Couple of Cool Things

A brief post on a couple of cool things recently:

A Sony C60 - brings back
so many memories.

Mark West has put together another one of his fabled 'mixtapes' - over on his site a number of us horror types have written about our favourite Stephen King short story. There's selections from Priya Sharma, Maura McHugh, Kit Power, Paula Limbaugh, Willie Meikle, and many many others.

My own piece is on King's story 'The Man In The Black Suit', although I spend almost as much time talking about a Bob Dylan song. (I often talk more about Bob Dylan than I should, especially after a beer or two.) You'll have to check out the Mixtape to find out which one.

On an unrelated note, the anthology Another Dimension (which features my story 'Red Route') has won an award! The Sterling Award, to be specific, which celebrates all things to do with the creator of The Twilight Zone. So that's rather nice.


Another Dimension (UK | US)

A-Z Of Books

I saw this blog challenge thingy on the site of the excellent horror author Thana Niveau who picked some great books. So I thought sod it, I'll give it a go too. Because it's basically just another excuse to talk about books... not that I really need excuses.

AUTHOR YOU’VE READ THE MOST BOOKS BY: A score-draw threeway between Ramsey Campbell, Stephen King and Terry Pratchett.

BEST SEQUEL EVER: The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe by Douglas Adams.

CURRENTLY READING: A Cold Season by Alison Littlewood - as you might expect, so far this is bloody brilliant. Oh and I'm also rereading The King In Yellow.

DRINK OF CHOICE WHILE READING: Currently a glass of Marston's Pedigree. 

E-READER OR PHYSICAL BOOK: I read both; in fact I'm normally reading a book on each at any given time.

FICTIONAL CHARACTER YOU WOULD HAVE DATED IN HIGH SCHOOL: Knowing my luck, Carrie White.

GLAD YOU GAVE THIS BOOK A CHANCE: Emma by Jane Austin. I guess my view of what Austin was like was coloured by half-watched TV adaptations. But she's so much more cynical and astute than her reputation for period romance might suggest.

HIDDEN GEM BOOK: Ice Age by Iain Rowan. A stunning collection of weird-creepy-shit stories.

IMPORTANT MOMENT IN YOUR READING LIFE: I've mentioned this before on here, but when my Dad handed me a copy of Salem's Lot from his bookshelves.

JUST FINISHED: The Wanderer by Timothy J. Jarvis, which was fantastic, and the The Best Horror Of The Year 6 edited by Ellen Datlow.

KIND OF BOOKS YOU WON’T READ: Anything where it's so obviously been written aiming for a film adaptation. Plus anything where the blurb is some kind of mashup such as "Like Harry Potter in Space!" or something equally repellent & cynical.

LONGEST BOOK YOU’VE READ: Not sure really. Vanity Fair? Anna Karenina? Crime & Punishment? Spot Bakes A Cake? 

MAJOR BOOK HANGOVER: The Road by Cormac McCarthy. An absolutely stunning achievement. But Christ, it makes most end of the world novels seem like Enid Blyton.

NUMBER OF BOOKCASES YOU OWN: Eight.

ONE BOOK YOU’VE READ MULTIPLE TIMES: The Waste-Land & Other Poems by T.S. Eliot. The language is so breathtakingly poweful and precise, sometimes I just reread the same lines.

PREFERRED PLACE TO READ: Somewhere with a view of the sea.

QUOTE THAT INSPIRES YOU FROM A BOOK YOU’VE READ: I'm not going to pick anything trite and inspirational, I'm just going to pick what I consider to be one of the most perfect openings to a novel ever written. It's inspirational because it's what I'm aiming for, and constantly falling short of:

“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.”
We Have Always Lived In The Castle, Shirley Jackson

READING REGRET: That I'll die before I read everything I want to, even if people stopped writing now. And yet, non-reading people get to live on average the same length of time. There's no justice; their years should be mine.

SERIES YOU STARTED AND NEED TO FINISH: The Culture novels by Iain M. Banks.

THREE OF YOUR ALL-TIME FAVOURITE BOOKS: Three? Three? Jesus, it was bad enough picking five for a recent interview. So here's three that I didn't include there:

1. The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood
2. House Of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
3. The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

UNAPOLOGETIC FANGIRL/BOY FOR: Ramsey Campbell. He's the guvnor.

