I know precisely where I got my attraction to the macabre: From my mother. Not only did she know all eighteen verses of Poe’s “The Raven” by heart (she could still recite them perfectly in her eighties), but she used to whisper them in bed to help herself get to sleep. She claimed it worked like a charm. You know you’re going to grow up to be a horror fan when your mom invokes Poe to cure insomnia.
This isn’t to say I like everything that falls under the horror umbrella. I’m not a fan of slasher stuff. I give three thumbs-down to anything featuring blood, severed limbs, or organs no longer firmly ensconced in a human body. What I like is the eerie, the supernatural, the uncanny. Stories that get your flesh crawling without making your stomach turn. That lead you into the foggy borderlands between reality and dream.
So, in celebration of Halloween—my favorite holiday of the year—I am offering my recommendations from a lifetime of reading horror. Only some of these works are literary masterpieces. But all of them are good spooky-scary fun. For a great All Hallows Eve, curl up by a fire with some cider and one of these:
Scariest Short Story Collection: Haunting Women by Alan Ryan. The fact that the fourteen stories in this anthology are all by women is incidental. Gender aside, it is simply a wonderful collection of the creepiest, most startling short stories around, including works by Shirley Jackson, Isak Dinesen, and Murial Spark. Bonus: it doesn’t have a single vampire.
Scariest Modern Short Story: “The Foghorn” by Gertrude Atherton. This eerie piece of fiction has stayed with me decades after I first read it. It’s included in the Haunting Women collection, but if you have to read it RIGHT NOW (or want to have it on hand for Halloween), you can find it here.
Scariest Classic Short Story: “Rappaccini’s Daughter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne. You have to trudge through the overwrought 19th century prose in this story, but the effort is worth it. This tale of tainted love is the only American short story to be turned into both a play (by Octavio Paz) and an opera (by Daniel Catán). Read it here.
Scariest Modern Novel: Pet Sematary. No list of horror fiction would be complete without at least one book by Stephen King. King is at his best when he uses the supernatural to explore the very real terror that lies at the core of our lives: The ever-present awareness that the ones we love could suddenly die. None of his novels explore that reality with more sinister power than Pet Sematary. King has called his 1983 work his most frightening novel. I concur.
Scariest Classic Novel: Wuthering Heights. If you read this book in high school and remember it as a long, boring, Victorian romance, you need to give it another look. At its heart, Emily Bronte’s only published novel is a ghost story, and it’s lavishly adorned with gothic horror—evil motives, revenge, a strange hero/villain with a mysterious past, vicious hounds, a spooky mansion on a stormy hill, and, of course, the windswept moor.
Scariest Trilogy: His Dark Materials. Usually labeled fantasy rather than horror, this luminous work of young- adult fiction by Philip Pullman includes alternate universes, a trip into the realm of the harpie-tormented dead, and a device that severs children from their souls. Sounds like horror to me. The first volume, The Golden Compass, is one of my favorite young-adult novels of all time.
Scariest Poem: “Her Kind” by Anne Sexton. Poetry usually gets left out of horror lists, but here is one that should be included. Sexton uses the traditional image of the witch—“haunting the black air, braver by night”—to explore identity, marginality, madness, and the repression of women. Horror at its best. You can read the entire poem here.
Scariest food to eat while you read. “Spiders”—a crunchy, chocolate-peanut-butter confection that is delicious and easy to make. Check out the recipe on Vegweb.
Happy Halloween!
Next week: National Novel Writing Month.
Great recommendations (including the insomnia cure). ;0)