Horror Stories You Can Read and Watch This Season

Tis the season for frights, freaks and ghouls. Tantalizing tales of terror. Frightening fables of misfortune. Electrifying legends of horror. ...Well, not for everyone exactly. There are many that don't take part in the traditions of Halloween, but for the lot that do, I've compiled a list of books made into movies or T.V. series - some older, some newer - that are sure to make you double check your locks at night (and if that's a little too dramatic, at least entertain you for a bit). So whether you are a searching for a terrifying book or movie (or both!), check these out.

*though some contain graphic content and parental guidance is suggested when permitting minors to read or watch (especially the DVDs that have a R rating)*

1. The Shining - Stephen King
Availability: Library - BOOK | DVD 

                      

Sorry to be so predictable. But let's be honest with each other. Stephen King is the most prolific horror/suspense author out there, so it's a genuine no-brainer that this would be here.  It's the unforgettable tale of the Torrence family alone in a secluded resort and all the supernatural happenings that take place there as the father Jack Torrence's mind starts to unfold. If you can't get enough, RPL also has the sequel that was released in 2013: Doctor Sleep.

2. Rosemary's Baby - Ira Levin

Availability: Library - BOOK & DVD

                     

Rosemary's Baby was inducted into the National Film Registry in 2014 thanks to some coercion from the Library of Congress. They found it to be historically and culturally significant. Sweet! Its conception would then spawn several woman-gives-birth-to-son-of-devil type movies that seemed 'o so popular in the 70s. It could even be said that along with The Exorcist, this movie helped propel the fad of demonic possession movies that flooded the big screen at the time (one of the most obvious movie series being The Omen (some horror buffs theorize that those two stories are interwoven)). All in all its a creepy tale. One that must be seen and read about. 

3. The Exorcist - William Blatty

Availability: Library - BOOK & DVD

                     

Blatty's book never had quite the success that his screenplay did. Though one considerably exciting thing about the adaptation is that it was written and directed by the author himself, which isn't always the case for successful adaptations. But it's left a lasting legacy on what scary / gross / horrifying really is. Despised and loved by many. It was the first horror film nominated for Best Picture despite its content. During its release, some theaters offered barf-bags (though some parts are admittedly cheesy). And it was even responsible for eliciting a message from the Zodiac Killer in 1974. The killer had been silent for many years, but this movie prompted his last letter sent to The San Francisco Chronicle, praising the movie. He called it, "...the best satirical comedy" he had ever seen. 

4. Invasion of the Body Snatchers - Jack Finney

Availability: Library - BOOK & DVD

                   

Originally published as a serialized story for Collier's Magazine, it's the tale of an alien seed race coming to earth. These aren't your typical alien race, more microbial and deadly. They make carbon copies (which only have a life span of 5 years) of human hosts while destroying the originals. Not exactly sure why these seeds do this. But they travel through space wreaking this havoc from planet to planet. This sinister story has been adapted four times in the last 60 years. And if you read the book and watch the movies, you'll notice some clear discrepancies. It has to do with the endings, which you'll just have to read to find out, or google it. 

5. I am Legend - Richard Matheson 

Availability: Library - BOOK & DVD

                      

Matheson's book release in 1954 was important landmark for the horror community. It was the first book that set up the zombie genre. Even though the antagonists are called vampires and garlic is a repellent, the disease they carry is transmitted through blood. But in their relation to the tried and true vampire motif that everyone had come to love, it didn't have much in common. George A. Romero (who you should know as one of the masters of horror ((responsible for giving us Night of the Living Dead)) credited this book as one of the main pools of inspiration for his brain-hungry monsters. It was the earliest zombie-apocalypse book to ever happen. If you want to read or see where all the sensation began, look no further than this cult masterpiece. 

6. American Psycho - Brett Easton Ellis

Availability: Library - BOOK

I remember this book coming up in my post-modern literature classes, which was surprising to me at the time.  Having little experience with Brett Ellis, I only knew about the movie, which was a classic dark-comedy about a Manhattan businessman. Upon the release of this film, some countries found the content so inappropriate that it was sold encased in shrink-wrap. We could dive into the awesome literary theory around this transgressive novel and talk about postmodernism in some attempt to look at the details of the book in a more theoretical way, but we'll save that for another day. Instead here's a little background on this book. The book was originally  dropped by Simon and Schuster for aesthetic differences. Ellis received death threats for this book and mountains of hate mail. Germany deemed it "harmful to minors." Australian legislation put a rating of R18 on it and most libraries require an age of 18 or more to check it out. Bookstores there still sell it shrink-wrapped. As you can tell, not everyone appreciates the content, but it certainly has a created a frightening legacy that makes it one of the important works of horror. Brett Ellis has commented on the serious amount of censorship his book has / continues to receive: he says, "I think it's cute...".

