What Should I Buy? What Should I Avoid?

I go through a lot of horror novels and there's just sooo many different takes on the genre out there. (This is a good thing mind you!)

What I can tell you:
Jack Ketchum's good. He's very icky though. He's kind of the king of Splatterpunk. Also, you might want to steer clear of "The Girl Next Door". You're going to want like....3 showers after that.

Brian Keene's all right. I never finished "Ghoul" but I've read a couple of his zombie novels and they were decent.

Poke around Dorchester Publishing's site, they seem to be the leading horror pub out there these days!

Anne, I run screaming from Richard Laymon. He makes me need to shower. Bentley Little bored me after the 2nd one of his I read. I was going to suggest Keene, but since you're already reading him...

IIRC, Leisure is one of the places reading my horror... ah, the eternal wait for pubs to respond...*sigh*

If you can handle scenery chewing, F. Paul Wilson's Midnight Mass is creepy and scary and has a *gasp* positive ending! There's also Wilson's The Keep.

Do I need to mention HP Lovecraft? Also William Hope Hodgson, Frank Belknap Long, and the ever-delightful Abraham Merritt. Early 20th century, and still great. They'll be at the library, in used bookstores, or my personal favorite money-siphon, abebooks.com.

You should order the anthology:

"Don't Turn the Lights On" Edited by Diane Bocco and available from Stonegarden Publishing. You can order it through Amazon, too.

It has a dozen wonderful stories.

I especially hope you will like the tale: 'Creamy White Flesh', and excuse my attempt at shameless self - promotion.

AnneMarble said:

I haven't been able to "do" short stories lately. I don't know why. I guess it's the feeling of "I didn't have the time to read a short story, so I read a novel instead."
Yeah, I know that makes no sense.

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No. It makes perfect sense to me.

Whenever I don't have time to read [short stories, newspapers, magazine articles or books that will improve my writing] I rush right out and buy (or borrow) the biggest honking novel I can find...and if I cannot find a big honking novel...I look for a series. 4 or 5 books is the norm.

Series?!????

Heeeeyyyyyy...you can read 'Necroscope' by Brian Lumley. Haggis liked it. So did III. So did I (I mean me...not 1).

Of course we are all on the 'only marginally sane' side of the line......

The classics. Bram Stoker. Mary Shelley. As someone else here mentioned, HP Lovecraft. Wilkie Collins.

You mentioned Braunbeck. I like him lots. Try In Silent Graves--one of my favorites.

Avoid Ketchum and especially Bentley Little. I like them both, but there is that definite ick factor going on. Try some Joe Lansdale. His High Cotton is a wonderful anthology. Of course there's Peter Straub too, and many more.

For newer voices, you could always check out some of the mags or zines like Cemetery Dance or Weird Tales. A quick trip to Duotrope and a check of the horror offerings will give you all you need.

Good luck and scary reading.

Take a look at published AWers in the horror section of the AW library. HINT, HINT.

well AnneMarble I don't have much to add that hasn't already been covered but I have to say I am very glad that you are reading The Exorcist! I'm kind of in the same boat, trying to get back to reading more horror (as opposed to my steady diet of detective suspense thrillers) now that I am habitually writing again and call myself writing in the horror genre. But it's very hard to find new horror even in the most well stocked of bookstores these days. You might like Grimm Memorials and The Prison by R. Patrick Gates. I read both of these within the past few years so they should still be in print. I got them both from Amazon. T.E.D. Klein has a book from the 80s called The Ceremonies which is worth tracking down. Klein was editor of Twilight Zone magazine at one point and I believe that is his only novel. I haven't read Ramsey Campbell in years but I always liked what I read. Incarnate was about some weird-ass dream therapy gone awry. You might be able to find Michael McDowell's stuff in used bookstores. The Elementals, Cold Moon Over Babylon, and the six volume Blackwater series are fun, light, quiet, southern gothics. McDowell is one of my personal inspirations. If for some reason you missed The Other or Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon, put those two on your modern horror classics list. Since I know you don't like to shower unnecessarily, another one to avoid is Edward Lee....dude has a pretty heavy ick ratio.

and thanks for the great thread topic!

Try Joyce Carol Oates. I hadn't read her before the short story, The Ruins Of Contracoeur I recently finished. She's excellent. I'm going to look for Zombie, which won the Stoker Award.

