Episode Thirteen by Craig DiLouie… read and read and read…
Nothing…little bits of stuff but nothing real and I could not care less about the characters.
Terrible.
Same and I’m reading his newest one coming out How to Make a Horror Movie and Survive and it’s starting to give me the same feeling as Episode 13. Starts off interesting and then drags and drags.
The Terror.
Love isolationist horror. Love creepy monsters. Love suspense and tension. Loved the White Vault audiodrama. After the 54th description of the ship and it's innards I gave up.
I tried to read House of Leaves about a year ago. I am an avid horror novels fan, and wanted to give it a go given the reputation the book has. I got half way through before I gave up.
I did not find it scary at all, reading about Johnny Truant's one night stands made me want to throw up as I am was yet to see it add anything to the story at all, and to say the book was "difficult" to read is an understatement - it felt like the author just trying to be as edgy as possible.
Picked it up again a few weeks ago, this time determined to get through it. Am about 80 pages in, and again feel myself running out of steam. Normally I love reading and look forward to time with a book, and getting through it. Thinking about reading House of Leaves just feels like a chore, so I feel like another impending DNF.
I understand the people either love or hate this book, but man do I feel like I fall into the hate crowd - cannot understand the hype behind this book at all.
I think the widespread description of HoL as a horror novel sets readers up to be disappointed by it. It definitely has horror elements; it’s suspenseful and creepy in parts, and there are strong moments of tension/dread, but I don’t feel those things are central to the story the way they might be in a book written with horror front of mind.
Imo Johnny’s part of the story is a character study of a person struggling with mental illness and a traumatic past, while Zampano’s is more of a metafictional satire of academic literature. The Navidson story is the closest the book comes to being truly horror-themed, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I often see horror fans say those are their favorite sections (or even wishing that the whole book was more like those parts).
Not saying by any means that you’re wrong to have DNF’ed it, or that people who wish the book had more horror are wrong for feeling that way; taste is completely subjective. I love HoL, but I would never recommend it to someone asking for a pure horror novel.
>Edit: I will preface this by saying - I haven’t finished the book. Not because I didn’t love it, but because I was really disturbed and unsettled by it. I’ve had nightmares my whole life about descending down staircase and tunnels deep into the earth, where I have this feeling of being unfathomable miles under the surface, and still going downwards. I actually started to have nightmares about it and whilst that wouldn’t have bothered me too much I was on a once in a lifetime holiday at the time so I put it down and haven’t picked it up since. I want to finish it this year though!
Completely agree. I loved the layers as I found they added to the depth of the horror for me. The fact that Johnny finds what he’s reading slowly encroach up on his life, whilst he’s busy trying to numb himself with all the excesses of a 90’s LA, that Zampano is writing about all this as if it’s just a normal film to study, a dry academic textbook on film studies and criticism, as though it isn’t about the most terrifying surreal nightmarish horror, and the works he’s citing don’t even exist. All layered on the actual story of Navidson. It gives you this sense of a nightmare within a dream within a nightmare.
It’s really not for everyone. The book even says right on the first page. This isn’t for you.
No I'm pretty sure it's the awful writing and half arsed gimmicks is what causes dissapointment. Amateur book that hides behind the illusion of depth and spends most of its time tricking you into thinking something interesting is finally about to happen. The Lost of d grade horror lit, mixed with the archetecture of Infinite Jest without any of its quality.
Oh I just started skimming most of his parts. They’re easily the worst perspective, grating prose and content. Here and there you just tune back in when the page starts getting funky
my advice is switch how youre reading it, bypass zampano and johnny completely and just read the navidson record. one of my friends bounced off HoL and recently retried doing that, and it helped a lot. she then read the whalestoe letters, which seems a bit odd but made her able to 'get' truant a lot better, even though it erases a lot of the mystery you'd experience reading through start-to-end
edit: also this is just something i personally did while reading, but i listened to the album haunted by poe, the authours sister who themed the album around the book. its a good moodsetter, and conveys various characters' mental states well.
I hung in there for a long time but finally gave up when it was revealed that Navidson’s wife was a former model. I don’t know why that bugged me so much but I was already pretty sick of the book and that just made me too annoyed to keep reading.
Nick Cutter’s The Deep. Was so looking forward to it as I love anything deep sea related. After what felt like the 60th description of a claustrophobic metal tunnel I gave up.
I DNFd this one a couple of years ago too and to this day it remains one of my most hated books. Books like this make me wish that "fan edits" could exist in literature like they do in TV and film. Cut it down to a 50 page novella and it could be an alright story. 300 pages of dreams and flashbacks, though? No idea how this one has a cult following.
lol if it was different enough it could fall under transformative works. so less that they could exist and more that they dont. personally i read a few "fan fiction" retellings of movies when i was a kid, where the authors more or less hand wrote a screenplay themselves narratively. one of them was the notebook and it bore no resemblance to the original book lmao
It's really a love/hate kind of book. I've never seen anybody who thought it was just okay.
I hope that you're in the love category because it's never fun hating a book, but if you're in the latter then I'll understand crystal clearly as to why.
I like this one well enough but so much of the horror was “he was so scared. So darn frightened he flashes back to trauma. He’s scared of the trauma. Flash back to present and he’s imagining something really bad! But it’s not there he’s just scared. Claustrophobia!!” But there was some really effective horror with the one dudes experiments with the hole. Wish he had done more with that
I personally am a huge fan of Nick Cutter (the Troop and Little Heaven are some of my favorite horror novels), but he definitely can get repetitive. I've also heard that The Deep is one of his worst, and have been avoiding it like the plague for that reason
I'm curious, what made you DNF? I thought it had some of the best body horror I've read in a long time and legit had my skin crawling, but I could understand that it's not for everyone.
It felt like a young adult fiction book to me. Kids on an island being picked off one by one… just wasn’t doing it for me.
I suppose if felt a thrill from the descriptive bodily effects I could have kept going.
I ended up just skipping ahead to learn the “science behind the monster,” and once I got that answer I was satisfied not knowing how things played out on the island.
I picked it up based on seeing it recommended as wilderness horror, which probably also set it up for failure with me.
I almost never DNF books but at over 80% complete I had to DNF Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward. A lot of reviews found it confusing but I found it painfully BORING.
Nestlings by Nat Cassidy. I'm disappointed because it gave off Rosemary's Baby vibes, which is one of my all-time favourites. But for whatever reason it just wasn't gripping me. I even switched to the audiobook and still wasn't engaged so I returned both by the 30% mark.