7. The Walking Dead - Robert Kirkman / Tony Moore
Availability: Library - BOOK & DVD

Once you know about Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, it's awesome to see how he created a theme that is still being explored to this day. It originally started out as a graphic novel series that has been adapted to a public television series. Not exactly the most frightful of stories out there, but it does keep close to the ideas like I Am Legend and Body Snatchers, human isolation and the looming end of humankind. What's not scary about that? This series has enthralled fans of the graphic novel and the show (which has engaged million of viewers continuously over the past several years). It even won the heart of another horror novelist dabbling in the zombie world. Which brings me to the next item on the list...

8. World War Z - Max Brooks

Availability: Library - BOOK AND DVD

Last on the list is Max Brook's most recent release. It manages to pull from the greats while doing something totally unique. That something is its international focus. The story is told through the accounts of people all across the globe. Unlike most zombie-apocalypse stories that have a feeling of human isolation, this one feels much bigger and more connected, exploring the whole global catastrophe by asking real survival questions. The story has been known for its political undertones and its focus on various governments and their response to the outbreak. Its got enough of a new twist on the genre to keep you hooked while having enough of the old tricks to keep it in company with Matheson and the others. All in all, a great story to sink your teeth into this Halloween season.


So there you have it folks. Eight seriously great books and movies that will chill you to the core this season - and even beyond, because it doesn't always need to be Halloween to get your scare on.  Just remember that they're all available in RPL system. So come in and check out (or get a card first if you don't have one already). It doesn't cost a dime to get scared this October when you have a RPL card.

The last man on earth heard a knock at the door.

(Don't you just love the shortest scary story/scariest short story in the title?)

This time of year, when the night is getting longer and the days shorter, pumpkins are proliferating and leaves are turning, I pull out all my sweaters and scary stories, and start planning my Halloween costume. Don't you? Anyway...hello, horror fans!

Chills! Thrills! Bills? All the scariest things you could possibly need are on the new books shelf right now:

Invasive
by Chuck Wendig

"Earth is home to more than twelve thousand species of ants." If that fact isn't enough to give you the creeps, get on Invasive, equal parts high-tech espionage thriller and creepy crawly horror story. Seems made for fans of Before the Fall, The Ruins, and the Area X trilogy.

Wolf Road
by Beth Lewis

Shaping up to be one of my favorites books of the year, this post-apocalyptic, western-style stalker thriller has something for fans of The Road, The Revenant, and True Grit.

The Binding
by Nicholas Wolff

Fans of Peter Straub and The Fog will enjoy this horror story about a small town seemingly ravaged by a rare mental disorder, and something in the town's dark past may be the answer.

Disappearance at Devil's Rock
by Paul Tremblay

From the author of A Head Full of Ghosts comes another terrifying tale, this time a mystery involving a missing teenager and the strange series of events that follow, haunting the search for the truth.

Speaking of scary things, have you guys been following this clown-sighting business on the news lately? 

Nightmares!

Books to take to the beach that will scare you out of the water

I recently made the excellent decision to read Tananarive Due's wickedly, chillingly wonderful short story collection, Ghost Summer, just after a dip in the James River. The first story kept me up all night worrying about what would happen to me. (I'm fine...so far.) Seriously, this book is insanely creepy and wonderful. It has literally every kind of scare: zombies; post apocalyptic things; conjure tales; vengeful ghosts; possession; good ol' swamp monsters. Put this in your beach bag and keep an eye on what might be lurking in the lake.

Ruth Ware's (author of In a Dark, Dark Wood) The Woman in Cabin 10 JUST walked in the library and leaped right into my weekend reading pile aaaand I'm already done with it. Fans of Paula Hawkins (The Girl on the Train) and Emma Healey (Elizabeth is Missing) will love this damp and claustrophobic thriller with a wonderfully flawed, unreliable narrator, set on board a cruise ship. No vacation destination is spared.

Now for the gross-out novels to end all gross out novels: Nick Cutter's nightmarish and cleverly disgusting  (sort of series?) The Troop and The Deep.  If you liked The Ruins by Scott Smith but thought it would have been better with worms, The Troop, a terrifying tale of Boy Scouts trapped on an island with a science experiment gone horribly awry, is for you. If you thought The Troop could have been a whole lot ickier, then go check out The Deep and never, ever get back in the water again. Fan of Stephen King's Dreamcatcher and Chuck Palahniuk's Haunted--these are for you.

A Field Guide to American Haunted Houses

“You mustn’t expect every night to be Halloween,” says a doctor in Robert Wise’s 1963 film, The Haunting. The doctor, a paranormal investigator, cautions his assistants not to expect too much from an allegedly haunted house. But left implied here is the fact that it is perfectly sensible to expect one night of the year to be Halloween, and, depending on the house you’re in, perhaps a few more. 

