Scary Books on The Point
We are celebrating Halloween on The Point with Mindy Todd today. Mindy, Melanie, & I picked an assortment of titles to get you in the Halloween spirit. Here is the list, and if you missed the show you can listen to it at 7:30 tonight or listen to the podcast whenever you want.
Mindy began the show with suggesting for a good scare you can read Stephen King, and I suggested you might also want to read something by his son Joe Hill.
Jill’s Picks
Monsters in the Movies: 100 years of cinematic nightmares by John Landis. (By the way … the 1965 movie based on the H. P. Lovecraft story “The Colour Out of Space” is “Die Monster Die”.)
Some Things Are Scary by Florence Parry Heide (my copy has pictures by Robert Osborn And if you click on Robert Osborn’s name you can see a much better reproduction of the photo on this page.)
Tales by H. P. Lovecraft (Be sure to read “The Colour Out of Space”)
Zone One by Colson Whitehead
(and the podcast I mentioned is called Pop Culture Happy Hour)
Interview from Harper’s Magazine with Colson Whitehead can be found here.
Haunted Massachusetts: ghosts and strange phenomena of the Bay State by Cheri Revai
The Narrow Land: folk chronicles of Old Cape Cod by Elizabeth Reynard
Real Monsters, Gruesome Critters, and Beasts From the Darkside by Brad Steiger
Ran out of time, but I’m intrigued by all of the mash-ups that are now appearing, wherein a classic work of literature is re-adapted to include supernatural elements. A recent sampling includes:
Little Women and Werewolves by Louisa May Alcott and Porter Grand
Mr. Darcy, Vampyre by Amanda Grange
Jane and the Damned by Janet Mullany
Wuthering Bites by Sarah Gray
Melanie’s Picks
1984 by George Orwell
The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History’s 100 Worst Atrocities edited By Matthew White
The Werewolf Book: The Encyclopedia of Shape-Shifting Beings by Brad Steiger
The World’s Creepiest Places by Dr. Bob Curran
Halloween edited by Paula Guran
M is for Monster: A Modern Bestiary of Classic Monsters compiled by Michael Kelahan
The Night Strangers: A Novel by Chris Bohjalian
Zone One: A Novel by Colson Whitehead
What Was I Scared Of? A Glow-in-the-Dark Encounter by Dr. Seuss
BONUS PICK
Scary story suggestion from Dan Tritle: ”I Have No Mouth … and I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison.
Dan also wanted everyone to know about H. P. Lovecraft’s character Cthulhu (Kuh-THOO-loo) who made its first appearnce in Lovecraft’s short story “The Call of Cthulhu”, published in 1928. According to Larousse Dictionary of Literary Characters: “Worshipped by the Old Ones, Cthulhu is a vast, amorphous life-form which embodies both the primeval origins of life and its entropic, undifferentiated end. Insofar as it has substance, Cthulhu resembles a jelly fish or giant amoeba” And the Old Ones are described as:”The worshippers of Cthulhu, they are ichthomorphic entities with designs on the human universe. They attempt to interbreed with people in order to take over the earth, but the invasion is thwarted and they dissolve into a noxious goo which resembles sperm.”
And may I just mention that the first reference question I ever answered for Dan revolved around the television series Dark Shadows!