NooneOfConsequence wrote on Nov 1
st, 2019 at 8:13pm:
I binge read Cormack McCarthy’s The Road in an airport waiting hours for my flight to Seattle. When I landed, a storm had rolled in along with the worst flooding in Washington state in 70 years. It felt like I had landed in the book even at the airport, but then I spent the next few days at an old decommissioned nuclear power plant. It would have felt extremely post-apocalyptic even without reading the book, but with the dreary rain... I was just waiting for some cannibal to lean out of a broken window and shoot me in the leg with a makeshift sharpened-spoon arrow.
The Road is... tough. Both book and film are fantastic but I find them more emotionally devastating rather than scary. I haven't read The Shining but the movie, as well as being one of the greatest movies ever made, is freaking terrifying. I have watched it all the way through once. I'm not sure I could do it again.
One book I really wasn't expecting to get to me is The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson. It's a really weird book. It's hard to explain, but it opens with a man from around the 1700's describing how he met the love of his life and then tragically lost her and then goes on to explain a strange "dream" he has. The whole thing is written in a faux 16th century style so the language is very flowery and old fashioned but the "dream" is set millions of years into the future after the Sun has gone out and the Earth is almost barren, pockets of life existing only in former oceanic trenches being sustained by a strange power emanating from deep within the Earth. The last humans are living in a giant pyramid that shelters them from horrific monsters and mutants and supernatural powers that stalk the Night Land and would like nothing more than tearing the last humans to pieces and utterly annihilating their souls. To avoid spoilers, all I'll say is that the main character has to go on a quest across the Night Land and there is a point where there is an attack by giants. The hairs on the back of my neck are prickling just thinking about it. Even with the old fashioned language, it's visceral.
It's a really long book (so long it's been edited down numerous times) and the language can get tedious (so tedious there has been a fan rewrite that puts it into modern language) but the world of the Night Land is one of my favourite fantasy worlds and boy, is it horrible.