What does this have to do with horror films, you might ask. Long answer? The more you know about a genre across different media, the more you can find and appreciate in each individual example Reading Lovecraft will help you find more to like about the video game Eternal Darkness. Playing zombie first-person-shooters will add to your appreciation of Shaun of the Dead.
Short answer? Shut it. You shut it right up.
5. The Body Snatchers
Jack Finney, 1955
John Campbell had the bright idea that an alien could look just like us with his classic story "Who Goes There?" (filmed as The Thing), but Jack Finney plants that idea smack in the middle of suburban America. The novel carries hints of Bradbury with its depiction of small-town life, but the aliens prove more threatening in theory than effect, and a copout ending is damn near infuriating. This is a worthwhile read for more hardcore genre fans, and the simmering post-war paranoia still simmers, but otherwise, best to stick with the 1956 and 1978 film adaptations. They're more haunting and more merciless.
4. People of the Dark
Robert E. Howard
"Muscular" is the name of the game here, as Robert E. Howard's chiseled, slightly dopey heroes give his stories a fun and furious tone. All the stories entertain, but "People of the Dark" and "The Challenge From Beyond" are highlights. In the former, Conan teams up with an enemy to escape a race of degenerate beasts in a system of caves. In the latter, Howard and four other authors (including Lovecraft) write a "round robin" tale about an alien artifact that transports a man to an planet full of giant centipedes. Once Howard's portion comes along, the hero basically says "Fuck all this talking," grabs the nearest sharp object, and hacks away at the monsters. Eff yes..
3. Horns
Joe Hill
Ignatius Perrish wakes up after a night of hardcore drinking, and, whaddaya know, he's got a pair of ram-horns twirling out of his head. People don't notice his new spiritual headgear, but the horns' presence make them all too eager to discuss their most perverted secrets. Hill's story takes its time, giving ample attention to Ig's broken-down life, his girlfriend Merrin, and his buddy Lee Tourneau, immediately one of the great horror-fiction sociopaths. There are times when the dips into people's sinful pasts and hateful wants feels a little too lopsided - is there a single decent human being in this town? But it's only fair that the devil rules this story's mood, and the closing chapters are appropriately uneasy and bittersweet. This book is a good book.
2. The House on the Borderland
William Hope Hodgson
Don't you hate it when pig monsters attack your house and interrupt your vivid dreams about witnessing the death of the universe? Of course you do, everyone does. The House on the Borderland is over a hundred years old, written by Hodgson in 1908, but there's a freshness and momentum here. The porcine humanoids attacking the eponymous house predicts Night of the Living Dead and a hundred other "siege horror" films, and the dream-travels to the far future drench the reader in ridiculous, beautiful imagery of a dying solar system. The book never completely blends those two elements together, but they're successful enough individually that the book works anyway.
1. Full Dark No Stars
Stephen King
Similar in spirit to King's earlier novella collection Different Seasons, Full Dark No Stars keeps the supernatural to a minimum. Instead, the horrors are all too real: coerced murder ("1922"), rape ("Big Driver"), and secrets buried in marriage ("A Good Marriage"). There's a grim propulsion to the stories, as King quickly cuts through his usual yoke of folksy rural Americans, exposing their regrets and sorrows and pitch-black desires without the safety net of ghosts or vampires or upbeat endings. Even the token spookhouse story - a Faustian sick joke called "Fair Extension" - plays hardball, presenting its hero's greed without any hope of a corrective. This book's title isn't kidding.
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