Biggest disappointment you've had in a horror book ?

Lobolover

Lobolover

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I'm talking about when you were realy pricked to read something and it turned out to be colossaly underwhelming ?

My personal pick would be "The Devil Tree of El-Dorado" by Frank Aubrey . I acidentaly read the only weird passage in the novel while rewriting the text (when I was stil trying to rectify corupt texts on the internet archive) and that was what got me pricked to read more . And there was nothing of any great interest in there at all . The devil tree itself gets blown up sixty pages before the end of the book .
 
Tbh I'd have to say 'The Keep'. Riveting reading with tense atmospheric build-up , but then it all starts to get a little bit silly.

Also Dracula - similar to the Keep , really good for the first 2/3rds , but then the ending is a huge let-down
 
paranoid marvin said:
Tbh I'd have to say 'The Keep'. Riveting reading with tense atmospheric build-up , but then it all starts to get a little bit silly.

Also Dracula - similar to the Keep , really good for the first 2/3rds , but then the ending is a huge let-down
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The Keep by whom ? I never heard of it , so you have to indulge my ignorance .

Silly as in how ?

Another candidate comes to mind : The Lair of the White Worm by Stoker . Now that is silly . I didn't expect to much because of Lovecraft's own lack of enthusiasm for the book but my lord - it has a guy claim that a local woman who is aparently a completely normal person that people have known all their lives is a centuries old gigantic worm without the faintest hint of proof , and yet the professor took it at face value . I mean how in the ....... :rolleyes: ?
 
A novel by F.Paul Wilson.It's a really interesting novel to start off with , featuring a troop of SS soldiers stationed in a spooky old castle in the Carpathian Mountains with only the dark and the mist for company as men start to mysteriously disappear.

To say why it gets a bit silly would spoil the story ; all I will say is that Glenn has a lot to answer for...

Still worth a read though
 
I am very well prepared to get spoiled .

Besides , It cannot get sillier then the Bram Stoker novel I mentioned .
 
Lobolover said:
The Keep by whom ? I never heard of it , so you have to indulge my ignorance .

Silly as in how ?

Another candidate comes to mind : The Lair of the White Worm by Stoker . Now that is silly . I didn't expect to much because of Lovecraft's own lack of enthusiasm for the book but my lord - it has a guy claim that a local woman who is aparently a completely normal person that people have known all their lives is a centuries old gigantic worm without the faintest hint of proof , and yet the professor took it at face value . I mean how in the ....... :rolleyes: ?
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A book by F. Paul Wilson- I just finished reading it and found it very good,not silly at all!
See my blog entry here:
Diary of a SF Addict: A change from SF and a Nazi surprise!
 
Hard to say, for me... but I suppose the one that comes to mind right off is All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By, by John Farris. An interesting premise, some very good passages... but overall, it just came across as... flat. Lifeless. Which is a pity, as it really did have potential. Certainly, some of the imagery and situations, if given their proper atmospheric preparation, could have made it one of the best horror novels of the twentieth century. Instead, it throws too many things at the reader without any such preparation, and so they simply come off as contrived and unconvincing.

I really need to re-read this one, as it has been some years now. Perhaps my memory is doing it an injustice, but I was distinctly underwhelmed when I first read it, despite the many accolades it garnered. Perhaps my expectations were too high. But, for what it's worth, I think this is my biggest disappointment. Other books I've read are worse, but I was somewhat prepared for their faults; here... I was not; I wanted to like the book, and found myself severely disappointed.....
 
That's going to keep me up all night now. Hopefully it wasn't the Susan Hill novel I'm reading...:rolleyes:
 
Actually, I liked it fine in the beginning, when it had some weird moments in the encounters with the old man's ghost, and it seemed he was following less in his father's footsteps. But as the novel progressed it just became safer and safer and more akin to King's weaker stuff.

BTW, some of his short stories are quite good; others are simply not my cup of tea.
 
Hee yea, the worst parts of Heart Shaped Box are when it comes across as a bad Stephen King book. And some of the best stories in 20th Century Ghosts have no King flavor to them.

One of the huge disappointments I had in horror was The Dunwich Horror. It goes on and on, and in the end what we get is some giant bear on a different plane? Given that this was my introduction to HPL, I was seriously skeptical of the hype around this man. Fortunately, I discovered other, MUCH better works.
 
ravenus said:
Hee yea, the worst parts of Heart Shaped Box are when it comes across as a bad Stephen King book. And some of the best stories in 20th Century Ghosts have no King flavor to them.

One of the huge disappointments I had in horror was The Dunwich Horror. It goes on and on, and in the end what we get is some giant bear on a different plane? Given that this was my introduction to HPL, I was seriously skeptical of the hype around this man. Fortunately, I discovered other, MUCH better works.
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......giant bear ?
 
Unless you mean the main antagonist (gaah , can't remember the name) he turns out looking like a bear .
 
Lobolover said:
Unless you mean the main antagonist (gaah , can't remember the name) he turns out looking like a bear .
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Eh? Wilbur Whateley? Here's the description in the tale, at Wilbur's death:

The thing that lay half-bent on its side in a foetid pool of greenish-yellow ichor and tarry stickiness was almost nine feet tall, and the dog had torn off all the clothing and some of the skin.... It was partly human, beyond a doubt, with very manlike hands and head, and the goatish, chinless face had the stamp of the Whateleys upon it. But the torso and lower parts of the body were teratologically fabulous, so that only generous clothing could ever have enabled it to walk on earth unchallenged or uneradicated.

Above the waist it was semi-anthropomorphic; though its chest...had the leathery, reticulated hide of a crocodile or alligator. The back was piebald with yellow and black, and dimly suggested the squamous covering of certain snakes. Below the waist, though, it was the worst; for here all human resemblance left off and sheer phantasy began. The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen a score of long greenish-grey tentacles with red sucking mouths protruded limply.

Their arrangement was odd, and seemed to follow the symmetries of some cosmic geometry unknown to earth or the solar system. On each of the hips, deep set in a kind of pinkish, ciliated orbit, was what seemed to be a rudimentary eye; whilst in lieu of a tail there depended a kind of trunk or feeler with purple annular markings, and with many evidences of being an undeveloped mouth or throat. The limbs, save for their black fur, roughly resembled the hind legs of prehistoric earth's giant saurians, and terminated in ridgy-veined pads that were neither hooves nor claws.
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Doesn't sound much like a bear to me -- not even remotely. And his brother (the actual "horror" of the title) is even less so. There is, of course, the "Bear's Den", but that was a topographical feature, not anything to do with the Whateley twins (it is also an actual site, visited by Donald Burleson many years ago)....
 
Don't ask me , I just said that was the only thing that came to mind .
 
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