VERY EXCITED ABOUT THIS RELEASE: Too many to mention, obviously, but I'm very much looking forward to The Grieving Stones by Gary McMahon.

WORST BOOKISH HABIT: When I'm reading and someone comes to talk to me and I look like I'm listening to what they're saying, but really I'm still thinking about the book...

X MARKS THE SPOT: START ON THE TOP LEFT OF YOUR SHELF AND PICK THE 27TH BOOK: The Woman In The Dunes by Kōbō Abe.

YOUR LATEST PURCHASE: Bodies Of Water by V.H. Leslie and Oh! The Places You'll Go by Dr. Seuss, for my daughter because it was one of the readings at her Naming Day.

ZZZZ-SNATCHER BOOK (LAST BOOK THAT KEPT YOU UP WAY TOO LATE): Phonogram 3: The Immaterial Girl. I love these graphic novels, in which music really is magic. There's some fantastic use of pop-cultutral imagery and references in this third volume, especially when the protagonist becomes trapped in a murderous version of the video for Take On Me. And the Appendix, explaining all of the musical references is a delight, so I stayed up late reading it and looking up various music videos on the internet.

My Dad, IT, And Me

A quick heads up to say that I've a guest blog up over at the King For A Year site. The brainchild of Mark West, the project aims to get 52 reviewers to review 52 Stephen King books throughout 2015.

My own piece is a rather personal take on what is, to my mind, one of his greatest books: IT (or CA  as it always pleases me to see it called in French bookshops). You can read my review here.

Fictional Emotions; Emotional Fictions

'I Hated This Book!' - it was one of those arguments on Goodreads where both sides had become entrenched before I even saw the thread. Arguing about whether a book was any good or if it "sucked". The whole thing was completely impenetrable unless you'd read the YA book in question, but the arguments seemed the same as a thousand other similar threads and reviews: "I didn't like the main character one bit!"; "I finished this book and I felt nothing..."

I felt nothing - that was said as if it should end all discussion (although no arguments are ever won or lost on Goodreads) which seems reasonable enough. Isn't that why we read - to feel? But it got me thinking - what exactly do we mean when we say this? It seems to me there are a whole range of ways books can create an emotional response, and many of the endless and tedious arguments about reading are caused by a failure to acknowledge one or more of them.

I've put some very loose and blurry definitions of different types of emotion response to fiction below; no doubt these are biased towards my own reading and writing preferences. Comments, criticism and additions very much welcomed below the line.


1. Experiencing the emotions the main character(s) are experiencing

This is probably what most people think of when they think of an emotional response to a story: the main character is excited and so you feel a vicarious excitement, the main character is conflicted and hence so are you. Much commercial and YA fiction is written to create just this kind of response, and it seems to me to be the driving force behind the idea that a story should have a POV character that is sympathetic; that there shouldn't be too much of an emotional leap required from the reader.

Much so-called literary fiction claims to be more 'sophisticated' than commercial fiction merely because the character you are invited to emotionally identify with for the duration of the story is unattractive or abnormal in some way: a murderer (The Outsider), a child murderer (Beloved), a child lover (Lolita). And this seems a good thing to me; one of the reasons reading is a valuable activity is precisely because it allows you to emotionally experience the world from someone else's perspective, which may be radically different to your own. And it's the reason I find the commercial insistence that the central character of a story should be someone the reader can easily identify with so dispiriting. 


2. Experiencing different or conflicting emotions to what the main character(s) are experiencing



Sometimes the emotional response the reader feels to what a character is going through is conflicting or at odds with what the character themselves would be feeling. Put simplistically, if a chapter about a villain's downfall is told from the villain's point of view, the reader will be experiencing some kind of positive reaction to the villain's own frustration and woe. More interestingly, someone like Jane Austin is great at writing scenes where the characters appear, even to themselves, to be acting civilly and rationally but the reader can perceive the more human and subjective reasons, such as pride (and, um, prejudice) for their behaviour underneath. In Austin's case this doesn't necessarily stop us from also empathising with the characters, but in a book like Carrie it might, at least to an extent. Carrie's actions are in one sense perfectly understandable, and in another monstrous; and the different points of view in the story dramatise this paradox.