Forgot one--Burnt Offerings.

Actually, Oates triggers my ick factor big-time. I think it's her combination of slit-yer-wrists depression and squicky things happening.

callalily61 said:

I think it's her combination of slit-yer-wrists depression and squicky things happening.

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Squicky? Now there's a word that cries horror. LOL Actually, of all the short stories in the book 999 that Haggis sent me, hers was the one that stayed with me. It kind of dug into the roots of things, and she had a way with that story of setting the mood. I guess I'd never tried her because she made her start in other genres, but she definitely knows how to haunt your mind after you're done reading.

Kerr said:

...she definitely knows how to haunt your mind after you're done reading.

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Yes, but for me, not in a good way. Like Harlan Ellison. I've sworn off him for life. Same reasons.

Hmm, speaking of Harlan brought to mind another old short story I found fascinating and terrifying, In The Barn, by Piers Anthony (of all people), which appeared in Again, Dangerous Visions in the late 70's, a SF anthology edited by Harlan Ellison. I guess the story was considered scifi as it takes place on an alternate world, but I found it perhaps the most terrifying story I'd ever read. Of course, that was then and we've all become somewhat hardened in thirty years time. I'll have to try to find a copy and see if it has the same affect again.

Anne, may I ask why you're getting into horror? Research? Entertainment? Professional development? All three? I've assumed all three, so I'm going to get a bit boffiny here.

I love a well-crafted horror story, but I'm very picky about its composition. I tend to class horror as either psychological, sociological, metaphysical or some mix of these.

Psychological Horror
I love psychological horror - which I think sits somewhere on the border of suspense/thriller. It's my favourite kind of horror. Good psychological horror serves you up well-crafted characters, sharp dialogue, revealing character arcs and the grisly underbelly of human thought - all enriched with clotted dollops of suspense. My favourites include Thomas Harris' Silence of the Lambs, and Stephen King's Misery, plus Roald Dahl in his darker moments. Because it's very dialoguy, psych horror lends itself very well to cinema and/or theatre, so let me also add Hitchcock's Rear Window to my list.

Sociological Horror
This is my term to describe horror about how society breaks down or fails to function. If psychological horror is kissin cousin to the thriller, sociological horror often sees a bit more mystery or action. It's by far the least common kind of horror. There are a few good books in this subgenre, and more good movies: Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos, the movie The Children of the Corn and the original Stepford Wives, and I believe I'd include Daphne Du Maurier's The Birds - which is also a great Hitchcock movie, and also The Wicker Man (see this before you ever go to a Burning Man festival ). Here I'd also include Invasion of the Body Snatchers - the original Donald Sutherland movie. Stretching just a little further into the SF realm you have The Omega Man - which is actually apocalyptic SF with a horror element rather than the Body Snatchers, which I consider the reverse. I'd park Rosemary's Baby here.

Metaphysical Horror
Omigosh, this is hit and miss. Most of the really trashy horror finds its home here. Metaphysical horror is the term I use to describe horror about man's relationship with the universe or himself. But there's a lot of crap here, and so I'm very, very picky indeed. The good stuff has great themes and concepts; the atrocious stuff merely has graphic imagery. The cinema has a lot to answer for here -- metaphysical horror is a great vehicle to deliver mindless special effects and titillation.

I'd agree with previous posters and definitely include the 19th century classics - Shelley's Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, and Stoker's Dracula. Definitely, definitely read these in their original before seeing someone's movie adaptation. Shelley's treatment of Frankenstein's monster is smarter, more lucid, deeper and more sensitive than anything you can find from Boris Karloff in makeup. She wrote Frankenstein at only 21, and it's very impressive in its maturity. Stoker's Dracula is far better in book form than in any movie form I've seen too. It's got a great undercurrent of Victorian raunch coupled with British colonial superiority and a wonderful xenophobic fear of Eastern Europe - plus the archetypal vamp, of course.

The Exorcist lives here.

