The Book of Lists: Horror

by Wallace, Amy

  5. Burnt Offerings, by Robert Marasco

  6. “Casting the Runes,” by M. R. James

  7. “Two Bottles of Relish,” by Lord Dunsany

  8. “The Great God Pan,” by Arthur Machen

  9. “The Colour Out of Space,” by H. P. Lovecraft

  10. “The Upper Berth,” by F. Marion Crawford

  — Originally appeared in The Book of Lists 3 by Amy Wallace,

  Irving Wallace, and David Wallechinsky (1983)

  DON D’AURIA’S TEN BOOKS

  THAT CHANGED THE HORROR GENRE

  Don D’Auria is Executive Editor at Leisure Books, where for more than a decade he has directed the horror line that Rue Morgue called “the champions of paperback horror.” During that time he’s been lucky enough to work with some of the leading authors in the field. Born and raised in suburban New Jersey, he was the quintessential horror kid, growing up on a steady diet of TV’s Chiller Theater on Friday nights, Creature Features on Saturday nights, and horror novels and Famous Monsters magazine the rest of the time. He is the recipient of an International Horror Guild Award for his contributions to the horror genre.

  1. The Monk, by Matthew Lewis (1796): Arguably the first horror bestseller. This mix of monks, nuns, demons, and Satan was a phenomenon in its day, so famous (or infamous) that its author was known as “Monk” Lewis for the rest of his life.

  2. Dracula, by Bram Stoker (1897): Sure, there were vampires before Dracula, but this is the book that established them firmly in the public’s consciousness and created a cultural icon in the process. Count Dracula is as recognizable today as Mickey Mouse or Snoopy and is the inspiration for countless subsequent novels and stories, as well as movies, TV shows, plays, breakfast cereals, cartoons, even a Sesame Street puppet. Without Dracula and his vampire kin, the horror genre would be a very different animal today.

  3. Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, by Edgar Allan Poe (1840): The father of American horror. Poe’s horrors didn’t come from monsters, ghosts, or demons; they came from inside the mind. (He’s also often credited with being the father of the detective story.) This book was the first collection of his work. It was hardly a success upon its release, but its influence grew and spread, largely after Poe’s death. Today his work is part of the canon of American literature and is taught in schools across the country—influencing and inspiring countless young future horror writers.

  4. The Outsider and Others, by H. P. Lovecraft (1939): Though Lovecraft wasn’t very popular during his lifetime, his influence has grown exponentially since his death—thanks largely to this book and other Lovecraft collections published by Arkham House. When Lovecraft died, August Derleth didn’t want to see his friend’s writing go out of print, so he created Arkham House to publish Lovecraft’s work, previously only printed in the pulp magazines. Gradually Lovecraft developed a (posthumous) following and eventually became recognized as one of America’s greatest horror authors. His brand of “cosmic” horror and the Cthulhu mythos created a whole subgenre, Lovecraftian horror. But it might never have happened without the Arkham collections. This is the prime example of what a small publisher can do.

  5. The Exorcist, by William Peter Blatty (1971): Blatty took the oldest bad guy in literary history, the Devil, plucked him out of his usual Gothic and religious settings, and let him loose in a contemporary Georgetown brownstone so he could terrorize a society that didn’t much believe in him anymore. Suddenly the Devil seemed to be everywhere. Almost overnight the floodgates opened to a slew of demonic possession books and movies, and “religious horror” was born. Inspired by a true story!

  6. Carrie, by Stephen King (1974): The first book by the most influential horror author of the twentieth century. A phenomenon not just in horror but publishing in general, at one time King described his fiction as the equivalent of a Big Mac and fries, but that sells his work short. His fiction is literature with the common touch, aimed squarely at the Everyman, and it hits its mark. His arrival on the scene—coupled with his enormous sales—was a major factor in the huge horror publishing boom of the 1980s. Basically, there’s horror fiction before King and horror fiction after King.

  7. Interview with the Vampire, by Anne Rice (1976): Rice created a whole new type of vampire: romantic, erotic, often homoerotic, sympathetic, conflicted, but still frightening. Her lush, neo-Gothic style was a dramatic counterpoint to King’s recognizably contemporary horrors. Her vampires seduced fans by the millions, and brought a lot of new female readers into the horror market.

