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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Perfect Horror

Less searchable M0rd4nt

00:30 / 19.04.02

I've been re-reading a book (Michael McDowell's The Elementals, FTR), which I would say comes close to being the perfect horror novel. It is a work of high-grade pulp fiction, having a considerable degree of stylistic merit and showing plenty of literary gloss. However, its power, to my mind, lies in its skillful construction of believable and likeable characters, a convincing, seductive stage-set, and the way it creates a "slow burn" of building apprehension in the reader, culminating in genuine feelings of fear and horror.

I don't want to go into too much detail here, because I'm interested in getting different takes on the subject. What is your favourite work of horror, and what makes a great horror novel? How does a horror novel differ from other story structures?

21:17 / 20.04.02

...can't quite say that there's a perfect horror concept that's come along in a while, but I'm a bit taken by Hellraiser. I'm not saying that it can't get away from some of its campiness (film, that is) at times, but the concept pulls my soul around the room. Like the sins of unhealthy obsession leading one's being into a state far beyond simple mortal expectations..."be careful what you ask for", in a sense. The Hellbound Heart was an easy and a tad more sexual and mature than the film, a quick read.

Also enjoy a good zombie flick...almost exculsively Romero. Like the themes that are placed within as well as some of the go-to's. Like...the token black man always gaining control of the situation...the needless death of people for reason like the compulsive need to run to the blood-pressure machine when you know it'll end in being surrounded by zombies (Dawn of the Dead), etc.

I guess these are more film references, but I think a good horror novel requires an intimate knowledge of at least one character, some interesting surroundings, an aberration that however simple or seemingly unimportant is quintessential to the storyline, and being slowly and anxiously drawn into uncomfortable situations.

But as I'm thinking now, I thoroughly enjoy Lovecraft and his ability to scare you senseless with notions that your mind may know better to believe but you're still not capable of disproving it. The use of language is quite good. Also classics like Bradbury and Welles (sp?) although not quite horror are wonderful.

In some ways, this is why I'm not a big King fan as he develops a story, but oftentimes pulls you too far in too many directions. By page 300, I don't want to have to remember a number of disjointed characters before they complete each other in the plot.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

21:54 / 20.04.02

Thomas Ligotti does it for me every time. Like Lovecraft if he could write, or Poe if he went a bit further into fear as the abstract, rather than merely the result of an unpleasant series of events. (Don't get me wrong, I love both Poe and Lovecraft... I just think Ligotti tends to fill in each of their failings pretty fucking well.)
But- and it pains me to admit this- other than Lovecraft's "The Rats In the Walls", the only stories that have ever actually kept me awake at night have been King's "The Shining" (when I was about 14) and Guy Burt's "After The Hole" (which the movie of is apparently fairly poo, but which was a truly disturbing read. I literally had to read a nice story about puppies before I could sleep after that motherfucker. And I was 29.)

Our Lady of The Two Towers

10:17 / 21.04.02

Michael Marshall-Smith's short story 'More Tomorrow' is one of the most disturbing things i've ever read.

I think it depends on how much is shown. It's that difficult thing of trying to judge how much information to give us so that our minds start working but not so much that the puzzle is solved and we no longer have anything to think about. I guess that's why so much horror depends on the ellipsis ending, to encourage us to think on. Horror that offers the complete package rarely interests me.

11:18 / 21.04.02

i'd have to vote for 'one flew over the cuckoo's nest'. does that count? and some of the visions of j g ballard.

what makes cuckoo's nest true horror for me is the awesome power that some have over others, and their happy abuse of it. perhaps the same reason 1984 is disturbing - the parallels with life here, now, really had me rattled. and stephen king's 'gerald's game' is a fine work - opens with a woman handcuffed to a bed in a rural house, her husband, dead, lying across her. you eventually find out why he's dead, and then you get to accompany the woman as she realises that she has to get out of the handcuffs if she wants to live. never thought king would come out with something like this, although i would agree that 'the shining' gave me some scary dreams when i was a kid.

18:25 / 21.04.02

...one more mention..."Funny Games" is this little German subtitled film that will put you off for a week or more. I won't bother going in to describe it but it has this ever growing anxiety to it that leaves movies like Requiem for a Dream in the dust. My friend brought it over (a horror buff) and the few of us that watched it felt ill for quite a while. It screws it up in the end in my opinion as the one character starts to query the audience but up to that point its incredible how it can affect you. This is one of those recommendations that I'm kind of sorry to give...I'm with Maom with the need for a puppy and kittie follow-up after something like this...

