Horror

Hecht, Daniel. City of Masks: A Cree Black Thriller. Bloomsbury, 2003.

Lila Beauforte wanted to make a new start for her family by moving back into Beauforte House, the family’s 150 year old mansion located in the moneyed Garden District of New Orleans. Uneasy from the moment she and her husband moved in, the tension only increased once the movers and painters had completed their work and Lila was more often alone in the house. The tension breaks in a horrifying series of manifestations that culminate in brutal physical attacks. They move out of the house, but Lila’s mental state continues to deteriorate and her family calls in parapsychologist Cree Black to finally convince Lila that it is all in her head. While Cree knows that manifestations are sometimes imaginary, it doesn’t take her long to realize the situation is serious and very, very real. It will take all Cree’s skill and courage to help Lila confront not only the ghosts that haunt her but also a family secret that could tear the Beaufortes apart.

THE MASTER OF HORROR

Stephen King is the American novelist and short-story writer, whose enormously popular books revived the interest in horror fiction from the 1970s. King's place in the modern horror fiction can be compared to that of J.R.R. Tolkien's who created the modern genre of fantasy. Like Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens or Balzac, King has expressed the fundamental concerns of his era, and used the horror genre as his own branch of artistic expression. King has underlined, that even in the world of cynicism, despair, and cruelties, it remains possible for individuals to find love and discover unexpected resources in themselves. His characters often conquer their own problems and malevolent powers that would suppress or destroy them. Here are a selection of some of his best horror fiction.

King, Stephen. Everything’s Eventual: 14 Dark Tales. Scribner, 2002.

This dark cocktail of terror is vintage King and displays his literary talents to best advantage. What would you do if you woke up in an autopsy suite with the Stryker saw on high, paralyzed and unable to speak or so much as move your eyes? Presumed dead, the narrator of the story is terror-stricken at the seemingly unavoidable procedure about to be performed on his living body. Want to know how he came to find himself in this predicament AND whether or not he’ll live through it? You’ll have to read this book to know for sure ‘cause I’m not tellin’. Explore the hallways of this macabre collection and sleep with the lights on…

King, Stephen. The Green Mile. Scribner, 2000.

When Stephen King originally wrote The Green Mile as a series of six novellas, he didn't even know how the story would turn out. And it turned out to be of his finest yarns, tapping into what he does best: character-driven storytelling. The setting is the small "death house" of a Southern prison in 1932. The Green Mile is the hall with a floor "the color of tired old limes" that leads to "Old Sparky" (the electric chair). The charming narrator is an old man, a prison guard, looking back on the events decades later. Maybe it's a little too cute (there's a smart prison mouse named Mr. Jingles), maybe the pathos is laid on a little thick, but it's hard to resist the colorful personalities and simple wonders of this supernatural tale. And it's not a bad choice for giving to someone who doesn't understand the appeal of Stephen King, because the one scene that is out-and-out gruesome (it involves "Old Sparky") can be easily skipped by the squeamish. The Green Mile won a 1997 Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel; and Tom Hanks stars in a film of the novel by Frank Darabont, the director of The Shawshank Redemption (from King's collection Different Seasons). Absolutely one of King’s best!

King, Stephen. It. Viking, 1986.

In the small sleepy town of Derry, Maine there is something wrong. Every 30 years, young children start disappearing. The children are being preyed upon by what appears to be a circus clown. Only this isn't your ordinary circus clown. Pennywise isn't a clown, IT is a creature that can shape shift at will. The story begins in 1958. Pennywise has targeted seven individuals that are outcasts in junior high. The heroes of the story are: Ben, Beverly, Mike, Stan, Mike, Eddie, and Richie, seven outcasts in junior high, who form "the loser's club" in order to provide themselves some protection from the school's gang of bullies -Henry Bowers, Victor Criss and Belch Huggins. Unfortunately, the bullies are just the beginning of their problems. The children start telling each other about encounters that they have had with Pennywise the clown, after Mike gives a class report that shows a drawing of Pennywise - The Dancing Clown -from the late 1880's. It turns out that Pennywise can shape shift into your deepest fear. Stan is terrified of werewolves and when he first encounters Pennywise - it looks like a clown, but as he his backing away looking for a exit (since you normally don't encounter a clown outside the circus - and one that calls you by name from out of the shadows) he starts to see the clown change - hair on the arms, and then more and more like a werewolf as he glimpses behind him as he is being chased through the building. After Richie's little brother is killed by Pennywise and other children disappear - the "loser's club" decide to enter the old town sewers and hunt down Pennywise themselves.... I have read much of what Stephen King has written and I would have voted this to be one of his very best books except for the disappointing, and completely lame explanation of what the clown really was at the very end of the book. I stopped reading King for a few years after this book. But despite this I would still place this book in the top 5 of Stephen Kings best books - in the company of The Green Mile, The Stand, Salem’s Lot, The Shining. The ending is a disappointment… so reader beware! The first ¾’s of the book is King at his best!!

