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Why don't we have this category on the website. never mind. Now, we do.
This might a be a short section, because I might be the only one who reads horror novels.
The Shining by Stephan King.
This book scared me. I had to finish it to the end before I could go to sleep. Granted, I was sixteen and imressionable and was not releasing my manly juices at frequent enought intervals, but I couldn't put it down. I had to get to the happy ending or I was going to be scared of my own house.
I've read it twice since but not in a long time. I'm going to let memory color how good the book was and how much I enjoyed it.
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Nay, Brother Greg!
The Shining is a great novel (one of my favorites), but it is not traditional horror. It is a commentary on idealogical differences reduced to a microcosmic stage.
Liberals, conservatives, independants are developed as single characters. Even the politically ignorant are reduced to a single character (Tom) for the sake of drama.
Nay - The best Horror novel is and proably always will be 'Salem's Lot'. My sophisticated, intellectual side says 'The Shining', but I realize that images from the movie are clouding my judgement. Kubrick's vision has some seriously fucked-up scenes that send nightmares into overtime.
'Salem's Lot' provided my brain with enough information to generate nightmares way before the TV movie. Thinking of my friends being turned into vampires who would gently tap at my window kept me awake many a night. Eventually I grew used to my friends tapping on my window and this fear went away, but still, geez.
Any way you cut it I still say Stephen King is the best horror novelist ever and even his crappiest books are light-years better than Dean Koontz and John Saul.
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The Stand was much scarier -- at least while everyone was dying. I was less creeped out after the survivors got together on each side. But the very vivid picture of how everyone could die of the flu so quickly definitely freaked me out!
But honestly, although I loved early King (pre-Gerald's Game) I think Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" was pretty terrifying.
For nonfiction horror novels, I guess I'd have to nominate "The Devil's Butcher Shop" about the riot at the lovely Santa Fe penitentiary (where Greg worked on The Longest Yard). That was severely creepy.
Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes.
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The Shining got me, both the book and the movie. Salem's Lot got me too, but the movie didn't (btw, ED, sorry about tapping on your window so much back in the day - would have been better if I could float). I haven't read the Stand.
My vote goes to the Shining though, mostly because I'm not that big on vampire stories. Blood sucking vampires never bothered me as much as psychic vampires, which I combat on a daily basis. I should also note that I saw the movie before I read the book, so Kubrick's imagery increased the impact of a great read.
For the record, horror doesn't work for me on the novel level as well as it does on the short story level. I'm not sure why that is. I guess I don't stay scared long enough to sustain it. So I'm not a big fan of the genre...
Shadow boxing the apocalypse
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Not so much.
It would have won if it ended after they found the woman of the corn or whatever. Everybody dying and the world ending was great. The big battle in Vegas, I'd rather see Douglass fight Tyson.
Long Live The Shining.
And what about that crappy Shining TV movie? That was the definition of blows.
So much for the flickr badge idea. Dammit
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Yeah - The Shining TV movie was supposed to be 'truer to the novel'
Which goes to show that sometimes novels should not be translated word-for-word to the big screen. I remember being such a big fan of the book that I was pissed at Kubrick's changes. Now I much prefer a hedge maze over topiary animals.
Although there was no reason to kill Scatman : (
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...so I can't comment on that, and I agree that the end of the book was anticlimactic -- thought he should have ended it much sooner. The part that totally creeped me out was the first half, with everyone but a few people dying from what seemed to be the common cold. I read that in high school and I had a cold while I was reading it, and so did just about everyone else around me. I don't know, maybe you native Californians didn't have that problem growing up in the warmth and sunshine and probably having open windows and unlocked doors at your schools, but back in the midwest, where we had to keep the outside completely outside 90% of the year and windows NEVER opened, colds were serious business. As soon as one person got infected and came to school, EVERYONE in the building got that same cold, and then passed it around for months.
Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes.
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...not to move to the mid-west. Yes, the smell of orange blossoms billowing through the open windows was an everyday occurance when I was little. Of course, that was long ago.
No, really.
Long, long ago.
Still, this was in the Pomona Valley, and one of the last surviving orange groves was across the street from my house.
So we never got colds. At least, not that I can remember.
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While I like King, he just doesn't know when to stop. And like many famous authors, now he can refuse to be edited. And what the hell was the point of the longer version of the Stand? I think the short stories are better than the novels. But to me, one of the scariest horror novels is actually a novella, Matheson's I Am Legend. The film (Omega Man) scared the crap out of me as a kid, and reading the book recently tapped right back into the same fear. It eases off at the end, but still a tour de force. And some of the other stories in the books were pretty freaky as well.
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If you really want my favorite King book, it was Night Shift. Pound for pound so many of those horror shorts delivered. I read it when travelling with my Grandfather across Mexico. His brother and his wife came too. It was a posh tour. The next youngest one was the tour guide, who must have been in his late thirties. Everyone else on the trip was a senior citizen. We travelled by bus, went all over Mexico, and stayed in these outrageouly posh hotels. p. o. s. h. posh. One was built in a medieval castle, complete with stone walls and round rooms. Another was this crazy gothic mansion. We saw the mummies in Mexico city, back when they were all just behind this broken glass case in this narrow hall that put you right up next to them. My grandfather was on this quest to learn the proper way to drink tequila. It took them a long time, well into the trip, before any even soaked in. My grandpa could hold liquor. He also had this gnarled up right hand, for which he got the Purple Heart in WWII. It was bent into a permanent hook with which he had some mobility.
I couldn't ask for a better setting to read that book.
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The best story from Nightshift was battelground. That was the one about the assasin who does battle with the toy soldiers. That's the one that needs to be made into a movie. HK? Toy Story 3 might be looking for a plot . . .
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Didn't they make a series out of the Mangler. That was my favorite one, but I never saw the movies....
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That movie also scared the crap out of me when I was a kid. I have a lingering fear of Anthony Zerbe to this day. Another movie which scared the crap out of me when I was a lad was "Lord of the Flies". Maybe also a candidate for Horror Novel of the millenium, since it tells horrifying truths...
In the Tudor Period, Fencing Masters were classified in the Vagrancy Laws along with Actors, Gypsys, Vagabonds, Sturdy Rogues, and the owners of performing bears.
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Battleground - No movie yet
The Boogeyman
Children of the Corn
Graveyard Shift
Grey Matter - No movie yet
I am the Doorway - No movie yet
I Know What You Need
Jerusalem's Lot - No movie yet
The Last Rung on the Ladder
The Lawnmower Man also ???
The Ledge
The Man Who Loved Flowers - Can't find but I swear I saw this one
The Mangler
Night Surf
One for the Road - no movie yet
Quitters,Inc
Sometimes They Come Back
Strawberry Spring
Trucks
The Woman in the room
Haggis Killer
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Greg Wrote:The best story from Nightshift was battelground. That was the one about the assasin who does battle with the toy soldiers. That's the one that needs to be made into a movie. HK? Toy Story 3 might be looking for a plot . . .
<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0122718/fullcredits#writers">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0122718/fullcredits#writers</a><!-- m -->
It doesn't say Stephen King in the credits, though. But it does have David Cross.
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