This Halloween I’m reading about houses, first in the inspiration for The Haunting, the 1959 novel by Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House, and then in Virginia Savage McAlester’s Field Guide to American Houses.

 

Jackson was born in San Francisco in 1916, and wrote The Haunting of Hill House with the image in her mind of a specific, eerie-looking California mansion, although very little geography is actually given in the novel. The story begins with a paranormal investigator enlisting the help of three others to stay in Hill House and note its abnormalities. He describes the house as “disturbed.” “Leprous,” he says. “Sick. Any of the popular euphemisms for insanity; a deranged house is a pretty conceit.” 

Much of the beginning of the novel is spent trying to pin down Hill House’s personality. The book drives home just how human-like houses really are. They are built by and for humans. Our most intimate moments are experienced inside them. And after all, they have faces. “No human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house,” wrote Jackson, “and yet somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair, more frightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice.”

Despite the despair of Hill House, the early scenes of its inhabitants exploring their new surroundings are comic and fun to read. Over time, however, one of the guests starts to steal the focus of the story, of the other guests, and of the house itself. After the recent death of her mother, 32 year old Eleanor Vance is freed from 11 years of her mother’s abusive demands. Ready to begin her life, she goes to Hill House. There, the forceful personality of the house meets the haunted past and expectant life of Eleanor, and, mysteriously, the two begin to meld. Or perhaps not so mysteriously. Isn't it natural for two personalities to influence one another? The house haunts Eleanor. Eleanor haunts the house. 

With these thoughts from The Haunting of Hill House, I picked up A Field Guide to American Houses, looking not so much for roofs and facades but for haunted personalities. Organized chronologically and by style, the book is designed for the new homebuyer or the architecturally curious to look up a side-gable or a multi-level eave and identify a house the’ve seen in the wild. But after Hill House, the field guide became an encyclopedia of medical maladies, a casebook of the criminally insane. 

The first thing I did was to try and identify Hill House itself—with its library in a stone tower, I thought perhaps a Gothic Revival house or a Richardsonian Romanesque. 

Then I looked for other personalities. Jackson wrote in Hill House that “almost any house, caught unexpectedly or at an odd angle, can turn a deeply humorous look on a watching person; even a mischievous little chimney or a dormer like a dimple, can catch up a beholder with a sense of fellowship.” I wondered: are any of the houses in the guide humorous? I looked up mischievous little chimneys and dormers like dimples.

But Jackson went on, “a house arrogant and hating, never off guard, can only be evil.” Were there any arrogant houses in the guide? This one?

Or this one?

I looked again. Do they really appear deranged? Or, like Eleanor in Hill House, is my personality at play here? Am I deranged?

(Happy Halloween!)

For more:

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/oct/22/haunting-wise-horror 

http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2015-10-14/readers-review-the-haunting-of-hill-house-by-shirley-jackson

http://www.darkecho.com/darkecho/horroronline/jackson.html

BLOGtober Fest: Halloween Reading Tips from Edward Gorey

In 1959, Edward Gorey, surrealist, aesthete, and master of the unexplained and unexplainable, collected twelve of his favorite ghost stories for a volume called The Haunted Looking Glass. He had just left his job as art director for Anchor’s line of classic paperbacks, teaming with two others to republish a series of children’s works. In this short series, the Looking Glass Library, Gorey designed the covers for books like The Wizard of Oz and The War of the Worlds.

Though The Haunted Looking Glass does not contain a word written by Gorey, the entire book is nevertheless soaked through with Goreyness. The Edwardian rooms, the sudden visitations, the endings that don’t really end anything--one can recognize all these elements in classic Gorey works like The Doubtful Guest and The West Wing. Each story features a full-page illustration by Gorey in the style of his Anchor paperbacks. But perhaps most of all the reader benefits here from Gorey’s immense literary erudition. This was a man whose floors had begun to bow under the weight of his collected books. He is exactly the person you would want to ask, on a chill, October evening, on Halloween itself, “Do you know a good ghost story?”

The stories Gorey chose come mainly from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in what critics have called the golden age of the ghost story. They are almost more English than scary, their effect having more to do with atmosphere than out-and-out terror and their atmosphere having a lot to do with damp streets and too-quaint villages. Anglophiles will smile at sentences like, “The rain kept up a steady patter on the glass roof of the coffee room.” Anyone looking for a new and seasonal reading experience should follow Gorey’s advice and look up Algernon Blackwood, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, E. Nesbit, Bram Stoker, Tom Hood, W.W. Jacobs, and Wilkie Collins. Here are little descriptions of four of the stories to give you a fuller picture:

“August Heat” by W.F. Harvey (1885-1937)

This is the shortest piece in the book and a great place to start. An artist spends the morning tapping his pencil, searching for a subject, before drawing, inexplicably, the figure of a fat man in court, accused of a terrible crime. After his work, and again inexplicably, the artist goes for a walk, where he finds a man “sitting with his back towards me, busy at work on a slab of curiously veined marble.” Who is this man? What has he carved into the marble? The story is so short I can’t say anything more without spoiling it.

“The Visitor from Down Under” by L.P. Hartley (1895-1972)

A man rearrives in London after time in Australia and retires to his favorite hotel, where, alone in the dining room, he chats with the waiter, Clutsam. They talk about the law, about how society might punish a criminal, and about how the dead might do the work society can’t. Later that night, the waiters are roused by a man in a cloak requesting a bed. Most chilling sentence: “The pillow with its fivefold perforation was the first object on which Clutsam noticed bloodstains.”

“The Thirteenth Tree” by R.H. Malden (1879-1951)

“The Thirteenth Tree” is as a story about houses, which ones look nice, which ones don’t, which ones have bizarre and intricate histories. It’s a story about the rooms inside houses: “completely lined with well-filled bookcases whose contents looked as if they would repay examination.” And a story about the gardens outside houses, which become like stages for the past to play itself out again before the present.

“Casting the Runes” by M.R. James (1862-1936)

Malden dedicated his book of ghost stories to M.R. James, still considered to be the master of this branch of horror writing. “Casting the Runes” takes place in academic circles, amidst backstabbing and jealousy. For historians, good ones or bad, the past never truly dies. Image most likely to linger in your brain: “And this poor boy was followed, and at last pursued and overtaken, and either torn in pieces or somehow made away with, by a horrible hopping creature in white, which you saw first dodging about among the trees, and gradually it appeared more and more plainly.”

BLOGtober Fest: Thrills and Chills!

I've been waiting for this all year. The leaves are turning, the days are shorter, decorative gourds are EVERYWHERE. It's time for round-the-clock scary books and movies at my house. Halloween is in, like, 2 days! TWO. DAYS. Can you believe it? I'm knee-deep in falling foliage and pumpkin spice EVERYTHING, fiendishly devising ways to strike terror in the hearts of little trick-or-treaters. If you are still craving something terrifying to read under the covers, alone with nothing but a flashlight in a creepy, creaky old house, then bolt the doors and check out a few of these RPL bloggers' favorite thrills and chills!

Natasha: "I recommend Ransom Riggs!!! Both books, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children and Hollow City." The reason why I am obsessed over these two YA reads is because of the eerie mysteries that coexist with the involvement of the characters in these stories. The photography is wonderful as well and brings an alluring element to the books. I am really looking forward to Tim Burton's film adaptation to the first book.

Ellen: "Here's one I bet none of you has read: "The Night Country" by . . . wait for it . . .Stewart O'Nan! (He can do ANYthing.) On the Halloween a year after three teenagers are killed in a horrific wreck, they come back to finish the job. Move over Ray Bradbury and Shirley Jackson: something wicked and deliciously scary, and literary to boo(t)" - (sorry, couldn't resist.)"

Tonya: "I recommend anything by Ransom Riggs and Dan Wells (the "I am a Serial Killer" trilogy.) Also Rick Yancey's Monstrumologist series is brilliant."

Natalie: Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky gives me chills! This Russian sci-fi novel originally published in the Soviet Union in 1971 has been newly re-translated and restored to its uncensored glory. An advanced alien race temporarily set up shop somewhere in Canada and has since evacuated, leaving behind dangerous and mysterious alien stuff. Terror ensues as people known as "stalkers" try to collect and study the extraterrestrial refuse. It inspired the Andrei Tarkovsky (Solaris) film Stalker, and apparently a video game of the same name.

It by Stephen King is insanely scary. The novel about a terrifying clown terrorizing children usually needs little introduction. Just say "They all float down here" and watch people shudder. Egad I'm still creeped out and I read it 20 years ago. (Fun fact: I enjoyed a brief correspondence with The King when I was a wee 12 year old library patron. I wrote to Mr. King to ask him for a list of all the books he had written because I was going to read them all and wanted to do so in chronological order. He replied promptly with a complete list. I followed up to suggest he write more stuff like The Langoliers because it was my favorite and it wasn't too long. He wrote back to thank me for the suggestion. Emboldened by two replies I wrote again, this time to extend a formal invitation to a Halloween party at which, of course, he would be the guest of honor, but he had to wear a costume. He declined. In a fit of pique, or perhaps simply embarrassed by my own earnestness, I destroyed the letters.)