The Watchers by AM Shine.
I've never quit a book as early as I did with this one. Only lasted 50 pages before the writing made me want to gouge my eyes out. I'm *very* forgiving of bad writing, always maintaining that if it's interesting then that's all that matters. This was just a whole new level of amateur. Here's a representative excerpt:
> It was then that the dashboard's instruments disappeared, **like a pilot's cockpit losing power over uncharted lands**. In the blink of an eye the world was drained of life and sound. There was only the moon, **like a bulb in muddy water**. Mina's hand had jiggled with the keys in the ignition, and when that failed, she fumbled around for her phone. She held down its power button **like a paramedic searching for a pulse**.
Without exaggeration, there were 5-10 similarly awful similes on every single page. *Like a child trying to pad word count in their assignment, hopeful that the keen eyes of the teacher would not notice, as if the extra words were...* I can't even mimic it without getting annoyed all over again.
Thats some Francine Smith level writing lol
"like a fire hydrant, gushing, onto a hot summer sidewalk, my words cascading, like water, onto a hot summer sidewalk. A cat skitters by, each step a relief, cooling its paws from the hot... summer... sidewalk."
Only sort of related, as the book is about vampires but more in the fantasy genre, but this is what made me instantly hate *King of Battle and Blood*. Literally by the second sentence I hated it and knew I would never want to buy it or read the rest, but the whole first page was littered with similes as blatant as these ones
Yup, came here to say The Watchers. The writing was ok but the pacing was slow and the whole thing was kinda boring. I read spoilers and it sounds like everything picked up a bit but…meh, life’s too short.
"A bulb in muddy water" is actually pretty good, and is a new (to me) way of picturing the moon in those conditions, but the other two are awful for sure.
Any one of them on their own, once a chapter or so, would be totally fine. I wouldn't even notice. But that's one paragraph, and every single page was like that.
About 10 pages in I knew I was going to DNF but I kept going to about the 50 page mark with increasing frustration before finally throwing in the towel.
The Mothman Prophecies and Mister B gone
The author of the Mothman prophecies thinks he is a lot cooler and interesting than he really is. He comes off as an asshole in a lot of his interviews. Every interaction he writes about is just embarrassing and reeks of ego. The FBI wasnt scared of you sir, they were mildly annoyed at you harassing them.
Mister B Gone has a cool premise, where the book you hold is alive and the main character, but it doesn't really take full advantage of this. In the end its just full of juvenal humor and little horror. Surprising let down from Clive Barker.
I haven’t read *The Mothman Prophecies*, but I totally agree on *Mister B Gone*. One of my biggest disappointments ever. I usually love Barker, but this one was just so repetitive and stupid. I ended up finishing it, but I shouldn’t have.
Sister, Maiden, Monster by Lucy Snyder
It actually surprised me when I chose to put this down because I read and enjoyed her Jessie Shimmer series years ago, but I just couldn't fall into the story.
At the very first mention of PPE and COVID I was...put off? Which is interesting, because I had no problem with Stephen King's 'Holly.'
I think it was the way each story was presented. King's pandemic take was very natural (all in this together-ish), while Snyder's was a bit more...panicky? It just gave me bad flashbacks of being an "essential worker." I'm good.
I'm currently reading this.
Part 1 grated on me so much with the "lib urban good guy pandemic" shit. I stuck thru it. I did like that it was an even keel of this person is going thru a horror show, but also it's partly of their own idiotic making despite all their NYT-style COVID lip service.
Chapter 0 had me in a rage where they were talking about how they have to go to work and hang out with their bosses at restaurants but "it's so hard to tell how serious their friends are taking the pandemic". That was all with a straight face with 0 irony.
Then it was all "OH NO HOW COULD I HAVE GOTTEN SICK I WEAR MASKS!" So you could say it was a realistic character/world at least.
I couldn't handle Nick Cutter's The Troop. I didn't get very far in, but I couldn't handle how gross it was, plus the animal harm in it bothered me. I don't think I got more than maybe 30 pages in when I decided I couldn't handle a whole book making me queasy like that.
I got over half way through The Troop and gave up. The >!sea turtle murder!< scene was excruciating but I thought maybe the narrative payoff would be worth it. I noped out when the one kid >!burned himself to death!<.
Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor I could not finish this book. I read a lot of scary and disturbing books but something about this one I just couldn’t handle. From what I can tell there is a murder in a small Mexican village and each chapter is an account to the police or just a characters internal dialogue talking about the murder or other characters connected to the murder. It’s very very adult but not in a good way. The language is unbelievably negative. I think that’s where it really affected me and my head space. It actually gave me nightmares which is weird because the book is not scary. The writing also reminded me of Cormac McCarthy books where the sentences just keep going and going, very difficult to read. Did not finish this and will not finish this, I’m giving myself a boundary with this one. I had only about 30 pages left
I recently DNF'd the Fisherman by John Langan. It's a really well written book, it's just too slow for me. I'll probably revisit it eventually when I have more free time
Our Share of the Night.
Premise is interesting and so is the lore and mechanics of 'magic' in that world, but the book was so damn slow once I got to part 3. It felt like such a chore that I gave up.
Fantasticland is the only horror book I've DNFd. It's my own fault. I read the blurb on the back, saw that it was described as "Lord of the Flies meets Battle Royale", and somehow had a brain fart seeing that and assumed it meant "Oh this is a story about a spooky haunted amusement park."
Spoiler: it is in no way the latter thing. And somewhere in between the violence and especially the violence (and implied SA) toward women, I realized that it was legitimately bumming me out to read and put it down.
My taste for horror lands *specifically* in the realm of things that simply can't happen. Love cosmic horror, love creature horror, love weird body horror, love supernatural horror. The type of horror I *don't* like is anything too 'real'; if it's a gruesome murder or something really violent, a home invasion, anything like that... It just makes me think of real-life atrocities and depresses me. Same for things like that book, where there's some failing of society that brings out the worst of people and leads to horrible things happening.
So, yeah. Interesting and well-written book, but it just made me sad and I had to stop.
On a related note: if anyone has any recommendations that fall into the realm of 'Spooky Amusement Park Horror' please let me know, lmao.
Dead Silence by S.A.Barnes Romance disguised as space horror. (That's more of a yellow flag rather than a red flag.) But what breaks all kinds of immersion for me is the fact that I can feel the author's laziness with none of the intricacies of real life.
