The After-Dinner Payback

Hi, it’s me. The Wolfman.

Why did I pick the Wolfman as my Halloween alter-ego? I have no idea, but I agree: Frankenstein’s monster and Count Dracula were much cooler.

As for book monsters? Now we’re getting somewhere! It’s difficult to pick five horror novels and five horror short stories, but it’s Halloween—my favorite day of the year—and I had to give it a shot. So here it is: the not-so-definitive list of the Wolfman’s favorite horror novels and short stories.

1. The Travelling Vampire Show by Richard Laymon

Richard Laymon’s award-winning 2000 novel follows three sixteen-year-olds on one August day in 1963, when the adults-only Travelling Vampire Show comes to town. Like a cross between Stephen King’s “The Body” and Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, Laymon’s novel is memorable for its nostalgic, dreadful atmosphere and blackened humor. Rather than relying on monsters and violence, The Travelling Vampire Show instead focuses on the three main characters and takes otherwise-normal situations and makes them bizarre enough to sustain suspense throughout its pages. This is a beautifully-written and horrifying book that will make you long for those summer days you spent as an insecure teenager.

2. ‘Salem’s Lot by Stephen King

Readers often point to The Shining as being Stephen King’s most frightening book, but I think that honor goes to ‘Salem’s Lot. Though it’s basically a novelized version of those countless horror comics King undoubtedly grew up on, it’s enjoyable because it doesn’t try to be anything more than pure, unadulterated horror, complete with violence, vampires, and a very spooky haunted house. King has always been at his best when he has a large cast of characters to work with and ‘Salem’s Lot shows why.

3. Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

With books like The October Country and From the Dust Returned, Ray Bradbury has become Halloween’s unofficial laureate. Unforgettable characters like Jim Nightshade, William Halloway, and Mr. Dark make Something Wicked This Way Comes a veritable fountain of youth. It’s a wonderful reminder of how fascinating Halloween really is.

4. Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin

Though it’s more popular as the Roman Polanski movie of the same name, Ira Levin’s second novel was one of the first contemporary horror novels to become a bestseller. Like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Rosemary’s Baby takes age-old superstition—in this case, witchcraft—and plants it firmly in modern times. The book’s blasphemous overtones and religious themes paved the way for classics like William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist.

5. Adams Fall by Sean Desmond

It’s difficult to sustain a ghost story over the course of an entire novel, but Sean Desmond manages to pull it off with Adams Fall. I was pretty jaded as a horror fan by the time I encountered this book and was pleasantly spooked by its creepy Gothic atmosphere. Like Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Adams Fall relies on psychology and ambiguity to disturb readers—it’s not entirely clear if the narrator was really being haunted or if he was just suffering guilt over his roommate’s suicide. Desmond does a wonderful job chronicling one Harvard senior’s life as it slowly falls apart.

I’ve always thought that some of the best horror comes in the form of the short story. Who can forget authors like Ambrose Bierce and Charles Dickens? But picking five of my favorite short stories was considerably more difficult than picking five horror novels; like most lists, it’s more a matter of having too much to choose from.

1. “The Monkey’s Paw” by W. W. Jacobs

I first read this story in eighth grade and it’s always been my favorite horror short story. This one has all the ingredients that make horror fun to read: great characters, a dollop of mystery, and a shocking ending that set the standard for all horror stories to follow. This is the story that started my decade-long obsession with all things horror.

2. “The Dunwich Horror” by H.P. Lovecraft

H.P. Lovecraft is probably the best of the bad writers from the pulp era, and “The Dunwich Horror” solidifies his reputation for being an unclassifiable author. (What exactly did he write? Horror? Science fiction?) There’s a certain mystery that comes with reading a Lovecraft story: despite the fantastic elements that go along with his writing, it’s not too difficult to imagine that perhaps he had it right all along. Sure, a lot of his fiction is garbage, but that’s part of the author’s appeal.

3. “The Man in the Black Suit” by Stephen King

Like Lovecraft, “The Man in the Black Suit” is hard to classify—it’s not horror in the strictest sense—but it did mark a turning point in Stephen King’s career: he won the prestigious O. Henry award for this story. Call it literary horror, but with “The Man in the Black Suit”—which he would later follow with Bag of Bones—King began to be taken seriously as a writer. He’s not going anywhere and now with Lisey’s Story, he’s proving that he just gets better with age.

