Horror: The 100 Best Books (26 page)

Worse Things Waiting
was the first book from the North Carolina imprint Carcosa. Established immediately after the death of August Derleth (when it was wrongly assumed that there would be no further Arkham House volumes), publishers Karl Edward Wagner, Jim Grace and David Drake decided to produce the kind of book they as collectors would like to own. The result was a beautifully-designed, 367-page hardcover that collects together two poems and 28 of Wellman's best stories, selected from
Weird Tales
,
Strange Stories
,
Unknown
and
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
. It includes "The Terrible Parchment" Wellman's tongue-in-cheek salute to H. P. Loyecraft and the
Weird Tales
circle, two previously uncollected John the Balladeer stories, such classic chillers as "Up Under the Roof, "The Kelpie", "Dhoh", and a pair of novellas: "Fearful Rock" and "Coven". "Larroes Catch Meddlers" and "School for the Unspeakable" were produced on the
Lights Out
television series, "The Valley Was Still" appeared as one of the most effective
Twilight Zone
episodes, and "The Devil Is Not Mocked " was adapted for Rod Serling's
Night Gallery
show. The book is illustrated with more than thirty original illustrations by
Weird Tales
artist Lee Brown Coye.

***

Choosing a favourite book is next to impossible. What is your favourite piece of music? Food? Friend? All impossible. There are too many to choose from. However,
Worse Things Waiting
is my choice in this instance for several reasons. First, it is an overview of the man's great writing talent. Next, it shows his extensive knowledge of Civil War history, of folklore and his love of the American Indian, to mention only a few subjects. His earliest stories about John the Balladeer, which led to his classic collection
Who Fears the Devil?
(1963), appear here. And the book was chosen Best Book by a Single Author at the World Fantasy Convention in 1975. In giving the award, Gahan Wilson said, "Mr. Wellman always knows how to give you a good scare." The book opens with "Up Under the Roof, which is based on a real-life experience Wellman had as a very small boy. It frightened one of the editors so badly that he finished reading it from a corner where he had a good view of his surroundings. Wellman said that the experience had cured him of fearing anything for the rest of his life. Although Wellman was born in Africa and retained many sentimental feelings about the place, it only appears in a few of his stories. One of the best is in this volume, "Song of the Slaves", which has also been produced on television. Wellman was a recognized scholar of the Civil War, which he preferred to call The War Between the States. One of my favourite stories about this period is "The Valley Was Still", which is in this book. This is another story which has seen television production, with many re-runs. The two John the Balladeer stories are "Frogfather" and "Sin's Doorway". Both are based on mountain folklore -- the weird custom of eating a dead person's skin in order to save him from Hell is a fascinating story. It is interesting to look at the critics' comments from this distance: The
WSFA Journal
said, "The quality of writing is evenly superb in the twenty-eight stories and novelettes. It presents the dark side of America so loved by Sinclair Lewis, Carl Sandburg and Stephen Vincent Benet. It merges the reality of city and farm, of mountains, peace, of woodland with the other reality of the beings, both friendly and inimical, that coexist with men." Several of the stories reflect Wellman's love of the mountains and the mountain folk, and they established him as a top folklorist in America. They made him a citizen of the mountains and a welcome guest in the mountain homes. This is one of the aspects of Wellman's stories that I like the most. In sum, all that I can say is that my love of the book comes from the fact that it is a good representation of the man and his work. -- FRANCES GARFIELD

Ben and Marian Rolfe try to escape from New York for the summer by renting a spacious but dilapidated country house from the Allardyces, a peculiar brother-and-sister couple. The Rolfes, with their son David and Aunt Elizabeth, move in, and settle down for some peace and quiet. The catch is that the Allardyces are only charging such a reasonable rent because they want the Rolfes to look after their aged mother, who never leaves her room on the top floor. As summer progresses, the house strangely repairs itself, the Rolfes suffer a series of puzzling accidents, and the old lady upstairs stays out of sight. Marasco's novel has many of the same ingredients as Stephen King's
The Shining
, but is a quieter work, though no less chilling.
Burnt Offerings
was filmed by Dan Curtis in 1976 from a screenplay by William F. Nolan starring Oliver Reed, Karen Black and Bette Davis.