  8. The Books of Blood, by Clive Barker (1984): The most visible and bestselling book in the revolutionary movement that came to be known as “Splatterpunk.” As the name implies, young authors like Barker and the team of John Skipp and Craig Spector took things to extremes in terms of gore, grittiness, and sex, and gave the genre a jolt of electricity. It was horror pushed over the top. This stuff was definitely not playing it safe. From this point on, all bets were off when it came to how far you could go in horror fiction.

  9. Welcome to Dead House, by R. L. Stine (1992): The first in Stine’s Goosebumps series. Not only did the immense success of the books convince publishers that kids read horror (a lot), it also introduced millions of young readers to the genre and created a whole new generation of horror fans.

  10. Guilty Pleasures, by Laurell K. Hamilton (1993): The first novel in the long-running Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series. Depending on your point of view, they injected a large dose of romance into horror, or horror into romance. Hamilton’s books broke down walls, blurred distinctions, and dramatically changed not one but two genres.

  BENTLEY LITTLE’S TEN HORROR ONE-HIT WONDERS

  THAT EVERYONE SHOULD READ

  Hailed by Stephen King as “the horror poet laureate,” Bentley Little was born in 1960. He is the Bram Stoker Award–winning author of The Burning, Dispatch, The Policy, The Town, The Store, The Vanishing, and many other novels, as well as an acclaimed short story collection titled The Collection. His short story “The Washingtonians” was the basis for an episode of Showtime’s Masters of Horror series. The son of a Russian artist and an American educator, Bentley Little and his Chinese wife were married by the justice of the peace in Tombstone, Arizona.

  1. The Auctioneer, by Joan Samson: Joan Samson made a huge splash with this stunning debut and then promptly dropped from sight. The story of an auctioneer who moves into a small town and gradually takes it over by first selling the unwanted items of its populace and then demanding increasingly steep tithes from the local citizens, The Auctioneer is social satire masquerading as horror, and it works on many levels. I read it in high school and never forgot it. A brilliant book.

  2. Burnt Offerings, by Robert Marasco: The novel that was made into one of the seminal horror films of the 1970s. Richer and more subtle than the movie, the book, by Tony Award–winning playwright Marasco, tells the story of the Rolfe family, who rent a summer house at a shockingly low price with the stipulation that they must care for the owner’s invalid mother, who never comes out of her upstairs room. Burnt Offerings may not have the critical cachet of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House or Richard Matheson’s Hell House, but it belongs in the company of those classics, and in its neo-traditionalist updating of haunted house tropes, it set the stage for much of what was to follow.

  3. The Cook, by Harry Kressing: The rumor in the early 1960s was that this was John Fowles writing under a pseudonym. There are echoes of The Magus here in both style and theme, and Fowles blurbed the book, which was thought at the time to be a clever bit of self-referential post-modernism. It turned out that Kressing wasn’t Fowles, but that didn’t detract from the power of this hugely influential yet now largely forgotten masterpiece, in which a mysterious cook uses food to gain control over the wealthy family for which he works. A great book.

  4. Falling Angel, by William Hjortsberg: The basis for the atmospheric film Angel Heart, Hjortsberg’s novel is an innovative synthesis of the horror and hardboile
d detective genres. The mysterious Louis Cyphre hires detective Harry Angel to find a missing pop singer, and the gumshoe is drawn into a terrifying world of black magic and evil. The book’s once-startling originality may not seem quite as fresh as it once did, since over the years numerous other authors have followed the same template, but Falling Angel remains impressive and extremely compelling.

  5. The House Next Door, by Anne Rivers Siddons: This novel became a hit primarily because of Stephen King’s enthusiastic endorsement in his horror overview Danse Macabre. Siddons quickly parlayed that triumph into a successful string of Southern soap operas and has never returned to the horror genre. That’s a shame. The House Next Door is a very original and contemporary haunted house story, completely free of ghosts. Unique.

  6. Magic, by William Goldman: A one-hit wonder only in that it’s the hugely successful William Goldman’s lone horror novel, Magic tells the story of Corky, a ventriloquist whose mind and personality are being taken over by his dummy, Fats. The movie made from the novel was good (and the commercial for the film was genuinely scary), but it’s the page-turning book, with its powerful ending, that has stuck with me all these years.