3. Atmosphere 


Of course, emotions don't have to have anything to do with characters at all; it's an odd fact about writing that almost anything, no matter how inanimate, can be be described emotionally. This is especially important in horror writing, where a sense of dread is frequently achieved by describing everyday locations in such de-familiarising ways that they seem full of portent and threat. Think of the brilliant opening to The Haunting Of Hill House - the sense that something is very wrong about the house is palpable but there is no viewpoint character to be experiencing this; it's all in our heads. And of course this kind of effect is not just limited to fear or tension; a good writer is selecting every detail to evoke whatever mood is desired.


4. The thrill of well-written sentence

Being able to actual write well is of course key to evoking any emotional responses in the reader. But separate and beyond that, I think, is the way a well crafted sentence can evoke an emotional response like a piece of music can - by the way it sounds:

"And I said I do, I do.So daddy, I'm finally through [...]If I've killed one man, I've killed two—The vampire who said he was you."

Or if poetry's too much for you on a blurry Saturday morning, how about this from Douglas Adams:

“He turned slowly like a fridge door opening.”

I'm not sure there's much point in trying to explain that - you either get it or you don't. Either feel the rightness of those words in that order, or you don't. Subjective, sure. But as much a part of the reading experience as anything else.

5. Game-playing, Plotting, and Climaxes

The plot of a book drives much of the character's emotional responses, but we as reader's can respond to it on an entirely different level as well - because we know it is a plot. This is best described as that feeling we get at a 'twist' ending to a story, or when the murderer is revealed at the end of a whodunit. In a sense, the author and the reader have been playing a game, the reader trying to guess the ending, the writer trying to stop them (whilst still playing fair and leaving enough clues). There's something pleasurable about being tricked by something like The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd and then having that trick explained to us at the end. And that 'Aha!' moment of realisation is an emotional response that came only come from a story, not from life, which doesn't play games.

More broadly, just knowing a story is nearing its end shapes our emotional responses to what occurs. We don't have to think, for example, about what the events of Romeo &Juliet mean to the poor sods who are left to pick up the pieces in the months and years afterwards because we're already back outside of the theatre, blinking in the light.


6. Intellectual Emotions


I read somewhere that we all belong to one of two camps with regard to facts: those people who think it's only worth knowing something if it's of use, and those who value knowledge for its own sake regardless of its usefulness. The fact that I've remembered this, when it's never been of the slightest use in my life, probably shows what type of person I am.

I think for at least some people the use of intellectual ideas in a piece of fiction triggers a peculiar kind of emotional response, one which is hard to describe (we really should have a specific word for it). Novels like Flatland by Edwin A. Abbot work almost entirely because of this play of intellectual ideas - and that's the best way I can describe it, as "play". Like the music of a piece of poetry, this is one you either get or you don't, I think. 


7. Fill In The Blanks

I'm pretty sure we all know that as readers we bring our own emotional baggage and experiences to a piece of fiction. And some books play on this by presenting events in such a flat, blank canvas way that we are tempted to fill in the void. We ascribe motivation, beliefs and emotions to characters based on their actions without any textual justification for doing so. Less Than Zero by Brett Easton Ellis (indeed, nearly all of Easton Ellis's books) seems to me to work at least in part because of this - it presents to us scenes so flat it's like an itch we can't quite scratch. 

And of course, if what you're after from a book is a likeable hero or heroine with whom you can share their ups and downs, this itch might drive you to close the covers before you finish it. Which is fine; it would be a boring world if we were all the same. But on that principle maybe avoid ranting about how you couldn't relate to the characters at all! on Goodreads. If only because, no arguments are ever won or lost on Goodreads.


8. And Finally, One For The Authors:

That crippling sense of bitter envy and self-doubt when you read something so bloody good it makes any talent of your own seem insignificant and counterfeit in comparison. That.

The Ritual & Wilderness Horror

I recently finished The Ritual by Adam Nevill, a horror novel set, to quote the blurb, in "the Scandinavian wilderness of the Arctic Circle". It's a fine novel, albeit one that I felt lost a bit of steam in its second half. It's also a very pure horror novel too: it's essentially about a group of friends lost in the woods, with 'something' stalking them. Even more essentially, it's a book about the fear of death.

That might sound a trite, even pointless description - aren't all horror novels about the fear of death? After all, what else is there actually to be afraid of, underneath? Maybe that's true, but it's surprising how many horror books and films pussyfoot around the issue. Very few put us inside the head of someone facing death for any length of time. The gory kills, the entrails and innards spilt in the worst horror films and fictions actually seem a distraction, a sensationalist focusing on the external side of death. The real horror is inside.