08:59 / 22.04.02

(I'm not gonna go into films, cos otherwise I'll be here all day)

I’m something of an old skool horror fan as far as books go, I think .. I honestly can’t think of any ‘modern’ horror book that I’ve enjoyed, but then maybe I just read the wrong ones..

I think the best horror stories I’ve read are probably HP Lovecraft’s most conventionally ‘scary’ tales – ‘The Rats in the Walls’, ‘The Lurking Fear’, ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’, ‘The Picture in the House’ – that kind of stuff. Something about the way the deliriously over the top gothic prose and the quaint victorianisms and the cardboard plotlines & characters function to hide a deep, dark strain of genuinely fevered repressed nastiness .. really quite disturbing.

Also, the first half of The House on the Borderland (William Hope Hodgeson), that quite frightened me. The way it’s based in a well-constructed first person narrative, so you end up really identifying with the central character as sits up all night in his big, empty house, grasping his shotgun as the faceless pig-demons pound on the doors and gaze through the windows .. a great example of Night of the Living Dead style survival horror.

To my mind, horror writing should never be ‘perfect’ .. I think it’s part of the deal that great horror should always be disconcerting, incongruous, unpredictable, hard to read, unfeasibly fucked up and preferably written by someone with a a genuinely diseased mind..

The Return Of Rothkoid

14:01 / 22.04.02

As Riz says, the first half of The House On The Borderland; it kinda lost its pull for me as it went on. Ditto too Chambers' The King In Yellow, which was incredibly Poe-like, and had some moments of real "something's not right and it's in the next room" going on.

I'm going to throw in with most who've posted it already: I still think The Shining is the most terrifying thing that King's produced. There's something really raw about it that I haven't found in the other stuff of his that I've read...

19:51 / 22.04.02

You have got to be kidding me with The Shining, right?

The gormless repetition of : "What has been forgotten will be remembered?" as some kind of pre-empting for the final showdown.

It's the supernatural equivalent of Pazuzu realising that he's left the tap running and has to dash.

If sales (and imitation) are anything to go by the Dracula is THE perfect horror novel by a mile.

Prove me wrong kids. Prove me wrong.

20:45 / 22.04.02

If sales (and imitation) are anything to go by the Dracula is THE perfect horror novel by a mile.

Prove me wrong kids. Prove me wrong.

Not about to. But I think in many ways what this shows is how horror can be categorized. I agree that Dracula just like Frankenstein has a broad appeal and defined many corridors that work created after that time has traveled. But its also just a piece of the genre.

But for me, I'm looking for that thing that ultimately "ruins" me. If I'm gonna read horror, I want to be uncomfortable and/or challenged. I'm thinking how both books and films pushed my imagination when I was little and how it in essence affected me while I sit here today. At the same time though, I do enjoy the trashy or pulp feel of old horror. Guess it's all about mood.

05:57 / 23.04.02

'I'm looking for that thing that ultimately "ruins" me.'

brilliant description, bizanchee - that's what i want to do with my own horror fic.

08:55 / 23.04.02

I haven't read any horror for years, I got all my grandads books, the only thing I can remember scaring me was "Here there be Tygers" by Steven King and I don't know why there was just something very strange about it when I was 14. Has anyone read it? It's a short story in the "Skeleton Crew". I tried to find it yesterday but couldn't find it anywhere online?

The Return Of Rothkoid

09:56 / 23.04.02

The Shining? Hey - I was about 12 at the time. It might explain a lot.

As for Dracula? Great book, but not at all terrifying. Genteel, it is, even - but that's probably due to the difference in our culture to Stoker's...

10:58 / 23.04.02

I tend to prefer short stories... our own sfd's stories make me extremely uncomfortable/uneasy. Lucy Taylor's also. Poppy Z. Brite I do like, though I don't find her scary or particularly disturbing - more goth and pretty. But erotic horror is the way to go, and the more fucked the better.

