The Nightmare Factory’s Missing Links for March 2015

Tonight is the night that The Nightmare Factory Book Club dons our black robes, straps on our sacrificial knives, and gathers together in the BookPeople cafe to celebrate the unholy ritual of discussing Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. To prepare ourselves, The Nightmare Factory has scoured the non-euclidean corners of the internet and found the most horrific, the most weird pieces of blasphemous bibliophilic information that we can find.

To help get in the mindset of poor distraught Eleanor Vance, our protagonist for the evening, it is perhaps a good idea to revisit that other haunting Shirley Jackson novel: We Have Always Lived In The Castle. Award-winning author Angela Slatter has just recently discovered Jackson’s work and here discusses Merricat, the narrator of this classic novel, and, without stating so, shows how she is both alike and different from Eleanor’s wilting wallflower.

Nick Cutter’s newest novel, The Deep, is a delightfully creepy book that reads like Stephen King rewriting Event Horizon and setting it at the bottom of the ocean. Publisher’s Weekly reached out to him for his list of Top 10 Horror Books you’ve Never Read. Take a gander and see if you agree or disagree with him. What are you’re top 10 horror books?
Cory Doctorow, one of my favorite science fiction writers and editor at Boing Boing, reviews a Lovecraftian novel from 2011 that seems to have slipped through the cracks. “Eutopia confronts the racial overtones of Lovecraftian fiction head on, revealing a terrifying story of the American eugenics movement and the brutality underbelly of utopianism.” I don’t know about you but I’m really interested in tackling this tome.

At the other end of the Lovecraftian spectrum, we have Pete Rawlnik whose novels Reanimators and The Weird Company envision a shared universe where the heroes and villains of H. P. Lovecraft’s stories are featured in the same book, the equivalent of some kind of Cthulhu-ian Avengers. Pete took time out of his schedule to answer 5 questions for The Lovecraft E-Zine. The Nightmare Factory book club has been discussing reading Reanimators later in 2015.

The first annual James Herbert Award will be handed out this month. The British horror writer is perhaps best known for his novel The Rats which is another book we’re looking at maybe reading in 2015. Anyway, here’s the short list of books nominated for the award with Nick Cutter’s The Troop and M. R. Carey’s The Girl With All The Gifts leading the pack with Carey’s novel (which I wrote about here) hopefully taking home the win.

And, finally, we can’t let a month go by without some China Miéville news. Could the BBC be producing a 4-part adaptation of The City & The City? And here’s the cover and table of contents for the new short story collection Three Moments Of An Explosion, Miéville’s first since 2005’s Looking For Jake. I’m excited!

So that’s it for our selected incantations for March. The Nightmare Factory will return on April 21st to discuss By Blood We Live, the concluding book in Glen Duncan’s Last Werewolf trilogy, and provide more horrific links for your perusal under the gibbous moon.

– Joe T.