Scary monsters, super freaks

Halloween was my favorite day growing up because I was fascinated by vampires, werewolves and mummies. Even now there are few ways to better spend it than reading a scary book by a cozy fire, while the goblins and ghouls lurk outside. So with that in mind, some chilling books to settle in with, broken down by category.

Since vampires are just about everyone’s favorite supernatural creatures, it wouldn’t hurt to go back to Bram Stoker’s still creepy Dracula, but the legend of Vlad Tepes, the “Impaler,” lives on in some recent fare as well, including Elizabeth Kostova’s eerie (if overly long) The Historian and Royce Prouty’s genuinely frightening Stoker’s Manuscript.

Dracula aside, two of the scariest vampire novels of recent decades are Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot and the underrated Robert McCammon’s They Thirst, which is essentially Salem’s Lot, only with the bloodsuckers taking over Los Angeles instead of just a small New England town.

Werewolves don’t have the literary lineage that vampires do, but the closest thing to the foundational role played by Dracula for the lycanthropes is Guy Endore’s The Werewolf of Paris (1933). King’s novella Cycle of the Werewolf also nicely captures the spirit and was later made into a wonderful little movie called Silver Bullet. But the best, defined as scariest, werewolf novel of all might be Christopher Buehlman’s Those Across the River, a deeply disturbing tale set in a small Georgia town during the Great Depression.

When it comes to shape-shifters it’s generally a good idea to skip the political allegory stuff (like Benjamin Percy’s Red Moon) and depictions of the werewolf as sensitive anti-hero (like Glen Duncan’s The Last Werewolf) and stick with the kind of rancid, savage creatures found in Buehlman. Zombies are all the buzz these days but haven’t really inspired many genuinely scary books. Some of the recent zombie novels are interesting, including Colson Whitehead’s ZoneOne, Peter Stenson’s Fiend, and Alden Bell’s The Reapers are the Angels, but the inevitable dependence upon post-apocalypse settings too easily leads to “big theme” ambitions that detract from the chills, as well as to some silly genre controversies (Should the “walkers” be fast or slow? Answer: slow, of course, because they’re dead!).

Still, for those who’ve caught the zombie fever, among the more frightening contributions are Jonathan Maberry’s Dead of Night and This Dark Earth by Arkansas’ (and Lyon College’s) own John Hornor Jacobs, each of which preserves the traditional elements of the genre but also some how makes them seem fresh again.

Ghosts, even if just a sheet over the head with holes cut in it for eyes, are really, in the end, what Halloween is all about. Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw and the classic short stories of M.R. James still work within this vein, but you can also move on to Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, John Harwood’s The Ghost Writer, or Susan Hill’s gothic The Woman in Black. Still, the creepiest of all, the one that might actually make the hair on the back of the neck truly stand up, is Dark Matter by Michelle Paver, a harrowing tale of isolation and haunting set in the Arctic. Haunted places sort of go along with ghosts (which, after all, need places to hang about) but can also be considered a category of their own, a decision-rule which reflexively turns us toward two genuine classics, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and the late Richard Matheson’s Hell House. Then again, no discussion of fictional haunted places would be complete without the Overlook Hotel from Stephen King’s TheShining, the sequel to which, Doctor Sleep, has just been released.

The Devil and his minions pop up now and then on any scary book list, most conspicuously with Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, which might be both the scariest book ever written and the scariest movie ever made. But an interesting newcomer in this area is Andrew Pyper’s The Demonologist, which ultimately frightens for some of the same reasons as The Exorcist did (the Devil’s capacity to undermine faith) and makes you look at Paradise Lost in a new way.

Finally, there is the loose category of “monsters,” including mutations and aliens from space. The one to begin with is H.P. Lovecraft’s short story “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” about fish-looking, web-handed mutants in a malevolent New England port town. Or, assuming that just about anyone interested in such fare has already read their Poe and Lovecraft, there is John W. Campbell’s novella Who Goes There? (the basis for three film adaptions of The Thing) and Jack Finney’s sinister pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (which, like the alien in Campbell’s story, specialize in taking over earthlings’ bodies).

But supernatural evil can lurk in lots of other places as well, in the abominable snowman (in Dan Simmons’ just released The Abominable, a follow-up to his earlier The Terror), in killer vines in the South American jungle (Scott Smith’s The Ruins), and in the New York Museum of Natural History (Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s Relic).

And if none of that does it, there is always the evil clown “Pennywise” in King’s It. And what can possibly be scarier than a clown?

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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Editorial, Pages 13 on 10/28/2013

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