The Ritual dares to show us the thoughts of someone who believes they are going to die for a very long time. The sense of dread, of hopelessness, is almost palpable and is as scary as anything I've read for a long time.

Maybe the starkness of the wilderness setting increases this feeling. After all, the central characters are in a hell of a mess before the supernatural element really makes itself known. They are lost, wet, alone, running out of food and a couple of them are injured, slowing the group down. They're suffering that modern dislocation that comes when suddenly, somehow in the middle of our routine lives we can be mortally in danger: they were on holiday for Christ's sake, and now this... But theirs is also an ageless fear, too: the fear of being lost in the woods.

It's the same fear Stephen King plays on in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon - one of his best books I think, because it's so simple: the titular girl is also lost in the woods and scared she's not alone. It's a very different book, both in terms of plot and tone, to The Ritual but there's a similarity there. As there is with The Terror by Dan Simmons, another book where the horrors of the Arctic wilderness the characters can't escape (stranded this time, rather than lost) almost seem to dwarf the supernatural element of the plot.

So why, we might ask, do these books even need a monster - is it a mere sop to the horror audience? A set of stabilisers that these writers can't write without?

Well no, I don't think so. I think it's important to the effect of these stories, and The Ritual in particular, that the 'thing' is barely described, a shadowy but constant presence at the characters' backs. No matter how far they walk, it keeps pace with them; no matter where they hide it seeks them out. It's like Death itself, in fact. Not so much a symbol, but an externalisation of the character's plight.

But, these being stories, the monster can also be evaded, fought off- temporarily and at great cost it can be defeated. Sometimes we can make it out of the wilderness, of the woods we have got lost in. Despite a sense of hopelessness as great as any I've encountered in a novel, there are brief moments of respite in The Ritual, of light and hope. But I won't give the game away about whether they are ultimately groundless or how the novel ends - this really is one you need to read yourself.

The Ritual (UK |US)

Strange Story #20: House Of Leaves

Strange Story #20: House Of Leaves

Author: Mark Z. Danielewski

Make no mistake, those who write long books have nothing to say. Of course those who write short books have even less to say...

Most of the strange stories I've featured in this column to date have been short, controlled tales – paranoia and fear mounting to a single moment of horror. Whilst the best of these stories might imply a lot, they definitively state very little.

House Of Leaves is not that kind of story.

This is a huge novel (and one you must read in its physical version rather than as an ebook, as the photographs in this post will indicate) with multiple plots and sub-plots, typographical tricks, footnotes and diversions. It tells the story of ‘The Navidson Record’, a film by a renowned photographer about a very singular house.

The book takes the form of an academic treatment of the film, discussing its themes and veracity. This has apparently been written by Zampano, a blind man who dies in mysterious circumstances. His manuscript is recovered by a second character, Johnny Truant, who interprets the Zampano notes and The Navidson Record in his own way, as well as chronicling the breakdown he suffers whilst reading the material, despite the fact that he can find no evidence that the film even exists.

So the book is in effect one narrator annotating the notes of another narrator about a film neither can ever have seen (one doubting it is real, the other being blind) and that even if it does exist might just be a fake anyway. I think.

Added to this, the book is a labyrinth (and that word is chosen deliberately) of other stories, from Johnny’s tall-tales told to impress girls to historical accounts of people shipwrecked in the Arctic. The book also features seemingly never-ending lists (of architectural features, famous photographers, ghost stories etc.), mirror-writing, poems, and letters with a secret code. There are 'quotations' about the Navidson Record from people like Derrida, Camile Paglia, and Stephen King. There are a number of seemingly trivial mysteries that nevertheless prey on the mind: why is the word house (or any translation thereof) in a different colour & font to the rest of the text? Why is every reference to the Minotaur myth crossed through?

This book achieves ambiguity not through sparseness of detail but through a surfeit of it.

And there remains the fact that, despite the interruptions and longueurs, there is at the core of this book a truly frightening and original horror story. The Navidson Record starts with the Navidson family moving into a new house, and Navidson realising his house appears to be a fraction of an inch bigger on the inside than the outside: Lovecraft’s crazy geometry rewritten on a domestic scale. Soon after, a door appears in the house that wasn't there before, that appears to open onto a small, dusty corridor… which is clearly occupying the same physical space as the garden outside the house. Navidson, and later others, explore the corridor, and they soon realise the space behind the door is potentially huge (infinite?), and shifting and protean... and there might be something in that impossible space with them. The sheer impossibility of the house, initially represented by that small fraction of an inch, becomes something experienced on a far vaster scale. Added to this is the very human drama played out between Navidson and his wife Karen, who desperately wants her husband to stop exploring the house, and between Navidson and his estranged brother Tom. The book contains several moving moments of catharsis as well as it's brain-frying detail.

House Of Leaves seems to me a stunning achievement, a book that will become a true classic of the genre (despite the fact that no genre can really contain it). It meshes post-modernism with a strong knowledge of horror tropes, and comes up with something absolutely original. It contains enough intellectual stimulation to fuel a thousand post-graduate essays, but with enough twists and turns of the plot to turn it into an addictive page-turner too. Despite its size it’s compulsively readable, and re-readable – I've read it three times now and found new pleasures and confusions each time.

In fact, typing this, it occurs to me it's a love story, too.

Absolutely essential reading.

Big Bulky Horror Novels for Halloween

Halloween is an odd time of year, when people who never normally watch horror movies or read ghost stories seem to find an excuse to do so. The webpage of a national newspaper might discuss a short story by Robert Aickman, and a respectable broadcaster might devote an hour to an informed discussion of European horror films.

 

I'm probably guilty on this blog of discussing the more obscure aspects of horror fiction, at the expense of commercial books that a wider audience will have heard of. So in tribute to Halloween and the temporary mass celebration of all things scary, I've decided to do a post on my favourite BIG horror best-sellers. These were the kind of books that introduced me to the genre when I was a teenager and it’s unlikely I’d be reading Aickman & Co. if I’d not read the likes of King and Simmons first.

 

I've imposed some strict rules on my selections here: no tricksy post-modernism (sorry, House Of Leaves); no psychological ambiguity (bye bye Turn of The Screw and Hill House); nothing old (stop moaning,  Doctor Jekyll And Mister Hyde) and no short stories or novellas (adiós just about every weird, under-appreciated book I've ever featured here). Instead, these are the block-busters. The writers of cracking action scenes with unambiguously evil villains. At least three have been made into movies, and the other two should be.

 

I guess it’s obvious from the above that this list would include King, so I thought I might as well start with him. IT is probably my favourites of his horror novels, and it exemplifies the kind of book I'm talking about here: vast, with a sprawling cast of characters, and a ‘big bad’ who has been responsible for decades of fear in the Maine town (of course) of Derry. The story takes place across two timelines – the characters repeat scenes from their childhood as flawed and weaker adults… King’s handling of this, and the creepy effects associated with time repeating itself, are a highlight of the novel and really call into question those people who think he can’t write with any subtlety. (Just because the books I'm talking about here are big bulky blockbusters doesn't mean they’re big bulky dumb blockbusters.)

 

For me, Ghost Story is Straub’s best book by a country mile – forget the singular title, this book should really be called Ghost Stories, containing as it does multiple stories told by a group of old men know as the ‘Chowder Society’. Straub takes the Stephen King approach of using an American small town as a setting for his horrors, and as a microcosm of society as a whole, but this is distinctly his own style. As the story progresses it becomes clear that each of the individual ghosts and monsters are just facets of the real evil; that each of the separate stories being told, are in fact just elements of one story after all.

Probably the most ‘arty’ book in this list, and arguably not horror, being told as it is from the point of view of a monster. But there are bigger monsters in this tale than the vampire doing the talking, and the real horror may be the slow falling away of his humanity… I like this book for it’s lavish set pieces (the whole book is nothing more than a series of set pieces, really) and the darkly luxurious feel of the prose, particularly in its descriptions of night-time New Orleans and Paris. Maybe this was the start of the trend towards Twilight and everything bad associated with that, but here the vampires still have a decadent, almost nihilistic  edge. (Everything else I've read by Rice, including the sequels to this, I've not liked at all.)

 

An absolute whopper of a book, which has a premise that makes it sound like the worst tripe imaginable: ‘mind vampires’ have been controlling human affairs for decades. But this was back when Simmons was at the top of his game (by contrast his last book was one part plot to nine parts Tea Party ranting) and he plays the idea of mind vampires with a completely straight bat. They become almost the ultimate villain, responsible for humanity’s evils both big and small. And like all the best villains they are completely compelling. The odds seem ridiculously stacked against the human heroes and despite the simple good versus evil plot, the book has an air of desperation in places that makes it stand out.

