Horror: The 100 Best Books (29 page)

***

In the mid-seventies, Whitley Strieber lived near New York City's Central Park. There he enjoyed the quiet of late night strolls until the night he was in the Literary Walk, going toward Bethesda Fountains, and noticed something in the trees nearby that appeared to be following him, pacing him step for step. The movement proved to be of canine origin -- but it wasn't simply one dog, loose in the park that night. Rather it was a pack of some eight or ten feral dogs of various sizes. Strieber beat a hasty retreat, but the thought of those creatures stayed with him -- "The wildness of these animals in the middle of the city", was how he later described it. Eventually that incident became the springboard for his first novel,
The Wolfen
, and an ongoing theme that can be found in his work, in various guises, up to the present day. With hindsight, it's easy to look back on his career to study this theme of alien beings coexisting for millennia with the human race. It also became Strieber's method of redefining hoary aspects of the genre in which he began his career.
The Wolfen
examined the possibility of werewolves existing on the fringes of society and also postulated an intriguing origin of the vampire myth -- a question he went on to address in an entirely different manner with his next book,
The Hunger
. Subsequent novels investigated secret societies (
Black Magic
and
The Night Church
) and faeries (
Catmagic
), and while he strayed from that theme for his next few books, which dealt with environmental concerns, he returned to it once again with
Communion
. The difference with
Communion
is that, with it, Strieber no longer considers his present work fiction. The imaginary parasitic aliens of his earlier novels have been replaced with mysterious
others
that, Streiber assures us, really do exist. But whatever one's feelings on Strieber's current projects, nothing can diminish the power and originality of his earlier work.
The Wolfen
in its day, and upon re-reading at the present time, retains all of its strengths. Foremost of these is the care with which Strieber revealed the novel's preternatural element. The presence of the Wolfen is with us from the first page until the last, but the reader comes to understand their nature only at the same time as the principal protagonists. At that point, the storyline occasionally switches perspectives to the Wolfen's points of view, where Strieber does an admirable job of conveying their alienness -- though not so much so that the creatures lose their impact through becoming indecipherable. They are presented as a race of carnivorous hunters -- not noble savages as they were portrayed in the film version of the book, but more in the manner we've come to understand from documentation of other carnivorous creatures, such as Serengeti lions and the like. Because of this, the Wolfen remain believable in the context of the work, a very real menace with which the characters must deal. The novel's other strong point is Strieber's understanding of how, if one wishes the preternatural to be effective, the natural world must be conveyed to the reader in clear, unaffected terms. Because of this
The Wolfen
reads almost like a police procedural as we follow the workings of the NYPD's investigation into the escalating horror of the Wolfen's presence in their city. The characters are fully drawn, with concerns that operate beyond the confines of the storyline. The novel's background and action were conveyed with just the correct amount of detail and power to effectively tell the story. And while Strieber's prose became more assured in later books,
The Wolfen
remains far more than merely a competently told first novel. To this day it stands up as one of the classic works of fiction to emerge from the horror genre, a book that will undoubtably be read and re-read by enthusiasts in the field for many years to come. -- CHARLES DE LINT

Nathan Slaughter, a small-town police chief in Wyoming, is confronted with a series of strange incidents. A corpse apparently revives and frightens a coroner to death, animals turn savage overnight, children go mad, and outbreaks of irrational violence disrupt the smooth running of the community. It develops that a strange strain of rabies has originated in a hippie commune degenerating up in the wilderness, and soon the town is under siege. Following his brutal and horrific thrillers
First Blood
(1972) and
Testament
(1975) and the ambitious Western
Last Reveille
, David Morrell in
The Totem
turns to more explicit horror, mixing in supernatural elements and a scientifically-rationalized form of vampirism/zombiehood/lycanthropy. Recently, with
Blood Oath
(1982) and the Trilogy commencing with
The Brotherhood of the Rose
(1984), he has revitalized the international espionage genre with a heavy dose of Gothic complication. Plot similarities between
The Totem
and the film
I Drink Your Blood
(1971) are probably coincidental, but the book might be one of the inspirations for Shaun Hutson's
Erebus
(1983).