King, Stephen. 'Salem’s Lot. Doubleday, 1975.

Stephen King's second book, 'Salem's Lot (1975)--about the slow takeover of an insular hamlet called Jerusalem's Lot by a vampire patterned after Bram Stoker's Dracula--has two elements that he also uses to good effect in later novels: a small American town, usually in Maine, where people are disconnected from each other, quietly nursing their potential for evil; and a mixed bag of rational, goodhearted people, including a writer, who band together to fight that evil. Simply taken as a contemporary vampire novel, 'Salem's Lot is great fun to read, and has been very influential in the horror genre. But it's also a sly piece of social commentary. As King said in 1983, "In 'Salem's Lot, the thing that really scared me was not vampires, but the town in the daytime, the town that was empty, knowing that there were things in closets, that there were people tucked under beds, under the concrete pilings of all those trailers. And all the time I was writing that, the Watergate hearings were pouring out of the TV.... Howard Baker kept asking, 'What I want to know is, what did you know and when did you know it?' That line haunts me, it stays in my mind.... During that time I was thinking about secrets, things that have been hidden and were being dragged out into the light."

King, Stephen. The Shining. Pocket, reissue, 2005.

Twenty-seven years after its publication, The Shining remains a visceral, gripping read that showcases Stephen King's unfathomable powers to hypnotize and terrify readers, a power King had in abundance in the early stages of his career. Coming on the heels of Carrie and 'Salem's Lot, The Shining truly established King as a modern master of horror and an unequalled purveyor of a literary mirror into pop culture. If you've only seen the original movie starring Jack Nicholson, you really owe it to yourself to read the novel; Stanley Kubrick made a fine and scary movie, but he did not capture the essence of King's story, and his dramatization followed a different path than what you find in the original vision brought to life through the words of King. The plot should be quite familiar to one and all by this point. The Torrance family embarks on a months-long retreat into complete isolation when Jack Torrance signs on to be the winter custodian of the Overlook Hotel in Colorado. Jack takes some personal demons with him to a hotel chock-full of malevolent, ghostly spirits; he is a recovering alcoholic who, in the last couple of years, lost his job and broke his little boy's arm in a state of drunken fury. He thinks the months alone with his wife and son will allow him to find peace - and to finally finish the play he has been working on. His long-suffering wife has some misgivings, but the only person really clued into the dreadful possibilities is his son Danny. Danny has "the shine," a gift which allows him to see and know things he cannot possibly know; it is a powerful gift which the Overlook (which really is an entity unto itself) jealously desires for itself. As the days pass, the Overlook exerts more and more of an influence on Jack, exploiting his weaknesses, exacerbating his paranoia and persecution complex, and basically turning him into a murderous new tool at the hotel's disposal. Danny sees what is happening, although he cannot really understand much of it given his very young age. He can certainly understand the terror of the Overlook, however, as he sees images of the hotel's murderous past and very dark near future in a number of unsettling scenes interspersed throughout the novel. This is a harrowing tale of survival against incredible odds of a supernatural nature, and King brings every nuance of the story to vivid life, capturing perfectly the internalization and externalization of fear among exceedingly real, believable characters that the reader gets to know very well indeed. As has always been the case with Stephen King, it is his incomparable powers of characterization that make the supernatural elements of his story work so amazingly well. You can't help but be emotionally committed to these characters.