  7. Maynard’s House, by Herman Raucher: I’m cheating here. Raucher’s huge hit was The Summer of ’42, and many readers think he dropped from sight after cashing in with that ubiquitous weepie. But he also penned this eerie and surrealistic tale of a Vietnam veteran who is willed a cabin in the Maine woods by his army buddy Maynard. Thought-provoking and at times confusing, Maynard’s House works as both a supernatural horror story and a study of an emotionally wrecked vet dealing with posttraumatic stress syndrome.

  8. Platforms, by John R. Maxim: Maxim has gone on to have success in other genres, but to my knowledge, this paperback bestseller from 1982 is his sole horror outing. And it’s terrific. In a New England suburb, train commuters are behaving strangely and becoming violent, while the dead are starting to appear to the living. That’s the starting point for a complex and epic horror novel that also postulates an intricately detailed afterlife. Personally, I was hugely influenced by the book, and my first (mercifully unpublished) novel owes a huge debt to Platforms.

  9. Ratman’s Notebooks, by Stephen Gilbert: Before Carrie there was Willard, another socially maladjusted misfit wreaking horrific revenge on his tormentors. Willard befriends the rats in his cellar that his mother wants him to kill and then trains them to do his bidding. A surprisingly touching and sensitive story, despite the ick-factor, it paved the way for a slew of similarly themed books and movies.

  10. Replay, by Ken Grimwood: Not exactly horror, but close enough for rock’n’roll. This is one of my favorite books of all time, and I’ve bought numerous copies over the years and given them away to friends, family, and even casual acquaintances. The basic premise has been used subsequently in films such as Groundhog Day and The Butterfly Effect, but nowhere has it been utilized more brilliantly than in Grimwood’s melancholy tale of a man blessed with the opportunity—or cursed with the burden—of reliving his life over and over again. Profound, moving, and unforgettable.

  KIRBY MCCAULEY’S TEN BEST HORROR ANTHOLOGIES

  Kirby McCauley is a veteran literary agent. He has edited a number of anthologies, including Dark Forces and Frights (both of which won the World Fantasy Award). He also coedited Nightmare Town, a collection of stories by Dashiell Hammett.

  1. The Omnibus of Crime, edited by Dorothy L. Sayers

  2. Sleep No More, edited by August Derleth

  3. They Walk Again, edited by Colin De La Mare

  4. New Terrors, edited by Ramsey Campbell

  5. Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, edited by Herbert A. Wise and Phyllis Fraser

  6. The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, edited by Robert Aickman

  7. Terror by Gaslight, edited by Hugh Lamb

  8. Terror in the Modern Vein, edited by Donald Wollheim

  9. And the Darkness Falls, edited by Boris Karloff with Edmund Speare

  10. The Dark Descent, edited by David G. Hartwell

  REVEALED! THE PSEUDONYMS OF

  SEVENTEEN HORROR WRITERS

  1. Stephen King—Richard Bachman; John Swithen

  2. Dean Koontz—K. R. Dwyer; Leigh Nichols; David Axton; Owen West; Brian Coffey; Aaron Wolfe

  3. Dennis Etchison—Jack Martin

  4. David J. Schow—Oliver Lowenbruck; Chan McConnell

  5. Douglas Clegg—Andrew Harper

  6. Whitley Strieber—Jonathan Barry (this pseudonym “collaborated” with Strieber on the novel Catmagic)

  7. Ramsey Campbell—Carl Dreadstone; Jay Ramsay

  8. John Skipp—Maxwell Hart

  9. Shaun Hutson—Robert Neville; Nick Blake; Frank Taylor; Tom Lambert; Samuel P. Bishop; Wolf Kruger; Stefan Rostov

  10. Douglas Borton—Michael Prescott; Brian Harper

  11. Anne Rice—Anne Rampling; A. N. Roquelaure

  12. Robert Bloch—Collier Young

  13. Bentley Little—Phillip Emmons

  14. Richard Matheson—Logan Swanson

  15. Kim Newman—Jack Yeovil

  16. Harlan Ellison—Cordwainer Bird

  17. Rick Hautala—A. J. Matthews

  — Compiled by S.B and R.P.

