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Post by lowtacks86 on Feb 4, 2023 19:15:15 GMT
Arguably the two most famous horror writers of the last 100 years (hell arguably of all time), which do you prefer?
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Post by novastar6 on Feb 4, 2023 20:02:30 GMT
Right off the bat I'd have to go with King simply because you can actually understand the stuff he writes.
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Post by Zos on Feb 5, 2023 12:31:14 GMT
Both ridiculously over rated frankly, though King is a great story teller, but a very average writer in need of a good editor. As a "horror" writer Thomas Ligotti is so far ahead of anyone else it's ridiculous.
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Post by Captain Spencer on Feb 5, 2023 15:54:55 GMT
Both ridiculously over rated frankly, though King is a great story teller, but a very average writer in need of a good editor. As a "horror" writer Thomas Ligotti is so far ahead of anyone else it's ridiculous. Never heard of Thomas Ligotti. Could you recommend one of his books? |
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Post by petrolino on Feb 5, 2023 17:38:09 GMT
Both ridiculously over rated frankly, though King is a great story teller, but a very average writer in need of a good editor. As a "horror" writer Thomas Ligotti is so far ahead of anyone else it's ridiculous. Never heard of Thomas Ligotti. Could you recommend one of his books?
I read an interview with Thomas Ligotti at the Lovecraft eZine online in which he spoke about a story called 'The Chymist' :
"I consider my breakthrough story to be “The Chymist,” which was also my first story to be published when it appeared in Harry Morris’s fanzine Nyctalops in 1981. Before that time, I had submitted only a few stories to other small-press horror publications. These were rejected. I agreed with the editors who rejected them and, like every other story I wrote in the 1970s, with one exception, I threw them away. The one exception of a story that I didn’t trash from that period was “The Last Feast of Harlequin.” I didn’t think much of that story, but there was something in it that kept me from tossing it in the garbage. While I dedicated “The Last Feast of Harlequin” to H. P. Lovecraft, I didn’t think of it as a Lovecraftian when I was writing it. That was an addendum added before it appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1990, believe it or not. It definitely reads like a Lovecraftian story, which is probably why I dedicated it to him. However, it also reads like non-Lovecraftian stories I later wrote, that is, as a first-person confessional account of a nightmarish supernatural encounter with or without monsters or something monstrous. That’s the kind of supernatural story I wanted to write. In my later story “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story,” the narrator makes this point. This was also how Poe, Machen, Blackwood, and other horror authors I liked best wrote all their best works, or so it seemed to me then. However, as much as I was influenced by these canonical figures of the genre in question, most of my reading was not composed of horror fiction. Primarily, what I read were works that would be considered experimental or postmodernist, whether or not they were written before or after the postmodern era at its height, roughly from the fifties and into the eighties. These works were all in some way more off the path of conventional fiction so to speak. They were more complex, more devious in their literary design, more thematically remote from the life of average persons, and more stylistically flashy or peculiar in their prose styles, qualities that also describe Lovecraft’s fiction. Some of the later, postmodern figures known for practicing this manner of writing were Vladimir Nabokov, William Burroughs, Donald Barthelme, minor “death of the novel” authors like Ronald Sukenick, Alain Robbe-Grillet and other French nouveau roman luminaries as well as writers associated with modern-era trends like Symbolism and Surrealism, and various foreign writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There are really too many to name, and, more or less as a literary collective, they worked far outside the bounds of literature as seen in the works of the vast majority of modern horror writers, even though I always returned to horror for my subject matter, because I couldn’t be or didn’t want to be a member of the world-historical literary class. I wanted to be a horror writer and only a horror writer in the sense I conceived such a thing, which for the most part had gone out of style with Lovecraft and descendants of other genre masters such as M. R. James. The ultimate product of all these influences from two different literary worlds, horror and non-horror, was “The Chymist.” In that story, I felt I was finally expressing myself in a way I felt most at ease and that flowed rather than lumbered in the traditional way of both classic horror genre and mainstream literature as I perceived how these forms manifested themselves in large part since their inception sometime in the eighteenth century. With few exceptions, I’ve had no love for the classics of literature as commonly regarded. They practically never address anything that has meaning for me as an admittedly outsider type of person."
- Thomas Ligotti, The Lovecraft eZine
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Post by petrolino on Feb 5, 2023 17:39:19 GMT
I like the work of both writers.
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Post by Prime etc. on Feb 11, 2023 7:36:05 GMT
Lovecraft and King are totally different in approaches and focus.
King took horror concepts he had been exposed to in movies and tv shows and wrapped them in a theme about suburban anxieties in huge books.
The Shining is a reworking of the Haunted Palace (partly inspired by a Lovecraft story). The Dead Zone was based on a 1970s tv movie called Visions. The Green Mile seems partly inspired by the Asphynx (sic?).
King is famous in the commercial publishing sphere although he got a mega boost from the early movie versions. Salem's Lot the tv mini-series has little in common with the book.
Lovecraft's fame grew after he died and only from his writing. They didn't make a movie based on his stuff until decades later.
Lovecraft did short stories and his human characters were never as important as the alien horror element. It's usually the opposite with King.
A better comparison would be Richard Matheson vs King because they both had commercial careers and movie writing.
Lovecraft's main contribution is the idea of a material universe where some kind of alien hell is waiting to reclaim it--with no hope of a benign force to intervene like found in religion.
King's work has elements of spirituality which Lovecraft never had.
Matheson too.
The gist of most of Matheson's work is that a character is confronted by some horrific alien threat but in the end comes to accept it as a good thing or at least is not afraid of it.
I Am Legend, The Shrinking Man, Hell House, Nightmare at 20000 Feet, the Zuni Fetish doll story...
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Post by jackspicer on Feb 13, 2023 0:40:31 GMT
They both like to pad their stories with irrelevant filler. King is less obnoxious about it than Lovecraft, but not by much.
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