by Wallace, Amy
12. Kamikaze: My mom worked as a nurse in the Pacific during the war. In college, I delved into the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. There’s a strong motive for revenge. In Kamikaze, a Japanese soldier lost three generations to the blast, and was sterilized by radiation. Now head of the Yakuza, he suicide-crashes the Pacific War Veterans’ Convention so the sushi chef can fillet a surviving crewman of the Enola Gay.
13. Crucified: The death of my dad when I was nine shook my faith in God. The real-life Beasts of Satan trial has the Vatican training exorcists by the hundreds. Crucified is a Christian’s worst nightmare come true. Golgotha, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Witch Hunt, Satanism, the Reichskonkordat, and a trial lawyer’s eye for the Achilles heel.
GEORGE CLAYTON JOHNSON’S TEN HORROR, SCIENCE
FICTION, AND FANTASY WRITERS WHO INSPIRE HIM
George Clayton Johnson is the coauthor (with William F. Nolan) of the novel Logan’s Run, which was the basis for the film of the same name. He also wrote episodes of many classic genre television shows, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, and Star Trek, as well as conceiving the storyline for the movie Ocean’s 11.
These ten great writers have inspired me with their writings and their character. They have influenced my thinking and decorated my life. I knew them all. I loved them all.
1. A. E. van Vogt
2. Ray Bradbury
3. Theodore Sturgeon
4. Rod Serling
5. Charles Beaumont
6. Richard Matheson
7. William F. Nolan
8. Jerry Sohl
9. Robert Bloch
10. Dennis Etchison
THIRTEEN SURPRISING HORROR WRITERS
We all know Winston Churchill as the Prime Minister of England. Agatha Christie’s name is synonymous with murder mysteries, and John Lennon’s with rock and roll. But did you know that they all also—at one time or another—tried their hand at writing horror fiction?
1. Winston Churchill—“Man Overboard”
Few recall that Churchill was a journalist and short-story writer before he became a politician and statesman. This harrowing tale of a sailor fallen overboard and praying for death is the only horror story he wrote. It was published in the late 1880s in The Harnsworth Magazine, a popular British journal.
2. Patricia Highsmith—“The Snail-Watcher”
There’s an argument to be made that most of Highsmith’s work, including the novels Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley, would qualify as a certain kind of existential horror. However, one short story, “The Snail-Watcher,” stands squarely in the genre. Along with Highsmith’s usual psychological insights, in “The Snail-Watcher,” creepy, gory things happen as she tells the tale of a henpecked husband who takes up snailbreeding. The new hobby takes over his life, and . . . we won’t spoil the end, except to say that a snail crawls up his nostril. After reading it, you’ll want to take a shower. “The Snail-Watcher” has become extremely popular and is often anthologized. In real life, Highsmith did breed snails and often traveled with her “pets.”
3. John Lennon—“No Flies on Frank”
At the height of his popularity, the internationally famed Beatle published a collection of stories and poems titled In His Own Write, which features this short and frequently anthologized bit of macabre surrealism about the fate of a rotting corpse. A husband kills his wife, and then notes with surprise that she is soon covered with flies while he is not. He bundles up the body and delivers it to his mother-in-law.
4. Evelyn Waugh—“The Man Who Liked Dickens”
Waugh is famous for such classic novels as Brideshead Revisited and Scoop. Among his short stories, “The Man Who Liked Dickens” is particularly disturbing: the tale of a man who falls ill in the jungle and is nursed back to health by an illiterate recluse with a passion for the works of Charles Dickens. The recluse forces his “guest” to read to him—and you’ll never forget the haunting trick-ending. This short story provided the seed for Waugh’s 1934 novel A Handful of Dust.
5. Truman Capote—“Miriam”
While Capote is certainly famous for the true-life horrors recounted in the famed In Cold Blood, he is only known to have made a single excursion into short horror fiction. This is the creepy tale of a seemingly innocent child who appears on the doorstep of a kindly middle-aged woman who is willing to help the waif. The little girl haunts and taunts her hostess, who is too well-bred to force out the demon child, who subtly reduces her to servitude. Blood-curdling, without a trace of gore.
6. Raymond Chandler—“The Bronze Door”
According to the late Peter Haining in his book The Lucifer Society, the legendary creator of private eye Philip Marlowe “loved fantastic fiction and his biographers have disclosed that he wrote quite a number of ‘strange’ stories . . . primarily for his own satisfaction. He allowed only a handful of these to be published, among them ‘The Bronze Door’, which was the very first and appeared in 1939.” Reading this tale makes us regret that the rest of Chandler’s horror fiction remains unobtainable. “The Bronze Door” epitomizes a revenge fantasy most of us would . . . kill for.
7. F. Scott Fitzgerald—“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”
First published in 1926, this is the popular story of a man who grows in reverse back to babyhood. Throughout Fitzgerald’s body of work there are touches of the fantastic and macabre, but this piece stands alone as truly supernatural.
