Date: Fri 27-Oct-1995

Publication: Bee

Author: KIMH

Illustration: C

Location: A-11

Quick Words:

horror-genre-King-Koontz

Full Text:

It's Halloween - Lock The Doors, Pull Up A Chair, And Be Afraid

(with book covers)

From ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties

And things that go bump in the night

Good Lord, deliver us!

- Scottish Prayer

By Kim J. Harmon

Ghosts... ghouls... vampires... werewolves... monsters slithering out from a

dark and stagnant pond - we have always been afraid, afraid of things that we

know could not possibly exist but, impossibly, do exist in the dark corners of

our minds.

In the past, the horror genre was one of the most popular segments of the

fiction market. Stephen King spoke to us of vampires and evil dogs, of girls

with telekinetic power and men that can see the future. Robert McCammon

introduced us to werewolves, to vampires, and to the monsters living in the

shadow of the world's destruction. And Dean R. Koontz has made us shiver with

talk of ancient enemies and of doorways to hell where the demons can simply

walk through.

With the way the horror fiction market is today, with its retread ideas and

new wave focus, chills are awfully hard to come by... but it's nearly

Halloween and maybe now is the time to be afraid again.

I remember, back 10 or 12 years ago, a good horror novel always came with the

admonition, "Lock the doors before you read this one!" or "Don't read this

with the lights off!" but few books ever made me feel as if I oughta check the

lock on the door or turn up the lights.

Salem's Lot by Stephen King is one.

There are a couple others, too, and I have here is a few excerpts from some of

the scariest novels I have read and a peak at some other classic horror novels

you might want to sample on the night of All Hallows Eve.

Beware...

Salem's Lot

By Stephen King

It was five to seven. Ben felt tension begin to seep into his body.

"Might as well stop staring at the clock," Jimmy said. "I doubt very much

vampires - if they exist at all - rise at almanac sunset. It's never full

dark."

But the sheet covering Marjorie Glick's body had begun to tremble. A hand fell

below the sheet and the fingers began to dance jaggedly on the air, twisting

and turning.

"Jimmy," Ben said. "Look at the cross."

The cross was glowing and a slow, choked voice spoke in the stillness, as

grating as shards of broken crockery. "Danny?"

Ben felt his tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth. The form under the sheet

was sitting up. Shadows in the darkening room moved and slithered.

"Danny, where are you, darling?"

The sheet fell from her face and crumpled in her lap.

The face of Marjorie Glick was a pallid, moon like circle in the semidark,

punched only by the black holes of her eyes. She saw them and her mouth

shuddered open in an awful, cheated snarl.

The ultimate vampire novel, Salem's Lot spawned or directly influenced at

least half of the vampire novels that have followed since it was first

published almost 20 years ago.

It remains a classic of the genre, the way King created a closed system - the

town of Jerusalem's Lot - and injected an insidious, creeping horror. There

was no splatter, no buckets of gore, just shadows and whispers and the feeling

that the next creaking floorboard would be a vampire slipping up behind you.

They Thirst

By Robert McCammon

"I want to get out of here," Rico said quietly. "I can't stand being in this

place anymore."

"A little longer, okay?" Palatazin said. He looked back to Silvera. "You saw

the bodies. Tell me. Are they dead or alive?"

"Dead," Rico said.

Silvera took a while longer in answering. "I don't know," he said finally. "No

heartbeat, no pulse... and yet they move..."

"Sergeant Teal tells me thirty-nine bodies have been found. How many people

live in this building?"

"Sixty or seventy, at least."

"But not all of the apartments were occupied?"

Silvera shook his head.

Palatazin stopped. "What happened to these people, officer? What kind of thing

did this to them?"

He almost answered, almost said the terrible word, but fear gripped his throat

and squeezed it.

Robert McCammon's third book, after a pair of lurid horror novels, bears an

uncomfortable familiarity with Stephen King's Salem's Lot in a number of

ways... the best way, managing to make the city of Los Angeles, under siege by

a Romanian vampire and his growing legions, seem isolated and alone while

under attack.

McCammon, though, has a way of stealing your breath away with his first

sentence. "Tonight, there were demons in the hearth," begins one of the

scariest chapters in horror fiction and one of grand vampire novels in the

genre.