 

The most recent book on the list and yet another one about vampires. I don’t know if Lindqvist has read Interview With The Vampire, but given it’s English-language ubiquity it at least seems likely he might have. One of the minor characters in that book might have been the inspiration for this one – a child vampire. A creature that has lived for centuries but still has the body of a kid. In some ways this is the darkest of the books in this list, with its setting of an 80s Swedish housing estate, and its background themes of addiction and child-abuse. In this setting the child-vampire is only partly horrific, and the tale of her relationship with a lonely schoolboy has a real emotional core, twisted and bleak, but there. The kind of book that gives best-sellers a good name.

Feel free to mention your own big bulky favourite horror novels in the comments...

Stephen King Nails It...

Stephen King has written an article about American politics and tax (keep reading!) for The Daily Beast... and he does a better job cutting through the bullshit than most political commentators or journalists. It's called:

Stephen King: Tax Me, for F@%&’s Sake!

Now I'm not American (I've never even been there) but it seems many of the attitudes King describes are becoming common over here too; the recent cutting of the top-tax rate by Cameron and Osborne is proof of that ("we're all in this together" surprisingly proved to be utter horse piss) as well as the opening of the NHS up for profit; the fawning over the Murdoch empire even as it topples; the lack of regulation or censure on the bankers who caused this bloody mess in the first place...

Etcetera, etcetera.

So anyway, this piece struck a chord with me; and it's nice to know an author who's had much of my money over the years isn't a total prick, but in fact seems grounded and self-aware enough to realise luck and society as well as his own (formidable) talent got him where he is today.

Some choice King quotes from the article:

"I don’t want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share."

"That it’s not fair to ask the middle class to assume a disproportionate amount of the tax burden. Not fair? It’s un-fucking-American is what it is."

But really, read the whole thing.

The Scattershot Writing Horror Anthology - As Chosen By You...

So I thought it would be interesting to list all the stories suggested in my competition post below - consider this some kind of ultimate Scattershot Writing anthology of goodness:

Robert Aickman: The Cicerones

Clive Barker: In The Hills, The Cities (2 votes)

Clive Barker: Tortured Souls

Algernon Blackwood: The Willows

Ray Bradbury: The Foghorn

Ray Bradbury: Mars Is Heaven

Ray Bradbury: The October Game

Poppy Z Brite: The Sixth Sentinel

Truman Capote: Miriam

Harlan Ellison: Jeffty is Five (2 votes)

Harlan Ellison: Sensible City

Neil Gaiman: Other People

Neil Gaiman: The Price

Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Yellow Wallpaper (2 votes)

Elizabeth Hand: Cleopatra Brimstone

M John Harrison: The Incalling 

Joe Hill: The Cape

WW Jacobs: The Monkey's Paw

Shirley Jackson: The Lottery (2 votes)

MR James: A Warning To The Curious

Kafka: Metamorphosis

Stephen King: Chattery Teeth

Stephen King: Mrs. Todd's Shortcut

Stephen King: Survivor Type

Neil LaBute: Iphigenia in Orem

Fritz Leiber: Smoke Ghost

Robert Leman: There Are Feesters In the Lake

Kelly Link: Louise's Ghost

Kelly Link: The Hortlak (2 votes)

HP Lovecraft: The Colour Out of Space

HP Lovecraft: The Rats In The Walls

HP Lovecraft: Pickman's Model (2 votes)

Arthur Machen: The White People

Richard Matheson: Born Of Man And Woman

Joyce Carol Oates: Family

Joyce Carol Oates: Smother

Edgar Allen Poe: The Pit And The Pendulum (2 votes)

Edgar Allen Poe: The Raven

Edgar Allen Poe: The Tell Tale Heart

Aaron Polson: Tesoro's Magic Bullet

Jim Shepard: The Creature From The Black Lagoon

Michael Marshall Smith: What Happens When You Wake Up In The Night

Margaret St. Clair: Horror Howce

Theodore Sturgeon: It!

F Paul Wilson: The Barrens

Well if it was a real anthology I'd buy it. You guys sure have good taste... I think everyone who contributed managed to list both stories I really love, and some that were new to me. Definitely some ones I will be checking out. Bradbury, King, Lovecraft and Poe were the most popular in terms of numbers of stories nominated.

