Horror: The 100 Best Books

by Jones, Stephen

  98: [1986] CHARLES L. GRANT - The Pet

  Ashford, New Jersey. Donald “Duck” Boyd, a mixed-up adolescent, discovers that he has the power to wish into existence the animals whose pictures cover his bedroom walls. When Don faces down The Howler, a homicidal maniac who murders only teenagers, he manages to summon up a huge stallion who tramples the killer to death. Don takes the credit and briefly becomes a local hero, but is still subject to intensive persecution at school. His notoriety only gives the community’s bullies another incentive to pick on him, and his parents — his father is also his high school principal, which adds to the all-round awkwardness of his situation — consistently fail to understand his problems. As his home and school life becomes unbearable, the stallion returns to carry out Don’s increasingly angry and violent wishes. Although obviously influenced by the plot and background details of Stephen King’s Carrie, Grant cites Bill Forsyth’s film Gregory’s Girl, a somewhat gentler picture of confused teenagers, as the inspiration for the novel.

  ***

  Once in a while a real blockbuster of a horror novel hits the bookstalls. The Pet falls into this category and it is one of the few books in recent years which has left a lasting impression with me. Sometimes the “big” book with its hype and 500 or so pages does not live up to its reputation; all too often size seems to be the criterion and when one gets down to reading it one is sadly disillusioned. The work is padded out for the sake of it and instead of a scary bedtime read guaranteed to give you nightmares it soon has your eyelids closing, and more than likely you will wake up the next morning, tread on the book as you leap out of bed and try to remember where you got to. You can’t because it is but a hazy memory of incidents unrelated to the main theme and in all probability you won’t try again. But not The Pet, you won’t sleep over this one because you won’t be able to put it down until you have finished it, and when you have finally reached page 343 you won’t dare to sleep! It would be unfair to the reader for me to dwell too much on the plot; suffice to say that the Howler, a Jack the Ripper-type killer who murders teenagers, has moved into the village of Ashford, New Jersey. I think that a small community as a setting for any book has a greater impact than a city one. If the author has done his job, and Grant certainly has, you feel that you are part of that small community, an unseen observer, and there is always the lurking fear that the Howler might seek YOU out! Grant is also a master of the sudden unexpected shock, a vital ingredient in any horror novel; however gruesome a book, however shocking, that necessary element is lacking if the next move is telegraphed. There is plenty in this book to make you jump, however hardened a reader of the horror genre you are. I bought The Pet for two reasons. First, I am an admirer of Charles L. Grant’s work and guessed it would be good. Secondly, I had enjoyed Pet Sematary by Stephen King and the word “pet” had suddenly taken on a new meaning for me. Of course, there is no similarity between the two books — I did not for one moment expect there to be — but I suspected that Grant’s novel might just top my league of favourite horror novels. The characterization is strong and the reader at once identifies with the characters. It could all just as easily be happening to YOU, not to some silhouette who flits in and out of situations and you don’t even know what he or she looks like. You know them almost as well as you know yourself, and their terror becomes very much your terror. The style is appealing. Grant’s short sentences create a sense of pace. The whole atmosphere of a book can be lost if the style is pedestrian. If a lengthy book is racy then it will grip you because the author has not had to pad it out. He has not needed to; the plot is full, there is no room for irrelevant sub-plots. We move on from one macabre scene to the next with barely a pause for breath. Today’s horror readership is discerning. Gone are the days when a mediocre novel could go to a reprint. Only the best is acceptable and The Pet is certainly among the front-runners. Having finished reading it, I was left with much to think about. Uneasy thoughts. But that’s the way it should be. — GUY N. SMITH

  99: [1987] ROBERT McCAMMON - Swan Song

  America, after a cataclysmic nuclear war. Swan, a scarred nine-year-old, has mystic powers which could provide a new hope for the ravaged world. However “Friend”, an evil force who can assume many forms, is out to prevent Swan from saving anyone. Swan and “Friend” both pick up allies and associates, with ex-wrestler Josh and bag-lady Sister Creep opting to fight for Good, and Colonel Macklin, a rabid militarist, and Roland Croniger, a young man with delusions of knightly splendour, on the side of Evil. Longer even than Stephen King’s similarly themed The Stand, Swan Song is an epic which combines nuclear nightmare with fantastical adventure, and is McCammon’s most ambitious work to date.

