Reddit mentions of The Devil Rides Out (Duke de Richleau)

I started The Devil Rides Out by Wheatley and was so underwhelmed by the way he does dialogue that I had to put it down. The way his characters speak to each other doesn't seem real or authentic at all. It's like I'm reading a real bad theatric action flick from the seventies or something. I looked at 3 or 4 other points in the story to see if the writing changes and it doesn't. I cannot recommend this, even though I've seen it mentioned by many others on this subreddit.

I tried Alectryomancer and Other Weird Tales and was also underwhelmed, though not for the same reasons. Slatsky is a great writer in that he knows how to use his prose and create some very beautiful passages, but the plots of the first four stories in the compilation, including his No One is Sleeping in this World, a story he's known for I guess, just fell flat, unfortunately. They didn't carry through and I felt it more tragic than irritating, to be honest. It's got only 5-star reviews on amazon as of now, so I bought it, thinking it would be one of the better things I'd read all year. One of the reviewers states that it's a "thinking man's weird tales", yet either I am not a thinking person or this book has been padded by some dishonest reviews. It really is a good attempt at a debut of stories but the plots just did not have the weight behind them, unfortunately. It felt more like a compilation of idea/prose experiments that seemed to all fall short. If I can muster the time, maybe I'll give some more of the stories a shot but, for now, this one goes back on the shelf and feels like a potential waste of money.

I'm currently making my way through Gateways to Abomination by Bartlett. The format of the small shorter passages/stories is one that, I have to admit, I came into the book with a biased against. I've been pleasantly surprised, though. This book is pretty rad when you get into it and I like the feeling of reading different passages about how fucked up Leeds, the town/city, can be.

I'm also making my way through Stephen King's IT and Clive Barker's Books of Blood Vol 4-6. Just recently finished Behold the Void by Fracassi and I can't recommend it enough. Fracassi has some very unique ideas for his stories and executes them with awesome prose—not too verbose and not too succinct, just right.

Writing is going okay. Still churning through the rough drafts of the stories that will be in the next compilation of mine, hopefully self-published by the end of this year (2017).