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.

This post is mostly about Horror Novels

49. Bones of the Yopasi, Graham McNeill
This is the second book in the Dark Waters trilogy by McNeill, which are novelizations in the universe of the FFG Cthulhu games (Arkham Horror, Elder Sign, Mansions of Madness).  I picked up the first one, Ghouls of the Miskatonic, at GenCon 2011 and have been waiting pretty eagerly for volume two (released, appropriately, at GenCon 2012).  I know McNeill first from the fabulous work he does for Games Workshop - I've mentioned some of his Horus Heresy work right here on this blog (his books are, largely, my favorites).  It's slightly baffling to me that his work with FFG isn't as strong, but as people have noted, the Cthulhu mythos universe may just be more difficult to write within - it's got the time period constraints, being set in the '20s, which comes with a whole load of issues (dialogue seems to be McNeill's biggest problem, all his characters end up sounding like Casablanca cliches) but in general, the Dark Waters books serve up a heaping dose of Elder God weirdness and some fun action.  At the end of the day, that's all I want.

50. 11/22/63, Stephen King
This is the third King novel I've read this year for my challenge, and I think it's my favorite.  When I was about 13, I went through an intense Stephen King phase: I loved (and still love) horror fiction, in a way that surprises most people who know how terrified I am of horror film.  But reading something is different from watching it, and King is a master of the genre.  I read IT, The Shining (one of my top five books ever), Eyes of the Dragon, 'Salem's Lot, Four Past Midnight, almost everything I could get my hands on (I missed some cornerstones, like Carrie, which I'm going to get to before the film remake comes out next spring).  At his best, King writes brilliantly paced, incredibly eerie prose that descends into the stuff of shambling nightmares.

What is so amazing about 11/22/63 is that it is both completely recognizable as one of King's works, but also something totally unlike anything I've read of his before.  It's a time-travel novel, and while it carries some of the typical tropes you'd expect to find in one, it's also a haunted house novel akin to The Shining.  The characters, especially our would-be hero Jake, are fighting against a malevolent, intangible force...which is time itself, rather than a spirit or ghost or something else supernatural, as Jake tries to do the impossible and prevent the assassination of JFK.  It's also a brilliant example of the way that King can write complete lives for his characters that don't seem to be particularly relevant to the specific story he's telling, but are compelling in and of themselves until the moment you realize, gob-smacked, that EVERYTHING you've read matters.

I did smile a little at one particular moment, because King is also known for being self-referential, and there was a moment were I thought he was going to slot the total plot of a previous novel into this one.  He doesn't, and unless you've read IT I don't think it would have mattered, but having read IT gives a little more insight into the world of 11/22/63.  Because, like I said, everything you've read matters - even if it didn't happen in this particular book.

It's Been A Long August.

46.  State of Wonder, Anne Patchett
I really wanted to like this more than I did.  Patchett is a beautiful, lyrical writer, but the story in this...just didn't work for me.  There's medical research in the Amazon, and the main character has to go find out what happened to her colleague, and the doctors working in the rain forest are living and working with a tribe of native people who could hold the secret to post-menopausal fertility.  The characters are intriguing, especially the acidic Dr. Swenson (who is leading the research team and has been for several years), but everything breaks down in the face of a very uncomfortable notion: it feels like Patchett is relying far too much on colloquial stereotypes, rather than on any actual experience or research, and ultimately I don't see that she says anything new about the issues she raises (and the rain forest itself feels like it stepped right out of Heart of Darkness - I'm sure we can all agree we don't need another definitive "savage worlds" narrative).  I've heard her other books are better, so I'll give them a shot, but I was disappointed with this.

47. Fablehaven: Rise of the Evening Star, Brandon Mull
These books are so fun!  The follow-up to Mull's first Fablehaven book ups the ante accordingly, pulling in the mysterious and evil organization, offering plenty of action, and leaving you with a much crunchier cliffhanger than volume 1.  I don't often feel surprised by the twists in children's/YA lit, but this one kept me guessing a little longer than most.  Recommended if you enjoy kid lit fantasy.

48.  Desperation, Stephen King
Hnngh.  Overall, not my favorite of King's - but it DID have a whole lot of the creepy, weird, gross horror stuff which is basically my motivation for reading Stephen King.  Unlike a lot of his books, Desperation hits the ground running; you don't get the slow burn build-up of The Shining or Salem's Lot.  Instead, you are instantly dropped into the middle of the desert, on the highway, with a murderous cop pulling people over and dragging them back to his town (Desperation, Nevada) where he may or may not have killed every single living person.

The big reason I didn't love this one as much as others is that, while it deals with King's typical examination of evil and the relationship between good, evil, faith, and possession, it's not subtle.  David, an eleven-year-old boy, is in direct contact with God.  God sent them there.  I'm not a fan of this trope because I feel like it takes some of the tension out.  When King lets things be more subtle, when his characters are less obviously "guided by God," there's more room for uncertainty and for human error.

I do kind of love the notion that he wrote a "companion" novel, called The Regulators, under his Richard Bachman pseudonym and published the novels side-by-side (The Regulators takes place in a parallel universe, with the same characters in different positions and the same overall villain).  I'd like to check that one out, just to see the complete vision of the story.

Almost done and it's only July

40.  Lockdown, Alexander Gordon-Smith
A friend of mine is reading the Monstrumologist books by Rick Yancey, which I've already read (and adored), and hearing him talk about them made me crave something dark, gritty, scary and weird.  So I looked up some title read-alikes on Novellist and pulled this title out of a pile.  It was ok - definitely not lacking in the dark and weird arena.  The story is about Alex, a teen who has the misfortune to be a small-time criminal growing up in the aftermath of the so-called Summer of Slaughter (an event in the book's history where teen gangs killed huge numbers of people).  When he gets framed for the murder of his friend, the judge locks him away for life in the juvenile detention center Furnace.  Furnace is basically hell with more nutritious food, complete with Nazi-esque body horror, some super creepy dogs that habitually tear inmates to pieces, and a geographic location a mile or so under the earth.  It turns into a pretty standard escape-from-prison story, but I appreciated the horror dressings Gordon-Smith applied in abundance.



41.  Fablehaven, Brandon Mull

I've been supervising junior volunteers at the library this summer, and they've been plying me with reading recommendations.  Fablehaven was one of these, and it turned out to be super fun.  It's young-young-adult fantasy, about a sister and brother who get sent to stay with their grandparents over summer break and find out that they're basically gamekeepers for a forest preserve full of fantastical creatures.  The fairies in Fablehaven are definitely the new breed, more inclined to harm and mischief than just being pretty, and the excitement ramps up after a pretty spooky midsummer night scene when the grandfather gets kidnapped.  I just got the second book in the series and I'm looking forward to reading more.

42.  Full Dark, No Stars, Stephen King
King's short stories are kind of hit-or-miss for me - for every Langoliers there's a Trucks, often in the same collection.  I thought that the first and the last stories in Full Dark, No Stars were pretty excellent; the middle two, not so much.  I had some trouble with one - it deals with the graphic rape and abuse of a young woman, and reeks a bit of appropriation; the other one I didn't care for was just too...boring.

43.  Age of Darkness, ed. Christian Dunn
Moar Horus Heresy.  This was fun, even the piece by Gav Thorpe (which was at least short fiction rather than a whole novel).  The big surprise for me was that the stand-out piece wasn't by Dan Abnett, Graham McNeill, or Aaron Dembski-Bowden (easily the strongest writers in Games Workshop's bull pen), but by some guy I'd never heard of named Rob Sanders.  His piece, "The Iron Within," wrecked me in a way I'm only used to from McNeill.  Good stuff.