***

Shirley Jackson's
The Haunting of Hill House
has cast such a long shadow over the body of post-war supernatural fiction that it comes naturally to the fore whenever the subject of "haunted house novels" arises. It's easy to think of it as the only such novel that matters, and that's not true. It is the best, without question, but there are other novels on the subject which are extremely fine:
Hell House
, by Richard Matheson,
The Doll Who Ate Its Mother
, by Ramsey Campbell, and William Sloane's
The Edge of Running Water
all come immediately to mind. But my nominee for the runner-up in the category -- and a damned close runner-up at that -- is
Burnt Offerings
, by Robert Marasco. Briefly,
Burnt Offerings
is the story of one family's hellacious -- and ultimately fatal -- summer holiday in the country. The family of four -- father, mother, boy-child, and ageing-but-sprightly aunt -- rent the dilapidated summer home of Roz and Brother Allardyce for the amazingly low price of $900 . . . not per month, but for the whole summer season. The only catch (other than the fact that the large estate seems to be sinking into a state of terminal neglect and ruin) is the fact that Roz and Brother's mother will be staying in the house. "Our dear one," Brother rhapsodizes, "our darling." She will be no trouble, Roz and Brother assure the Rolfe family; in fact, she will probably never leave her small upstairs suite. Their only responsibility is to leave a tray of food outside her bedroom door three times a day. Ben Rolfe has misgivings, but they are swept away by his wife Marian's nearly obsessive enthusiasm for the place . . . and the Rolfes make the deadly mistake of moving in, bag and baggage. What follows is a memorable and remarkable descent into terror. The Allardyce house begins to regenerate itself. This process is slow at first -- dying flowers which return to full bloom, seemingly of their own accord, cracked walls and ceilings which seem to heal themselves -- but as the summer goes on, the process begins to accelerate. The Rolfe family, pleasant and rather average (as average as any New York City cliff-dwellers can be, anyway), begins falling to pieces. Tirelessly cheerful Aunt Elizabeth finally begins to show her age. Marian becomes more and more obsessed with the house and with the Allardyce's mother, "our darling". She 'sits in the old lady's little parlor for hours on end, looking at the hundreds -- or is it thousands? -- of pictures on the tables and walls . . . and some of the subjects jf these photographs seem to be in a state of stupefied terror. Worst of all, Ben Rolfe comes chillingly close to drowning his son, David, when some ordinary father-son horseplay in the newly regenerated pool turns deadly serious. The house is, in fact, a living entity, a psychic vampire, and it is sucking the Rolfe family dry, as it has untold families before it. What elevates Marasco's novel of terror to a plateau of near brilliance is his answer to this question: why in the hell don't the Rolfes
get out
once they have sensed what is happening to the house, and their role in it? The house is able to make flight difficult . . . but not, Marasco is careful to point out, actually impossible. His answer is so simple it's chilling. Because, he tells us, they can't. And neither can we. We only
think
we own the things we want; the truth is, our possessions actually own us. We can all lay claim to a little piece of 17 Shore Road, and we have all jumped, completely of our own accord, into the hell of stewardship. Horror stories are waking nightmares, and the best of them are whispering of very real fears at the same time they are screaming of ghosts and demons and werewolves. It is the sound of these two intertwined voices speaking together, one at top volume, the other very softly, that gives the good tale of horror its dreamlike power, I think. But writers of horror very rarely attempt out-and-out allegory, and the novels of this sort which come immediately to mind are not generally considered horror stories at all:
Lord of the Flies
, for instance, or George Orwell's political fable
Animal Farm
. Marasco's haunted house tale is such a novel, and it lends the tale a richness and resonance even really good horror stories rarely achieve. It is a cautionary and disturbing tale, and one which comes highly recommended not just to fans of the genre but to the general reader. -- STEPHEN KING

Jerusalem's Lot, Maine. Antique dealer Richard Straker moves into the ill-famed Old Marsten House, and sets up a business in town, promising the imminent arrival of his partner, Kurt Barlow. Ben Mears, a local writer traumatized at an early age by an experience with the Old Marsten House, is suspicious. Children start to disappear, and it becomes clear that Barlow is a King Vampire intent on spreading his plague throughout "Salem's Lot. Mears and a group of Fearless Vampire Hunters -- which includes his girlfriend, Susan, her doctor father, the local priest and young Mark Petrie -- try to resist the vampire take-over. Stephen King's second novel is a transposition of the basic plot of
Dracula
into a small town setting patterned on Grace Metalious'
Peyton Place
(1957), and fruitfully plays its sources off against each other. It was made into a two-part TV mini-series by Tobe Hooper in 1979, but Larry Cohen's 1987 film
A Return to 'Salem's Lot
is a sequel in name only.

***

It certainly might seem odd calling a vampire novel published in 1975 a seminal work, but that's just what I'm calling
'Salem's Lot
. I suppose I should find out what I'm saying. I've looked up the word seminal, and besides describing a tribe of American Indians it also means other things. Webster's gives its number 1 definition as "of or containing seed or semen". As far as I can remember, none of that stuff was in my copy of
'Salem's Lot
when I read it -- heck, as far as I can remember (not very far, these days, I'm afraid) I wasn't even wearing my trench coat and dark glasses when I bought the book! And so, on to Webster's number 2 definition: "of reproduction [
seminal
power]". Though, as you can see, Webster even gives an example here, it still sounds like sex to me. Finally, when we reach beyond Webster's smutty mind, we find that definition number 3 says seminal is "like seed in being a source or in having a potential for development; germinal, originative." Ah. I don't know why I just said "Ah", but I do think I've finally found what I'm looking for. A
metaphor
. You see, writers are lost without metaphors, and Webster seems finally to have figured that out and (grudgingly, given the lingering sexuality of the earlier entries) decided to give writers, the only ones except perverts to use dictionaries, something to work with. (More likely he's figured out, as you already know, that writers
are
perverts, and, in his infinite wisdom and kindness, decided to feed the groin before the mind.) Anyway, what I really want to say is that
'Salem's Lot
is certainly
like
seed, because, though it is arguably a mirror of Bram Stoker's
seminal
1897 novel
Dracula
(which, of course, owed allegiance to John William Polidori's
seminal The Vampyre
of 1819), it, like the books which preceded it, gave birth not only to gaggles of vampire stories (Anthony Boucher, for one, cites
The Vampyre
as the spark of a "vampire craze" culminating twenty-eight years later in
Varney the Vampire
-- which, sadly, was not followed by
Wally the Werewolf
) but also all kinds of creepy works in general. While
Rosemary's Baby
and
The Exorcist
mined supernatural niches in the bestseller list, I would argue that
'Salem's Lot
, because of its genuineness, its verve, its originality, its willingness to reflect, expand and
celebrate
its sources, and, most importantly, its establishment of Stephen King, after the sincere but unseminal
Carrie
, not as an interloper but as a pioneer in a field ripe for re-invention, was
germinal
and
originative
of the entire boom in horror fiction we find ourselves in the middle of -- with no culmination in sight. As soon as I put on my trench coat and dark glasses and look up
germinal
and
originative
, I may even know what I'm talking about. -- AL SARRANTONIO

Subtitled (in some editions) "A Pantheon of Modern Gods" and with an introduction titled in the Ellison manner "Oblations at Alien Altars",
Deathbird Stories
consists mainly of stories written in the sixties and early seventies, woven into some kind of a tapestry by brief linking passages in which Ellison, in his Rod Serling persona, adds pithy messages and pauses for thought. If H. P. Lovecraft drew on myth and lore and his own nightmares when creating his monster gods, Ellison is inspired by 20th-century obsessions, appalling news items and the sixties' counterculture ethos. Included are pieces on the Kitty Genovese incident ("The Whimper of Whipped Dogs ), drugs ("Shattered Like a Glass Goblin"), Vietnam ("Basilisk"), car culture ("Along the Scenic Route"), a twist on the
Twilight Zone
possessed one-armed bandit theme ("Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes"), a Genesis re-write ("The Deathbird), the bankruptcy of modern religion ("Bleeding Stones") and the self-explanatory "Paingod", "Ernest and the Machine God" and "Rock God". The Hugo-award-winning "Adrift Just Off the Islets of Langerhans: Latitude 38 54' N, Longitude 77 00' 13" W" is, almost subliminally, a sequel to the 1941 film
The Wolf Man
.