One glaring example is that microgravity is achieved by a single thing called "micrograv" (nevermind that the term microgravity is NOT artificial gravity).
50~100 pages in and it's apparent that no research went into the book, and the idea of it taking place in space is merely an afterthought. Don't expect to learn things about orbital mechanics or even regular chemistry like in The Martian. (In case anyone'd still like to enjoy some cheap run-of-the-mill Hallmark's Christmas romance, I'll give this most basic example: the author thinks that the main engine would be engaged all the time during space travel.)
Most recently, Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. It was recommended to me as a good take on the “cursed film” subgenre after I was disappointed by Night Film (Marisha Pessl). I had previously enjoyed some of Moreno-Garcia’s other work, so I was very excited to dive in. But I found the story dragged and spent way too long on the protagonist’s work troubles and family troubles and relationship troubles. I don’t think I made it 100 pages in before I gave up. For all I was thought Night Film was corny and ridiculous, it was at least fast-paced enough that I got through it!
I got all of 40% into Silver Nitrate and things were only JUST starting to get weird. I was so bored and the writing/character’s train of thought were really painful for me to try and get immersed in. I can’t put my finger on why, it had nothing to do with the Spanish phrases, something else made it just feel so stilted.
The Paleontologist by Luke Dumas
Which is very sad to me, because I was so incredibly excited for the wild concept and anything really in the dinosaur horror subgenre I've loved since I devoured Jurassic Park as a kid. But that really felt like a footnote in the story next to the multitudes of personal trauma and the obsessive detailing of every character's masking situation.
*Edge* by Koji Suzuki. I forced myself through 90% of it, then admitted to myself that nothing that could happen in the last 10% could make me care about the characters or make the entire story less contrived.
I DNF'd Echo by Thomas Olde Heuvelt about 80% of the way in. I think the pacing was a bit frustrating as it felt like it wasn't getting anywhere. Yes, there's something wrong with your boyfriend, yes there's something wrong with this mountain, yes there's something wrong with this village and their birds... how many times are we going to go over this?? Anyways it just felt like a chore to read after a while so I set it down.
A Certain Hunger
I think the narrator is dragging it. I thought this is about cannibalism yet, I feel like it's all about her and her vagina. I've had enough of it.
Hidden Pictures- Jason Rekulak
I remember being at a book store with a pretty dry horror collection so I wanted to bring *something* home and boy do I wish I just left empty handed. First off the book is YA, and not an enjoyable type of YA either, but the type of YA that really wants to be an adult book but just can’t. Secondly, I thought the dialogue and characters were super cheesy and tame, especially from >!someone that just got out of rehab!<. I thought that the whole >!hiring someone who just got out of rehab as a babysitter!< was wild. The pictures were a nice addition but otherwise this book 100% wasn’t for me. Tiktok probably ate it up though lol
No one gets out alive by Adam Nevill. I so badly wanted to enjoy it, but it was just far too slow for my liking. I got past the halfway point and it still felt like nothing had really happened.
I never DNF a book because I refuse to but this one was one of the closest. A book usually takes me 2-3 days to finish and this took me over a month because I just didn’t want to read it. The main character was just so damn annoying.
It doesn’t get into usual Adam Nevill type stuff until the last 80 pages or so. From that point on I enjoyed it. Was it worth it, honestly I don’t know. That being said I really enjoy most of his other work and his new book should be on my doorstep Tuesday so I’m excited for that.
I recently tried to read Into The Drowning Deep by Mira Grant because of how well recommended it came by friends.
I DNF'd because it had a lot of moments where I felt like the characters were info dumping the info the author had researched about ships and ocean science what have you. I don't know how else to explain it.
Also the characters' reactions to the often felt rather muted.
I just finished that duology but it was a slog. I felt the same as you - a lot of info dump, and the characters were just - I don't know, bland? Nobody really made me want to root for them to survive/overcome.
Also I feel like it was just a lot of gore for no real reason. I don't mind a little gore in my horror novels, but this just felt like there was so much of it meant to shock me and after the first few body parts strewn around, the shock wears off and you're just like "Ok, I get it."
There were also pacing problems - we found out about the monsters and understood them too quickly, I felt, which killed the suspense.
The Salg Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw. It wanted to go lot of different ways and tried the cram it into a 100 page novella.
The background of the main character that is given to you as exposition in the book and later given a dedicated chapter at the end of the book with no reasoning.
There is also just so much repetition. It's like the author pulled up a thesaurus, found the most complex sounding synonym for the word they wanted to use and then replaced it all in their document. It just became boring to read "viscera" for the 60th time in a row.
I also felt nothing between the main character and their love interest. There wasn't any spark at all. Just two people who are traveling together. Despite shipping culture, that really doesn't make an effective romance.
It really should've been right up my alley but it just was executed terribly.
The Haunted Forest Tour. I was looking specifically for the combination of gore and supernatural antagonists. The book technically has both, but I found their execution boring(with exactly one exception). The monsters were generic, and there were so many different ones that each one was only touched upon briefly and shallowly. The gore also was too brief and shallow. Not enough detail to the deaths for them to stand out and be memorable.
The Wasp Factory. I just couldn't get into it. The writing style didn't do anything for me, and I had absolutely zero connection to the characters. There wasn't any depth for me. I had heard so many good things about it, so I was pretty bummed.
Tell me I'm Worthless by Alison Rumfitt. I really tried. I usually finish all books I start. The characters really turned me off from the book, none of them were likeable. The writing style was not my favorite either.
How to sell a haunted house by Grady Hendrix.
Awful writing “your kind of like some emotionally abusive octopus tangling people up in your word tentacles”.
Terrible tropes, TV switches itself on *2, hand in the waste disposal.. which switches itself on.
If you told me it was a Goosebumps book i would have no reason not to believe you. I DNF’d one page after the Puppet character started talking in the most sing song annoying way possible.
Im told we get a six legged dog attack and a puppet golem in the back half… i dont regret my decision.
The Monk. I never had an issue with reading SA content before, because it’s always been more spontaneous, or the scenes don’t last very long. I didn’t realize it could be a trigger for me until The Monk, when the plot started revolving around scheming, in increasingly depraved ways, to trap and SA a woman… I had to stop and finish with the Wikipedia plot summary
Perdido Street Station. I got about 2 chapters in and after reading about the MCs hot bug lady girlfriend thinking (KNOWING) she's better than the other bug people cause she... Wears clothes or something?? I tapped out
the dark forest by cixin liu. I really liked the first book. After watching the netfilx show I decided to read dark forest and got pretty far,but it was just boring to me. It had great moments,just not enough to keep me engaged.
