Book Meme III - Horror

This was difficult.  Extremely difficult.  I'm just not a voracious horror reader, despite reading a bit of everything.  And when I do read horror, I'm very critical.  It's the lowest rated category in my book list, primarily because I'm supposed to find it frightening, and usually I find it boring.  I remember liking it much more as a teenager when Christine, The Stand, It, and Pet Semetary were new and I was still coming off a childhood of Hammer films and Soylent Green.  The only thing to make me nervous as an adult was a movie, not a book.  I went to Dawn of the Dead alone close to midnight in 2004 when it came out, and when I walked out the back of the theater into an empty lot I was a bit twitchy.


The last horror book I read was:
Law 101: Everything You Needed to Know About American Law by Jay M. Feinman.  Actually, Horns by Joe Hill.  Enjoyable, but not great.  I do like him better than Stephen King.

The horror book I am reading right now is:
I am not.

The next horror book I will read is:
Probably the new Joe Hill book, Nos4A2

The last horror book I didn’t finish was:
I almost didn't finish The Cipher by Kathe Koja.

I didn’t finish it because:
It gets a little weird for a little too long and the language requires some work in my opinion.

The last horror I recommended to a friend was:
I never recommend horror books to friends.  Although I have told my wife a few times whether something was ok to read, like a Stephen King book (I think I told her Under the Dome and Cell were ok reads).

The last horror book someone recommended to me was: (Did you enjoy it?)
I truly think the last horror book someone recommended to me was Pet Semetary in high school.  And I did enjoy it at the time.  Someone recommended The Last Gunslinger series to me, but I consider that fantasy and I didn't really enjoy it.

My favorite horror novel is:
This is truly the lowest rated category in 17 years of tracking what I read.  The Living Dead edited by John Joseph Adams was good, lots of short stories about zombies, but only about 1/4 of it.  1/4 of that book was truly excellent reading.  The other 3/4 not so much.  I suppose it can't be my favorite then, because even if I gave it a 10, the other 3/4 drags it down to a 2.5?  I think John Dies in the End is my favorite I can remember recently, although I disliked the sequel.  I do like the classics: Frankenstein, Sleepy Hollow, Dracula, and The Mountains of Madness.  One of the scariest endings I remember to a book was A Handful of Dust.  It gave me the sort of feeling I imagine I'm supposed to get from slasher movies.

An underrated horror author is:
I think most horror is overrated: King, Koontz, Lumley, Brooks (Max that is, as in World War Z).  So I'm going to go with zombie SHORT stories are underrated.  There are some gems if you read enough of them, but you have to put in some time and get past a sizable selection of turds.

My favorite sub-genre of horror is:
Using this list from Wikipedia, comedy horror and science fiction horror.

It's been a long time, and I've been meming to meme...

John DeNardo posted a meme over at the SF Signal.  It asks questions about scifi, fantasy, and horror, so I'm going to break it down into three parts.  Part I, the Scifi Book Meme:


The last science fiction book I read was:
The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain Banks.  I read a lot of Banks and Scalzi.  I read Redshirts while I was recovering my card accident last year.

The science fiction book I am reading right now is:
Constellation Games by Leonard Richardson

The next science fiction book I will read is:
I'm not sure.  I'm not currently queued up and I want to finish Law 101 and getting ready for my PMP, so it'll be a short gap, even with my 50 pages a day (average) rule for 2013.

The last science fiction book I didn’t finish was:
Subterranean Scalzi Super Bundle

I didn’t finish it because:
It's a mix of scifi and nonfiction about writing, so I'm reading it in chunks over a very very long period of time.  Like one chunk between each other book I read, and there are a lot of chunks.

The last science fiction I recommended to a friend was:
Banks to my wife.  The Expanse series (James S.A. Corey) to Erik.  Soft Apocalypse (Will McIntosh) to Ming.  I don't think Ming read it, although he liked 2030 when I recommended that book.

The last science fiction book someone recommended to me was: (Did you enjoy it?)
Larry recommended Constellation Games by Leonard Richardson.  I am enjoying it.  I like the quote (among many excellent pieces of writing), "You are employed by a suspicious number of douchebags!"

My favorite science fiction novel is:
Probably Orwell's 1984, although I don't usually classify it as science fiction.  But I always pair it with Zamyatin's We, and that's definitely science fiction.  I rave about War With the Newts by Karel Capek all the time.

An underrated science fiction author is:
Terry Pratchett.  He gets props for his fantasy, but The Long Earth (with Stephen Baxter) was underrated.  It was a good book and I particularly liked that my family liked it, both my wife and daughter.  Eryn liked it enough that she used it for a school project.  I'd say the same about A. Lee Martinez and Emperor Mollusk versus the Sinister Brain (also a favorite of Eryn after I recommended it).

My favorite sub-genre of science fiction is:
Hard science fiction.  I like it technical.  Technical enough to bother other casual scifi readers.  I also like historical.  Not a sub-genre as in books about the past, but rather I like reading older scifi like War With the Newts, Wells and Verne, Sturgatskys' Roadside Picnic (another candidate for favorite), and dystopias that span history and were perhaps thought of as scifi in their time.

Fashion Sense

Kyle left his jacket at my house on my birthday.  There's a picture of me wearing it, but you can't see my face.  More of an in-the-mirror picture.  I'll have to fix that, because we're now trying to turn Kyle's jacket into a meme.

Eryn in Kyle's jacket.

My mother-in-law in Kyle's jacket:

My wife in Kyle's jacket:

My niece in Kyle's jacket:

 My father-in-law in Kyle's jacket: