3 posts tagged “horror”

This is a booklist for librarians and anyone else interested in good scary reading this Halloween season. I've selected a mix of paperbacks and hardcovers for this list and tried to stay within 2006-2007 publication dates but I wasn't always successful. Feel free to print up this list and use it as your personal checklist or use it to create a display or bookmarks.

African-American Authors:
The Fledgling by Octavia Butler (Hardcover, 2005)
The Wicked: A Vampire Huntress Legend Novel by L. A. Banks (Trade Paperback, 2007)
Within the Shadows by Brandon Massey (Mass Market Paperback, 2007)

Anthology:
Horror: The Best of the Year, 2006 edited by John Gregory Betancourt and Sean Wallace (Trade Paperback, 2006)
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror: The Year's Best Terror Tales edited by Stephen Jones (Trade Paperback, 2006)
Whispers in the Night: Dark Dreams vol. 3 edited by Brandon Massey (Trade Paperback, 2007)

Apocalyptic Horror:
The Conqueror Worms by Brian Keene  (Mass Market Paperback, 2006)
The Road by Cormac McCarthy (Hardcover, 2006)
Monster Planet: A Zombie Novel by David Wellington (Trade Paperback, 2007)

Ghosts:
Bones of the Barbary Coast by Daniel Hecht (Hardcover, 2006)
Chasing the Dead by Joe Schrieber (Hardcover, 2006)
Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill (Hardcover, 2007)
Joplin's Ghost by Tananarive Due (Hardcover, 2006)

Golems:
Mr. Hands by Gary Braunback (Mass Market Paperback, 2007)

Historical Horror:
The Queen of Wolves: A Novel of the Vampyricon by Douglas Clegg (Hardcover, 2007)
The Terror: A Novel by Dan Simmons (Hardcover, 2007)

Humourous Horror:
Fangland by John Marks (Hardcover, 2007)
Gil's All Fright Diner by A. Lee Martinez (Hardcover, 2005)
You Suck: A Love Story by Christopher Moore (Hardcover, 2007)
Vamped by David Sosnowski (Hardcover, 2004)

Ohio Horror:
Blood and Rust by S. A. Swiniarski (Mass Market Paperback, 2007)
Darkness Wakes by Tim Waggoner (Mass Market Paperback 2006)

Mystery Horror:
An Ice Cold Grave by Charlaine Harris (Hardcover, 2007)
Poltergeist by Kat Richardson (Trade Paperback, 2007)
The Unquiet: A Thriller by John Connolly (Hardcover, 2007)
Wraith by Phaedra Weldon (Trade Paperback, 2007)

Romantic Horror:
Bite Me if You Can by Linsay Sands (Mass Market Paperback, 2007)
Dead Sexy by Tate Hallaway (Trade Paperback, 2007)
The Last of the Red-Hot Vampires by Katie MacAlister (Mass Market Paperback, 2007)

Shapeshifters:
Blood Bound by Patricia Briggs (Mass Market Paperback, 2007)
Ivy Cole and the Moon by Gina Farago (Hardcover, 2005)
Kitty Takes a Vacation by Carrie Vaughan (Mass Market Paperback, 2007)
Stray by Rachel Vincent (Mass Market Paperback, 2007)

The Theme Books:
Hallows Eve by Al Sarrantonio (Mass Market Paperback, 2004)
Horrorween by Al Sarrantonio (Mass Market Paperback, 2007)

Things That Go Bump in the Night:
The Hollowers by Mary SanGiovanni (Mass Market Paperback, 2007)
The Ruins by Scott Smith (Hardcover, 2006)

Things Mortal Man Was Never Meant to Chat With:
Brother Odd by Dean Koontz  (Hardcover, 2006)

Vampires:
13 Bullets: A Vampire Tale by David Wellington (Trade Paperback, 2007)
Baltimore,: Or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden  (Hardcover, 2007)
Bottomfeeder by B. F. Fingerman (Trade Paperback, 2007)
They Hunger by Scott Nicholson (Mass Market Paperback, 2007)
Valentine's Resolve: A Novel of the Vampire Earth by E. E. Knight (Hardcover, 2007)

Vampire Detectives:
The Blood Books vol. 1-3 by Tanya Huff (Mass Market Paperback, 2006)
No Dominion by Charlies Huston (Trade Paperback, 2006)
X-Rated Bloodsuckers by Mario Acevedo (Trade Paperback, 2007)