We'd also have to find room for these less than precise suggestions:


"[Can't remember title*] by Richard Matheson * sure it has a child, locked in a room, and faces painted on the wall with glow in the dark paint, not Born Of."


"A story about people in the arctic purposefully freezing and amputating their limbs that I am sure I read at chizine.com but which I can find no mention of. "

"A lot of Ligotti stories." 

Horror Stories: What's In The Box?

Iain Rowan has posted a good review of The Shelter over at his blog - when I say a 'good review' I don't mean he liked it (although he did, thank goodness) but that it was an informative and perceptive piece, saying many interesting things about horror fiction. I was particularly struck by this:

Horror fiction often disappoints me, as the suspense and dread rises, but then you see the monster, and...is that it? 


This immediately made me think of Stephen King's wonderful non-fiction book Dance Macabre where he makes a similar point about horror - you throw open the door to reveal the monster and the reader thinks 'A ten foot ant! Yikes quite scary! But I can cope with that... Now a 100ft ant, that would be scary...' But of course, if what was behind the door was a 100ft ant, the reader would be thinking: Scary! But I can cope with that...


The image I have in my own head is of a jack-in-the-box - as a horror author, you better have something good springing out of that box. (And that thought always makes me hum this song, but anyway). 

All of which has got me thinking, what are the different ways horror authors solve this problem? Seems to me it's these:

1. Pretend There Isn't A Problem
Maybe, if you're a really skilled author, and having a really good day, you can still get away with writing a story where the big reveal is basically "Boo! It's a vampire!" Maybe.

2. Monster With A Twist
This one is quite common - vampires that turn into a snake not a bat, zombies that run etc. It can be done well   - vampires have been reinvented scores of times, the most recent high-profile case being Let The Right One In. When it's done well it works - the twist creates a frisson of shock, and allows creatures grown dusty with familiarity to be scary once more. But it's damn hard to do, and one suspects there's more failures than successes. Do it badly, and it's apt to seem to the reader like a cheap gimmick rather than anything they should react to, let alone be scared by.

3. Invent A New Monster
If ghosts, werewolves, vampires, aliens and zombies (and alien zombies) are all seeming too stale, then the best thing to do is invent a new monster, no? The reader can't have a jaded reaction to something they've never encountered before can they?

Well no. But there's little new under the sun. Dance Macabre time again (and if you read or write horror and haven't a well-thumbed copy of this on your bookshelf then you really need to examine your life choices up to this point) - King talks about the books Psycho and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as werewolf novels. Werewolf novels? 

Yes, because the really scary thing about werewolves isn't the teeth or fur, but the fact that those guys walk around most of the time looking just like you and me. As does Norman Bates when he's not in his dead mother's dress; as does the respectable looking Mister Hyde. The scary thing is they look normal but can change.

So if you want to create a new monster for your story, be careful. In reality, this method is likely to be identical to Number 2.

4. Only Partially Reveal Your Monster
Now we're talking. I do this one quite a lot - letting the reader glimpse the thing out of the corner of their eye, throwing in some choice description but leaving most to the imagination. The idea being, if the unknown is what's scary, keep it a bit unknown. Lovecraft was a master at this - how many of us could really say exactly what Cthulhu looks like?

Be wary though - if done clumsily this approach can seem to the reader to be a cheap trick.

5. Ambiguity #1: Call Into Question Just What The Real Monster Is
Just because you've revealed what everyone thinks the monster is, it doesn't mean they're right. Maybe it's just an aspect of the real Big Bad. Think Ghost Story by Peter Straub which gets all sorts of ghosts and monsters and scary kids roaming around, but they're all just reflections of the real monster... and of ourselves. You can keep the tension tight if the reader is never sure which reveal is the big one.

6. Ambiguity #2: Call Into Question If The Monster Is Even Real 
Another one I really like. What if it's all in the protagonist's head? Isn't that more scary than a monster, in some ways - especially if you're not sure? The obvious example here is The Turn Of The Screw (ghosts are the perfect monster for this type of horror) but it doesn't have to be as overt as that; a lot of horror can be read in this way.

