Horror: The 100 Best Books (36 page)

***

A dozen years ago, in a little piece for
Harper's
on neglected spook masters, I sang the praises of an unknown named Ramsey Campbell, "a young British writer who is probably the best living creator of supernatural horror". Robert Aickman was still alive, so the statement was perhaps a reckless one, but my friend Ted Klein had put me on to a book called
Demons by Daylight
, and I was in that peculiarly heightened state one experiences when discovering an utterly new literary voice. Here at last, I thought, was a horror writer who could really write, who was scarier than anyone in the business and whose scares were earned, who brought the same intelligence and verbal sophistication to the creation of terror as Le Fanu, M. R. James, and other past masters, but who did so in uncompromisingly contemporary terms. Since 1976, Campbell has gained steadily in popularity and critical acclaim, and others have made similarly sweeping generalizations about his work. He has even survived the trappings of success in the genre -- the lurid paperback covers, the claustrophobic thrall of fandom, the suspicious promotional blurbs -- that have reduced so many others to self-parody. Campbell's volume,
Dark Feasts: The World of Ramsey Campbell
, is dedicated to T. E. D. Klein, "who helped launch me and wrote tales for me to aspire to". This is an entirely fitting dedication since Klein, now a prominent writer himself, has often confessed to being inspired by Campbell, and whose prose has raised the standards of the genre in America much the way Campbell's has done in Britain. For anyone who has not sampled the dark delights of Campbell's short fiction,
Dark Feasts
is the book to get, for the simple reason that it has more first-rate Campbell tales than any other single volume. Campbell aficionados will want to have the book too, because of its chronological range and stylistic variety. It takes in everything from early masterpieces like "The Scar" (surely the most terrifying doppelganger tale ever written) to recent tales like the Halloween treat, "Apples", a story which demonstrates Campbell's peerless ability to get inside a frightened child's sensibility. For those who enjoy Campbell at his most relentless, there is "The Hands", which revives the anti-cleric (in this case, anti-nun) tradition of Gothic horror with a vengeance. For those who prefer a lighter touch, there is the creepily delightful "Seeing the World", which reveals a terseness and satirical flair that constitute a new direction in Campbell's work. For those who prefer brooding atmosphere to terse repartee, there is "The Brood" (like "The Scar", an inventive variation on
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
). And for those who still delight in a dollop of Lovecraft there is "The Voice of the Beach", which manages to avoid the Lovecraftian mannerisms of "The Inhabitant of the Lake." As the subtitle promises, this book thus encompasses a large portion of Ramsey Campbell's "world". It is unmistakably a modern one: dislocated, disorienting, and alienating. Campbell is a master of capturing that world and the myriad ways it makes us feel vulnerable. Long before Stephen King made it fashionable, Campbell was writing about ordinary people and settings, capturing a moment of anxiety or panic in their lives and thickening it into nightmare horror. The heroes in this book are alienated college students, harassed secretaries, anxious parents, lonely children, and struggling middle-class families. The epiphany these characters invariably experience is the realization that the world is even more awful than they thought it was, so much so that positing supernatural conspiracies seems an utterly sensible and fitting thing to do. Campbell's style is a perfect embodiment of his vision. He is a master of spectral atmosphere, but also very good at hard realism. His jagged, hallucinatory prose is exactly in touch with the reality he depicts, both psychological and physical. He knows how to inject just a drop of paranoia or dream sensation and let it either spread out to engulf an entire tale (as in the delectably wacky "Boiled Alive") or remain in a state of deeply unsettling ambiguity (as in "The End of a Summer's Day"). At his very best, in "The Chimney", his most moving and personal story, he is capable of creating something as multi-layered and exquisitely disturbing as anything by Hartley or de la Mare. In, the introduction to
Dark Feasts
, Campbell writes that his purpose has always been to disturb. Disturb, you notice, not disgust: "Many horror stories communicate awe as well as (sometimes instead of) shock, and it is surely inadequate to lump these stories together with fiction that seeks only to disgust, in a category regarded as the deplorable relative of the ghost story." This statement needs to be made again and again, especially in the current market, where sadism and misogyny are regularly confused with "horror". Even in the most physically jolting tales, such as the notorious "Again", Campbell hopes to communicate "a little of that quality that has always appealed to me in the best horror fiction, a sense of something larger than is shown". It is precisely this sense -- that something lurks in the corner of the page even more chilling than what is so vividly shown -- that makes Campbell's fiction so memorable. -- JACK SULLIVAN

Inevitably, in a work like this -- with its more or less random sampling of 100 titles -- certain important books and authors have unavoidably been overlooked or forgotten. Therefore, in collaboration with our distinguished line-up of contributors, we've compiled this list of recommended books. We could have presented a comprehensive listing, but that would have meant dropping everything else in the book, so regard this -- unabashedly arbitrary -- list as a guide to further reading in the genre rather than a pantheon of classics engraved in marble and handed down to posterity.

