The Book of Lists: Horror

by Wallace, Amy

  5. “The Howling Man,” by Charles Beaumont: My relatively recent discovery of Charles Beaumont led to a long, obsessed binge. I believe “The Howling Man” to be the greatest of his stories. (Some of you may remember it from The Twilight Zone.) As I mentioned, I love suburban horror, and second place goes to Beaumont’s spine-cracking “The New People,” about a very unusual suburban tract neighborhood. To say more would be to risk spoiling.

  6. “The Pear-Shaped Man,” by George R. R. Martin: A writer now best known for his fantasy—which is utterly horrific—and previously known for his horrifying science fiction, I’ve always read anything by Martin I could get my hands on. If you read “The Pear-Shaped Man” (see Lisa Tuttle’s list for a surprise) you’ll never be able to look at a cheese puff without trembling. Kudos, too, for the runner-up tale “The Monkey Treatment.”

  7. “The Box,” by Jack Ketchum: This short, sour masterpiece deserved its Bram Stoker Award. It concerns a large man with a box. To say any more would be travesty. One of the most impressive very short stories I’ve ever read; a haiku of foreboding and terror.

  8. “Manskin/Womanskin,” by Lisa Tuttle: Discovering Tuttle led me on a long, still-continuing quest to read every word she’s ever written, no matter if it be humor, horror, or sci-fi, or just that plain old thing we call literature. Like George R. R. Martin (with whom she collaborated on a novel), her writing defies categorization. She is my favorite writer about the dark, bleak side of “love” relationships. I could have picked any of fifty stories—sitting down to a Tuttle is like tucking in to a favorite meal. I chose this one because it is one of her quirkiest “love is strange” pieces. Tuttle is my favorite living female author. My favorite deceased is Edith Wharton (four stars to “Afterwards” by Wharton).

  9. Pet Sematary, by Stephen King: While not a favorite book, this was a truly seminal horror read. It’s rumored that King scared himself so much as he wrote it that he hid it a drawer. As the story goes, he had to deliver a book to get out of a contract, and is said to have slapped on an ending and whammo . . . bestseller! I can’t tell where the tacked-on ending begins. Anyway, in 1986, I was recently divorced and feeling blue when my friend Ned Claflin, who had turned me on to much horror, called to say “How are ya?” I said I was depressed, to which he replied, “Wait right there! I’ll be over!” He sped from San Francisco to where I lived in Berkeley and we trolled crummy paperback shelves in that bookish town until we found two (I still didn’t know what was going on) copies of the novel. Ned finally said: “A person cannot be scared shitless and depressed at the same time. This is the cure. We’ll sit down and read the first 10 pages together, then I’m going home.” Every day, Ned called leaving scary quotes from the book, such as “Injun stole my fish,” on my answering machine. And guess what? Ned was right—you can’t be that scared (and it was the height of summer at the beach!) and stay depressed. This is a dangerously scary book (unless you’re depressed). Thank you, Ned.

  10. “The Wendigo,” by Algernon Blackwood: Thanks again, Ned. Again, it’s hard to choose with Blackwood, but whenever I want to be truly “taken out of myself” and no martini is at hand, I read “The Wendigo,” a deep country terror set in the wilds of Canada. The dialogue toward the end is among my favorite passages in all literature. The ending is one of my favorites in all of literature.

  11. “The Bushmaster,” by Conrad Hill: Leave it to Julian (brother of Andrew) Lloyd Webber to track down the extremely reclusive Mr. Hill and reprint this masterpiece in his anthology Short Sharp Shocks. Reading “The Bushmaster,” I discovered that humor and horror really could go hand in hand, something I’d always been dubious about. Ngomo, a mysterious African businessman, sells a most unusual vacuum cleaner from his native land to a man with a neat-freak wife. Mayhem, awfulness, and hilarity ensue. I often read aloud to my boyfriend and coauthor Scott Bradley his favorite scene in the story, in which the henpecked hubby acquires the titular creature in Ngomo’s deliciously mysterious shop, and watches it go to work for the first time.