4. “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe

There’s not much to say about Edgar Allan Poe that hasn’t already been said; he exemplifies the American Gothic tradition. Any one of his short stories would be perfect for Halloween (and no Halloween would be complete without one), but “The Tell-Tale Heart” is my favorite of Poe’s fiction. You can’t go wrong with “The Fall of the House of Usher” or “The Pit and the Pendulum,” either.

5. “The Lost Ghost” by Mary Wilkins

I love ghost stories and “The Lost Ghost” is one of the spookiest I’ve ever read. While nothing particularly malevolent happens in this story—the little girl is actually helpful—Wilkins takes the idea of a haunting and amplifies the creepiness considerably. Reading “The Lost Ghost” is like reading three stories in one, but Wilkins deftly juggles all the elements to make a very atmospheric whole.

As for my favorite movie monster? I’m going to have to go with Max Schreck’s Graf Orlok from Nosferatu. Seriously: has there ever been a creepier vampire than that guy?

Happy Halloween!

Thoughts of no particular interest to anyone but myself:

• I spent most of last night reading Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. I still remember how, as a kid, my friends and I would pass Schwartz’s book around, shining flashlights in our faces while trying to pull off the author’s stage directions (”As you shout the last words, stamp your foot and jump at someone nearby”). We never did manage to scare one another; all of us were already familiar with the book and its two sequels, so we usually ended up laughing at each other.
• I’ll probably spend most of this evening (and some of tomorrow) reading James Howe’s Howliday Inn.
• I really wish I’d made a list of all the books I’ve read this year. My reading has been pretty scattershot this year—not to mention literary. In addition to pop fiction like Dan Brown’s Deception Point and Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island—okay, so it hasn’t been all literary around here—I managed to pack in contemporary literature (Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day), young adult fiction (John Gardner’s Grendel), a short story collection (James Joyce’s Dubliners), and lots of classics (such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby). And now that I think about it, I’ve probably done more reading this year than in any other year previous. I really can’t account for my sudden mad dash to the finish line—maybe it’s because I’m reading better books—but I’m not complaining, either.

I’m not even sure what to say about Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, which I finished yesterday afternoon. It’s probably the best book I’ve read this year. I’m not quite ready to let this one go; why should I? The Remains of the Day is one of those rare books that proves there is such thing as the perfect novel. I’m still thinking about Ishiguro’s portrait of Stevens, the aging butler who, for all his skills, still hasn’t mastered the art of bantering.

Listening to them now, I can hear them exchanging one bantering remark after another. It is, I suppose, the way many people like to proceed. In fact, it is possible my bench companion of a while ago expected me to banter with him—in which case, I suppose I was something of a sorry disappointment. Perhaps it is indeed time I began to look at this whole matter of bantering a little more enthusiastically. After all, when one thinks about it, it is not such a foolish thing to indulge in—particularly if it is the case that in bantering lies the key to human warmth.

George Orwell and the Thought Police.

What remains most unsettling about the list he actually sent is the way in which a writer whose name is now a synonym for political independence and journalistic honesty is drawn into collaboration with a bureaucratic department of propaganda, however marginal the collaboration, “white” the propaganda, and good the cause. In the files of the IRD [Information Research Department], you find the kind of bureaucratic language that we now habitually describe as Orwellian or Kafkaesque. Next to the very personal handwritten letter from Orwell (”Dear Celia…with love, George”) in FO 1110/189 is a typewritten communication from the British embassy in Moscow: “Dear Department,” it begins, and is signed, surreally, “yours ever, Chancery.”

Yet perhaps we should not be surprised, for Orwell knew this kind of world from inside, and drew on it for his “awful book.” While 1984 was a warning against totalitarianism of both the Nazi (that is, National Socialist) and communist (that is, Soviet Socialist) kind—hence “Ingsoc”—much of the physical detail was derived from his experience of wartime London, working in the BBC, itself a considerable British bureaucracy in close touch with the Ministry of Information and home to the original Room 101.

[...]

Orwell sought desperately to fight his last enemy, death; yet it was his early death that secured his immortality. Tempting as it is to speculate, in the light of the list, about which way he would have gone if he had lived—an iconoclastic left-wing voice on the New Statesman? a curmudgeonly old cold warrior on Encounter?—this is strictly illegitimate. We will never know. One thing, however, is clear: he would have taken definite, strong political stands, and therefore alienated people on the left or the right, and probably both. Only his early death allowed everyone to beatify him in their own way. And he would have written more books—possibly, as his previous novels and last draft story might suggest, less good ones than Animal Farm and 1984. Untimely death made him the James Dean of the cold war, the John F. Kennedy of English letters.