King, Stephen. The Stand. Expanded Edition: For the First Time Complete and Uncut. Modern Classic, c1978, 1998.

Arguably the greatest horror novel ever written by the greatest horror novelist, this is a true modern classic that was first published in 1978, and then re-published in 1990, complete and unabridged, with 150,000 words cut from the first edition restored, and now accompanied by unusual and imaginative line art. The total copies for both editions, in hardcover and paperback, exceeds 4 million worldwide. The Stand is a truly terrifying reading experience, and became a four-part mini-series that memorably brought to life the cast of characters and layers of story from the novel. It is an apocalyptic vision of the world, when a deadly virus runs amok around the globe. But that lethal virus is almost benign compared to the satanic force gathering minions from those still alive to destroy humanity and create a world populated by evil. There is much to admire in The Stand: the vivid thumbnail sketches with which King populates a whole landscape with dozens of believable characters; the deep sense of nostalgia for things left behind; the way it subverts our sense of reality by showing us a world we find familiar, then flipping it over to reveal the darkness underneath. Anyone who wants to know, or claims to know, the heart of the American experience needs to read this book. Stephen King is a brilliant storyteller who has the uncanny gift of putting ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, giving readers an experience that chills and thrills on every page.

Martinez, A. Lee. Gil’s All Fright Diner. Tom Doherty, 2005.

Earl and Duke are a couple of beer drinking buddies rambling across the country in their rickety pickup truck. Almost finished with their cache of beer and low on gas, they decide to stop at Gil’s All Night Diner for a meal and end up getting more than they bargained for. With Earl (as in Earl of Vampires) and Duke (as in Duke of Werewolves), you have to expect that. No sooner have they taken the first bite than a horde of zombies attack the diner and Earl and Duke break out their vampiric and lycanthropic powers to fend off the attackers. In return the owner of Gil’s, Loretta, offers them each a free piece of pie, a job fixing the gas line, and a fee in return for discovering who’s raising the zombies from the local cemetery. This rollicking, gore-filled thrill ride will amuse (or abuse) you from start to finish.

Matheson, Richard. Hell House. Viking Press, 1971.

Lionel Barrett, a paranormal investigator, has been hired by a millionaire to investigate whether there is really life after death. The target of the investigation: the legendary Hell House. Its evil reputation is well-founded; a previous expedition attempted to probe its secrets and only one member emerged alive, in a state of severe shock. Now Barrett and his wife Edith will make another attempt, together with Florence Tanner, an actress turned medium, and Benjamin Franklin Fischer, a psychic who is the only survivor of the last investigation. This novel is often compared to another famous haunted house novel, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. There is some justification for this, as Matheson makes use of some of the same devices and themes as Jackson, such as one’s own personal vulnerabilities being a greater threat than any sort of supernatural danger. Matheson, however, is far more direct with the atmosphere he creates. Jackson relies on subtle details to create a creeping sense of wrongness that will have a readers looking over their shoulders and turning on extra lights; Matheson serves up more openly gruesome action with the obvious intent of making the reader squirm and scream. Both approaches are effective, depending on how you enjoy your horror, and are excellent demonstrations of the possible range of haunted house stories.

Smith, Scott. The Ruins. Knopf, 2006.

Vacations are for relaxation---unless you find yourself on a trip to Mexico with Stacy, Eric, Jeff, and Amy, two couples indulging in some carefree time before they take up their high-powered lives in graduate schools and new jobs. When they meet a German named Mathias whose brother has mysteriously gone missing in the jungle, the couples decide on the spur of the moment to go on an expedition with Mathias to find his lost brother. What follows is a nerve-racking experience with one of the nastiest plant species to appear in fiction since John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids. However, the real horror of the story has less to do with carnivorous vines than with the realization that one wrong choice, something that doesn’t seem to matter much at the time, can plunge you into situations worse than you ever dreamed possible. The Ruins will have readers taking a long, hard look at their houseplants---and canceling those trips to Cancun and Cozumel.