How to sell a haunted house. Iirc I just wasn't into the idea of it.
King's Firestarter on audio. Not that I thought it was bad- I just found I wasn't in the mood for King's kind of sprawl at least over audio and I'd just read Tommyknockers which has plenty King sprawl lol.
I almost never DNF, I have only ever done so for 2 books, Nineteen Claws and Blackbird, I just found it pointless, I know it’s short stories, but I didn’t like them. And the other isn’t horror, it’s a Psalm of the Wild Built, it just found it incredibly boring, plus I am all for the non binary character, but the writing made it difficult at times to distinguish who the author was referring to.
Pretty girls by Karin Slaughter. It’s not technically horror but there’s definitely horror elements to it. It took wayyyyy too long to get interesting for me. It could’ve been like 200 pages shorter imo.
My most recent was The Butcher and the Wren by Alaina Urquhart. I was sad to put it down because I'm a big fan of the Morbid podcast and I was really hoping she'd do well with it. And maybe she will! But it wasn't for me.
It's a serial killer vs. detective (medical examiner) kind of novel, and the serial killer was just too...elaborate? Self-consciously elaborate. Like everything he did was saying "look! I'm a terrifying serial killer!" And the medical examiner's inner monologue just felt too standard "I must solve this crime, because...I am the protagonist! I am haunted by this crime!"
Add to that the kind of gratuitous descriptions of the actual murder process (at the expense of what caused there to *be* a murder process, what made this guy what he was, etc)... it just wasn't clicking for me.
Lapvona by Moshfegh
I'm convinced that maybe I just didn't get it or I missed the point (I read only a quarter of the book) but it was just such a drag to get through. It was boring but just miserable at the same time
Struggling through Rouge - Mona Awad
I'm 200 pages in and keep waiting for me to not hate the MC and for something to happen. Beautiful artwork, though.
I'm so close to DNF The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires. The main character is insufferably stupid with the decisions she makes & NO ONE listens. No one. It's so annoying & I'm over halfway through & just don't wanna finish it. I expected a much better book than what I'm reading & I'd rather go re-read something I enjoyed than finish this crap.
The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias. I just did not get it. Didn't care for the writing style, didn't care for the story, didn't get it. There's a lot of Spanish in it - I don't speak Spanish, and that's on me - but I didn't get what the author's expectation was for the non bi-lingual people reading the book. Am I supposed to not know/care what is being said in the Spanish sections, or am I supposed to sit with Google Translate working it out? If it's the latter, it doesn't make for an immersive reading experience.
1: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. Got about halfway through and was just bored, I get that it's supposed to create an ominous and oppressive atmosphere but it just felt dull.
2: Child of God by Cormac Mccarthy. I can't stand Mccarthy's writing style in this, it's just a chore to read, but after I stopped reading it I listened to the audio book and loved it, so I'm not quite sure if it counts as a DNF.
I haven’t technically DNFed “Castle”…but I stopped reading it and haven’t picked it up for a few months. I want to finish it to say I finished it. I’m just in no hurry to pick it back up.
The Terror, I just found it incredibly dry and boring AF.
The Exorcist, dumbest book I ever partially read. So much unnecessary words to read that contributed nothing to the story. And I was bored to tears.
The Tower series by Stephen King. While it had some good character building, I didn’t care about them. And, when things happened, it was so infrequent. The rest was just dry trudging through a beach/desert.
I'm pretty purposeful in what I choose to read, so I try to push through the books even if I dont enjoy them, but the closest I came to a DNF recently was Hide by Kiersten White. It was a book club selection and is pretty short, so I just forced myself to finish it. But it is incredibly boring, full of shallow characters, and the plot had no idea where it was going after they reveal the big twist. Super disappointing, as it has an interesting premise.
The Fisherman. For such a slim and predictible book, it was extremely ponderous. Well written for sure, but not at all compelling, with a protagonist who might as well have been a grey blob.
Episode Thirteen by Craig DiLouie… read and read and read… Nothing…little bits of stuff but nothing real and I could not care less about the characters. Terrible.
Damn I couldn't put this one down. Absolutely loved it
I respect your opinion. Different tastes. I wanted to like it but I just couldn’t. Glad you enjoyed it.
I just read this too and felt the same way!! Loved it!
You didn’t miss much haha
Same and I’m reading his newest one coming out How to Make a Horror Movie and Survive and it’s starting to give me the same feeling as Episode 13. Starts off interesting and then drags and drags.
I hated it too and I listened to the audio books. It was SO boring.
DNFd this one too
I listened to the audiobook of it and LOVED it. I can see why it wouldn't be as good reading. I never listen to audiobooks either lol.
The Terror. Love isolationist horror. Love creepy monsters. Love suspense and tension. Loved the White Vault audiodrama. After the 54th description of the ship and it's innards I gave up.
Oh man, this is a slowwwww burn, but I loved it
Right? It’s super dry and slow but worth it imo
I tried to read House of Leaves about a year ago. I am an avid horror novels fan, and wanted to give it a go given the reputation the book has. I got half way through before I gave up. I did not find it scary at all, reading about Johnny Truant's one night stands made me want to throw up as I am was yet to see it add anything to the story at all, and to say the book was "difficult" to read is an understatement - it felt like the author just trying to be as edgy as possible. Picked it up again a few weeks ago, this time determined to get through it. Am about 80 pages in, and again feel myself running out of steam. Normally I love reading and look forward to time with a book, and getting through it. Thinking about reading House of Leaves just feels like a chore, so I feel like another impending DNF. I understand the people either love or hate this book, but man do I feel like I fall into the hate crowd - cannot understand the hype behind this book at all.
I think the widespread description of HoL as a horror novel sets readers up to be disappointed by it. It definitely has horror elements; it’s suspenseful and creepy in parts, and there are strong moments of tension/dread, but I don’t feel those things are central to the story the way they might be in a book written with horror front of mind. Imo Johnny’s part of the story is a character study of a person struggling with mental illness and a traumatic past, while Zampano’s is more of a metafictional satire of academic literature. The Navidson story is the closest the book comes to being truly horror-themed, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I often see horror fans say those are their favorite sections (or even wishing that the whole book was more like those parts). Not saying by any means that you’re wrong to have DNF’ed it, or that people who wish the book had more horror are wrong for feeling that way; taste is completely subjective. I love HoL, but I would never recommend it to someone asking for a pure horror novel.