Though George Orwell’s 1984 is one of my favorite books—never has a book gotten me to think about society, freedom, and human nature quite like this one—it’s always been something of an enigma to me. In his afterword to 1984, Erich Fromm calls the book “an expression of a mood” and a warning, but I’ve never really thought of it as being strictly prophetic; it’s always struck me as being more of an Existentialist account of the world as it already was back then (and still is today). But Timothy Garton Ash’s article, along with Orwell’s list of possible communist sympathizers, brings a whole new aspect to 1984: instead of just being a damning indictment of totalitarianism, the book suddenly becomes a caricature of the world Orwell lived in. Given the author’s pessimism regarding human nature, Oceania could very well have been his vision of the perfect society, where propaganda becomes news, everyone is under constant surveillance, and good citizens are informing the Thought Police of anyone showing signs of thoughtcrime. One can only speculate on Orwell’s motivations—did he make this list out of a sense of civic duty or out of love for a woman?—but it’s perfectly clear that he had no problem informing the British government of possible dissidents. When seen by the light of his list, perhaps 1984 was really Orwell’s warning to all those he deemed subversive to the British empire.

Wired magazine has an article in which they ask thirty-three writers, including Margaret Atwood and Gregory Maguire, to come up with their own six-word short stories in the spirit of Ernest Hemingway’s “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” There are a lot of winners here—James Patrick Kelly writes, “We kissed. She melted. Mop, please!”—but my personal favorite comes from Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: “Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so.”

I have a strange sense of humor.

So how would I tackle the challenge? With a healthy dose of cynicism and a little bit of humor: God creates man and woman. Oops.

You didn’t really expect anything different from me, did you?

Thoughts of no particular interest to anyone but myself:

• From the Fall 2006 issue of the Cimarron Review: Glen Pourciau’s “Ring” is an amusing and ironic look at how annoying it can be when someone’s cell phone goes off during the middle of a movie.
• Ninth Letter has a good-looking website. I can’t really say anything about the journal’s content, though; they don’t offer up any samples. Slackers.
• I like Ploughshares. I may get a subscription to this one. (Also, check out the blog.)
• Poetry isn’t really my thing, so I’m not sure what to think of Cranky. And I’m annoyed by people who don’t use capital letters in their prose. Is this postmodernism for the Internet age?
• I wish Driftwood would give readers more to chew on. The journal certainly seems interesting; some of the samples had me salivating for more. Jacob M. Appel’s “The Punishment” has a good first sentence. Too bad all readers get is the first sentence.
• I’ll take the hint.
• Am I the only one who finds it difficult to take those online-only literary journals seriously? (Although, to be fair, The Absinthe Literary Review looks interesting.) Maybe it’s because I’m a purist; I like to hold a book or magazine in my hands while I read. Sure, the Internet is a relatively new frontier, but I’m not convinced that the digital age is heralding the death of the printing press. I’ve never read an entire book online, nor do I want to. I actually find it a bit stressful to read something on a computer screen.
• I’m not making a lot of progress with Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. It’s not that I don’t like it; it’s just that it’s very rich and seems to go down a lot smoother when it’s taken in small sips. I really have to be in the mood to read it. But it’s a short book—my library copy is under 250 pages—and it isn’t due back until early next month, so I’m not in a rush to get through it.

Thoughts of no particular interest to anyone but myself:

• I feel really bad about yesterday’s post. It’s awful and I’m tempted to delete it, but I hate myself, so it stays.
• Can I offer up an excuse?
• Didn’t think so. But I’ll make an excuse anyway: the long and short of it is that I’ve been burned out. I’d spent most of the previous day and night finishing up a short story and, well, I just didn’t have any inspiration to dump into a blog post. I just felt obligated to post something. It happens.
• After putting the finishing touches on my story, I spent some time looking at literary journals. And it occurred to me that, to my knowledge, there aren’t any blogs that revolve around these magazines. For shame!
• I considered starting up a blog that puts the focus on literary journals, but I decided against it. I can barely maintain multiple email addresses, much less multiple blogs. So I’ll just integrate the journals into this blog. At the very least, I’ll have something to fall back on when I have nothing to write about.
• But after reading some of the stories and poems in these journals, I realized that there’s a literary goldmine out there. (Of course, I did read some stinkers, but it’s all a matter of opinion, I suppose.) It seems literary journals often collect dust at bookstores and magazine outlets, which is understandable; who wants to read Denver Quarterly when Scarlett Johansson is pouting from the cover of Maxim?
• I certainly haven’t been much help—Scarlett Johansson is very attractive—but I’m making up for lost time.