  12. “In the Hills, the Cities,” by Clive Barker: Was there ever a more imaginative tale than this? No attempt to describe it—and nevermind a spoiler—could ever do it justice. As I began to read it, it was creepy; it proceeded to terrify me, and by the end I was astounded by the visionary heights Barker reached. I don’t love all of Barker’s work, but this story wins my Nobel Prize for weirdness and somehow stretches beyond horror into something unnamable. I can’t imagine having a mind that could even conceive this tale. Read it and be awed.

  13. “Into the Wood,” by Robert Aickman: I’ve saved my all-time favorite story for last: “Into the Wood” is the insomniac’s bible. Margaret Sawyer is an English housewife on a business trip with her husband in Sweden. Alienated, she decides to visit a forest “rest house” named the Kurhaus. No story has ever represented the interior of my mind and soul so perfectly. Reading it I felt, “You’re not alone,” even though the story is about loneliness. The “rest house” is an ironic name; it is a place for people who never sleep, who walk forest paths from dusk till dawn. The guests have nothing in common but their existential dilemma. When Margaret encounters a courtly colonel, he tells her why he and the guests walk at night. “They go,” he said, “because they have reached their limit. For men and women there is to everything a limit beyond which further striving, further thought, leads only to regression . . . For those who do not set out, the limit varies from individual to individual, and cannot be foreseen. Few ever reach it. Those who do reach it are, I suspect, those who go off into the further forest.” Before reading this, I could not have explained my own feelings, even to myself. Truly great horror fiction holds a mirror up to our secrets. When the colonel speaks of striving deep into “the further forest,” Aickman expressed for me the true reason for continuing—with the regime of the path, one may someday break away into the unnamable, be it light or dark, both or neither.

  EIGHT MEMORABLE QUOTES FROM HORROR AUTHORS

  1. “I have the heart of a small boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk.”

  —Robert Bloch

  2. “I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the grossout. I’m not proud.”

  —Stephen King

  3. “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” —H. P. Lovecraft

  4. “The kind of horror I like drags things into the daylight and says, ‘Right. Let’s have a really good look. Does it still scare you? Does it maybe do something different to you now that you can see it more plainly—something that isn’t quite like being scared?’ ”

  —Clive Barker

  5. “Horror is not a genre, like the mystery or science fiction or the western. It is not a kind of fiction, meant to be confined to the ghetto of a special shelf in libraries and bookstores. Horror is an emotion. It can be found in all literature.”

  —Douglas E. Winter

  6. “The best horror stories are stories first and horror second, and however much they scare us, they do more than that as well. They have room in them for laughter as well as screams, for triumph and tenderness as well as tragedy.”

  —George R. R. Martin

  7. “Let’s say it once and for all: Poe and Lovecraft—not to mention a Bruno Schulz or a Franz Kafka—were what the world at large would consider extremely disturbed individuals. And most people who are that disturbed are not able to create works of fiction. These and other names I could mention are people who are just on the cusp of total psychological derangement. Sometimes they cross over and fall into the province of ‘outsider artists.’ That’s where the future development of horror fiction lies—in the next person who is almost too emotionally and psychologically damaged to live in the world but not too damaged to produce fiction.”

  —Thomas Ligotti

  8. “Horr
or fiction upsets apple carts, burns old buildings, and stampedes the horses; it questions and yearns for answers, and it takes nothing for granted. It’s not safe, and it probably rots your teeth, too. Horror fiction can be a guide through a nightmare world, entered freely and by the reader’s own will. And since horror can be many, many things, and go in many, many directions, that guided nightmare ride can shock, educate, illuminate, threaten, shriek, and whisper before it lets the readers loose.”

  —Robert R. McCammon

  — Compiled by S.B. and A.W.