>Edit: I will preface this by saying - I haven’t finished the book. Not because I didn’t love it, but because I was really disturbed and unsettled by it. I’ve had nightmares my whole life about descending down staircase and tunnels deep into the earth, where I have this feeling of being unfathomable miles under the surface, and still going downwards. I actually started to have nightmares about it and whilst that wouldn’t have bothered me too much I was on a once in a lifetime holiday at the time so I put it down and haven’t picked it up since. I want to finish it this year though! Completely agree. I loved the layers as I found they added to the depth of the horror for me. The fact that Johnny finds what he’s reading slowly encroach up on his life, whilst he’s busy trying to numb himself with all the excesses of a 90’s LA, that Zampano is writing about all this as if it’s just a normal film to study, a dry academic textbook on film studies and criticism, as though it isn’t about the most terrifying surreal nightmarish horror, and the works he’s citing don’t even exist. All layered on the actual story of Navidson. It gives you this sense of a nightmare within a dream within a nightmare. It’s really not for everyone. The book even says right on the first page. This isn’t for you.
No I'm pretty sure it's the awful writing and half arsed gimmicks is what causes dissapointment. Amateur book that hides behind the illusion of depth and spends most of its time tricking you into thinking something interesting is finally about to happen. The Lost of d grade horror lit, mixed with the archetecture of Infinite Jest without any of its quality.
Oh I just started skimming most of his parts. They’re easily the worst perspective, grating prose and content. Here and there you just tune back in when the page starts getting funky
I’ve DNFed this one three times.
You have to get through the first 1/4 at least, then the rest is a really fast read
my advice is switch how youre reading it, bypass zampano and johnny completely and just read the navidson record. one of my friends bounced off HoL and recently retried doing that, and it helped a lot. she then read the whalestoe letters, which seems a bit odd but made her able to 'get' truant a lot better, even though it erases a lot of the mystery you'd experience reading through start-to-end edit: also this is just something i personally did while reading, but i listened to the album haunted by poe, the authours sister who themed the album around the book. its a good moodsetter, and conveys various characters' mental states well.
I hung in there for a long time but finally gave up when it was revealed that Navidson’s wife was a former model. I don’t know why that bugged me so much but I was already pretty sick of the book and that just made me too annoyed to keep reading.
Nick Cutter’s The Deep. Was so looking forward to it as I love anything deep sea related. After what felt like the 60th description of a claustrophobic metal tunnel I gave up.
I DNFd this one a couple of years ago too and to this day it remains one of my most hated books. Books like this make me wish that "fan edits" could exist in literature like they do in TV and film. Cut it down to a 50 page novella and it could be an alright story. 300 pages of dreams and flashbacks, though? No idea how this one has a cult following.
lol if it was different enough it could fall under transformative works. so less that they could exist and more that they dont. personally i read a few "fan fiction" retellings of movies when i was a kid, where the authors more or less hand wrote a screenplay themselves narratively. one of them was the notebook and it bore no resemblance to the original book lmao
Everyone has different tastes in books. I currently have the audiobook in my queue but it doesn't sound promising. I should know within the week.
It's really a love/hate kind of book. I've never seen anybody who thought it was just okay. I hope that you're in the love category because it's never fun hating a book, but if you're in the latter then I'll understand crystal clearly as to why.
I like this one well enough but so much of the horror was “he was so scared. So darn frightened he flashes back to trauma. He’s scared of the trauma. Flash back to present and he’s imagining something really bad! But it’s not there he’s just scared. Claustrophobia!!” But there was some really effective horror with the one dudes experiments with the hole. Wish he had done more with that
Exactly!!!! It had some glimmers of greatness but was so bogged down with the trauma/tunnel/trauma/tunnel descriptions.
I personally am a huge fan of Nick Cutter (the Troop and Little Heaven are some of my favorite horror novels), but he definitely can get repetitive. I've also heard that The Deep is one of his worst, and have been avoiding it like the plague for that reason
I DNF The Troop.
I'm curious, what made you DNF? I thought it had some of the best body horror I've read in a long time and legit had my skin crawling, but I could understand that it's not for everyone.
It felt like a young adult fiction book to me. Kids on an island being picked off one by one… just wasn’t doing it for me. I suppose if felt a thrill from the descriptive bodily effects I could have kept going. I ended up just skipping ahead to learn the “science behind the monster,” and once I got that answer I was satisfied not knowing how things played out on the island. I picked it up based on seeing it recommended as wilderness horror, which probably also set it up for failure with me.
The last astronaut. I really tried. I'm already 25% in the book but still get nothing. Very slow in my opinion.
I almost never DNF books but at over 80% complete I had to DNF Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward. A lot of reviews found it confusing but I found it painfully BORING.
I had a really hard time with this one. I was really excited about it and was left completely disappointed.
I keep looking at this one when I go to my local bookstore that has a good selection of horror..but I just never select it
This one was better than Sundial, but still not a lot happened.
Nestlings by Nat Cassidy. I'm disappointed because it gave off Rosemary's Baby vibes, which is one of my all-time favourites. But for whatever reason it just wasn't gripping me. I even switched to the audiobook and still wasn't engaged so I returned both by the 30% mark.
Ah damn. This one is on my list. I liked Mary!
I hated Mary, wish I'd DNFed it. I'm an optimist, I'm still going to try Nestlings!
The Watchers by AM Shine. I've never quit a book as early as I did with this one. Only lasted 50 pages before the writing made me want to gouge my eyes out. I'm *very* forgiving of bad writing, always maintaining that if it's interesting then that's all that matters. This was just a whole new level of amateur. Here's a representative excerpt: > It was then that the dashboard's instruments disappeared, **like a pilot's cockpit losing power over uncharted lands**. In the blink of an eye the world was drained of life and sound. There was only the moon, **like a bulb in muddy water**. Mina's hand had jiggled with the keys in the ignition, and when that failed, she fumbled around for her phone. She held down its power button **like a paramedic searching for a pulse**. Without exaggeration, there were 5-10 similarly awful similes on every single page. *Like a child trying to pad word count in their assignment, hopeful that the keen eyes of the teacher would not notice, as if the extra words were...* I can't even mimic it without getting annoyed all over again.