7. Make The Monster Relevant To The Characters
There's tons of good examples of this one, but to pick a familiar one: in The Exorcist the priest has to determine whether the girl is really possessed by a demon, or just faking or suffering some psychological trauma. But here's the turn of this screw: the priest is losing his faith in God. But if the demon is real, if Evil with a capital E is real, then surely Good with a capital G is too? The priest almost wants the demon to be real... (which dovetails nicely with technique 6. above).

8. Don't Have A Monster
Guess what? Horror doesn't need a monster. Horror needs dread, unease, fear; horror needs... well horror. And a good author can generate this without a bogeyman. To end with an example of my own, A Writer's Words in my collection The Other Room has no psycho-killers, no mutants or mummies. What it does have, hopefully, is a creepy sense of unease as an almost existential situation overtakes the main character. And somehow, with this kind of horror story, where there's no monster as such, the reveal can be seamless.

So, fellow horror authors, what do you think? Have I missed any out? In reality of course authors mix and match these approaches to the issue of opening the box, or the door, to reveal what's been lurking.

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In other news, I'm taking part in a 'blog hop' running from 24th to 31st October, where I'll be giving away some books and maybe other stuff if I can work something out. (If you aren't sure quite what a 'blog hop' is, like I wasn't, check out this post from Belinda Frisch, which explains it better than I could.)

If you're a fellow horror author (and let's face it, if you've read all of blog post so far there's a good chance you probably are) and want to take part, check out the Coffin Hop webpage.

A Drunken Conversation about Ghost Stories...

I was talking to some of my non-reader friends in the pub the other night (non-readers are people too, apparently) and the somewhat boozy conversation got round to hobbies, and while I don't view it as a 'hobby' I told them about the stories I'd written. It was the first time I'd mentioned the subject to them, and they naturally asked what my stories were about. So I gave them a rough synopsis of the plot of my forthcoming novella The Shelter and a few stories from The Other Room...

"What? You write ghost stories?"

I was a bit taken aback by that shocked "you". Why shouldn't I write ghost stories? I asked what they meant by that comment, and amid the general beer-confusion I got the answer out of them: they wouldn't expect someone like me to believe in ghosts.

Well no. I wouldn't expect that of someone like me either. I can be pretty scathing toward people who believe in mumbo-jumbo, good-luck, or attributing significance to coincidental oddities. I can't stand people who argue by constructing straw-men or from conflicting premises (hello, internet discussion groups!). As well as fiction, my bookshelf comprises of non-fiction works of popular science, philosophy and logic...

So for the record: no, I don't believe that ghosts, or any of the other supernatural gubbins in my stories, actually exist.

I guess this a statement that only horror stories would routinely have to make. For realistic fiction, the question doesn't generally apply. For the other kinds of speculative fiction, fantasy and sci fi, the tendency is for the author to build a whole world - internally consistent but not mimetic. Horror is the only genre which generally strives to create a realistic view of the world, but then introduces a single unrealistic element into that world.

Neither of my drunken companions continued the conversation beyond this point, but if they'd been sober I suspect the natural next question would have been, "Okay, so why do you write ghost stories then, if you don't believe in such things?"

Good question.

There's a somewhat trite assumption that the creations and monsters of horror are just analogies for our real world fears - vampires = fear of sex; zombies = fear of plague; and so on. But I don't believe that equations apply to literature, or that the complexity of a great story can be reduced to a mere binary relationship with a small part of the real world. But removing the over-simplification, there's some truth to the idea that horror fiction plays on what we find disturbing, on things that we find creepy or just, somehow... wrong.

If I look back at the science and philosophy books I proudly displayed as evidence of my rationalism above, I find I'm fascinated by all sorts of oddities, paradoxes where logic seems a flimsy construction. Schordinger's Cat and Hempel's Ravens. Fascinated, and maybe just a little... scared.

And I find this same sense of rationality being more flimsy than we'd like to think in the best horror stories: in Call Of Cthulhu and the elder gods lurking out there somewhere; in The Turn of The Screw and the ambiguity of not knowing whether the ghost is real or not (by which I mean real in the context of the story); in stories as different as The Stand and The Summer People where society and its conventions are shown to be paper-thin; in stories by Ramsey Campbell where even descriptions of the mundane seem to convey a hazy sense of menace...

Capturing that feeling - that's why I write ghost stories. (And thinking up blog posts like this is why I drink beer with my non-reader friends in pubs.)

Am I alone in this - other horror authors, do you believe that the things you write about could actually exist? Or are your views like mine, or somewhere else entirely?