Thoughts of no particular interest to anyone but myself:

• I started Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day a few days ago and though I’m only about sixty pages into it, it’s a beautifully-written and very engrossing story.
• I just wish I could get Anthony Hopkins out of my head.
• I’m the kind of guy who likes to read the book before seeing the movie (not that I’m much of a moviegoer to begin with), so I’m anxious to get my hands on Christopher Priest’s The Prestige.
• Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s The Club Dumas also looks appetizing. I hope it’s better than the awful film adaptation (remember The Ninth Gate?).

These days, there isn’t much an author can do to shake up the horror novel. With few exceptions—Richard Laymon immediately comes to mind—it’s a genre that’s been stagnating for years, with writers taking a certain glee in rehashing the clichés that were more or less invented by Stephen King. The endless parade of corpses and tired metaphors clogging horror novels were enough to get me to stop reading them.

It would be nice to think that Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves could resurrect a genre that’s been dead since the eighties, but it’s probably too experimental for anything more than cult status. Considering how the novel reads like a film student’s dissertation, comparisons to movies like The Blair Witch Project and The Ring are inevitable. House of Leaves certainly isn’t for the conservative reader. Taking cues from James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, David Foster Wallace, and Umberto Eco, Danielewski has great fun obliterating the novel form. The first thing I noticed was the book’s structure (or lack thereof), which makes for a challenging and engaging read. It’s like reading two books at once: Zampanò’s book is a pseudo-academic examination of a documentary called The Navidson Record and Johnny Truant’s footnotes are studies on the effects of obsession.

But House of Leaves doesn’t always work. Johnny Truant isn’t a particularly strong or likeable character (though, to his credit, he brings some much-needed levity to the story) and the footnotes threaten to become tiresome and repetitious—at times, I found myself wishing that they would disappear. And though there are flashes of brilliance, Danielewski’s experimentation often overshadows the main story. Readers will find themselves turning the book sideways, reading it upside-down, and flipping ahead to appendices, poems and letters. The story is simple enough—a family moves into a house with dimensions that are far bigger on the inside than they are on the outside—but Danielewski travels every possible avenue, sometimes in exhaustive detail. Characters are saddled with flaws, making them seem like real people, and the tongue-in-cheek culture references keep the setting firmly rooted in reality.

The book’s true power lies in Danielewski’s examinations of the psychological toll the house takes on its inhabitants. Compared to other horror novels, there is very little violence to be found in House of Leaves and, unlike most horror novels, Danielewski doesn’t spend much time describing the visual aspects of violence. The dry, scholarly tone of the main story stands in stark contrast to Johnny’s obsessive and often-breathless footnotes. The effect is jarring at times, making for a disjointed read, but it also underlines the sense of chaos that runs throughout the novel. In House of Leaves, anything goes.

Despite its flaws, House of Leaves is a literary and visceral horror novel that’s certainly worth reading. It probably won’t appeal to readers who enjoy conventional novels; rather, this one is for those who are tired of reading conventional novels altogether.

Thoughts of no particular interest to anyone but myself:

• I finished Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves this morning. Have I mentioned how great this book is?
• I can’t wait to get my hands on Danielewski’s latest novel, Only Revolutions.
• Now that I think about it, finishing House of Leaves means that I finished the Readers Imbibing Peril challenge. I didn’t read all the books I’d planned on reading, but I still managed to read five books that are “scary, eerie, moody, dripping with atmosphere, gothic, unsettling, etc.”: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone, and, of course, House of Leaves.
• And I still have nine days to spare.
• What to read next? Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day was going to be the next book I read, but now I’m not too sure. It’s a pretty short book, one that I could probably read over a weekend. I may start up on John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. That book is calling out to me.
• I’ll decide tomorrow. After having my brain gutted by House of Leaves, I need a break.