  MICHAEL SLADE’S HORRIFIC INSPIRATIONS

  FOR HIS THIRTEEN NOVELS

  Michael Slade is the pen name of a lawyer and a historian. Of the 100-plus murder cases the lawyer has been active in, fully one-third involved issues of insanity: psychosis and psychopathology. When a satisfied client offered to kill anyone he wished “as a tip,” Slade switched to writing horror-thrillers. More information on Michael Slade and his work is available at www.specialx.net.

  1. Headhunter: In 1978, I took a 3,350-mile road trip around Britain. On arriving in York, I could have bowled down the streets at night and not hit anyone. The Yorkshire Ripper was loose. That inspired me to release a headhunting psycho in my home town, and on the day I began writing, the Clifford Olson case broke. The Mounties were investigating eleven serial killings, so I fictionalized their manhunt.

  2. Ghoul: Alice Cooper praised Headhunter and invited me backstage. That spawned Slade’s rock ’n’ roll thriller. It plays off allegations that rock drove real-life psychos to kill: AC/DC’s Highway to Hell and the Night Stalker; the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter” and the Manson family; and so on. It’s my homage to Lovecraft.

  3. Cutthroat: Time for a Monster Mash: Bigfoot and the Wendigo will do. To suspend disbelief, let’s start with the Zodiac Killer, bring back the Mad Mountie for Custer’s Last Stand, and serve up the culinary tastes of China. We’re hunting the Missing Link in human evolution.

  4. Ripper: In 1962, my mom took me to London. Once I mastered the Underground, I went searching for Jack the Ripper’s killing sites. In 1967, Scotland Yard let me into the Black Museum. The plot for Ripper grew out of that: a carnival of carnage on Deadman’s Island, with killing machines. It’s my take on Agatha Christie’s classic And Then There Were None.

  5. Zombie (North American title: Evil Eye): My all-time favorite battle is the defense of Rorke’s Drift: 100 British Redcoats against 4,000 African Zulus who must either rip out their guts or go without sex for years. That provides the juju for a modern psycho who is disemboweling Mounties, and took me on safari to Zimbabwe and the Okavango Delta of Botswana to act out the naked prey chase.

  6. Primal Scream (British title: Shrink): There was to be no sequel to Headhunter. Readers disagreed. Finally, to silence the persistent question, “What about Sparky?” (the killer’s name came from a real mad dog that attacked me when I was five), I wrote this tale of a psychotic archer hunting “bum boys” in the snowy Northern woods. It’s based on a real Canadian skull-crusher who sodomized American tourists because the U.S. Army rejected him as “too violent” to fight in Vietnam.

  7. Burnt Bones: Sherlock Holmes has Moriarty. The 87th Precinct, the Deaf Man. Let’s give the Mounties an arch-nemesis: Mephisto. My early trips to Stonehenge
were when you could still walk among the megaliths. The search in Burnt Bones goes back to Coliseum gladiators, Hadrian’s Wall, headhunting Picts, and those sneaky Campbells who butchered my ancestors at Glencoe.

  8. Hangman: As a lawyer, I argued the last hanging case in the Supreme Court: a cop-killing “for fun.” The State of Washington retains the gallows. That gave me the setup for a cross-border jury killer who plays the game Hangman in reverse with the police. A wrong guess makes the next victim lose an extra limb.

  9. Death’s Door: In 1977, I climbed illegally to the top of the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt—what a view!—and almost got pushed off by a gang of Cairo street punks. That gave me the mummy plot for the return of Mephisto—a plastic surgeon gone mad. Some say this book’s darker than Ghoul.

  10. Bed of Nails: Slade’s cannibal feast. I was a Guest of Honor at the World Horror Convention in Seattle in 2001. The outside world worries we’re a bunch of bloodthirsty freaks. Playing to that dread—and setting a novel at the WHC—was too delicious to resist. To experience the climax, I flew to the Cook Islands in the South Pacific, and talked my way into Atiu’s secret skeleton cave.

  11. Swastika: My mom died in 2003. In cleaning out her house, I found my dad’s Bomber Command archive. He flew forty-seven combat missions against the Nazis, with 2-in-100 odds of surviving, and trained the crews that struck SS Sturmbannfuhrer Wernher von Braun’s V2 rocket factory at Peenemunde. Twenty thousand prisoners of war died in the concentration camp that built his missiles so I could watch von Braun—as a whitewashed Tomorrowland hero—on Disney’s TV show as a boy. The secret behind the Roswell Incident.