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Horror Books

Started by king mob, February 10, 2004, 02:51:05 PM

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king mob

Thanks to the fuss & bother over Garth Marenghi its got me thinking about the Horror novel & how bad they can get.

Mundays pointed Saun Hutson's website out which is very funny, even funnier when you see a picture of the man.




Hutson turns out the lowend gore & sex stuff that Guy N Smith churned out in the 70's, mainly about flesh eating giant crabs rampaging through small British towns on the coast.
The thing that made Smith stand out was his ability to write, have a look at his biblography to see just how prolific.
Sadly his books are terrible but when you read them at 13/14 they're great stuff, sex & gore always a hit with teenagers.

Both Hutson & Smith jumped on the bandwagon James Herbet started with Rats but Herbet  managed to diverge & actually write some fairly decent novels, something Hutson & Smith just dont seem to be capable of.

Personally I still feel Clive Barker's Books of Blood are the stand out short stories of the last 20 years, stories like Midnight Meat Train & the Last Illusion are classic horror shorts up there with Lovecraft.

Right now i'm a bit out of touch with whats good & bad out there as any time i go to the horror section of a bookshop i get depressed by the sheer mass of Buffy spin off books(as i am when i go to the SF section and its all Dr Who & Star Trek/Wars) so whats good out there that isnt Ramsey Campbell?

bill hicks

I used to love Shaun Hutson and still think Deadhead is really very good. If I remember it's about a PI who is investigating abductions and finds a snuff ring and then his daughter is kidnapped....not entirely sure of the plot anymore but I remember the ending being very grim and nihilistic.

But then he tried to go legit and started writing 'thrillers' about the IRA and stuff and it all went tits up.

I saw him on Richard and Judy (or something similiar) once too and he was exactly like Merenghi. The leather trews were terrifying.

Mr Flunchy

Oh come on, how can you dislike someone who wrote a series of books about killer slugs?


El Unicornio, mang

Stephen King's still the boss as far as I'm concerned. I actually find his short stories a lot scarier than his full novels, although generally I find it very hard to be scared by a book in the same way as I do for a film.

dan dirty ape

'It' by King, man. That's the killer. They made it into a dopey point-missing TV miniseries, which inexplicably was named as the scariest TV programme ever in Radio Times the other week, but the book is fantastic.

elderford

You're all sadly mistaken the most pleasureable horror read to be had is from Mr Peter Straub. Writes like a dream. I don't think he writes horror as such, but he does tend to get lumped in with the genre.

And of course Lullaby by Mr Chuck Palahniuk.

nixon

Yeah..  but hutson wrote the first novelisation of  "The Terminator"

king mob

King is under rated as a writer generally but is a bit scattershot with how good his books are, hes produced many a stinker to pay the rent.
Saying that Misery is possibly the finest horror story of the 80's.

To be fair to Shaun Hutson he has written some good books - he also wisely got out of the horror market just as it was collapsing and continues to sell well now with his urban thrillers.

I fucking loved him I did. I have all his horror novels, slugs and breeding ground (it's sequel) have been read so often the pages are falling out.

If you ask me Herbert went downhill as soon as he left his pulp roots behind and started being all serious (he should never have started hanging out with that King fellow) I don't care what good reviews things like '48 get - to every school kid in the early 80's it was The Rats you were reading under your desk. Now THATS what I call a classic.

Guy N Smith I was always aware, even as a horror-luvvin teenyager, was shit! I think he's pretty much retired now (after writing about 20 million novels) - I gave his giant crab books a good go and thought they were okay. I notice that Garth Merhangi's site features a little homage to them too!

You don't see these sort of books dahn smiffs anymore do you? It was around the early 90's they all seemed to start vanishing, I doubt a new horror writer could crack their way into the market now. I always remember exciting new authors Steve Harris and Mark Morris having a couple of best sellers around 1989 (Adventureland & Toady) both of which I read and I expected a long and great career from them both, excited by their youth and love for the genre. Sadly you couldn't find their subsequent novels for love nor money now, they were just born five or six years too late to make their millions. Shame. I think Mark Morris writes Doctor Who novellas now.

