Halloween Special:What is your favorite horror novel?

"My favorite horror novel is It by Stephen King. Scared the crap out of me. Reminded me of what it was like to be a small child and scared of the dark. Afraid to have the closet door open with the lights out. Scary book. "

What novel was that?

"BTW Matt Dracula is also one of my all time favorites. I was a HUGE fan back when I was in my teens. Hell I was first in line to see Bram Stokers Dracula waaaaay back in the old days of 1992. I was disapointed. "

Ahhh yes."Bram Stoker's" Dracula.Stoker's novel had classy vulgarity. That movie was just vulgar.

It was like a some weird soft porno.

 

Muke is talking about It, Matthew. IT was a classic in that it forged frightening situations out of simplicity: the dark, leaving the closet door open, etc.

 

Damn.I missed that in his post.

Just call me speacial

(yes,I know special is spelled s-p-e-c-i-a-l.It's a joke)

 

=)

 

Pet Semetary or Misery. Actually, Misery was more psychological, so I think it actually scared me more. Stephen King knows how to get to me, though.

 

'Salem's Lot!

Even now, I can imagine Danny Glick scraping on Mark's window, wanting to be let in to visit his friend...

 

What was that novel about?Vampire story?

 

Facts about my favorite horror novela, At the Mountains of Madness, by H. P. Lovecraft:

Time: The mid-1930s
Place: Antarctica

In this 100-page story, Lovecraft gives us another tale featuring his Cthulhu Mythos. A group of scientists and explorers accidentally find a gargantuan prehistoric city (I'm talking hundreds of millions of years old) in an Antarctic mountain range. There are still some of the weird inhabitants left, which seeped down from the stars eons ago. Death and madness is the fate of the explorers.

I generally don't like horror, but Lovecraft is a master. No comic book blood and guts and sudden frights. No. Rather a chill, barely perceptible at first, runs up your spine and ultimately unsettles the reader's convictions. Lovecraft's hard-core materialist and atheist philosophy is given narrative form in his tales.

Here is a sample of his style. It is the first paragraph of his short story, The Call of Cthulhu:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

 

ANY novel, and I mean ANY novel (except "Fluke") by James Herbert.

 

Dracula. Though my favorite Halloween movie is Young Frankenstein.

 

That was pretty cool,Binary.

 

Yes, 'Salem's Lot is a vampire story. About a small Maine town that becomes a town of bloodsuckers in rather short order.

 

Bear with me here folks.



Stephen King's IT: Great, scary read. king fleshed out the characters very well and really made you care about them.

Book of the Dead 1and2: Two great collections of Living Dead short stories. They aren't all just blood and guts(but, I happen to like blood and guts)some of the stories are quite funny and very original.

Richard Matheson's short story Prey: God, talk about freaky! Read it, then go watch the film version. It was in an anthology film called "Trilogy of Terror" made back in the 70's. The film version scared the crap out of me. I'm not telling you what it's about on purpose. Rent it if you can find it, but make sure you get the original. They made a sequel a few years back.

Stephen King's short story The Sun Dog: This one is from his Four Past Midnight collection. It vaguely reminded me of something Lovecraft might have written.

I've read lots of Lovecraft and Derlith. Some of those stories leave you with a feeling of dread unlike anything else you've ever read.

That's it for now, but i'll keep thinking of anything else i've read that I think is worth mentioning.

 

Oh, if anybody makes a thread involving films, i'll be sure to post a long list.

 

Well, I know this has been said before adn I'm gonna say it again. For me the scariest book is "It" by Stephen King. I read it a few years back and parts of it left me shuddering.

I agree someone should make a scariest movies list.

 

Ok for general horror, I have to say, just like almost everyone else, IT by Stephen King. Of course my mother is a huge King fan, has everything except the online novel, that he's ever written. But out of all or them, I have to say that It is the most disturbing and scariest of them all.

Something that isn't necessarily considered horror but is is "The Martian Chronicles" by Ray Bradbury. That was my first Bradbury book I read and oh...it really makes you think. Actually, I think it is horror but you don't necessarily associate horror with him.

 

My personal favorite horror novel is I AM LEGEND by Richard Matheson.

I AM LEGEND is probably one of the finest books on vampires, those undead and oft nightmarish bloodsuckers of our own creations. However, Matheson presents his vampires as the ultimate human terror, that of a replacement species for our race. The story follows Robert Neville, the sole survivor of a biological holocaust that created night stalkers, who has turned his home into a fortress in suburban Los Angeles. During the day he hunts sleeping vampires, staking them through the heart and barricades himself in his home at night while they mill about his yard like cadaverous door to door salesmen, calling his name while the females raise their dresses to tease and taunt him.

Neville is a beautiful study into the deterioration of the human mind, aside from the loss of his wife and daughter that haunts him constantly, he begins to lose his own grip on humanity. For three years he has lived this life of solitude, but surrounded by human monsters who, incidentally, do not wear 18th century regalia, top hats nor do they moan about how much their unlife makes them do such terrible things. Matheson's vampires are a paradox of life, do not turn into bats, wolves or mists and haven't an ounce of pretense or angst found in the likes of Anne Rice's Eurotrash vampires or the found in Vampire: the Masquerade. Neville has forgotten the sound of his own voice and much of the common etiquette that we as humans all share.

Matheson's masterful descriptions of the monotony of daily life mingled with the nagging question of why he just doesn't give himself up to them permeate the book. He constructs arguments for both sides, and deconstructs the myth of vampires by producing a wonderful scientific explanation that Neville learns over a period of a few years, literally by educating himself at the UCLA libraries. The reader is so aware of the protagonist's torment and the surging desire for companionship, human or otherwise, that when he finds the stray dog, we are captivated and pulled along as Neville spends weeks trying to coax the terrified animal into his home. And, without giving it away, the ending will knock the reader off of whatever he or she is sitting on.

Some might see similarities to this and the Chuck Heston flick, the Omega Man, which was a pale adaptation of the novel into a typical 1970's dystopian film. For myself I churned through the pages with a certain eagerness that I never possessed while reading Rice's morose and trite endeavors in the world of undead. This book soars and packs emotion into fluid verse that never stalls or loses direction. I Am Legend fits beautifully with movies such as Blade and John Carpenter's Vampires.

 

up

 

I would agree with It up to a point. It was very scary, except for the ending. I guess I don't find that particular bad thing that scary so it lost something for me.

The scariest book for me was his book the Shining. I couldn't put that one down.

 

Hey, this is the Literature forum. Yes, we primarily discuss Star Wars lit in here, but you do discuss other lit as well. I haven't seen the admins close a thread because it wasn't purely Star Wars lit.

Anyway, I don't read modern horror stories. I'd have to go with one of Poe's works, maybe The Black Cat, The Tell Tale Heart, or Masque of the Red Death. My favorite ghost story, however, has to be Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

 

Fovorite scary book? IT definatly
Favorite SW scary book? Conquest

 

up some more

 

Rise my child!Rise and come into my world!

 

Actually, on second thought..

Has anyone read the original novella form of "The Lost Boys" by Orson Scott Card?

 

up