11:00 / 23.04.02

And I agree with what Rizla said:
quote:
I think it’s part of the deal that great horror should always be disconcerting, incongruous, unpredictable, hard to read, unfeasibly fucked up and preferably written by someone with a genuinely diseased mind..

Abso-fucking-lutely.

11:04 / 23.04.02

Um - not to imply that sfd has a genuinely diseased mind - just that she writes the part very well (not to imply that she just writes erotic horror, either, though she does so fantastically) and she's going to have a self-published collection out soon. I for one am thoroughly looking forward to that...

14:27 / 23.04.02

Ditto too Chambers' The King In Yellow, which was incredibly Poe-like, and had some moments of real "something's not right and it's in the next room" going on.

Yeah, what was up with that? The 'horror' bits at the start looked like they were leading towards something pretty interesting, but why the fuck was the rest of the book all about art students prancing round Paris falling in love? I want my money back!

14:33 / 23.04.02

Oh, and

a)is anyone still interested in that Barbelith horror zine we were going to do a while ago? Maybe we should start gathering submissions until we've got enough and then think about putting it out?

b)so does anyone want to recommend some seriously good modern horror books that I might enjoy? As I said earlier, pretty much everything post-1950 I've read in the genre has been complete wank.. there must be something good out there, surely?

14:44 / 23.04.02

You know this Yellow book people are mentioning has been made into a movie

Also any good modern horror would be welcomed by the bear.

16:21 / 23.04.02

The King in Yellow? a movie? that's gonna be pretty crazy..

16:37 / 23.04.02

...as far as a horror project/zine goes, I'm all up for illustrations, images, etc. I can conceptualize horror and terror quite well but writing it would be an entirely difficult matter for me. Is this posted in Creation yet?

...also..sfd...do you have any examples or material available. If not, you strike my curiosity...

18:08 / 23.04.02

bizanchee - all i have online is some journo writings and a piece of fiction with a broken link. pah! however, i have a story in the new issue of kimota magazine, which is due out v soon and should be online as well as on good old fashioned paper, and, as cholister said above, i'm hopefully going to publish a short story collection soon. can email you a text file if you're really interested, but it won't look half as pretty.... what about you? got any illustrations online?

18:53 / 23.04.02

not sure it's 'perfect' but an honourable mention should go to ian banks' the wasp factory. it was truely disturbing - life skewed right out of line.

20:18 / 23.04.02

I would agree with the Wasp Factory - nothing I had seen in film or anywhere up till that point had quite the same 'physical repulsiveness' element of horror for me as certain scenes. But it's also kind of eery and creepy in subtle and interesting ways.

Went to see Banks in Glasgow about 8 years ago and he was talking about all the different covers that book has in different countries. In Finland it's apparently a picture of a burning dog, amusingly. And in France an enormous wasp.

08:42 / 24.04.02

...as far as a horror project/zine goes, I'm all up for illustrations, images, etc. I can conceptualize horror and terror quite well but writing it would be an entirely difficult matter for me. Is this posted in Creation yet?

We jived about it* ages ago, then sort of forgot about it. If you search the creation, you'll probably find the thread.

*dig the beatnik lingo

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

10:04 / 24.04.02

yeah... apathy kind of hit us like some blasphemous cyclopean entity from the outer darkness... I'm still up for it though (mea fucking culpa... weird work shit started happening, and what with that and posting badly-spelt diatribes here, I lost the impetus- anyone know anyone who'd be good at giving us all a good kick up the arse?)
Those parentheses should probably have been in the Creation, so here's some Books stuff related to my earlier post in this thread- check out Ligotti's website:

http://longshadows.com/ligotti/

there's a new story, as far as I can tell, the longest he's ever done (or had published at any rate) called "My Work Is Not Yet Done"- it has kind of a normal setting for Ligotti, but is just as fucked as any of his other stuff... (Apart from maybe "I Have A Special Plan For This World")...

13:54 / 24.04.02

sfd...when my host is up and I get some coin to reregister my domain name, i'll post some images up on the server. I'm more of a designer really, but I like manipulating images and such. I'll see if I can get a friend or two interested in zine illustrations since they do some pretty wild work. A direction to go in might be what they're looking for. As far as the text, point me in the right direction when it's available.

13:55 / 24.04.02

Just thought I'd mention that I just read another one of sfd's stories, and it was fucking brilliant. Really can't wait for the book!