-- The Editors

458 BC
:
The Oresteia
, Aeschylus

1300:
Inferno
, Dante

1657:
Paradise Lost
, John Milton

1764:
The Castle of Otranto
, Horace Walpole

1776:
Ugetsu Monogatari
/
Tales of The Pale
Moon After Rain
, Ueda Akinari

1778:
The Old English Baron
, Clara Reeve

1788:
Vathek
, William Beckford

1794:
The Mysteries of Udolpho
, Anne Radcliffe

1798:
Wetland; or: The Transformation,
Charles Brockden Brown

Lyrical Ballads
, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge

1815:
Die Elixir Des Teufels
/
The Devil's Elixirs
, E. T. A. Hoffmann

1819:
The Vampyre
, John Polidori

1831:
Notre Dame De Paris
/
The Hunchback of
Notre Dame
, Victor Hugo

1834:
Pikovaia Dama
/
Queen of Spades
, Aleksandr Pushkin

1883:
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
, Edgar Allan Poe

1839:
The Phantom Ship
, Frederick Marryat

1843:
A Christmas Carol
, Charles Dickens

1845:
Varney The Vampire
, J. M. Rymer

1847:
Jane Eyre
, Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights,
Emily Bronte

1850:
Auriol; or: The Elixir of Life
, W. Harrison Ainsworth

1851:
House of The Seven Gables
, Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Piazza Tales,
Herman Melville

1857:
Les Fleurs Du Mal
/
Flowers of Evil
, Charles Beaudelaire

1860:
The Woman In White
, Wilkie Collins

1870:
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
, Charles Dickens

1872:
In A Glass Darkly
, J. Sheridan Le Fanu

1883:
Contes Cruels
, Villiers de l'Isle Adam

1887:
The Diamand Lens
, Fitz-James O'Brien

1888:
The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Tales
, Rudyard Kipling

1890:
Hauntings
, Vernon Lee

1891:
La Bas
/
Down There
, J. K. Huysmans

The Picture of Dorian Gray
, Oscar Wilde

1895:
A Bid For Fortune
, Guy Boothby

1897:
The Hill of Dreams
, Arthur Machen

The Beetle
, Richard Marsh

1898:
The War of the Worlds
, H. G. Wells

1902:
The Hound of The Baskervilles
, Arthur Conan Doyle

1904:
Kwaidan
, Lafcadio Hearn

1906:
The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories
, Algernon Blackwood

1911:
Wandering Ghosts
, F. Marion Crawford

Fantome De L'Opera
/
The Phantom of The Opera
, Gaston Leroux

1912:
The Night Land
, William Hope Hodgson

1913:
The Lodger
, Mrs. Belloc Lowndes

The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu
, Sax Rohmer

1914:
Beasts and Superbeasts
, Saki

Dracula's Guest
, Bram Stoker

1915:
The Golem
, Gustav Meyrink

1922:
The Undying Monster
, Jessie Douglas Kerruish

1923:
Madame Crowl's Ghost
, J. Sheridan Le Farm

1925:
The Smoking Leg and Other Stories
, John Metcalfe

1926:
The Ghost Book
, Lady Cynthia Asquith (ed.)

Das Schloss
/
The Castle
, Franz Kafka

1927:
Benighted
, J. B. Priestley

Lukundoo and Other Stories
, Edward Lucas White

1928:
The Beast With Five Fingers
, W. F. Harvey

1930:
As I Lay Dying
, William Faulkner

1931:
The Supernatural Omnibus
, Montague Summers

1933:
Burn, Witch Burn
, A. Merritt

Miss Loneleyhearts,
Nathaniel West

1934:
The Cat Jumps
, Elizabeth Bowen

1935:
The Circus of Dr. Lao
, Charles G. Finney

The Devil Hides Out,
Dennis Wheatley

1936:
Metamorphosis and Other Stories
, Franz Kafka

1937:
The Beast Must Die
, Nicholas Blake

1
938:
Rebecca
, Daphne Du Marnier

Hangover Square,
Patrick Hamilton

1939:
Day of The Locust
, Nathaniel West

1939:
Gaslight
, Patrick Hamilton

The Edge of Running Water
, William Sloane

1940:
Darker Than You Think
, Jack Williamson

1942:
The Best Short Stories of Walter De La Mare
The Uninvited,
Dorothy McCardle

Black Alibi
, Cornell Woolrich

1943:
Donovan's Brain
, Curt Siodmak

Malpertuis
, Jean Ray

1944:
Ficciones
, Jorge Luis Borges

Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural
, Wise and Fraser (ed.)

1945:
The Demon Lover
, Elizabeth Bowen

Witch House
, Evangeline Walton

All Hallows' Eve
, Charles Williams

1946/59:
The Gormenghast Trilogy
, Mervyn Peake

1946:
Fearful Pleasures
, A. E. Coppard

The Deadly Percheron
, John Franklin Bardin

Skull Face and Others
, Robert E. Howard

The Hounds of Tindalos
, Frank Belknap Long

West India Lights
, Henry S. Whitehead

1947:
This Mortal Coil
, Cynthia Asquith

Dark Carnival
, Ray Bradbury

Night's Black Agents
, Fritz Leiber

Bend Sinister
, Vladimir Nabokov

1948:
The Travelling Grave
, L. P. Hartley