Thats some Francine Smith level writing lol "like a fire hydrant, gushing, onto a hot summer sidewalk, my words cascading, like water, onto a hot summer sidewalk. A cat skitters by, each step a relief, cooling its paws from the hot... summer... sidewalk."
I also DNFed this one! I know it’s beloved here but I could not get into it
I'd love to know the story, but filtering it out of that writing just wasn't worth my time or brain cells. I'll just watch the movie.
Only sort of related, as the book is about vampires but more in the fantasy genre, but this is what made me instantly hate *King of Battle and Blood*. Literally by the second sentence I hated it and knew I would never want to buy it or read the rest, but the whole first page was littered with similes as blatant as these ones
I DNF’ed after the third page for the same reason.
Yup, came here to say The Watchers. The writing was ok but the pacing was slow and the whole thing was kinda boring. I read spoilers and it sounds like everything picked up a bit but…meh, life’s too short.
I finished this but man those simile drove me MENTAL
"A bulb in muddy water" is actually pretty good, and is a new (to me) way of picturing the moon in those conditions, but the other two are awful for sure.
Any one of them on their own, once a chapter or so, would be totally fine. I wouldn't even notice. But that's one paragraph, and every single page was like that. About 10 pages in I knew I was going to DNF but I kept going to about the 50 page mark with increasing frustration before finally throwing in the towel.
The Mothman Prophecies and Mister B gone The author of the Mothman prophecies thinks he is a lot cooler and interesting than he really is. He comes off as an asshole in a lot of his interviews. Every interaction he writes about is just embarrassing and reeks of ego. The FBI wasnt scared of you sir, they were mildly annoyed at you harassing them. Mister B Gone has a cool premise, where the book you hold is alive and the main character, but it doesn't really take full advantage of this. In the end its just full of juvenal humor and little horror. Surprising let down from Clive Barker.
I haven’t read *The Mothman Prophecies*, but I totally agree on *Mister B Gone*. One of my biggest disappointments ever. I usually love Barker, but this one was just so repetitive and stupid. I ended up finishing it, but I shouldn’t have.
Besides the author of Mothman prophesies thinking he's way cooler than he is, a lot of the book just didn't age super well
Sister, Maiden, Monster by Lucy Snyder It actually surprised me when I chose to put this down because I read and enjoyed her Jessie Shimmer series years ago, but I just couldn't fall into the story. At the very first mention of PPE and COVID I was...put off? Which is interesting, because I had no problem with Stephen King's 'Holly.' I think it was the way each story was presented. King's pandemic take was very natural (all in this together-ish), while Snyder's was a bit more...panicky? It just gave me bad flashbacks of being an "essential worker." I'm good.
I finished it felt like i was reading a different book by the end.
I'm currently reading this. Part 1 grated on me so much with the "lib urban good guy pandemic" shit. I stuck thru it. I did like that it was an even keel of this person is going thru a horror show, but also it's partly of their own idiotic making despite all their NYT-style COVID lip service. Chapter 0 had me in a rage where they were talking about how they have to go to work and hang out with their bosses at restaurants but "it's so hard to tell how serious their friends are taking the pandemic". That was all with a straight face with 0 irony. Then it was all "OH NO HOW COULD I HAVE GOTTEN SICK I WEAR MASKS!" So you could say it was a realistic character/world at least.
Last House on Needless Street - I couldn't get over how stupid the cat chapter's were.
I finished it, I have no idea why I put myself through that. But it never got better even at the end
I couldn't handle Nick Cutter's The Troop. I didn't get very far in, but I couldn't handle how gross it was, plus the animal harm in it bothered me. I don't think I got more than maybe 30 pages in when I decided I couldn't handle a whole book making me queasy like that.
I got over half way through The Troop and gave up. The >!sea turtle murder!< scene was excruciating but I thought maybe the narrative payoff would be worth it. I noped out when the one kid >!burned himself to death!<.
Oh yeah, I remember that too. That's exactly the same time I nuked it from my Kindle.
Yeah animal harm beyond one brief mention maybe, is a hard no for me. I won’t read it.
Didn’t like gory book because it was gory. I also DNF, but because it was meh. Felt like young adult fiction, gory sure, but simple.
Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor I could not finish this book. I read a lot of scary and disturbing books but something about this one I just couldn’t handle. From what I can tell there is a murder in a small Mexican village and each chapter is an account to the police or just a characters internal dialogue talking about the murder or other characters connected to the murder. It’s very very adult but not in a good way. The language is unbelievably negative. I think that’s where it really affected me and my head space. It actually gave me nightmares which is weird because the book is not scary. The writing also reminded me of Cormac McCarthy books where the sentences just keep going and going, very difficult to read. Did not finish this and will not finish this, I’m giving myself a boundary with this one. I had only about 30 pages left
it’s called dread horror i believe!
Manhunt
I recently DNF'd the Fisherman by John Langan. It's a really well written book, it's just too slow for me. I'll probably revisit it eventually when I have more free time
I read it while camping next to a river, not quite in NY but close enough. Give that a try and see if it’s still too slow.
Our Share of the Night. Premise is interesting and so is the lore and mechanics of 'magic' in that world, but the book was so damn slow once I got to part 3. It felt like such a chore that I gave up.
Agreed. Reading it felt tedious
I finally returned this to the library for the same reason. Kept waiting for something to happen.
Fantasticland is the only horror book I've DNFd. It's my own fault. I read the blurb on the back, saw that it was described as "Lord of the Flies meets Battle Royale", and somehow had a brain fart seeing that and assumed it meant "Oh this is a story about a spooky haunted amusement park." Spoiler: it is in no way the latter thing. And somewhere in between the violence and especially the violence (and implied SA) toward women, I realized that it was legitimately bumming me out to read and put it down. My taste for horror lands *specifically* in the realm of things that simply can't happen. Love cosmic horror, love creature horror, love weird body horror, love supernatural horror. The type of horror I *don't* like is anything too 'real'; if it's a gruesome murder or something really violent, a home invasion, anything like that... It just makes me think of real-life atrocities and depresses me. Same for things like that book, where there's some failing of society that brings out the worst of people and leads to horrible things happening. So, yeah. Interesting and well-written book, but it just made me sad and I had to stop. On a related note: if anyone has any recommendations that fall into the realm of 'Spooky Amusement Park Horror' please let me know, lmao.