  ***

  Robert Bloch once wrote that the most frightening thing was “the clown at midnight”, the smiling face of innocence hiding whatever evil we care to imagine. Swan Song is in several ways a novel about masks: the mask of make-believe society under which man tries to hide what he has done to the world and himself, and the mutation mask nine-year-old Sue Wanda (“Swan”) grows on her mutilated face, turning her into an abomination. Meet the adversaries for the final Armageddon: a sick nine-year-old who is slowly changing into a monster, and is aided by a group of weird characters, and a sadistic and utterly crazy creature which acts like a clown. Good survives under a mask of horror, while Evil wears a clown’s mask: the Man with the Scarlet Eye, the Man with Many Faces, our old friend Satan himself. Robert R. McCammon has taken on the most ambitious theme of dark fantasy: the ultimate confrontation of Good and Evil, using mankind as pawns. A theme worked to death by countless others, but McCammon manages to make it something unique and special, keeping his readers entranced through all the 956 small-print pages of this meganovel of multiple disaster. There are hundreds of plot twists, but what keeps the reader turning the pages is the way McCammon blends mood and atmosphere with characters which are alive, no matter how bizarre they are. The post-nuclear war setting has its drawbacks: some of the situations are familiar stuff (the Survivalists, the warring armies, the crazies and cultists), but McCammon manages to give new flavour to old concepts, and turn them into something original. The occult themes (the powers of the spiked ring, the mental communication by “dreamwalking”, all leading to the quest of Swan and her friends) are developed parallel with the more “realistic” adventures and horrors in the postwar societies. McCammon shows all his strength in characterization: the first several hundred pages show us the cataclysm and destruction, including some really remarkable scenes, but mainly they serve to introduce the many people who will aid Swan unselfishly, unaware of the importance of what they are doing. These are scenes of great power, tragedy and compassion, but also scenes of utter horror: McCammon doesn’t shy away from graphic descriptions, and some are real stomach-turners. Swan Song may be called fantasy or even SF, but it delivers more than its share of gory horror and straight terror. The survivors first have to learn to stay alive and then learn that survival alone means nothing if it means losing their humanity, compassion and hope. This feeling extends itself to the adversary: the Man with Many Faces (who is never really called Satan) is evil incarnate, and he knows it. This gives him his power: a terrifying shapechanging being, feeding on its own insane hatred of mankind. At the same time, however, this self-knowledge hurts him, constantly showing him what he can never be, and this makes this sociopathic and murderous creature at the same time a pathetic, sad and lonely being. When Swan’s change is completed and the mask goes off her face, we not only witness a symbolic revelation of the beauty of the “inner face” of mankind, but also a mystical transformation which transcends her humanity. The very earth becomes a real power which cleans itself of the horrors inflicted by the stupidity of mankind. This is utter abomination to the Man with Many Faces: no longer is he just fighting his old opponent (there are a few references to his past, and to God) but the power of life itself. A “God” of a kind makes a rather unexpected stage-appearance, but the final fight is not b
etween God and Satan but becomes the struggle of mankind cleaning itself of its inborn evil. Swan Song is a rollercoaster ride into a world of terror and horror, but also of wonder and beauty, a story which is cruel and compassionate, a novel of eternal struggle, and eternal hope. — EDDY C. BERTIN

  100: [1987] RAMSEY CAMPBELL - Dark Feasts

  This collection demonstrates why Ramsey Campbell has been hailed as Britain’s foremost horror writer. Assembling the pick of Campbell’s earlier collections — The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants (1964), Demons by Daylight (1973), The Height of the Scream (1976) and Dark Companions (1982) — plus other outstanding pieces from various original anthologies and magazines, Dark Feasts represents the author’s own choice from the first 25 years of his writing career. Campbell began as a self-confessed disciple of H. P. Lovecraft (“The Room in the Castle”), gradually expanded within the Lovecraftian vein to find his own subjects (“Cold Print”, “The Voice of the Beach”), and then emerged as a distressingly original voice in his own right. His speciality is urban Angst and horror as supernatural nastiness stalks the inner cities (“The Man in the Underpass”, “Mackintosh Willy”, “The Midnight Hobo”, “Boiled Alive”), but he also includes EC comic-style black jokes (“Call First”), several evocative stories about childhood (“Apples”, “The Guy”, “fust Waiting”), and dark visions of a twisted religion (“The Words That Count”, “The Hands”).

