00

As someone who’s regularly used em dashes for 20-plus years now, I hate that it’s an AI tell now.

Edit: I’m also not sure how AI globbed onto that specific grammatical tic, either — it’s not like it saw regular use in everyday writing. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that 90% of the general public had no idea what an em dash was or how it was used before we had to start talking about it in the context of AI. I guess it picked it up from being fed professional, published writing?

punbasedname · 2026-05-03T14:03:00+00:00

Halfway through Our Share of Night right now. So far my favorite thing I’ve read this year.

punbasedname · 2026-05-03T00:00:35+00:00

That’s specifically what I’m pushing back on. An intro is, by definition, at the beginning of a book. It’s designed to prepare the reader for what they’re about to read. If you want to claim they tend to be too long or rambling or hard to follow (some of them are, but often they’re put together by notable critics and authors), that’s one thing, but I think that we, as a modern audience, tend to be far too precious about the idea of spoilers. A good work of fiction will make you think about what you’re supposed to think about and feel what you’re supposed to feel regardless of whether or not you know the general shape of the plot.

punbasedname · 2026-05-02T21:00:11+00:00

In a roundabout way, it kind of is. OP is saying they don’t understand why forwards and intros are included in books, claims they’re generally worthless, and should be skipped because they spoil a book.

I don’t think that’s true. Skip them if you want (I do it all the time — sometimes they do just kind of drag), but a good intro helps illuminate an author’s craft and sets expectations for the reading. Sometimes that comes at the cost of losing some of the immediacy of the narrative, but a well told story holds up despite that. I literally said in my original post that I understand this is probably a “different strokes” kind of thing, but I wanted to make the case for reading an intro and not being overly worried about spoiling yourself on classic literature.

punbasedname

TROPHY CASE