  THE HORROR WRITERS ASSOCIATION BRAM STOKER

  LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS, 1987–2007

  2007—John Carpenter; Robert Weinberg

  2006—Thomas Harris

  2005—Peter Straub

  2004—Michael Moorcock

  2003—Anne Rice; Martin H. Greenberg

  2002—Stephen King; J. N. Williamson

  2001—John Farris

  2000—Nigel Kneale

  1999—Edward Gorey; Charles L. Grant

  1998—Ramsey Campbell; Roger Corman

  1997—William Peter Blatty; Jack Williamson

  1996—Ira Levin; Forrest J. Ackerman

  1995—Harlan Ellison

  1994—Christopher Lee

  1993—Joyce Carol Oates

  1992—Ray Russell

  1991—Gahan Wilson

  1990—Hugh B. Cave; Richard Matheson

  1989—Robert Bloch

  1988—Ray Bradbury; Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes

  1987—Fritz Leiber; Frank Belknap Long; Clifford D. Simak

  — Courtesy of the Horror Writers Association (www.horror.org)

  T. E. D. KLEIN’S TWENTY-FIVE MOST FAMILIAR

  HORROR PLOTS

  T. E. D. Klein is the author of the novel The Ceremonies (1984) and two collections, Dark Gods (1985) and Reassuring Tales (2006). His fiction has appeared in such acclaimed anthologies as Dark Forces and 999. He also cowrote the screenplay for Dario Argento’s film Trauma. He was the editor of the legendary Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone Magazine from 1981 to 1985 (which inspired the following list) and the editor of CrimeBeat from 1991 to 1992. The following list is excerpted from his nonfiction chapbook, Raising Goosebumps for Fun and Profit.

  1. Hey, I’m Really Dead!— The victim of a car crash or some other accident discovers, at the story’s end, that he didn’t survive after all. Often he can’t understand why friends look right through him or scream when he approaches. Occasionally, he hitches a ride from a driver who turns out, at the end, to be Death. Final image: a funeral, or a corpse in a crumpled car. Cf. Twilight Zone episode “The Hitch-Hiker,” Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “A Wedding in Brownsville,” and of course The Sixth Sense.

  Most Familiar Horror Plot #1, “Hey, I’m Really Dead!” (Illustration by Peter Kuper,

  used by permission)

  2. I’m Really in Hell— The TV’s on the fritz again, the wife or the job keeps growing more annoying (or merely more boring), and suddenly the hero realizes that he’s actually died and gone to hell. A gloomy attempt to make sense of life’s little miseries. Cf. ending of the Twilight Zone episode “A Nice Place to Visit,” with that famous zinger: “Send me to the other place,” begs the cad. Replies the angel (or demon): “This is the other place!”

  3. They’re All Against Me!— A paranoid fantasy turns out to be true. Cf. Robert Heinlein’s “They,” whose hero is the ruler of the world—if only They’d let him remember; Richard Matheson’s “Shipshape Home,” whose subbasement turns out to be the engine room of a spaceship; and Gahan Wilson’s cartoon shrink who asks the patient, “When did you first become aware of this supposed plot to get you?” while secretly beckoning to the daggerwielding assassins who’ve just slipped into the room.

  Most Familiar Horror Plot #3, “They’re All Against Me!” (Illustration by Peter Kuper, used by permission)

  4. I’ll Show Them! (Version 1)— Parents don’t believe their child’s tale of an invisible playmate (or a monster in the closet, etc.), but in the end the “imaginary” figure turns out to be real, saving the child’s life . . . or killing the child . . . or better still, killing Daddy. Famous examples: “Thus I Refute Beelzy,” by John Collier, “The Thing in the Cellar,” by David H. Keller, and “The Boogeyman,” by Stephen King, complete with monster disguised as shrink (which also makes it an example of #3).

  5. I’ll Show Them! (Version 2)— A shy, misunderstood youngster is rejected by schoolmates for being “different,” but is vindicated when he (although it’s usually a she) turns out to be gifted with startling psychic powers. Frequently submitted by sensitive teenage girls, perhaps inspired by Carrie.

  6. The Magic Picture— It draws one in. The hero or heroine—often an unhappy soul, as in #5—vanishes mysteriously and is later found depicted in an old painting, photo, tapestry, wallpaper pattern, etc. Usually, the unchanging world inside the picture is an improvement on real life, though in the Night Gallery episode “Escape Route,” the ex-Nazi protagonist accidentally dooms himself by escaping into the wrong picture.

