I like existential, cosmic, surreal, or body horror, as well as limited fantasy, speculative fiction, non-fiction etc etc.
Book-reading alt for cloudisland.nz/@dznz.
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"Stories from a lost American classic "in the same arena as Alice Munro" (Lydia Davis) …
Years later, images from these stories have stayed with me: a terrified girl helping her grandfather pull out all his teeth, ER doctors and their kind voices, the little injured jockey who speaks no English, bad smells that smell good.
David Peace's acclaimed Red Riding Quartet continues with this exhilarating follow-up to Nineteen Seventy-Four. It's …
A lukewarm James Ellroy imitation wherein we spend 300 pages with two deeply unpleasant men as they supposedly try to solve murders and assaults but instead commit their own litany of shitty acts. And then they have the audacity to be upset that other men are doing nasty things to these same women.
Was a fan of the miniseries but honestly maybe I ought not to have been.
Content warning Short story summaries
Lena
Accidentally becoming an AWS vm image.
If you are reading this
What if a civilisation sent us a message and we mostly missed it?
The frame by frame
When corporate espionage meets self-driving cars.
The Difference
I’d fail the Turing test
gorge
Whoops we woke up the hungry nanofungus planet
cripes does anyone remember
Classic creepy pasta idea based on the Google graveyard of social medias
Driver
Sequel to Lena, about the need to manage all these worker brains.
I don’t know, Timmy
That creepy moment you realise you aren’t the simulating universe but the simulated.
A powerful culture
They built a pipeline through our planet. Humans, eh?
Valuable humans in transit
In which the grey hoo actually, maybe, saves most of humanity.
When Louise finds out her parents have died, she dreads going home. She doesn’t want …
Good clean fun. The main characters are mildly insufferable and there are a few beats where they make egregiously silly choices that happens to suit the plot, but the slow escalation of horror mixed with plausible family conflict is a solid mix.
Hyperion is a 1989 science fiction novel by American author Dan Simmons. The first book …
It’s ok? Lots of interesting ideas. I didn’t love it, but there was plenty to chew on.
Honestly, the endless literature references felt pretty forced.
Still a great bit of work, full of heart and gentle world building.
I feel like I did not leave this book with a clear idea of what all these stories meant. I count that as a mark in its favour. Worth a read for those who enjoy Ligotti, Aickman. I’ll be back for another chew, I suspect.
Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (titled Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle …
Pretty incredible work. If you saw Chernobyl, the series, this is what the human stories were based on.
