Recommend me novels: horror, sci-fi, thriller

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A system of cells interlinked
Pandora's Star - Peter F. Hamilton
A Deepness in the Sky - Vernor Vinge
Perdido Street Station - China Mieville
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“It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.” ― Thomas Sowell



Darcy Coates is a good writer of haunted house stories. The Haunting of Ashburn House and Craven Manor are both good places to start.



I finished The Ruins a couple nights ago. It’s about as gruesome as The Troop but I liked this one quite a bit more. Right from the start The Ruins sets up these college kids as so privileged and clueless that the locals in Cancun and tourists from other countries mock them to their face and take advantage of them. It could not be more clear that these kids do NOT have what it takes to survive the least bit inconvenience. And that tickled me to no end.

I’m only 17 pages into The Descent but it’s already pretty ****ing metal. \m/

And I see there’s some new recommendations here. Thank you for those, I added them to the list. More are welcome.



I finished The Ruins a couple nights ago. It’s about as gruesome as The Troop but I liked this one quite a bit more.
Glad you liked it.

It's been probably 15 years or so since I read it, but certain elements have always stuck in my mind, like the
WARNING: spoilers below
woman holding the baby early on with the weird rash, and the girl isn't sure if the baby is alive or not. Or the part where they realize that the plants can mimic the phone sounds. Or just that part at the end where only the one girl is left and she's like "Screw it!" and eats and drinks all of the remaining rations because she knows she won't survive.



I loved Clive Barker's The Damnation Game and you should also check out Dan Simmons. He's written in just about every genre but all of his stuff is good including his horror novels. Summer of Night is excellent. There's a sequel titled A Winter of Haunting, but that one's more of a psychological thriller. And there's Children of Night. His best known is The Terror which was made into an AMC miniseries.

If you're in the mood for hard boiled noir read his Joe Kurtz novels or his fictional biographies Drood and Black Hills. He's also known for numerous sci-fi novels.

I don't much like his politics but he's a damn good writer.



His best known is The Terror which was made into an AMC miniseries.
The Terror deserves the usual "book is better" clause. It's a bit too long, but the ideas are more interesting than in the miniseries.
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The Terror deserves the usual "book is better" clause. It's a bit too long, but the ideas are more interesting than in the miniseries.
He does write some gargantuan novels. I remember Drood being a behemoth at around 800 pages.



I finished The Descent last night. Now this is what I’m talking about! Pulpy Michael a Crichton is the best way to describe it. I do think it does go on for a little too long. The early parts of the book spend so much time setting up the world and I was definitely enjoying that as well but it was almost halfway through before the book was finally like, “Ok main characters here’s your mission.” I appreciated the macro level storytelling and wondered if they could have kept it up for the whole time, or maybe some new stories in this world it sets up. Overall I liked it a lot.

Next up is Final Girl Support Group, which I don’t think was directly recommended in this thread but fit what I was looking for.



Unseaming - Mike Allen
North American Lake Monsters - Nathan Ballingrud
Occultation - Laird Barron
Whom the Gods Would Destroy - Brian Hodge
The Imago Sequence - Laird Barron
Last Days - Adam Nevill
Haunted - Chuck Palahniuk
House of Suns - Alastair Reynolds
Vurt - Jeff Noon
The Machine Stops - E.M. Forster
Mutt - Eden Fenn
Ship of Fools - Richard Russo
The Willows - Algernon Blackwood
Dreamer - Daniel Quinn



I finished The Final Girl Survival Group last night and liked it quite a bit. I especially liked Lynette, the way she processed her trauma was fascinating and the way she changes over the course of the book was well done. And while there are parody elements of '80s and '90s slasher movies, her backstory was genuinely upsetting, which helped me understand her issues. I liked that the other final girls aren't perfect, they all got their own problems and don't get along with each other well.

The parodies of the slasher movies was kind of all over the place though. Sometimes it was generic and had me guessing what they were referenceing and other times it was almost exactly a franchise. Like Julia's backstory for example was literally Scream, right down to the ghostface killer, his motivations, and the making of the Stab movies, which are the name of the movies in the Scream world. And this book does want to stay grounded in reality for the most part so they're pretty vague about what The Dream King was all about, since Nightmare on Elm Street was the most supernatural and surreal of the franchises. The acknowledgments section was cute too. I want to see Sweet Dreams are Made of Screams.

Overall though it's a solid read. Next up is The Island.



Yay, glad you liked it!

I also really liked that the central cast of women was in their 40s/50s/60s. It's not an age bracket you usually get in horror.



I finished The Island last night and enjoyed it. Nothing else in recent memory conveyed such an imminent threat and sense of danger like the chases in this. It felt like our heroes could be killed at any moment. Overall a compact survival thriller. I might look into some of the author’s crime novels.

Next up: Summer of Night.