  ***

  A dozen years ago, in a little piece for Harper’s on neglected spook masters, I sang the praises of an unknown named Ramsey Campbell, “a young British writer who is probably the best living creator of supernatural horror”. Robert Aickman was still alive, so the statement was perhaps a reckless one, but my friend Ted Klein had put me on to a book called Demons by Daylight, and I was in that peculiarly heightened state one experiences when discovering an utterly new literary voice. Here at last, I thought, was a horror writer who could really write, who was scarier than anyone in the business and whose scares were earned, who brought the same intelligence and verbal sophistication to the creation of terror as Le Fanu, M. R. James, and other past masters, but who did so in uncompromisingly contemporary terms. Since 1976, Campbell has gained steadily in popularity and critical acclaim, and others have made similarly sweeping generalizations about his work. He has even survived the trappings of success in the genre — the lurid paperback covers, the claustrophobic thrall of fandom, the suspicious promotional blurbs — that have reduced so many others to self-parody. Campbell’s volume, Dark Feasts: The World of Ramsey Campbell, is dedicated to T. E. D. Klein, “who helped launch me and wrote tales for me to aspire to”. This is an entirely fitting dedication since Klein, now a prominent writer himself, has often confessed to being inspired by Campbell, and whose prose has raised the standards of the genre in America much the way Campbell’s has done in Britain. For anyone who has not sampled the dark delights of Campbell’s short fiction, Dark Feasts is the book to get, for the simple reason that it has more first-rate Campbell tales than any other single volume. Campbell aficionados will want to have the book too, because of its chronological range and stylistic variety. It takes in everything from early masterpieces like “The Scar” (surely the most terrifying doppelganger tale ever written) to recent tales like the Halloween treat, “Apples”, a story which demonstrates Campbell’s peerless ability to get inside a frightened child’s sensibility. For those who enjoy Campbell at his most relentless, there is “The Hands”, which revives the anticleric (in this case, anti-nun) tradition of Gothic horror with a vengeance. For those who prefer a lighter touch, there is the creepily delightful “Seeing the World”, which reveals a terseness and satirical flair that constitute a new direction in Campbell’s work. For those who prefer brooding atmosphere to terse repartee, there is “The Brood” (like “The Scar”, an inventive variation on Invasion of the Body Snatchers). And for those who still delight in a dollop of Lovecraft there is “The Voice of the Beach”, which manages to avoid the Lovecraftian mannerisms of “The Inhabitant of the Lake.” As the subtitle promises, this book thus encompasses a large portion of Ramsey Campbell’s “world”. It is unmistakably a modern one: dislocated, disorienting, and alienating. Campbell is a master of capturing that world and the myriad ways it makes us feel vulnerable. Long before Stephen King made it fashionable, Campbell was writing about ordinary people and settings, capturing a moment of anxiety or panic in their lives and thickening it into nightmare horror. The heroes in this book are alienated college students, harassed secretaries, anxious parents, lonely children, and struggling middle-class families. The epiphany these characters invariably experience is the realization that the world is even more awful than they thought it was, so much so that positing supernatural conspiracies seems an utterly sensible and fitting thing to do. Campbell’s style is a perfect embodiment of his vision. He is a master of spectral atmosphere, but also very good at hard realism. His jagged, hallucinatory prose is exactly in touch with the reality he depicts, both psychological and physical. He knows how to inject just a drop of paranoia or dream sensation and let it either spread out to engulf an entire tale (as in the delectably wacky “Boiled Alive”) or remain in a state of deeply unsettling ambiguity (as in “The End of a Summer’s Day”). At his very best, in “The Chimney”, his most moving and personal story, he is capable of creating something as multi-layered and exquisitely disturbing as anything by Hartley or de la Mare. In, the introduction to Dark Feasts, Campbell writes that his purpose has always been to disturb. Disturb, you notice, not disgust: “Many horror stories communicate awe as well as (sometimes instead of) shock, and it is surely inadequate to lump these stories together with fiction that seeks only to disgust, in a category regarded as the deplorable relative of the ghost story.” This statement needs to be made again and again, especially in the current market, where sadism and misogyny are regularly confused with “horror”. Even in the most physically jolting tales, such as the notorious “Again”, Campbell hopes to communicate “a little of that quality that has always appealed to me in the best horror fiction, a sense of something larger than is shown”. It is precisely this sense — that something lurks in the corner of the page even more chilling than what is so vividly shown — that makes Campbell’s fiction so memorable. — JACK SULLIVAN

  List of Recommended Reading

  Inevitably, in a work like this — with its more or less random sampling of 100 titles — certain important books and authors have unavoidably been overlooked or forgotten. Therefore, in collaboration with our distinguished line-up of contributors, we’ve compiled this list of recommended books. We could have presented a comprehensive listing, but that would have meant dropping everything else in the book, so regard this — unabashedly arbitrary — list as a guide to further reading in the genre rather than a pantheon of classics engraved in marble and handed down to posterity.