Horror Novels/Short Stories: S/D

Deadfall is kinda broken up into novellas based on the seasons at the hotel. but there is a common thread/characters.

this may be old news, but a bunch of Michael McDowell's novels are now available on Amazon thanks to Valancourt Books. I'd recommend The Elementals, which is sort of like Solaris reimagined as a southern gothic family drama: a Victorian beach house is haunted by the dead relatives of a wealthy Alabama clan, but it's unclear if the apparitions are sentient or if they're sand gollums assembled by a non-human entity to torment the family with memories of their oppressive former matriarch. he has a knack for dysfunctional family dynamics (using the supernatural to awaken and complicate old jealousies/feuds) though he occasionally veers into soap opera melodramatics. I'm making my way through his 6-volume Blackwater series now.

he churned out close to 30 novels in the '80s, but a lot of them are regarded as hackwork and will probably never be reprinted; he was quoted as saying, "I would be perfectly willing if a publisher came up to me and said, 'I need a novel about underwater Nazi cheerleaders and it has to be 309 pages long and I need fourteen chapters and a prologue.'" he's best know today for writing the original screenplay for Beetlejuice, which started off as some dark twisted Clive Barker shit until Tim Burton turned it into a comedy.

how Lovecraftian is that Steve Rasnic Tem novel? I'm vaguely aware of him as a 'new weird' writer along the lines of Laird Barron, but maybe I have the wrong impression.

Valancourt do have a very interesting catalogue - a mix of gothic, gay, horror and mid-20th-century neglected literary novels

yeah, I wonder how they manage to secure the rights to all of those obscure titles. their catalogue is huge, and it seems like almost all of the modern stuff has come out in the past two years.

I haven't read his work but I'm fairly confident that Tem does a little of everything horror, and he's from a bit earlier than most of the current wave of weird writers.

i'm sure he could do the lovecraft thing really well, but deadfall is fantastical/supernatural in a more straightforward way. it's an amusing book but also can be totally creepy. he plays with lots of genre ideas/cliches/etc. it's worth buying the book just for the king of the cats chapter. just insane and intense and really cool. i would definitely read more by him.

i read an interview with him and he says with this book he just wanted to throw everything into the pot.

i also like that he and his wife created their own legal last name together. pretty cool idea.

http://gingernutsofhorror.com/5/post/2014/03/horror-author-interview-steve-rasnic-tem.html

i want to read his book Blood Kin. i never knew about the Melungeon people before!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melungeon

https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2018/08/the-best-horror-novels-of-all-time.html

I've read...5!

there is this list too https://www.npr.org/2018/08/16/632779706/click-if-you-dare-100-favorite-horror-stories

I've only read 4.

At the Mountains of Madness
Dracula
Frankenstein
Let the Right One In (This seems like a weird placement to me.)

wow i have read 10 from that paste list!

lots of good stuff in there. the thomas tryon book is slept on and recommended but not as good as harvest home

Only read a few but IT at number 2 is absurd.

yeah -- i think Carrie deserves more praise than IT tbh

Still need to read it, but I found the screen version of Thomas Tryon's The Other to be the perfect and in my experience very rare example of what Stephen King called "sunlight horror" (in Danse Macabre, which led me to so much good stuff): starts out like several other early 70s flicks did,
like it's trying to lift some Little House On The Prairie charm---a sick set-up for the long, perfectly timed sucker punch (just one perfect dab o' gore, barely glimpsed, in the whole thing). Directed by Robert (To Kill A Mockingbird Mulligan, once again deploying his very rare gift for directing children, in this case with even less acting experience than Scout Finch's crew, like 0.

But back to print: some good stuff mentioned on both Rolling SF etc. threads, incl:

Also Richard Matheson, who wrote a lot of the best Twilight Zones, Speilberg's Duel, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, which Chris Carter credited with inspiring him to create The X-Files, also novels like The Shrinking Man and I Am Legend, which could be an ancestor of Breaking Bad, with the one Normal terrorizing a world of vampires, although in his mind, of course, he's Making Good. Also lots of short stories---Ward Fowler scared the crap out of me by posting this 'un on the old Rolling sf etc. thread:

http://magicmonkeyboy.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/drink-my-red-blood-by-richard-matheson.html

^my fave matheson short story, which deeply affected horror-obsessed-young-me when i read it as a boy. the whole treatment of vampirism seems very similar to the vibe that george a romero was going for w/ his movie martin, and i know romero admitted that matheson was the primary inspiration behind NOTLD. you can see why stephen king is such a big matheson fan, too - that 'naturalistic'/everyday treatment of the supernatural. again, this story reminds me v much of parts of the tobe hooper tv movie of salem's lot - vampirism as teenage yearning/disaffection

― Ward Fowler, Sunday, September 9, 2012 4:17 PM (3 years ago)'

― dow, Friday, June 17, 2016

Film version of The Other has an absolutely exquisite Goldsmith score. I haven’t read The Other yet, just Harvest Home, but I found both The Other and Night of the Moonbow in used paperback sections within the past month yay!

