The one where Dark is trying to ‘tempt’ Will Holloway’s father?
That was a really great scene…
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Good one. But, remember, this one has not one but two serial killers. Definitely transgressive. Speaking of which, if you are prepared for the onslaught, might I recommend Dennis Cooper’s The Sluts. Experimental, yet highly (even compulsively) readable and even more over the top than Exquisite Corpse (and if you didn’t think that is possible, well it most certainly is).
It just made me feel like King thought he was getting paid by the word or something. The kiddie sex scene was disturbing but that was the only thing I really found scary in the book.
I liked the Shining but I didn’t really like the end.
Salem’s Lot was just lots and lots of nothing happening.
Fie! Fie, I say!! I first found this book because the original paperback cover was like nothing I’d ever seen before (or since). It was almost totally black with a relief of a young girl with a drop of red at a corner of her lips. No title, no author; that was it. I figured that the publishers must have something special here. I’d never heard of King before so I went into this cold. Being a King novel (really, even his bad stuff is highly readable), this story grabbed me from the start. But I didn’t twig to the fact that it was a vampire novel until quite a ways into the book. I was ecstatic as at the time I was taking a course at UT called ‘Vampirism in Eastern Europe’ (your basic ‘easy A’ that was chock full of interesting stuff). So this book is rather special to me.
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If “best” means the ability of a book to give you the occasional lasting chill and eerie afterglow that forces you to avoid staring into dark parts of the house, turn on all the lights, and pull up something stupidly distracting on TV (yuck!), then the best – for me at least – was “Dead Lines” by Greg Bear. It has a matter-of-fact, low-key vibe that lends weight to the possibility of ghosts (in the context of the book, of course) that’s reminiscent of the two best ghost films ever made; The Haunting (1963), and The Uninvited (1944). No insipid, way-over-the-top, exploding skull, scare-killing scenarios.
FD: I have to state that what scares me may not scare others. Personal history might have something to do with that, a neighbor’s story related to me by my father many year ago. The neighbors – a mother and her daughter – were watching TV together. No one else in the house. From where the TV was set and from where they were sitting they could see down a hallway connecting two bedrooms. They said they saw a woman in the hallway walk from one bedroom to the next. That was all. Mother: “Did you see that?” Daughter: “Yes”. They stayed frozen in place until the Dad came home from work.
I can see why one of his books might sell like hotcakes. Being well publicised, pushed to the front of book stores (remember them?) and so on.
But not books. Once you have read one of the books, you have read them all.
Indeed, I felt they could have saved quite a bit of production money on books 2 to gazillion by simply having each with one page and the word ‘ditto’ on it.
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Wow. Exquisite corpse was one of those books that was really good, but left me feeling a bit “soiled” for having read it. May have to look into “the Sluts”…
A M Hurley’s The Loney. A horror that builds up to a climatctic scene that gave me a feeling like vertigo
Agreed. I feel like IT has been adapted so well, and been so influential, that people forget how awkwardly bad the original book can be. Great ideas, not his best writing.
Very much agreed, and I have to protest their note…
“Were this list inclusive of short story collections, Ray Bradbury’s The October Country would be a serious contender for the top spot.”
Then perhaps the list should include From the Dust Returned, Bradbury’s reconstruction of the October Country stories into a full-fledged novel, which absolutely deserves a place in the top 100.
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Uh, not exactly. Only a couple of the Elliott family stories originally came from The October Country.
Sorry, I guess I meant that it took the Elliott stories from The October Country as well as the others he’d done over the years and reconstructed them into a novel (kind of like his other novels-of-short-stories such as Martian Chronicles). It just seemed a little weird that the list was bemoaning not being able to include October Country when the best bits of it are available to include in genuine novel form.
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