***

The door crashed open and he hurtled through it, slamming it behind him, breath coming in gasps. The door to the sitting-room was open and he blundered through, vaulting the coffee table, landing with a crash on the sofa. The beginning of
The Totem
. . . ? Is it hell! That was me coming back from the bookshop after I'd bought it. Having read Morrell's earlier novels (
First Blood
and
Testament
) his third book looked like a bit of a departure for him, but it is written with the same breathless speed of its predecessors.
The Totem
is one of the few novels I've ever read in a day -- usually I'm lucky if I get through two chapters in a week. But once I'd started reading it, the rest of the world could have disappeared in a ball of flame for all I cared. Immersed in it? God, if I'd been any more involved I'd have drowned . . . I chopped the dog's legs off so it wouldn't want walking, nailed my Fiancée to the front door to keep visitors away and ploughed into Morrell's book. It's like the literary equivalent of an aerobics work-out. By the time you've finished you can hardly breathe. You can reel out all the cliches you like for Morrell's superb handling of a horror story that is constructed like a thriller and which, if you analyse it (I'm not going to but
you
can), is occasionally an extension of some themes he explored in
First Blood
(the scene where Rambo crawls through the cave full of bats being the one which immediately springs to mind). As I say, the cliches to describe
The Totem
are endless but I mean it when I say that this novel moves at such a pace it makes the bullet train look like a shunter. If it was a car its number plate would be "Turbo Speedburst Maniac". When I say it moves, it moves. I'm getting tired just thinking about it . . . At times you feel as though you should be hanging on to your seat in case you fly off. The thing about the book which also makes it so admirable is that the speed never overshadows the characters. I mean, the central character's name is Slaughter, for Christ's sake . . . With a name like that you can't go wrong. Quite appropriate too, especially in the scene where . . . No, why should I? Read it for yourselves. There is of course the other tiny detail which I've so far neglected to mention and that is that
The Totem
is one hell of a frightening novel. Well, I counted at least two changes of underwear and that was just reading the blurb! The set pieces are beautifully constructed, the short chapters accentuating the speed of the novel. In fact, now I come to think about it I hate David Morrell: With
The Totem
, he's written a book which set a standard few authors could ever come close to in the horror/thriller genre. Yeah, I hate him. He's a genius. Buy it, borrow it, steal it. But for God's sake read it.
The Totem
isn't a rollercoaster ride, it's a high-speed journey on a Harley Davison, straight towards a brick wall. Living dangerously? Damn right. Only problem is, the brakes don't work . . . -- SHAUN HUTSON

Milburn, New York. A group of old men who call themselves The Chowder Society, linked by their long-ago involvement in the drowning of the strange Eva Galli, meet regularly to tell each other ghost stories. Don Wanderley, a writer of occult novels, returns home to Milburn after his involvement with Alma Mobley, the latest incarnation of shape-shifting Eva, which has led to the death of his brother. During the siege of a vicious winter, Don and the Chowder Society have to face up to the ancient and deadly monster woman. Straub's third novel, patterned in its use of the background community on Stephen King's
'Salem's Lot
, is a conscious attempt to evoke the shades of the classic ghost stories ofM. R. and Henry James, Hawthorne, Poe and others within the framework of a complex and multi-faceted modern Gothic plot. Its success established him as second only to King as the leading figure in contemporary horror. The 1982 film, directed by John Irvin, is a travesty of the material, despite a strong cast of veterans and the very creepy Alice Krige as the many faces of Eva.

