Biographer Ruth Franklin's National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life places beloved horror writer Jackson within an American Gothic tradition that stretches back to Hawthorne and Poe. Here Franklin shares how Stephen King sparked her love of the genre, and she recommends some dark tales to enjoy this Halloween.
My first taste of horror came at a high school slumber party. After the pizza and ice cream, somebody popped Pet Sematary into the VCR, and we all hunkered down on the couch. As the burial ground began to reveal its awful secrets, I was surprised to find myself in tears. It wasn't the gore that got to me; it was the story's human pain. Who wouldn't pay any price to bring a dead child or spouse back to life? Even if we were warned things might go horribly wrong, wouldn't we still want them back?
The movie sent me to Stephen King's bestselling 1983 novel, and then I was hooked. I read horror voraciously throughout my teenage years and beyond, always searching for something like the combination of terror and pathos that I first glimpsed in Pet Sematary. (A nice bit of trivia: Reportedly, King put that novel aside after writing it, worried that it was too dark.) Horror, at its best, doesn't offer just scary images—it investigates the question of fear itself. What we're most afraid of, it often turns out, are the things that make us most human.
Here are a few recommendations of books that aren't afraid to go deep into the dark.
The Dark Half , by Stephen King. This novel about a writer who gets hijacked by his own alter ego is one of King's best. In addition to being incredibly creepy—I'll never forget the sparrows—it's a profound meditation on writer's block (which he also treats unforgettably in The Shining) and the creative process.
The Witching Hour , by Anne Rice. Fans of Rice's vampire novels tend to overlook this book about a family of women with psychic powers and the spirit familiar—or demon—who guides them. A villain at once sinister and deeply alluring, he's what makes this book extraordinary. Rice's prose is always lush, whether she's describing the mansions of New Orleans's Garden District (and instilling in me a lifelong desire to see them) or the swampy plantations of the Old South, but sex has always been one of her specialties, and that's what's truly at stake here: the depth of sexual obsession and the lengths to which we're willing to go for it.
Come Along With Me , by Shirley Jackson. As her biographer, I couldn't make a list like this without including something by Jackson. Of course, The Haunting of Hill House is her best-known work of horror, with good reason. But this posthumously published collection contains a number of lesser known stories that might be just as eerie. In The Beautiful Stranger, a woman greets her husband after a business trip and discovers he's turned into an identical, but different, person. In A Visit, a kind of precursor to Hill House, a girl falls in love with a man only she can see. And The Rock—which Jackson pulled almost verbatim from a diary she kept of her dreams—features another mysterious man who may or may not be human.
What are your favorite "deep" horror novels? Let me know in the comments.
See the complete coverage of Horror Week including:
Top 50 Favorite Horror Novels on Goodreads
The Campy, Bizarre World of Paperback Horror
Supernatural Tales and Spooky Folklore
posted by Cybil on October, 13
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