8. Robert Graves—“Earth to Earth”
Graves is widely known as a British poet, novelist, and scholar. He wrote only one humorous disturber, “Earth to Earth.” This fourpage piece of nastiness, written in 1955, is the tale of an organically minded couple, Mr. and Mrs. Hedge, who fall under the spell of master composter Dr. Eugen Steinpilz and his secret method.
9. Edith Wharton— The Ghost-Feeler
The great Edith Wharton is so well known for her marvelous novels (including The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth) that only her dedicated readers know she was, as evidenced in this collection, a master of the supernatural tale. Her brilliant ghost stories include “Afterwards,” “The Triumph of the Night,” and many more. She referred to herself as “a ghost-feeler,” one who senses the unknown. So delicate was Wharton’s imagination that she was unable to sleep in a room containing spectral stories, and destroyed any she came across at home. This did not, however, stem her wonderful output of the supernatural.
10. Paul Gallico—“The Terrible Story”
A bestselling author in his day, Gallico is today most remembered for his novel The Poseidon Adventure (the basis for two film versions). “The Terrible Story” is the only work of horror in his considerable oeuvre. It is an early work about the power of computers. Professor Haber spends a final night with his creation, the Mark IV, a giant computer. Having renounced all human love, Haber refers to the Mark IV as “liebchen.” After a night of communion with the activated computer, Haber receives his comeuppance for his rejection of humanity and his power-madness.
11. John Steinbeck—“An Affair at 7 Rue de M—”
Steinbeck, author of classics such as The Grapes of Wrath, wrote one horror story, although his body of work is usually concerned with cruelty and suffering. “An Affair at 7 Rue de M—” is a humorous tale with a touch of the macabre. It is about an evil piece of bubble gum, and its fight to the death.
12. Tennessee Williams—“Desire and the Black Masseur”
A playwright best known for A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Williams also published a few spooky stories. “Desire and the Black Masseur” so frightened horror anthologist Peter Haining that he called it the most terrifying story he’d ever read. It is a purely psychological tale about a depressed middle-aged white man who finds masochistic release in a sauna bath at the hands of a muscular black masseur. Barely a word is exchanged between the men, and as the client begins to come regularly, the pain deepens with each visit.
13. Doris Less
ing— The Fifth Child
The author, who won the 2007 Nobel Prize for literature, published this subtle but insidious shocker in 1988. It tells the tale of a middle-class English family whose existence is turned upside down by the arrival of a decidedly abnormal fifth child named Ben. Lessing penned a sequel to the novel in 2000 called Ben in the World.
—A.W. and S.B.
JACK KETCHUM’S TEN BEST HORROR NOVELS THAT
DON’T CALL THEMSELVES HORROR NOVELS
Jack Ketchum is the author of such classic novels as The Girl Next Door, Off Season and its sequel Offspring, and Red. His work has earned four Bram Stoker Awards from the Horror Writers of America. Prior to his writing career, he was a soda jerk, actor, teacher, and Henry Miller’s literary agent. Film versions of his novels The Girl Next Door and The Lost have been released to wide acclaim, and a film of Red is in the works. More information can be found at www.jackketchum.net.
1. Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
Novel, novella, what’s in a name? Congo, Kurtz and . . . The horror! The horror!
2. Doctor Rat, by William Kotzwinkle
Animal researchers, pit bull enthusiasts, beware—this rat has teeth.
3. The Collector, by John Fowles
My own book The Girl Next Door owes a debt to this one. So, probably, do butterflies.
4. Maldoror, by the Comte de Lautréamont
The Godfather of Surrealism contemplates the tenderness of a baby’s flesh in the first couple of pages, with evil intent. Take it from there.
5. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez
Welcome to Macondo and the Buendía family—haunted and haunting. Magical realism at its amazing best.
6. Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville
Ahab to universe: “Have ye seen anything of a white whale?” Arguably the most enduring flop of all time. Asks the question, who’s more terrifying, Moby or the Captain? I know who I like.
7. The Siege of Trencher’s Farm, by Gordon M. Williams
Peckinpah hated the novel but adapted it into Straw Dogs anyway. The book’s scarier, and a lot of it made its nasty way into Off Season.
8. The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosinski
One boy’s harrowing survival story in war-torn Poland. Liked it so much I stole Mr. K’s first name for my early nom de guerre, Jerzy Livingston.
9. Grendel, by John Gardner
Miscreant intellectual monster contemplates the meaninglessness of life while eating villagers. ’Nuff said.
10. Child of God, by Cormac McCarthy
The ultimate outsider. With dead girls.
RAMSEY CAMPBELL’S THIRTEEN NOVELS
ON THE EDGE OF HORROR
The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes Ramsey Campbell as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer.” He has received more awards than any other writer in the field, including the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association, and the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild. Among his novels are The Face That Must Die, Incarnate, The Overnight, Secret Story, and The Grin of the Dark. His collections include Waking Nightmares, Alone with the Horrors, Ghosts and Grisly Things, and Told by the Dead, and his nonfiction is collected as Ramsey Campbell, Probably. His novels The Nameless and Pact of the Fathers have been filmed in Spain. His regular columns appear in All Hallows, Dead Reckonings, and Video Watchdog. He is the president of the British Fantasy Society and of the Society of Fantastic Films. Campbell lives in Merseyside with his wife, Jenny. His pleasures include classical music, good food and wine, and whatever’s in that pipe. His Web site is at www.ramseycampbell.com.
1. Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, by Peter Ackroyd (1994)
Ackroyd has written several novels that deserve a mention here— the darkly occult Hawksmoor, the rurally weird First Light, the alchemical House of Doctor Dee—but Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem is still a revelation: a fast-paced Victorian serialkiller novel, witty and ingenious and suspenseful.
2. The Deadly Percheron, by John Franklin Bardin (1946)
What was Bardin’s secret? According to the introduction by Julian Symonds to a Penguin omnibus of the first three novels, Bardin’s mother was a schizophrenic, which may suggest a reason for the author’s focus on abnormal psychology. The Deadly Percheron is the tale to which the Robbie Coltrane character keeps referring in Neil Jordan’s film Mona Lisa. It begins like a story from Unknown Worlds, with the narrator attempting to psychoanalyze a patient who receives mysterious instructions from a dwarf. Soon the narrator is attacked and robbed of his identity. Philip Marlowe would have swapped clothes with his neighbor in hospital and made his escape, but Bardin’s protagonist recognizes how paranoid his story sounds and becomes a victim of it. The book progresses further into nightmare and never quite emerges, even to the point that it extends into Bardin’s second novel, The Last of Philip Banter. Read that too, and the third, Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly. Alas, his later novel Purloining Tiny is perverse, but reads like someone imitating Bardin.
3. The Unnameable, by Samuel Beckett (1953)
Beckett at his most austere and intense. Deirdre Bair’s biography reveals that he wrote the novel as a way of surviving the imminent death of his mother. If it’s a vision of any kind of afterlife, it’s a truly terrifying one, and is best read in a single sitting. Characters and memories (if that’s what they are) rise out of the disembodied monologue and vanish like ghosts, bearing fragments of the narrative and the narrator. It may not be an experience for all readers, but if you can take it, it’s unforgettable.
4. Committal Chamber, by Russell Braddon (1966)
“Three men and their women are brought to face the truth about themselves in the committal chamber of a crematorium.” So says the blurb of the British hardcover, accurately enough, but it avoids mentioning that the book is a variation on one of the earliest classic short horror stories. Its understatement only adds to the intensity, and it rises to a fine pitch of terror.
5. The Death Guard, by Philip George Chadwick (1939)
This nightmare vision of a new kind of warfare has seen only two editions. The Hutchinson hardcover is even rarer than the first and only paperback, published in 1992 with an introduction by Brian Aldiss. The novel grew out of the horrors of the First World War, and proposes the creation of a humanoid race bred simply to kill. The humanoids finish off a war and then proceed to overrun humanity in scenes that amply justify Karl Edward Wagner’s inclusion of the book in his list of the best science fiction horror novels. A thread of racism runs through it, but it’s still richly deserving of revival.
6. The Plague Court Murders, by Carter Dickson (1934)
This was John Dickson Carr’s first novel under this transparent pseudonym. Most of Carr’s work is detective fiction influenced by Chesterton, especially in a fondness for apparently impossible crimes. He had a strong sense of the macabre, not least in his titles—The Hollow Man, Skeleton in the Clock, He Who Whispers, It Walks by Night (his very first novel, close to Poe in its Gothic atmosphere and gruesomeness). Another influence is the ghostly fiction of M. R. James—the short story “Blind Man’s Hood” is a spectral tale in that tradition—and this is apparent in The Plague Court Murders, which even quotes James’s “A School Story” near the end. While the murders are solved, the book conveys an almost palpable sense of evil and dread. The haunted house of the title feels oppressively authentic, and a chapter devoted to its history never explains away the supernatural horror. Under both his names, Carr is worth reading, but don’t read The Hollow Man first; it includes a chapter that lists many of the solutions to his tricks.
7. Magic, by William Goldman (1976)
Don’t see the film, read the novel. It is indeed magic in a variety of ways. Goldman often plays brilliant tricks on the reader—in Control, for instance, and in the book (though not the movie) of Marathon Man—but this is the most ingeniously sustained. In fact, this
reader didn’t immediately catch it when it was revealed. As an account of a mind at and beyond the end of its tether, the book far outstrips the film (for which the author has to take some blame, since he wrote the screenplay).
8. Hangover Square, by Patrick Hamilton (1941)
John Brahm’s film Hangover Square stars Laird Cregar as a deranged Victorian pianist and composer who is sent into murderous fits by high-pitched sounds. It’s a compelling melodramatic thriller, rendered all the more intense by Bernard Herrmann’s score, and an absolute travesty of the novel by Patrick Hamilton, author of Gaslight and Rope. In the book the protagonist William Harvey Bone suffers blackouts in 1939 London and imagines acts of violence that perhaps he will commit. He’s a precursor of American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, disintegrating in an England as bleak as anything in Graham Greene, without even that writer’s hints of religious redemption. By all means see the film, but don’t let it put you off the novel.