***

It's obvious from
Ghost Story
that Peter Straub loves genre horror fiction, and indeed he has many times professed great admiration for Stephen King, with whom he was later to collaborate. But on the evidence of this, his best book, Straub is most entertaining when he is not consciously working within the genre, just flirting with it.
Ghost Story
is a serious work of
mainstream
fiction which takes as its subject a writer of horror fiction ("A nice exercise in genre writing. More literary than most.") who transforms real-life horrors into art, or so it seems at first. Later it seems as if the real-life horrors may in fact
be
his art, as if he somehow dreamed them into existence. The title of the book is a very careful choice; it is a ghost story and it is about a ghost story, and within it are many ghost stories, including those told by four men almost old enough to be ghosts. The word "ghost" flickers wittily into and out of its pages. At the very end, as Don the ghostwriter chops up what may be a wasp and may be something female and infinitely more dangerous, a passing observer remarks "That thing ain't
ever
gonna give up the ghost." I don't want to sound pretentious, but I think
Ghost Story
is partly a book about how we create within our own minds the things that most frighten us. On the surface it seems that the terrible woman whose initials are A.M. (Alma Mobley, Anna Mostyn
et al.
) has a solid, external reality: that she is a manifestation of some ancient shape-shifting nature spirit, now feeding vampire-like on the imaginations of the humans she destroys. But the subtext seems to be that she is in some sense
created
by human imagination. (I think therefore I A.M.) It is no accident that she is both destroyed and most vividly brought to life by a writer. (Even the elderly lawyers have the names of the two writers, Hawthorne and James, who between them created in the real world a kind of consensus image of the New England guilt, which is partly what this story is about.) The theory that A.M. was dreamed up by Don also explains the mysterious exchange between man and creature that is returned to throughout the story. At the beginning, narrator to little girl: "'What are you?' She smiled all through her amazing response. 'I am you.'" Or near the very end, dead brother to narrator: "'You invented these fantastic beautiful creatures, and then you "wrote" yourself into the story as their enemy. But nothing like that could ever be defeated.'" If Alma is a beautiful poem, as the book suggests -- "Could you defeat a cloud, a dream, a poem?" -- Don is her author. (But then, how real are Don and even Straub, whose surrogate Don is? The uncertainty runs deep, for at the key moment when allure turns to horror, when Alma, sexual athlete and monster, turns round in the darkness, we get this, though it takes us most of the book to find out: " 'You are a ghost.' You, Donald. You. It was the unhappy perception at the center of every ghost story.") We will always as humans write such monstrous, lovely poems the book suggests. Somehow we need them, and feed on them just as they feed on us. The moral outrage we feel at the vanity and cruelty of A.M. and her disciples is outrage at something dirty and attractive in the corner of our own minds. And that dirtiness, of course, is the other great attraction of
Ghost Story
. I refer to its central metaphor, which is especially forceful for any male Australian of my age who grew up in a puritanical and sexually repressive society. A.M. is fundamentally a
female
horror. What is it that peeping Toms see through her window, what is it that she shows foolish old men in bedrooms, something so horrible that it drives them mad, their faces locked in a rictus of fear? The real answer is surely
vagina dentata
. This novel is fundamentally about repressed men appalled at the sexuality of woman, their strength, their darkness; the wetness, the cavernousness, the dangerousness of their sexual parts. Peter Straub's amusingly bitter insight into this question might usefully be extended to all horror fiction, where the succubus, the lamia, so often makes her vilely seductive lair. "The horror! The horror!" as Kurtz said when he reached the Heart of Darkness up that long Freudian, dank yet somehow tranquil river that Conrad so beautifully describes in another, related, classic. -- PETER NICHOLLS

Thomas Abbey, the son of a famous film star, is obsessionally interested in the works of Marshall France, a mysterious children's writer whose classic books include The Land of Laughs, Pool of Stars, Peach Shadows and The Green Dog's Shadow. Spurred by Saxony Gardner, his girlfriend, Abbey decides to attempt a biography of his hero, who chose to live a reclusive life in Galen, Missouri, and whose estate is jealously guarded by his daughter, Anna. Abbey and Saxony travel to Galen, and after some teasing the author's heiress agrees to let Abbey attempt the biography. However, it soon develops that Galen isn't quite the middle American idyll it seems to be: tragedies are shrugged off by the population, some of the local dogs can speak, and a weird kind of predestination appears to rule everyday life. The author has added to his bizarre reputation with
The Voice of Our Shadow
,
Bones of the Moon
,
Sleeping in Flame
,
A Child Across the Sky
,
Outside the Dog Museum
,
After Silence
and
From the Teeth of Angels
, along with the novella
Black Cocktail
and a short story collection entitled
The Panic Hand
.