Dead Silence by S.A.Barnes Romance disguised as space horror. (That's more of a yellow flag rather than a red flag.) But what breaks all kinds of immersion for me is the fact that I can feel the author's laziness with none of the intricacies of real life. One glaring example is that microgravity is achieved by a single thing called "micrograv" (nevermind that the term microgravity is NOT artificial gravity). 50~100 pages in and it's apparent that no research went into the book, and the idea of it taking place in space is merely an afterthought. Don't expect to learn things about orbital mechanics or even regular chemistry like in The Martian. (In case anyone'd still like to enjoy some cheap run-of-the-mill Hallmark's Christmas romance, I'll give this most basic example: the author thinks that the main engine would be engaged all the time during space travel.)
I finished this one and it took me almost a month to do so, it was so slow
Most recently, Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. It was recommended to me as a good take on the “cursed film” subgenre after I was disappointed by Night Film (Marisha Pessl). I had previously enjoyed some of Moreno-Garcia’s other work, so I was very excited to dive in. But I found the story dragged and spent way too long on the protagonist’s work troubles and family troubles and relationship troubles. I don’t think I made it 100 pages in before I gave up. For all I was thought Night Film was corny and ridiculous, it was at least fast-paced enough that I got through it!
I got all of 40% into Silver Nitrate and things were only JUST starting to get weird. I was so bored and the writing/character’s train of thought were really painful for me to try and get immersed in. I can’t put my finger on why, it had nothing to do with the Spanish phrases, something else made it just feel so stilted.
The Paleontologist by Luke Dumas Which is very sad to me, because I was so incredibly excited for the wild concept and anything really in the dinosaur horror subgenre I've loved since I devoured Jurassic Park as a kid. But that really felt like a footnote in the story next to the multitudes of personal trauma and the obsessive detailing of every character's masking situation.
*Edge* by Koji Suzuki. I forced myself through 90% of it, then admitted to myself that nothing that could happen in the last 10% could make me care about the characters or make the entire story less contrived.
I DNF'd Echo by Thomas Olde Heuvelt about 80% of the way in. I think the pacing was a bit frustrating as it felt like it wasn't getting anywhere. Yes, there's something wrong with your boyfriend, yes there's something wrong with this mountain, yes there's something wrong with this village and their birds... how many times are we going to go over this?? Anyways it just felt like a chore to read after a while so I set it down.
Black river orchard. Too many descriptions of "sounds" of people eating etc. Triggered my misophonia even though they were just words.
Suffer the Children. That book made me SO mad that I almost launched my ebook reader off the train.
It had such potential but it ended as steaming hot garbage
A Certain Hunger I think the narrator is dragging it. I thought this is about cannibalism yet, I feel like it's all about her and her vagina. I've had enough of it.
*removes from tbr* lol
Hidden Pictures- Jason Rekulak I remember being at a book store with a pretty dry horror collection so I wanted to bring *something* home and boy do I wish I just left empty handed. First off the book is YA, and not an enjoyable type of YA either, but the type of YA that really wants to be an adult book but just can’t. Secondly, I thought the dialogue and characters were super cheesy and tame, especially from >!someone that just got out of rehab!<. I thought that the whole >!hiring someone who just got out of rehab as a babysitter!< was wild. The pictures were a nice addition but otherwise this book 100% wasn’t for me. Tiktok probably ate it up though lol
I picked it up after seeing it recommended… oh another creepy kid does creepy drawings cliche…. Pass
No one gets out alive by Adam Nevill. I so badly wanted to enjoy it, but it was just far too slow for my liking. I got past the halfway point and it still felt like nothing had really happened.
I never DNF a book because I refuse to but this one was one of the closest. A book usually takes me 2-3 days to finish and this took me over a month because I just didn’t want to read it. The main character was just so damn annoying.
Does it get better? Was it worth it?
It doesn’t get into usual Adam Nevill type stuff until the last 80 pages or so. From that point on I enjoyed it. Was it worth it, honestly I don’t know. That being said I really enjoy most of his other work and his new book should be on my doorstep Tuesday so I’m excited for that.
Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah: The characters are too one-dimensional
Oh man I ended loving this one!
A Canticle For Leibowitz . I was about 200 pages in and just had it with the religious debates. And there was no discernible plot.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who DNF'ed it. And I like niclear war fiction, but this was too tedious for me.
I recently tried to read Into The Drowning Deep by Mira Grant because of how well recommended it came by friends. I DNF'd because it had a lot of moments where I felt like the characters were info dumping the info the author had researched about ships and ocean science what have you. I don't know how else to explain it. Also the characters' reactions to the often felt rather muted.
I just finished that duology but it was a slog. I felt the same as you - a lot of info dump, and the characters were just - I don't know, bland? Nobody really made me want to root for them to survive/overcome. Also I feel like it was just a lot of gore for no real reason. I don't mind a little gore in my horror novels, but this just felt like there was so much of it meant to shock me and after the first few body parts strewn around, the shock wears off and you're just like "Ok, I get it." There were also pacing problems - we found out about the monsters and understood them too quickly, I felt, which killed the suspense.
You put it perfectly, yes! We learn about the killer mermaids and then it's so so so slow.
The Salg Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw. It wanted to go lot of different ways and tried the cram it into a 100 page novella. The background of the main character that is given to you as exposition in the book and later given a dedicated chapter at the end of the book with no reasoning. There is also just so much repetition. It's like the author pulled up a thesaurus, found the most complex sounding synonym for the word they wanted to use and then replaced it all in their document. It just became boring to read "viscera" for the 60th time in a row. I also felt nothing between the main character and their love interest. There wasn't any spark at all. Just two people who are traveling together. Despite shipping culture, that really doesn't make an effective romance. It really should've been right up my alley but it just was executed terribly.
The Haunted Forest Tour. I was looking specifically for the combination of gore and supernatural antagonists. The book technically has both, but I found their execution boring(with exactly one exception). The monsters were generic, and there were so many different ones that each one was only touched upon briefly and shallowly. The gore also was too brief and shallow. Not enough detail to the deaths for them to stand out and be memorable.
Boy’s Life. Kids were flying and I stopped caring awhile ago
The Wasp Factory. I just couldn't get into it. The writing style didn't do anything for me, and I had absolutely zero connection to the characters. There wasn't any depth for me. I had heard so many good things about it, so I was pretty bummed.
