As a follow up to my last post: If you enjoy Lovecraftian horror, I cannot recommend two books more strongly. I read both of them in 2012 so I won’t be putting detailed reviews of them up as part of the 2013 reading list material, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to bring them up given the last book’s content.
This was quite possibly my favorite book from last year. I read it late in the year and was blown away. I had just finished a fairly dull and boring collection of Lovecraft inspired short fiction when a friend recommended this book. It blew me away. After the collection proved that so many authors, some quite good, didn’t get the core of Lovecraft’s work, 14 comes and shows how it is done. Basic premise is that a guy moves into a new apartment building and things seem a little odd. Like, the building is creepy and on further exploration there are certain places that the laws of physics seem to be bent in very odd ways. Almost nothing happens for three-quarters of the book and all it does is build up the tension until you are utterly convinced that when something does happen, it will be very, very bad.
There was one point that I actually jumped in my chair. A bit of formatting on my kindle made it so that one of the discoveries by the main character was right at the bottom of the page and in a different font, so just as the main character was relaxing after another chapter of exploring the apartment building…. *pow!* It was very well done.
This book is a collection of short stories all based around Lovecraftian science fiction. Not the same collection I mentioned in the 14 section above. This one is really good. It is all Lovecraft inspired horror set in space. Most of the stories take place on spaceships of one type or another. One story is even from the point of view of aliens. Some set in the future, one that spans from ancient Egypt to the future of FTL space travel, one that involves using secrets man was not meant to know to travel the stars (and the consequences of that). The stories are many, varied, and almost all of them are above average to excellent in quality.
The City of Doors 