  7. The Magic Typewriter— An author (or would-be author) acquires a supernatural typewriter which either transforms his writing style or churns out bestsellers all by itself. Sometimes—as in Gary Brandner’s “The Loaner”—it’s haunted by the ghost of its previous owner. A perennial writer’s fantasy (for obvious reasons) ever since John Kendrick Bangs wrote The Enchanted TypeWriter in 1899, right up to David Morrell’s “The Typewriter” and Stephen King’s 1982 variation, “The Word Processor.”

  8. The Forgetful Vampire— He fails to remember that it’s daylight savings time and emerges from his coffin one sunny hour too soon.

  9. Not Just a Game (Version 1)—A child gets so caught up in a fantasy role-playing game that he murders friends or family.

  10. Not Just a Game (Version 2)— A video or computer game provides training for galactic combat; or sometimes the “game” itself is actually a real war. Plays on the wish that our most trivial pastimes have world-shaking consequences, that we’re actually destined for something important, or that at least someone’s watching us and is (we hope) impressed. Cf. films such as WarGames, Tron, The Last Starfighter, etc., and Philip K. Dick’s novel Time Out of Joint.

  11. Make a Wish— The Twilight Zone TV show’s favorite plot, an illustration of Oscar Wilde’s maxim about there being only two tragedies in this world: not getting what one wants . . . or getting it. The hero or heroine in this type of story is granted three wishes, or one wish, or some long-wished-for superhuman power—and soon learns to regret it, for it goes horribly awry, often because (out of malice or stupidity) the wish-granting genie, god, or benevolent alien has taken the wish too literally. It’s a plot as old as King Midas, as old as the oldest fairy tale in which a hero was forced to use the third of three wishes to remedy the damage done by the previous two. Cf. the fisherman who wishes for the sausage, the wife who wishes it on his nose, and the third wish wasted in getting it off. Most celebrated example: “The Monkey’s Paw.” Classic variations: Wells’s “The Man Who Could Work Miracles” and Hawthorne’s “The Ambitious Guest.” Moral: Don’t rely on wishes; you’ve got to work for what you want. Alternate moral: Leave well enough alone, be content with what you’ve got, and don’t try to rise above your station—the sort of defeatist belief that would have stopped human progress in its tracks.

  12. Ironic Retribution— The classic EC (Entertaining Comics) plot. A murderer, haunted by his victim, is driven to suicide; a strangler is strangled; a war criminal is gassed; a man who blinded someone is blinded himself; a cat-killer is killed by a real (or ghostly) feline; hunted animals take revenge on a cruel hunter; machines get back at a cruel owner (as in the Twilight Zone’s “A Thing About Machines”), etc. Cf. Hans Christian Andersen’s “Girl Who Trod on a Loaf,” who pulled the wings off flies and was punished when they crawled over her frozen face.

  13. Meet the Myth— The hero or heroine encounters a hitchhiker, a seductive woman at the
beach, a new neighbor, a tramp, etc., etc., who turns out to be a centaur, a mermaid, Pan, Cthulhu, or Medusa.

  Most Familiar Horror Plot #13, “Meet the Myth” (Illustration by Peter Kuper, used by permission)

  14. The Living House— Yes, it’s really alive, and it eats anyone foolish enough to enter. Or imprisons impertinent visitors. Or crashes on the head of an evil real estate developer.

  15. The Henpecked Hubby— A milquetoast plans the intricate murder of his wife. Often ends with “Come in, dear, I have something to show you!” as the husband sits waiting for her in a room full of giant carnivorous plants. Commonly submitted by men.

  16. You Can’t Cheat Fate— A prophecy proves true, usually in some irritating, ironic way. A man fated to die of “cancer” is murdered by an astrological Cancer; a future “plane crash” victim refuses to fly but is killed when a plane hits his home, etc. A plot as old as Oedipus, not forgetting Macbeth, Moby-Dick, and William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley.