The 3 Books That Scared Me Most

It's October and people are dusting off those old horror movies and preparing to scare themselves silly. This got me thinking about the books that had frightened me most. While the ones I chose don't strictly belong in the horror genre—one is a literary short story, another is a dystopian SF novel and the third is dark fantasy—they scared me far more than anything I've read by that master of horror, Stephen King. Why did they make the top slots? Because the horror factor stayed with me long after I turned the last page and sat in a stupor, eyes glazed and tee-shirt sweaty, my mind reeling from the hellish possibilities conjured by these authors.

Now, what scares me might not scare everyone. I know that some are scared by evil spirits and things that go bump in the night. Storms. Sharks, spiders. No Internet service. I'm not scared of those things. It's reality that makes my teeth chatter, or the logical projection of current reality into a nightmare reality that is all too believable, even inevitable. This brings me to my top contender, the book that scared me more than any other in my 50+ years on the planet....

1. The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
(Spoilers!) Here is the earth, America to be precise, after some ass started a nuclear war. Nothing grows because sunlight can't get through the thick cover of smoke and dust. Everything is covered with ash. Everything is dead, including the ocean. Shorelines are strewn with the bones of all the dead fish. Some people survive, and what they become in the desperate quest for food and water is something that cannot be called human. This book contains the single most horrifying scene I've ever read—even more horrifying than a scene in a short story I read decades ago where a child is slowly disemboweled by a Mephistophelean character. Yes, it tops that.

2. Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury.
This novel should not even be on this list because I never finished it. I was a child when I blithely picked it off a bookshelf at home, and I didn't get very far. All I remember is a fairground where nothing is as it seems, and the more I read, the creepier everyone and everything became. To my child's eyes, this perversion of things that should be innocent and harmless, like carousels and merry-go-rounds, was so terrifying that I closed the book, slipped it back on the shelf—and shivered every time I saw its grey, faded cover over the next couple of decades. Still can't bring myself to finish it.

3. A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor.
(Spoilers!) This is a short story I read just a few years ago, so I vividly remember how this tale hung over me like a seething, dripping, noxious cloud for several weeks. O'Connor takes an ordinary, flawed family, Granny and all, and puts them on a road trip from Georgia to Florida where they make a wrong turn and fall into the hands of some men who embody the worst qualities mankind has to offer. The family—mom, dad, gram and kids—do not survive the encounter, and it was the utter banality of the savagery that did me in. It was a long time before I could push that horrific tale of murder, madness and mayhem out of my head.

There we have it—three stories that scared the pants off me. What are the stories that terrified you the most? Tell me in the comments!

Headhunting and Short-Story Writing: Two Nearly-Lost Arts

As an anthropologist who spends a great deal of time thinking about culture, I’m always on the lookout for professions that appear to be vanishing from our world.  Alchemists are few and far between.  Shamans are having a hard time making a living.  Conjurers, shape-shifters, taxidermists, and jesters have all been hit hard by recent economic downturns. 

But nobody is currently experiencing more economic and social woe than the headhunter and the short-story writer.  Vilified, feared, and loved by none, the short-story writer lurks at the edge of polite society, practicing dark unsavory arts, choosing words carefully, willfully ignoring the lack of audience.  The tribal headhunter, though somewhat more respected and appreciated, must also become something of an outcast in order to thrive.  The market for shrunken heads, about as robust as the market for short stories, gives constant reminder that these labors are no longer appreciated.

So I decided to write a short story about headhunters.  I began with Robert James Waller’s masterful tome “The Bridges of Madison County.”  Weighing in at a whopping 38,000 words, this book was a massive hit, inspiring a movie and scores of action figures.  I enjoyed the book, but found it lacking.  Waller had the perfect set-up for headhunting, and every time I turned the page, I thought it was coming.  But it never did.   I had to do something about that.

My short-story “The Cannibals of Madison County” is a cannibal-laden homage to Waller’s vision.  And being a short story, it has no home in the modern world unless one can be crafted. 

I put the story up as a Kindle short story, because let’s face it, there’s nowhere else to publish these days except Highlights for Children, and they’re cagey when it comes to headhunting.  I intend this as an experiment.  The story is only 18 pages long, and you can download it free today.  If you get a moment, you could help out by reading the story and then, if you like it, give a short review.  If I can get 15 good reviews, I can blast the story on all the sharing pages and get thousands of readers.

In any case, this has been a fun project, and I plan to keep you posted as to the results.  Thanks for reading.

Get your free copy today by clicking HERE

Cover Art Woes

There’s no doubt about it: nailing the cover is as important as writing the book!  I’d love for that not to be the case, but it is.  

I’ve been working for the last few months on the final touches of my soon-to-be-released e-book The Mummies of Blogspace9.  It’s about undead conquistadors who... well, that’s a story for another day.  But geez, the cover is killing me.  

I’ve browsed a number of prefab cover art sites.  I’ve seen some great covers and some lousy covers.  But oddly enough, nothing that really captured the essence of my story.  I wanted something that screamed “read this chilling tale of conquistador mummies who blog about stolen Inca gold.”  Maybe that’s too much to ask for.

In the end, I decided to go it alone.  I needed some cool graphics and some chilling text.   And I also realized I had to narrow down some of the thematics.  You can’t fit everything into a tiny image that someone is going to see on Amazon.  So minimally, I decided I wanted an image of a mummy, something scary, and if possible, some computer elements.  Not too much to ask for, right?

So I hunted through istockphoto.com, then I fired up InDesign, and here’s what came down the chute:

Cover #1 meets my first criterion.  It does indeed have a mummy on it.  But it’s not scary.  And it’s a really bad cover.  OK, now for my second try:

Cover #2 meets the second and third criteria.  It’s very scary, and has computer stuff, but that’s technically a zombie, not a mummy.  And it is also a really bad cover.  Third try:

I know, right!  Cover #3 is adorable - a kitten on an internet logo!  Yeah, that has to go.  Fourth try:

I think this is it!  Cover #4 is hauntingly scary, has a mummy, and has some computer stuff.  Plus the text is nice.  I think this is the one I’m going with.

I’ll let you know when the book is ready, but for now, I’m happy with the cover.

Also, how’s this for a teaser:  Horror has a new URL.

Guest author Gary William Murning: Visiting an Old Friend

 Gary William Murning lives in the north-east of England and has published three novels to date. His third novel, The Realm of the Hungry Ghosts, has been described as "a complex supernatural thriller […] to be savoured" and is available here and from all good bookstores. 







My first real introduction to the world of books, the one that made me want to write, occurred in the late 1970s, early 1980s when I first stumbled across horror writers like Stephen King, Peter Straub, William Peter Blatty and the lesser-known but extremely imaginative Ray Russell. These, among others, were the gentleman who fired my imagination, took me into worlds that seemed real beyond belief (in spite of their vampires and daemons), and who helped me see that writing was not something reserved for the intelligentsia—for college graduates, gentlemen with bifocals and pipes or well-read but very plain ladies in twinsets. Through their entertaining and, yes, sometimes very thought-provoking work, I discovered the compulsion to write—the driving force that hasn't left me since and which has, on the whole, taken me far beyond the horror genre into territories then unimagined.

Wherever our writing might take us, however, those initial formative encounters can't be ignored for too long. Following my early efforts at writing horror fiction—dire attempts, extremely derivative and often rejected with phrases like "you have a lot to learn about the narrative form"—I found as my ability developed a love for other forms of fiction, trying my hand at tragicomedy and realising that I was (at that time, at least) better suited to writing in other genres. Nonetheless, it was horror fiction that paved the way—and as I was recently compelled to revisit my old, much maligned friend with my latest novel The Realm of the Hungry Ghosts, I thought I'd today like to talk about the value of horror/dark fiction and, briefly, why we need it.

The most idyllic childhood is often a very dark place. During daylight hours, all is often ostensibly well. The sun shines (I'm from the UK, so I use the phrase in its loosest possible sense), the world and the people around you generally do what they're supposed to and the rules seem very much well set. And then night-time comes along with its darkness and witch-finger shadows and its seemingly unending opportunity to dream …

In the imagination, not only of the child, but of adults, many daemons lurk and cackle. I'm quite sure I don't need to explore the specific natures of such forces. If we haven't experienced them ourselves, we most surely know someone who has—and perhaps the one thing that makes so many of these real-life horrors so terrifying is the struggle faced in finding some kind of resolution.

Whilst working on The Realm of the Hungry Ghosts it seems fair to say that this was my most important discovery (or rediscovery—because I was only articulating ideas grasped intuitively all those years ago); horror fiction often takes us into the most shocking and disturbing of places but, at its best, it offers something that in one form or another provides a kind of understanding, an order from the chaos that so often reassures. At times almost biblical in its good versus evil battle, the genre allows the reader to explore—in a safe, controlled environment—that which he or she might otherwise hide away in some dusty, repressive corner of his or her mind.

Cathartic? Maybe not—not in any obvious, clinical sense. Nevertheless, horror serves a purpose. Its heritage, with the likes of Matthew Gregory Lewis, Mary Shelley, Henry James and others all trying their hands at it at one time or another, is a fine and, I would argue, respectable one. So often tainted by its image of a genre purely associated with unthinking violence and limitless gore, it is in fact—in many cases—a creative arena of exploration and cultural analysis.

Horror is a mirror held up to the face of the societies we inhabit. The reflections may often be distorted and misty but I for one considered myself fortunate to see myself in its images, and to return—however briefly—to its analytical gaze whilst writing The Realm of the Hungry Ghosts.

All Men Are Vampires

Vampire romance is, to me, an oxymoron. I don't have issues with human-other love in fiction - I've even written a story in which a slightly mutant human consorts with alien beings. I do, however, draw the line at human-vampire hanky-panky.

• Vampires are not hot guys who just happen to be a little, well, different. However handsome, sophisticated or dangerously alluring they might seem, they are blood-sucking demons. Demons have their place in horror, not romance. Sexy romantic heroes kill all the time, but for noble reasons. They don't kill because they are dark, undead creatures who must prey upon people to maintain their own un-life. Adding teen angst and glitter doesn't change that.
• The combination of death, sex and lust is bizarre. Sex with dead (or 'undead') people reeks of necrophilia. Blood-drinking rituals are creepy and disturbing, not erotic.
• Centuries old creatures seeking the love of teenage girls? Isn't that taking pedophilia to new extremes?

So why are vampire incubi the new rock stars, evidenced by the hordes of squealing teen girls (and their mothers!) buying the books and packing the theatres to drool over pale fanged guys with an insatiable thirst for human blood? I've seen many rationales for the popularity of the genre, including:

• The stories are entertaining and provide pure escapism in grim economic times when readers find reality depressing. Fantasies about vampires, werewolves and such are simply fairy tales for adults, and cool guys with issues is a standard of the romance genre.
• People have an enduring fascination with death. Vampire romances explore this realm and provide an intriguing look into the 'other side' of the life-death equation. According to some, these stories aren't really about vampires; they're about death, immortality, and transformation.
• In our youth-obsessed culture, the fantasy of unending pleasures, unending life and unending youth is irresistible. The hero of the Stephanie Meyer novels is 400 years old yet he has the appearance of an attractive young man - and there's no botox or plastic surgery involved.
• Forbidden love has always been a huge romantic trope. Think Romeo and Juliet, Wuthering Heights, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lolita, The Thornbirds, The Scarlet Letter, Helen of Troy and Paris, Tristan and Isolde... Vampires are as forbidden as you can get.
• "All men are vampires." (Michael De Groote, writing in The Mormon Times) They are all capable of hurting women very, very badly, far more so than women are capable of hurting men, both in romantic and physical contexts. They inflict scars, literal and psychological, that take a long time to heal, or never heal at all. The greatest threat to women comes not from strangers in dark alleys, but from the men they are intimate with; examine the crime statistics if you doubt this. Women are fascinated - and aroused - by the element of danger in men, a fascination they learn to curb in real life (if they're wise). A vampire is the ultimate dangerous male, and by consorting with him between the covers of a book women get all the excitement and none of the dire consequences - such as ending up in the emergency room or, yanno, dead.

I'm not swayed by any of the above, though. I prefer vampires, those terrifying creatures of the night, in their rightful place in the horror genre. Pretty them up all you like but let them mince along the corridors of nightmare where they belong. They have no place in my romantic fantasies.

—Liane Spicer

Vampires and Sex

The first vampires I ever met stalked Salem’s Lot. Man, they were cool. Deadly, too, but with a disturbingly seductive and rotted beauty. The next vampire novel that I recall with fondness was Robert McCammon’s They Thirst, about some of the nastiest bloodsuckers you’d ever want to meet razing Los Angeles in search of gore. Only later did I venture back to the originators, first to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, then to the even earlier Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu.

In those days I preferred the villainous aspects of the vampire. I recognized the erotic attraction that characters like Carmilla and Dracula had for some readers, but I was far more interested in the horror than the seduction. By the mid-1980s, though, when I began to write seriously myself, a change had swept over vampire literature, initiated, perhaps, by Anne Rice’s 1976 novel Interview with the Vampire. Vamps were still dangerous, but the focus fell increasingly on their seductive and romantic qualities. The age of the antihero vampire was “dawning.”

Anthology series and magazines like Prisoners of the Night, Dead of Night, and The Vampire’s Crypt were pioneers in unleashing this new kind of vampire on the world. These were some of the magazines publishing dark fantasy and horror at the time I became interested in writing in those genres, and by then I was ready to embrace the rising trend. I began to enjoy writing about vampires who were not so much evil as they were “conflicted.” My vampires did bad things; they killed and fed. But they often struggled with the “thirst,” and with their own lost—or not quite lost—humanity.

Recently, a collection of my vampire stories was published, called Midnight in Rosary. There’s a werewolf tale or two in the collection. There’s a ghost. But mostly it’s vampires of various kinds and stripes. I was surprised when I was putting it together that I’d written so many stories about vampires in which they weren’t total villains. There are some nasty ones in there, but most of them have a lot more complexity to their characters, and I found I appreciated that.

I was also surprised that there was so much sex in the stories. Most of what I’ve written in my life would fall under the “adventure” heading, and quite often there is no sex at all, or it’s mostly implied. The stories in Midnight in Rosary are different. The sexual descriptions range from the romantic to the graphic, although I doubt anyone who has read a Laurell K. Hamilton book would be shocked. But there’s quite a lot of sex and it is generally integral in some way to the plot. I have to think that it is the vampire thing that led to this. Eroticism existed as part of the vampire equation from it’s beginnings in Carmilla and Dracula, but it has certainly become far more pronounced over the last 30 years. In the modern day it seems almost impossible to write about vampires without some kind of sexual element.

Vampires can be many things to many people, and that has gone far toward making them the most enduring “monster” in all of literature. It’s a major reason why I’ve visited and revisited them so many times in my work.

So, what do you think of vampires? Is there room for really nasty, non-sexual vamps in today's world? Would anyone read such a book?