Worlds With Monsters:
For a Few Demons More by Kim Harrison (Hardcover, 2007)
The Harlequin by Laurell K. Hamilton (Hardcover, 2007)
No Humans Involved by Kelley Armstrong (Hardcover, 2007)
White Night: A Novel of the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher (Hardcover, 2007)

Zombies:
Cell by Stephen King (Hardcover, 2006)
Dead Sea by Brian Keene (Mass Market Paperback, 2007)
Dying to Live by Kim Paffenroth (Trade Paperback, 2007)
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks (Hardcover, 2006)

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(Originally posted in . . . With Intent to Commit Horror)

I have been asked, on a couple of occasions, to talk about the horror genre to librarians who don't normally read horror but want to help their patrons who do.

I started the sessions by announcing that I have two stories to tell. They both happened to me.

The Ghost Story:

This morning I had to travel across Cleveland to get to my library an hour before opening for the Early Bird Meeting. I dashed out into the frigid night air, carelessly shutting the door behind me. I reached the last stair before I froze. Did I lock the front door?

As I retraced my steps back to the porch, a small sphere of light began to glow in the screen door and grew in size as I approached it. A fearful wonder filled me. I'd never seen anything like that in my life except in grainy black and white photos reprinted in children's books about ghosts and haunted houses.

I didn't know my place was haunted

My first thought was I didn't know my place was haunted. I experienced a tingling in my gut which spread throughout my body as I realized I didn't actually want a ghost in my home.

No, I thought. I turned and discovered the culprit - a street lamp across the street was beaming brightly on the glass of my screen door. Relieved, I chuckled as I locked the front door. The fear had been banished and I felt euphoric and energized. I enjoyed the moment of fear and the tingle, as well as the happiness that bubbled up when the moment of fear passed.

I felt these same emotions when I read City of Masks by Daniel Hecht, the first novel in many years to scare me. It's addictive.

The Horror Story:

My family had been invited by my wife's boss to attend an all day staff outing at Geauga Park, an amusement park almost 20 miles from where I live. We got off the highway and hit a long stretch of rural road going 40 miles an hour. We crest a hill and saw the park in the distance. Closer, about 500 feet, was a long line of fifteen cars held up by a police officer citing another driver for a traffic violation.

My family and I were going to crash into the last car in line

We were going uncomfortably fast so I stepped on the brake. Nothing. I tried again. Nothing. I pumped the brake and we slowed a little but not nearly enough. My family and I were going to crash into the last car in line. I swore many profanities.

My stomach turned. I felt sick and scared silly. I pumped the brake quickly, downshifted viciously (to heck with my transmission) and turned the car off. We were still traveling way too fast. I swerved on to the berm which thankfully was a rural road width, so I could shoot past the last car without touching it. I could barely breathe as we passed one car and then another and then another.

By the time we reached the fourth car, we'd slowed to a stop. I had to force myself to breathe and not soil my clothes. My stomach lurched. I was happy we were alive. I was angry that the car was broken. I was afraid of the repair cost and unsure how we were going to get home.

I spent the rest of the day alternating between depression and fearfulness. It was not an experience I could recommend to anyone.

The Moral of the Stories:

The librarians immediately caught the difference between horror as entertainment and horror as a real life experience in a way they'd never understood before. I won't say I converted anyone to horror reading and a life long pursuit of the scare, but I did bring home to each of them the value of the genre and the legitimacy of the reading experience.

Tell me, did this work for you? Did you gleam any insights from it? What were they? Is this something you might be able to use in your own conversations about horror? If this would be helpful to you, you may use it under the rules Creative Commons License below. Click on the graphic to see what you can and cannot do with these stories.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

I ported the new look of  . . . With Intent to Commit Horror from a testing subdirectory to the front lines. Next up is transferring all the old pages into the new look. That’s hundreds of pages -- a lot of work for one person -- but the end product will be so worth it. In the meantime, I’ll do the best I can to keep the booklists that haven’t been transferred available to you. It means a lot of the website will retain its old black and red look and the links to Barnes and Noble will be broken. The information, however, will still be good.

Besides changing the look of the website, I’ll also be pulling out the material on graphic novels and Ohio authors. Horror graphic novels and Ohio authors who write horror will remain. The rest of the material will hopefully find a new website after . . . With Intent to Commit Horror is finished.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.