Phantoms

By Dean R. Koontz

As they reached Skyline Road, a church bell tolled, startling them.

"Who's ringing it?" Gordy wondered.

"Maybe nobody's ringing it," Frank said.

"Does it usually ring this time on a Sunday night?" Bryce asked Dr Paige.

"No."

"So who's pulling the rope?" Gordy asked.

A macabre image crept into Tal Whitman's mind: Jake Johnson, bruised and

bloated and stone-cold dead, standing in the bell-ringer's chamber at the

bottom of the church tower, the rope gripped in his bloodless hands, dead but

demonically animated...

Tal shuddered.

"Maybe we should go over to the church and see who's there," Frank said.

"No," Bryce said instantly. "That's what it wants us to do. It wants us to

come have a look. It wants us to go inside the church, and then it'll turn out

the lights again..."

There was a time when Dean R. Koontz did not write rambling, involved novels

of suspense like Dark Rivers of the Heart, Mr Murder, and Hideaway. There was

a time when Dean R. Koontz was a master of quick, cutting horror - writing

that was stripped bare of cumbersome descriptions that slowed the pace of the

story.

He said it became too easy for him, too easy to scare his readers.

But that's what I liked.

Phantoms is one of his earliest horror novels - and one of his best. He

theorizes about an ancient enemy, an amorphous creature living in the Earth

that may be responsible for some of the mass disappearances in world history.

Like Snowfield, California.

From the very first sentence to the very last word in this novel, you have to

step lightly and be afraid of what may be coming up. Koontz only shows the

actual creature once, but manages to convey feelings of freezing terror with

nothing but shadows.

Afterage

By Yvonne Navarro

Tommy didn't know or care how he had gotten here. The Hunger was overwhelming

and the bloodsmell was driving him insane. He needed -

Bloodsmell.

Where was it? He crouched in the corner and fought the urge to claw at the

walls again, knowing it would only frustrate him. Tangled at his feet was the

rope and duct tape that had held him for only a few seconds. The boy's eyes

searched the rubble more carefully, then followed the line of the door to the

ceiling of the tiny room.

There! Suspended from a hanger about seven feet above the floor was a small

plastic bottle of blood. For months he had been living on subway rats, though

the wily rodents were scarce and hard to catch and the tunnels full of others

who wanted only to pull him apart for sport after making sure nothing

worthwhile flowed in his veins.

The blood - barely more than a pint - was a rare feast.

Later, his stomach half-full, he tossed the bottle aside and curled up to

sleep and dream of dark and evil innocence.

I rarely pick up any vampire novel anymore because about the only thing

reaching the shelves nowadays are straight ripoffs of Anne Rice, erotica, or

just simply dull.

But Yvonne Navarro intrigued me with her concept of the time after the

vampires ravage the world, a time when the vampires are desperate and hungry

and have to resort to human blood farms in order to survive.

There are pockets of humans left and those living in seclusion in Chicago take

on a heroic quest of their own - to save the people being raised for food and

to rid the world of the creatures.

This is good, scary adventure.

Other Frights

Wet Work by Philip Nutman - Zombies. The grand battle between the living and

the dead. Great stuff.

The Keep by F. Paul Wilson - An ancient castle. A vampire brought back to

life. Lots of creeps.

Hour of The Oxrun Dead by Charles L. Grant - A haunting little town. Shadows

and whispers in the trees. Atmospheric stuff and nobody is better at it than

Grant.

Neverland by Douglas Clegg - A weird kid, a lightning bolt of evil. An island

and a shack that is a doorway to hell.

Moonbane by Al Sarrantonio - An unusual, but apocalyptic, look at the werewolf

legend.

Night Warriors by Graham Masterton - Dreamwalking, chasing a monster across

the nightmare landscape of the human mind. The first in a series of great,

scary novels.

Cold Moon Over Babylon by Michael McDowell - A dead girl wreaks revenge from

beyond the grave. Traditional stuff, very scary.

Rapture by Thomas Tessier - Slasher stuff, seen from the eyes of the killer. A

psychotic, skewed book from a Watertown author.

Psycho by Robert Bloch - The classic. How can you deny yourself this one?