Spooky Reads
20 Oct
With Halloween around the corner, ASF sees fit to give a shout out to the horror story—that often ignored but much loved genre. Here are a few of our staff favorites.
Jill Meyers claims, “I don’t read horror so much, but the three suggestions below are
deliciously creepy reads. I get freaked out by stories about amoral, seemingly omniscient children. Bad seeds.” Her list:
What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt
“The Rocking-Horse Winner” by D. H. Lawrence (“not really a bad seed, but creepy nonetheless—a child possessed, you could say”)
We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver (“a child in the form of a Columbine killer”)
Stacey Swann
“Stephen King’s last short story collection, Everything Is Eventual, is pretty erratic. However, the short story ’1408′ has an unexpected creepy power (much more so than the film adaptation). Also, I still have a weird affection for Henry James’s Turn of the Screw. Old-school horror.”
Rebecca Bengal’s getting scared by “the very timely The New Vampire’s Handbook: A Guide for the Recently Turned Creatures of the Night by Joe Garden, Janet Ginsburg, and a whole coven of past and present Onion writers and editors.”
Sarah Wambold:
“I don’t read too many specified horror novels but I do find certain reads frightening or just bizarre.” Such as:
Lenin’s Embalmers by Ilya Zbarsky & Samuel Hutchinson
My Sweet Audrina by V. C. Andrews
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
Call Me Crazy by Anne Heche (excessively strange)
Stacy Muszynski insists that “Time for horror means time finally for the two Steven King novels whose film versions have messed with my head for just about 20 years now—Carrie and The Shining. If those go well (and my nightlight stays lit), I’ll take on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. And there’s always Kathy Acker’s strangely funny and repulsive Blood and Guts in High School and Hubert Selby Jr.’s astonishing The Room.”
Johannes Lichtman still loves “Jane Eyre. That book never ends, and, much like Michael Myers in the Halloween movies, it just keeps coming back.”
Dina Guidubaldi begrudgingly admits that “Stephen King kind of rules. I don’t necessarily want to write like him, but I wish I could think like him. I still get freaked out remembering ‘Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut’ and ‘The Jaunt’ from Skeleton Crew.”
Stephanie Stickney recommends
House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski “my all-time horror favorite”
Lost by Gregory Maguire
Ghost Story by Peter Straub
And Angella Beshara thinks “Let the Right One In is one of the scariest, creepiest books I’ve read. I haven’t seen the movie but heard it was great [it is—Ed.].”
Great suggestions. I’ll echo the King mentioned here, as well as PET SEMATARY, early shorts in NIGHT SHIFT, and a story up at TNY called “Harvey’s Dream” . GHOST STORY, LTROI and HOL were all great. I found AMERICAN PSYCHO by Bret Easton Ellis to be really disturbing. Most anything by Jack Ketchum, but he’s pretty brutal. Really OLD Dean Koontz is good like WHISPERS and PHANTOMS. Most anything by Clive Barker.
Oh, V.C. Andrews, you so bad! And Turn of the Screw *still* messes with me. Those James boys and their psychological thrillahs!
E.T.A. Hoffmann “Der Sandmann”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman “The Yellow Wallpaper”
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa “Cogwheels”
Arthur Machen “The White People”
Ray Bradbury “The October Game” (from “Long After Midnight”)
Shirley Jackson “The Haunting of Hill House”
M John Harrison “Gifco” (from “Things That Never Happen”)
Kelly Link “Stone Animals” (from “Magic for Beginners”)