Scary Books on The Point
Scary books was today’s topic on The Point with Mindy Todd on WCAI. Remember if you missed it, you can hear it tonight at 7:30 or listen to the podcast online.
“Horror is not a genre, like the mystery or science fiction or the western. It is not a kind of fiction meant to be confined to the ghetto of a special shelf in the ghetto of libraries or bookstores … horror is an emotion.”
–Douglas E. Winter in the introduction to Prime Evil
“Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall down the sewer and die. Horror is when you return from the dead and haunt me for laughing at your nasty trip down that sewer.”
–June Pulliam’s embellishment upon an old saw
Melanie’s Picks
General interest:
Horror! 333 Films to Scare You to Death byJames Marriott and Kim Newman
Houses of Horror Hans Holzer
Classic horror:
The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
The Third Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories ed. by Chrstine Bernard (especially “Green Fingers,” “The Specialty of the House” and “The Academy,” but all are good)
[Alas, no one in CLAMS has a copy of The Third Fontana collection, but you can read “The Specialty of the House” in the book The Mystery Hall of Fame : an anthology of classic mystery and suspense stories. The same story is also available in the collection: Murder on the Menu.]
The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Writings by Edgar Allan Poe (Bantam Classic)
Hawthorne: Selected Tales and Sketches or any collection of short fiction
Scary for what they’re about:
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome
Upton Sinclair The Jungle
Elie Wiesel Night
Readers can also search for Top 10 and Top 100 lists of good horror books. I found the “Horror Reading List” at the Horror Writers Assocation, horror.org
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Jill’s Picks
Hooked on Horror: a guide to reading interest in horror fiction by Anthony Fonseca & June Pulliam
We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
The Bad Seed by William March
Burning Your Boats: the collected short stories by Angela Carter (particularly “The Fall River Axe Murders” & “The Bloody Chamber”)
Dracula’s Guest: a connoisseur’s collection of Victorian vampire stories edited by Michael Sims
Vampire Stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Scary Stories illustrated by Barry Moser (includes “Man overboard” by Winston Churchill)
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
False Memory by Dean Koontz (includes haiku!)
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
Half-Minute Horrors edited by Susan Rich
And you can find Neil Gaiman’s idea for giving a scary book on halloween on his blog, which also includes some other great scary author suggestions! And if you want lots more horror suggestions, stop by the Horror World web page which reviews new horror fiction.