I bought a used copy of Night of the Moonbow earlier this summer because I remembered reading something about it 15 or so years ago. Beyond that, I know nothing about it or the author.

Gay Hollywood actor turned horror novelist - I would actually like to know more about tryon himself

I have read 8 of the books on paste’s list

Night Things is a new addition to my look-for list based on that article. Also I did not know Anne rice had just lost a young child when she wrote Interview.

Yeah, I only know Tryon from the movies, as an actor (in The Cardinal etc.)and literary source---what are his books like?

Harvest Home is as good as any "outsiders travel to backwards-seeming village with pastoral pagan beliefs about crops, horror ensues" story I've read.

Much better than I would expect from an actor tbh -- not to be rude toward actors but I would consider him a writer who acted more than an actor who wrote. Imo.

Otm

You will like harvest home dow- and that’s my money back guarantee

NPR listicle is a pretty good list but terribly written

Paste: Read 12 plus abandoned another on the list. Can't fault their #1 choice.
NPR: 37, +1 abandoned, rather to my surprise, though this list is very heavy on the classics

I think I'm up to like 7 on the Paste list and 13 on the NPR (the short story anthology section of the latter spooked me out because they basically took a photograph of one of my bookshelves). Of the top of my head, I'm only disappointed that House on the Borderland is missing from both. Definitely bookmarking these for future reference.

Ketchum's The Girl Next Door from the Paste list is an extremely disturbing read. Although I'm not sure I'd even classify it as a horror novel

LL's description of Harvest Home sounds appealing. I'll try to track that down.

It's really good! The Widow Fortune is a character I will never forget.

I've read 17 on the Paste list, 29 on the NPR list ... there are a lot of titles on both that I've intended to read for a long time, especially those Tryon novels.

The Elementals is a perfect horror beach book.

Started / the woman in black / , going well so far. Review was correct in saying that it could pass as having been written a hundred years ago

“Burnt Offerings” comes close to being a masterpiece and just might be.

Still need to read that. The paperback cover (for movie tie-in?) used to give me the heebie jeebies as a kid. I wasn’t even familiar with the title phrase at the time, which added to it.

Actually don’t think they had movie tie-ins per se at the time, when the book was written beforehand. There were novelizations of course, but that’s different.

It starts kind of pedestrian but then gets good.

I just bought the movie sight unseen the other day. I'm guessing it isn't quite as classic.

I don't know how it compares to the book, but it's a very decent 70s horror flick ... good cast, good score, lots of atmosphere, some scary set-pieces

Book is undoubtedly a source for king’s shining

I think he's acknowledged that, yeah

Anyone read the Ceremonies by Klein?

Yes... about 20 years ago. My recall of it is hazy but it’s on my reread list

Just two weeks ago!

I read it relatively recently too. Felt like all sizzle and no steak to me. Plus the villain is lame

The villain is a centuries-old charred treehugger with one eye. Not lame at all.

He's a little old man who runs around giggling a lot

That's the sidekick.

Familiar perhaps. But he has a lot more screentime

Damn, Wimbourne Books is not fooling around, 17 volumes is a lot of Victorian ghost stories ... are these collections pretty well edited? Decent amount of info about the authors and original publications?

volume 26 was published this year

with all these things the Amazon preview often covers all of the introduction (and sometimes none of the actual book). checking book 26 it put all the details into said introduction: small bios and publication details by the look.

thank you, that introduction is exactly the sort of information I was hoping to see

I wish more of these volumes were available in non-Kindle formats

Leonid Andreyev has quite a few english translations and for a while there was a bunch of horror fans/writers recommending him, I think there was a tribute anthology that never came to be.

There's this anthology of Russian Decadence, probably has some horror.
https://www.dedalusbooks.com/our-books/book.php?id=00000188

I once looked for Alexander Grin (I think he written Morgiana?) books and I've heard a lot of the recent ones are bad machine translations but they look like cheap print on demand designs, so they aren't too hard to spot.

I'd be surprised if Twisted Spoon didn't have some slavic horror, there's some other similar presses but I blanking right now.
https://www.twistedspoon.com/authors.html