I'd suggest reading a couple of Lovecraft shorts for completeness - but only read more if you can see past his purple prose, stiff sentences and flat characterisation to the fun ideas. Lovecraft is a great conceptualist. He loved screwing with our smug notions of man's place in the universe. I love his imagery and themes of tortured solitude, but someone should have taught him what pacing and character are all about. If you like Lovecraft's take on the universe, you can also pick up some August Derleth, Robert Bloch and Brian Lumley - they also work with tentacles-in-ya-face metaphysical horror, but to my mind have much stronger characterisation and narrative ability. Just don't eat kalamari or baby octopus while you're reading. As an offshoot, you might try Colin Wilson. I put him in the same camp as Lovecraft etc... but he's more into hairy legs than tentacles. He has a very dark mind for the metaphysical though, which I think is a good prerequisite.

Let me also mention Poe here: Poe.

Ghost stories! Oh, these can be a delight. They're partly psychological horror -- did I see what I thought I saw or did I not? What does this thing want? But they're also metaphysical too by their very nature - what's life like after death? How should we treat the dead? Most of the best ghost stories are shorts; any reputable ghost story anthology has scads of good material.

Stories of human depravity and bestialism get their own paragraph too here. Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a must read. Cat People I'd say is a must-see. I'm trying to think of a pinnacle werewolf story to recommend, but one doesn't come to mind right away -- there's a whole thread on werewolves at the moment though. The Hunger is a pretty good story of human depravity too - vampirism without the fangs.

Nonspecific horror
Quite a bit of horror mixes the psychological, sociological and metaphysical - a little from columns A, B and C; mix it up to try and scare you. To be honest, it feels a bit like cheating to me -- like throwing in curry-powder to spice up otherwise uninteresting cooking. I like my horror to be strongly theme- and character-driven; but nonspecific horror tends to be plot- and effects-driven.

There are a few artists who are just horror factories - King, Koontz and Craven come straight to mind. Sometimes they've got a great thematic idea, but other times they'll just throw together anything that might scare without regard to theme. They're all good story-tellers, so it'd be unfair to call their work hit and miss; rather, I'd say hit and bunt. If Misery is one of my favourite King stories, IT is one of my least favourites - great imagery, good narrative and brilliant scene-setting searching for a theme.

On my Avoid List
What horror to avoid? Anything that lacks suspense; anything that lacks a meaningful theme; anything that's titillating rather than confrontational. So when I'm looking for horror I spurn most vamp stories (many aren't horror so much as sadomasochistic gothic romance), zombie brainmunching stories (dark humour more than true horror), most stories involving large animals, or swarms of animals (excepting The Birds, which is much more about social breakdown than birds themselves) or people grown very large or small, or people/animal hybrids, anything involving human mutilation where that's the only point. It's not that you couldn't tell strong horror stories using these premises - it's just that so few people do, when special effects and titillation are so cheap and easy.

Why Horror?
Good horror changes us. It shakes up the brittle edifice of our smug complacency; our tendency to take ourselves, each other and our world for granted. It cuts through our denials and self-justifications and veneer of civilisation to find the limbic core of what drives us - our greeds, our lusts and our fears - and to serve them back up to us, naked, wet and slithering and garnished with a sprig of parsely. With good horror, taking a shower isn't enough. You need to flee to bed with a bunch of pillows and a hot water bottle and hide under the covers with your toes clenched whimpering for a while. And when you emerge, you come out a little less self-assured, but a lot more grateful for the world we've managed to construct for ourselves.

Hope there's something vaguely helpful in this. My tastes may be nothing like yours, but sometimes hearing why someone likes or doesn't like something, can help us work out why we disagree with them.

AnneMarble said:

Of course, now I have the urge to write a novel about a shrunken half-human half-ferret vampire attacked by giant rats and a swarm of eggplants who want to cut off his limbs.

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I think it'll be a big, big hit.

AnneMarble said:

Of course, now I have the urge to write a novel about a shrunken half-human half-ferret vampire attacked by giant rats and a swarm of eggplants who want to cut off his limbs.

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I so want to crit that!

anthologies are always good place to start. Because if you like a writer you can go get their books. I've read a lot of Anne Rice, she is very good with historical details but has weak ancient egyptian myth. plus side if you like brooding vamps she is your go to girl. I like Nancy Holden also she has done alot of books including ones in the Buffy and Angel series. She clubs out strong images and neat plots. Some juv. writers are good. Some folks like Laurell K. Hamilton. My all time favorite horror novel was The Stand but not so much light reading.