Horror Roundtable - Week Seventy-Four
Name your favourite horror novel.
Sean T. Collins - Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat
It’s a toss-up between It and The Stand, which is 50% the origin of my oft-repeated maxim that Stephen King is at his best over 1,000 pages or under 100. (The other 50% is the short-story collections Night Shift and Skeleton Crew.) I’ve re-read them both recently and I think The Stand holds together better, but with the exception of the superflu section, which always makes me paranoid when I get a case of the sniffles, It is much scarier.
Probably the Dracula series written by Robert Lory for Pinnacle. Drac is back and he’s being used by an old Van Helsing-ish professor to fight evil. It had the flavor of the old Universal monster series of films where Drac or Frankenstein’s monster met other horror characters.
Lots o’ fun.
Jeff O’Brien
FADE by Robert Cormier
Definitely a toss up between “Nemesis” by Shaun Hutson (How more of his work has not been filmed, Slugs aside, is a travesty, all great B-Movie material!), Clive Barker’s “Cabal” or finally anything of Richard Laymon’s, great vacation horror reading!
Well I’ve been seriously lax on being all I can be when it comes to reading horror as of late, but I will say that one of my fondest memories is the Summer post-college when I had no job and no prospects for three straight months and spent a couple of weeks therein sprawled out on an air mattress in the laundry room of my mothers house - don’t ask - plowing through The Stand and It for the first time. I’d stay up until 5 or 6 reading them every night, scaring myself silly, and then sleep all day. Ahh, good memories. What’s weird is sometimes I think my entire life after that moment has been a dream and someday I’ll wake up back on that air mattress. Is this considered an over-share? What was the question again? Where am I?
THE HORROR SHOW by Greg Kihn which is the most perfect homage to b-movies, FAMOUS MONSTER MAGAZINE, and filmmaker Ed Wood and his gang of cohorts. The plot of the book mixes it up with the supernatural and a few other pulp elements all which culminates into a very cool twist ending. It had two sequels that followed it but it never seemed to be as perfect as the first.
This is a tough question to answer because I like a lot of books. I also tend to like short horror stories over full-length novels. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is probably my favorite full-length horror novel of all time, but I also really love Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House. J. K. Huysmans’ classic L-Bas and Clive Barker’s Damnation Game are some other personal favorites. I could go on naming books forever!
Novel? Who has time to read novels these days? Oh, sure, the classics are required reading– Frankenstein, Dracula, The Shining– but if you’re a person of limited attention span like I am, then short story collections are where it’s at. Here are three great ones to get you started:
The Collection, by Bentley Little
Peaceable Kingdom, by Jack Ketchum
100 Jolts: Shockingly Short Stories, by Michael A. Arnzen
Each of these books contained multiple scenes that kept me good and haunted for several days. You’re bound to find something to your liking. And if a story starts to bore you, just skip to the next one!
I haven’t read many horror novels, but one I did read back in the day and really enjoyed was Cabal. It’s the one by Clive Barker that became a not-so-successful (but I thought still rocked) movie called Night Breed. Something about it was just cool to me reading it, kinda like X-men, but more “realistic”. These creatures were outcasts and everything, but you totally wanted to be one. That, and the book was great for sexy monster sex scenes and pretty short which is great for my attention span (it took place in Canada too I think or am I thinking of something else?). Give’er diesel, sex monsters, give`er diesel.
Like the Bookmobile, the Horror Roundtable delivers. Thanks to all the well-read ladies and gents who participated in this week’s salon. If you’d be so kind, please give us your literary recommendations below.
November 26th, 2007 at 2:51 am
Some of my all time favs in no particular order are:
VAMPYRRHIC by Simon Clark - Clark takes the worn out vampire novel & does some really cool things with it. And he actually creates a couple of scenes which raised the hairs on the back of my neck a wee bit. Not at all an easy task when it comes to this jaded, lifelong genre fiction fan & voracious reader. Highly recommended.
Now if Leisure would just get around to publishing Clark’s sequel, VAMPYRRHIC RITES!
SUMMER OF NIGHT by Dan Simmons - This one has my vote for being the scariest novel ever. At least it’s the scariest novel that this particular individual has ever read. It’s also firmly entrenched within my top three favorite novels of all time in any genre.
A WINTER’S HAUNTING by Dan Simmons - Though this sequel to his SUMMER OF NIGHT isn’t quite as scary or as epic as is the earlier novel, it’s chilling in it’s own right.