Horror Novels/Short Stories: S/D

I just got a library card. Recommend some pop fiction creepitude - something that goes with late nights and chilly autumn weather. I've read loads of crime fiction and non-fiction, some creepy sci-fi, I like seventies pop lit a lot. What is good creep-reading, and not TOO "literary"?? I'm not trying to pass an English lit test here...

Thanks in advance!

For example, I am def going to check out "Devil's Midnight". If someone has it. I like Satan and witches!

First off - Ray Bradbury, The October Country. I always pull it out when the air gets like this.

Picked up the October Country! Amazing how unnerving the stories are without actually having a lot of horror on the surface. Like the one about the hypochondriac who "realizes" he has a skeleton inside his body, how he loses his mind obsessing about skeletons as separate entities living inside us. He stops eating food with calcium to try and starve his :O

The cover art is amazing! Anyway I started it a few weeks ago but read infrequently cause it gets under your skin so well.

The Scythe is the one that gets me.

Some horror discussed and linked on Rolling Science Fiction Fantasy & Speculative Fiction: for instance, try this vintage Richard Matheson---you have to click to magnify, but works fine---then brace yerself:

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

That was great!

I love October Country! I'm starting to read some of Caitlin Kiernan's early short stories in Tales of Pain and Wonder mostly because I want to see how she deals with gender and body horror--the earliest stories still feel like they're trying too hard to be unsettling, but I like her oblique plotting, and I've heard good things about her recent novel The Drowning Girl.

"The Emissary" really gave me the creeps as a kid. Still does tbh.

I just finished the novel I was reading so there's still time for me to read a couple October Country pieces within the month of October, as is my practice.

"The Emissary" really gave me the creeps as a kid. Still does tbh.

i read this one for the first time as a college student sitting alone in a near-deserted library and it still terrified me.

enjoying this. almost done. anyone read anything by steve tem? or his wife? or the both of them together? she died this year. rest in peace, melanie tem. also, i hate to think this way, but deadfall hotel would make a super t.v. series if done right. i don't ever really read horror/weird fiction anymore. glad i read this though. would read more by him. this book is a mix of every kinda thing. horror/supernatural/weird/fairy tale.

http://horrornovelreviews.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/deadfallhotel.jpg

I liked Tem's novel Excavation, though I remember thinking it felt like the work of a short story writer going long. Good writing, realistic rural setting, sustained slow-building creepiness.

Also suitable for this thread: I don't know how I missed William Sloane's The Edge of Running Water (1939) for so long. It's exactly the sort of mad scientist story you'd expect to have been made into a Karloff movie, but the book is quite a bit weirder and more dreadful than I expected. Slick rather than pulpy prose keeps you wondering if the story will turn toward mystery or SF or horror. It's set in Maine and some scenes are Stephen King avant la lettre.

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

I see it's discussed way upthread, but it's new to me:

I'm working my way through the VanderMeer-edited The Weird anthology, and so far it's the best-curated collection of this kind I've seen. I like the way it's limited to the 20th and 21st centuries, with all the texts presented in chronological order, and I especially like the way stories by the canonical English-language writers sit side-by-side with equally strong works in translation (many of them newly translated for this book). About a quarter of the way through, my biggest discovery has been the Belgian writer Jean Ray, represented by two quite different but equally unnerving stories. I've already downloaded some more of his work for future reading.

I'm glad I've got The Weird on my iPad -- handling the dead-tree edition would be a strength workout.

Wow - 110 stories, you’re not kidding

my gf got me the dead-tree anthology and i always feel terrible for not reading more in it but it's not exactly a book i can toss in the bag for an idle moment.

xxp description of The Weird also applies to the VanderMeers' massive Big Book of Science Fiction, which suggests to BB reader me that you should brace yourself for recurring bouts of inconsistency, esp. when DO YOU SEE social commentary trumps art & entertainment value. But keep on keepin' on.