Ghost Stories and Zombies

Y'all know how much I love lists.  In a break from our regular programming, I present to you:

Martha's Top Ten Horror Novels

Because it's Halloween, and All

If you read my other blog, Boycott Bluray (if not, why don't you?) you may have heard about my aversion to watching horror movies.  It comes with a lot of  caveats - I don't like ghost stories but am generally fine with slasher movies, but I'm also utterly fascinated by them and spend hours reading the plots of horror movies I will never ever watch on Wikipedia.  Also, I've been watching (and enjoying!) American Horror Story.  So, you know.  When I say I don't like watching horror films, take it with a grain of salt.

One thing I can say definitively is that I love READING horror, and I have for a long time.  So, in this spookiest of seasons, let me share with you some of my favorites.

Blood Music, Greg Bear

Medical and body horror.  Greg Bear is masterful at medical-based science fiction, and this novella is the perfect blend of clinical medical science and eerie future tech.  It's a little bit Prey, a little bit The Blob, and a whole lot of skin-crawling disease.

Bonechiller, Graham McNamee

For anyone who thinks creature features aren't scary.  This one, taking place in the frozen darkness of Alaska in the wintertime, reaches right into your primal survival center and wrings you out.  It's about a creature that stalks children, biting them...and returning later to collect.  A group of kids decide to fight back.  This novel is creepy and cold, living up to its title, and will make you want to stay indoors once the sun goes down.

Curse of the Wendigo, Rick Yancey

This is the second book in Yancey's Monstrumologist series, and I think it's the best.  Everything the first volume does, Wendigo does better: the gritty Victorian setting, examining human nature, peeling back the layers of civility to expose the savagery within.  It expands the world of Will Henry and his monster-studying (and hunting) master, Dr. Pelinore Warthrop, and does what The Monstrumologist didn't quite manage to do: give the good doctor some humanity.  It's also viscerally disgusting and pretty terrifying, especially when you consider that this is a young adult novel.

Every Dead Thing, John Connolly

I'm not a big fan of cops and robbers mysteries, which is why it is continually a pleasure to read Connolly's books about the intrepid investigator Charlie Parker.  These are detective stories imbued with a heavy amount of supernatural horror, and while he hardly ever comes out and actually says that Parker is involved in a larger war between good and evil, it's heavily implied.  Parker is a man haunted by figurative ghosts, until he starts tracking a grisly serial killer...and the ghosts who speak to him become much more literal, and much more personal.  There are a whole bunch of these, and I recommend them all.

Feed, Mira Grant  

Less outright horror, this superbly written zombie novel slowly reveals details of life in the world post-zombie apocalypse as well as bites of a conspiracy that will make your hair stand on end.  It questions the nature of truth, the relationship we have to fear, and the human survival instinct.  Not your average zombie story - quite a bit better, in fact.

House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski

I freely confess to not having finished this book...yet.  The truth is, it got under my skin so bad that I had to walk away from it for a while, and it's so dense that it's been a little intimidating to get back to.  When I started it I had no idea that a book about a house that is larger on the inside than it is on the outside

Rotters, Daniel Kraus

A zombie book that has no zombies in it.  It's just as gross, though!  Joey, the main character, moves in with his dad after his mother dies and discovers that Dad makes his living digging up the dead and plundering their coffins.  So, naturally, he decides to learn the family trade.  Kraus is so descriptive the pages fairly reek of the dead, and even though there's nothing supernatural about this story you'll still want the lights on when Joey decides to take some unconventional measures to solve a bully problem later in the book.

'Salem's Lot, Stephen King

There are two King novels on this list, and I STRUGGLED to keep him from overtaking it completely.  But I finally decided I couldn't live without 'Salem's Lot being here, because it is, simply put, one of the best vampire novels ever written.  King's vampires are not romanticized, which makes them more frightening than most.  They are animals, and they are clever, and no matter how young their bodies are they will eat you.

The Shining, Stephen King

Let's face it, my top ten Stephen King novels could probably comprise a list of its own - he's prolific and extremely good at what he does, and that is to bring me, white knuckled, to the edge of my seat with slow-burn terror.  I think The Shining is pretty much the microcosmic best of what Stephen King does: it takes his fascination with inherent evil, an innocent child hero, and a spiral into bloody madness, and it does so in less than 700 pages.  It's nerve-wracking, claustrophobic, terrifying, and exhilarating, and has made more of an impression on me than almost any other book.

The Silence of the Lambs, Thomas Harris
Will there ever be a psychopath as charismatic as Hannibal Lecter?  I honestly kind of hope not - one of the things that makes him so memorable is how unique he is in the horror landscape.  I prefer this one to the followup, Hannibal, both because the ending doesn't go totally off the rails but also because watching two dangerously insane people circle each other like tigers makes for some gripping thrills.  Buffalo Bill is horrible, but even his flaying activities can't compare to the smooth, eerie, compelling cannibal Lecter.