31 Days of Halloween: Week 3

~post by Joe T.

We’re ever closer to Halloween so that means there’s another seven horror books to talk about. This time around, we’ve got some of my very favorite books, one of which is truly one of my top ten and is not generally considered a horror novel. Another book is a comic book that I think has been wronged by never earning a Pulitzer Prize. So read on and maybe, just maybe, you might find your newest favorite book on this list.

I Am Legend  by Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson IS a legend. He wrote for The Twilight Zone and never failed to deliver a magnificent episode. His novels such as The Incredible Shrinking Man and Hell House have been made into iconic films. Stephen Spielberg’s first movie was an adaption of Matheson’s short story Duel and Night of the Living Dead is an acknowledged lift of I Am Legend.

It’s a simple story. A strange disease has turned everyone but Robert Neville into cruel, bloodthirsty vampires. Neville locks himself into his house at night as the beasts taunt him and by day he goes about killing them in their lairs. It is a solitary life that is changed when Neville encounters what may be perhaps another human being.

Like I said, it’s a simple story but one full of pathos and dread. It’s been made into a film three times (The Last Man On Earth, Omega Man, and I Am Legend) but none of them have been able to capture what made Robert Neville or Richard Matheson LEGEND.

From Hell  by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell

I consider From Hell to be the greatest comic book ever written. Amazingly dense and detailed, it is the history of the 20th century disguised as a Jack the Ripper story. Drawing from the historical record and outlandish conspiracy theories, Alan Moore has given us a true face of evil and a new face for a monster. Eddie Campbell’s images are like pictures carved into wood and they illuminate as they horrify. This is not an easy book to read. It will make you uncomfortable. It will stay with you.  This book should have won a Pulitzer.

From Hell will be the January 2013 Nightmare Factory Book Club selection.

The Terror  by Dan Simmons

Dan Simmons, known more for his science fiction novels such as Hyperion, is no stranger to terror. His first novel, Song of Kali, is one of the best examples of how a locale can be a source of horror and be used in lieu of “a monster.” The Terror is another book in this style of writing. Yes, there is a monster of sorts in the book but it is the unyielding Arctic environment that provides the source of the horror.

Based on the true story of the lost Franklin Expedition that attempted to find the Northwest Passage in 1845, the book makes the film Ravenous look tame by comparison. The Terror is the perfect book for when the nights start to chill and the wind begins to howl.

World War Z  by Max Brooks

This great book was our December book club selection back in 2011 and I still think it’s the best piece of zombie fiction to date. As I stated a year ago:

“Inspired by Studs Terkel’s Pulitzer Prize winning account of World War II, The Good War, which was a collection of oral accounts of the war from people who lived and breathed it, the novel is marvelously structured and tells the story of the zombie apocalypse from its first outbreak in China to its last, if not final, defeat many years later. Harrowing, horrific, heart breaking, and at times humorous, it is, in my opinion, the crowning work of zombie fiction, taking what George Romero gave us over 40 years ago with Night of the Living Dead and following the idea all the way through, something that Romero and his acolytes have really failed to do. So, if you’re a fan of the hit television show The Walking Dead, then this is a must read book for you.”

The Atrocity Archives  by Charles Stross

Not every story with monsters need to be scary. Sometimes they can be a blast. The Atrocity Archives is just that kind of book. Part H. P. Lovecraft and part James Bond, the book has Bob Howard fight both the tentacular terror of eldritch evil from beyond the stars and the even more cosmic horror of Human Resources and other bureaucratic nightmares. Government work can be brutal.

We Have Always Lived In The Castle  by Shirley Jackson

“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.”

With that paragraph, we are introduced to Merricat, one of the most interesting and scariest characters in modern fiction. Shirley Jackson, author of the short story “The Lottery” (I’m sure you’ve read it) and the novel The Haunting of Hill House, weaves a tale told from a singular viewpoint that is part fable and part scathing denunciation of prosecution. And all of it is unsettling. By the end of the story you are left wondering who the real monsters are, the girl who maybe, probably murdered her family, the fortune seeking cousin, or crazed superstitious mob?

The Secret History  by Donna Tartt

As in Shirley Jackson’s novel, the monsters in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History are sometimes difficult to identify. The book opens with the murder of a student by his friends at a northeastern college that is based on the same college that Bret Easton Ellis used for his The Rules of Attraction, Tartt and Ellis being classmates. The story is then how the characters got to that point and the fallout that occurs afterwards. Like John Knowles’s A Separate Peace crossed with Arthur Machen’s The White People, this is one haunting book that most critics don’t see as horror but, to me, is nothing but. The real monsters in life are not goblins who live under our beds but our friends, our teachers, our very selves. This is one of my very favorite books and its portrait of decadent youth is far more terrifying than anything in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho or Less Than Zero.