Let's not forget the gloriously sexist Richard Laymon (who made an appearance in my pleb book club on the old board) - violent as hell he wrote some very readable mad as fuck horrors like The Cellar. Always something sinister about him though, put it this way - if you ever get turned into a female fictional character then make sure you don't wind up in one of his works.

What about Pan Horror collections? Are they still going? I doubt it, they certainly went up until the late 80's and I used to get some of the older ones from carboot sales, now some of them used to scare the fucknuts out of me.

Cerys

Ooh, the Pan anthologies!  My parents had four or five of those, and they used to scare me years before I actually read any of them.  It was the pictures on the covers.  I was about three or four when I first started taking notice of them, and got fixed in a kind of terrified compulsion to look.  Thinking about it, they're probably at least partially responsible for my taste in Photoshoppery.

I went through a phase of loving James Herbert stuff in the mid to late 'eighties, but then went off him when I noticed that he seemed always to use the same sex scene, merely adapting it to change names, settings, etc.  I might be wrong about this, but that's how it felt at the time.  These days Stephen King is definitely my favourite Horror writer, although he doesn't scare me.  The hand-peeling scene in 'Gerald's Game' makes the backs of my knees ache, but that's about it.

Come to think of it, I don't know of any horror writers who do scare me.  I'm probably not trying hard enough.

Rats

I've had two ideas for that short stories thread and I bet my rubber spider steven kings already done them. I want to ask you horror bods if they're old hat but I don't want to give away the story. I suppose I'll just bight my lip, I'll not put much effort into them anyway and they'll just be short. Sorry, just thinking out loud, carry on.

Qatar-wol

No mention yet of Ramsey Campbell - excellent Brit horror author that King rates.  "Doll Who Ate His Mother", despite its title, is a very nice little horror set in Liverpool in the 70s' (shit - it was actually written in the 70s').

Anyone here read "Everything's Eventual" byt King?  There's one story there that put the fear into me so bad.  It's called something like "That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French."  Amazing story about deja-vu.

Highly recommended.

king mob

Whats not widely known about Campbell is that he gave Clive Barker his break into publishing due to his support of local writers.
Hes a lovely man & no matter how hard i try i cant like his books & i've really, really tried.
:(

Marcus Or Relius

I loved the Books Of Blood by Barker but I never got into his other novels. I tried reading The Great And Secret Show but gave up after a while it was just too vague and silly.

Even as a teenager I thought Shaun Hutson was shit, especially the time he felt compelled to list his favourite heavy-metal bands under his acknowledgements, the stupid frizzy haired poodle.

"IT" by King is my favourite horror novel, followed by "Legion" by William Peter Blatty (which was made into the Exorcist III of course, my fave horror movie).

king mob

I saw Exorcist 3 for the first time in about 10 years the other night & loved it, forgot how good a film it was, if only Blatty can convince Warners to do the directors cut he wants it would be perfect.

Barker's books after Books of Blood i found to be pretty tedious, overlong affairs & in some cases very obvious attempts to write a stroy that could be filmed.
We can thank Barker for Gods & Monsters & Hellraiser though.

king mob


Borboski

I wouldn't want to raise the tone, or even imply the tone needed raising, but does anyone have any recommendations of horror that is genuinely well written?

I think Poe is a good starting point.

I read a novel called House Of Leaves by Mark Z Daniewlski that was genuinelly chilling at points. It's a fantastically produced and structured novel to - you have to turn the book round and round to read circular passages, there are sections with two or three words a page to instill pace to the reading, there's about 3 differents perspectives to the story.

Really would recommend it.

Rats

Poe is the man, you can read all of his shit here http://bau2.uibk.ac.at/sg/poe/poe.html

Rats

The idea for the one I'm not going to do is "girl poisons her sexually abusive father and finds herself pregnant, giving birth to his fully grown and clothed corpse". Has that been done before?

king mob

Its not that i can think of, reminds me of somethingJoe Lansdale would do.