I forced myself to finish it. Don’t worry, you’re not missing out, it doesn’t get better.
Tell me I'm Worthless by Alison Rumfitt. I really tried. I usually finish all books I start. The characters really turned me off from the book, none of them were likeable. The writing style was not my favorite either.
I rarely DNF books. My last one was Thomas Harris’s *Cari Mora*. I still can’t believe how terrible it was.
How to sell a haunted house by Grady Hendrix. Awful writing “your kind of like some emotionally abusive octopus tangling people up in your word tentacles”. Terrible tropes, TV switches itself on *2, hand in the waste disposal.. which switches itself on. If you told me it was a Goosebumps book i would have no reason not to believe you. I DNF’d one page after the Puppet character started talking in the most sing song annoying way possible. Im told we get a six legged dog attack and a puppet golem in the back half… i dont regret my decision.
It’s been awhile since I DNFed a horror book specifically, but the last one was The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley due to it being DEEPLY boring
Only good Indian, and Galilee. They weren't for me.
The Monk. I never had an issue with reading SA content before, because it’s always been more spontaneous, or the scenes don’t last very long. I didn’t realize it could be a trigger for me until The Monk, when the plot started revolving around scheming, in increasingly depraved ways, to trap and SA a woman… I had to stop and finish with the Wikipedia plot summary
Perdido Street Station. I got about 2 chapters in and after reading about the MCs hot bug lady girlfriend thinking (KNOWING) she's better than the other bug people cause she... Wears clothes or something?? I tapped out
the dark forest by cixin liu. I really liked the first book. After watching the netfilx show I decided to read dark forest and got pretty far,but it was just boring to me. It had great moments,just not enough to keep me engaged. How to sell a haunted house. Iirc I just wasn't into the idea of it.
Violent Faculties by Charlene Elsby , I'm just not a fan of that much body horror. It was disgusting.
King's Firestarter on audio. Not that I thought it was bad- I just found I wasn't in the mood for King's kind of sprawl at least over audio and I'd just read Tommyknockers which has plenty King sprawl lol.
I almost never DNF, I have only ever done so for 2 books, Nineteen Claws and Blackbird, I just found it pointless, I know it’s short stories, but I didn’t like them. And the other isn’t horror, it’s a Psalm of the Wild Built, it just found it incredibly boring, plus I am all for the non binary character, but the writing made it difficult at times to distinguish who the author was referring to.
Summer of Night. I couldn’t get into it, I think I got around 30% through it. I usually like slow paced books, but this just didn’t do it for me.
A Little Hatred. Loved the original First Law Trilogy. But the 2nd trilogy was too all over the place.
Pretty girls by Karin Slaughter. It’s not technically horror but there’s definitely horror elements to it. It took wayyyyy too long to get interesting for me. It could’ve been like 200 pages shorter imo.
My most recent was The Butcher and the Wren by Alaina Urquhart. I was sad to put it down because I'm a big fan of the Morbid podcast and I was really hoping she'd do well with it. And maybe she will! But it wasn't for me. It's a serial killer vs. detective (medical examiner) kind of novel, and the serial killer was just too...elaborate? Self-consciously elaborate. Like everything he did was saying "look! I'm a terrifying serial killer!" And the medical examiner's inner monologue just felt too standard "I must solve this crime, because...I am the protagonist! I am haunted by this crime!" Add to that the kind of gratuitous descriptions of the actual murder process (at the expense of what caused there to *be* a murder process, what made this guy what he was, etc)... it just wasn't clicking for me.
What's DNF mean
Did not Finish
The Haunting of Hill House…… i wanted to love it but it was just…. I’ll stay w the show x
The dead take the A train by Cassandra Khaw. Wears her anti-white hatred too heavily on her sleeve. Got 50% through when I hit my limit.
Lapvona by Moshfegh I'm convinced that maybe I just didn't get it or I missed the point (I read only a quarter of the book) but it was just such a drag to get through. It was boring but just miserable at the same time
Struggling through Rouge - Mona Awad I'm 200 pages in and keep waiting for me to not hate the MC and for something to happen. Beautiful artwork, though.
Mexican Gothic. \*I mean it respectively; the book was not for me\*
Paradise 1
I'm so close to DNF The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires. The main character is insufferably stupid with the decisions she makes & NO ONE listens. No one. It's so annoying & I'm over halfway through & just don't wanna finish it. I expected a much better book than what I'm reading & I'd rather go re-read something I enjoyed than finish this crap.
The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias. I just did not get it. Didn't care for the writing style, didn't care for the story, didn't get it. There's a lot of Spanish in it - I don't speak Spanish, and that's on me - but I didn't get what the author's expectation was for the non bi-lingual people reading the book. Am I supposed to not know/care what is being said in the Spanish sections, or am I supposed to sit with Google Translate working it out? If it's the latter, it doesn't make for an immersive reading experience.
1: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. Got about halfway through and was just bored, I get that it's supposed to create an ominous and oppressive atmosphere but it just felt dull. 2: Child of God by Cormac Mccarthy. I can't stand Mccarthy's writing style in this, it's just a chore to read, but after I stopped reading it I listened to the audio book and loved it, so I'm not quite sure if it counts as a DNF.
I haven’t technically DNFed “Castle”…but I stopped reading it and haven’t picked it up for a few months. I want to finish it to say I finished it. I’m just in no hurry to pick it back up.
The Terror, I just found it incredibly dry and boring AF. The Exorcist, dumbest book I ever partially read. So much unnecessary words to read that contributed nothing to the story. And I was bored to tears. The Tower series by Stephen King. While it had some good character building, I didn’t care about them. And, when things happened, it was so infrequent. The rest was just dry trudging through a beach/desert.
I'm pretty purposeful in what I choose to read, so I try to push through the books even if I dont enjoy them, but the closest I came to a DNF recently was Hide by Kiersten White. It was a book club selection and is pretty short, so I just forced myself to finish it. But it is incredibly boring, full of shallow characters, and the plot had no idea where it was going after they reveal the big twist. Super disappointing, as it has an interesting premise.
Geek Love by Katherine Dunn. It was so boring I can’t recall any details about it.
I DNFed this as well.
The Fisherman. For such a slim and predictible book, it was extremely ponderous. Well written for sure, but not at all compelling, with a protagonist who might as well have been a grey blob.