FIVE SCARY BOOKS TO READ FOR HALLOWEEN BY JOHN C. FOSTER

By John C. Foster, author of Mister White and the forthcoming novel, The Isle

Horror is Legion, for your choices are many…and therein was the problem with narrowing down the array of stories we have available to us. There are simply too many that I’d like to recommend, so my first decision was to give up.
 
Hope returned while walking my dog, Coraline. In between dodging Brooklyn traffic and pulling her away from curious stains on the sidewalk, it occurred to me that I could do this thing if I was willing to kill my darlings. Thus fortified, I returned home to play the butcher and began hacking away at my half formed list of potential reads. Slash! Novels by Stephen King were hacked away. Snip! Shirley Jackson’s towering achievement, The Haunting of Hill House, was cut loose. Stomp! (is that a butcher sound?) the great classics by MR James and Ambrose Bierce were driven into the bloody muck. Panting with exertion, I realized that we had roughly a billion stories left from which to choose. Immediately (and without sound effects) I disinvited anything from the present horror renaissance. The wires are already humming with the news of Laird Barron and Gemma Files and Paul Tremblay, so I chose to save them for another day.
 
To me, Halloween horror relies on the recognizable tropes so beloved of Hammer films and the classic Universal monster movies. Haunted houses and black cats, yawning tombs and hideous creatures. In short, Halloween horror celebrates our shared joy in things that go bump in the night. To that end, I’ve selected five works that might be a little off the beaten path.

HELL HOUSE by Richard Matheson

If Shirley Jackson’s novel didn’t hold the title of undisputed heavyweight champion of the world, I would hand the belt to Richard Matheson’s Hell House. The novel begins with a similar set up but unfolds as a more lurid, percussive and voluptuous tale of black cats, psychic phenomena and possession in the terrifying and vengeful Belasco House.
 
It stands so often in the shadow of its big sister (deservedly so) that is too often forgotten. But Matheson was a master in his own right and had a profound impact on the genre. Where Jackson’s story is told in measured tones, Matheson’s book roars and stomps (there is, in fact, reference to a “roaring giant” within its pages) and my copy comes complete with a list of supernatural phenomena that readers will encounter within the story, helpfully enumerated on the back cover.

THE LONG NIGHT OF THE GRAVE by Charles L. Grant

Charles L. Grant expressed his love of Hammer Films to publisher Donald Grant (no relation) at the World Fantasy Convention in Berkeley, California in 1981, and his desire to see that style of horror reflected in print. So began what would become a trilogy of novels about a vampire, a werewolf and a mummy.
 
The Long Night of the Grave is Grant’s ode to the linen wrapped revenant, when a violated sarcophagus finds its way to the ill fated town of Oxrun Station (the setting for many Grant stories). Grant brings the mummy to life with signature prose and sets it loose on the small town’s populace with a panache sure to delight fans of the Hammer classics. It’s a slim volume (as are its two siblings) and could be read during a single dark and stormy night by those with the courage to press on when the lights flicker and the wind howls.

BREEDING GROUND by Sarah Pinborough

I’ll be upfront, spiders terrify me. I cannot rest if I know that there is a spider in the room but because I share our particular fetish for fear, I leapt at the chance to get my hands on Sara Pinborough’s novel Breeding Ground. Set in the English countryside, the novel begins with pregnancies gone awry as women give birth to (yes, you guessed it) spiders. Giant spiders. Spiders that feed on their hosts and hunt down the surviving males for food. It’s a garish, outlandish premise that Pinborough pulls off with macabre glee and catapults readers into the most terrifying of apocalypses.

DON’T LOOK NOW by Daphne Du Maurier

I may be cheating a bit on my pledge to avoid classics, but I’m not sure enough horror readers realize the brilliance (and readability) of Du Maurier’s work, or would even think of her in terms of horror. Don’t Look Now is the name of both a collection and a novella that was adapted (quite faithfully) into the movie of the same name, starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie as a couple visiting Venice after the death of their young daughter. Delivered with direct, wry prose, Du Maurier gives us a tale of grieving parents, psychics, a psychotic killer and a dead child pursued through the byzantine byways and canals of an ancient city. As a bonus for those who seek out the collection instead of simply the novella, the book includes the short story The Birds, which inspired Hitchcock’s enigmatic and thrilling movie of the same name. Du Maurier’s story differs significantly from the movie and is more bleak and terrifying than the film.

THE DARK DESCENT edited by David G. Hartwell

The Dark Descent might very well be the anthology of all horror anthologies, where stories by Clive Barker and Joyce Carol Oates rub shoulders with tales by Edith Wharton and Edgar Allen Poe. Including (by my count) some 56 stories, you’ll encounter brilliant writers of past and present including Robert Bloch and Robert Aickman, Tanith Lee and Fritz Leiber. I bought this massive collection just to get my hands on Karl Edward Wagner’s story Sticks and count myself well satisfied. Little did I expect at the time that I was laying my hands on my ‘desert island read.’

John C. Foster was born in Sleepy Hollow, New York, and has been afraid of the dark for as long as he can remember. His forthcoming novel, The Isle, grew out of his love for New England, where he spent his childhood. He is the author of three previous novels, Dead Men, Night Roads and Mister White, and one collection of short stories, Baby Powder and Other Terrifying Substances. His stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies including Dark Moon Digest, Strange Aeons, Dark Visions Volume 2 and Lost Films, among others. He lives in Brooklyn with the actress Linda Jones and their dog Coraline.

For more information on John C. Foster and his forthcoming novel, The Isle, please visit:
 
Official Author Page  
  
Amazon Author Page  

In the shadowy world of international espionage and governmental black ops, when a group of American spies go bad and inadvertently unleash an ancient malevolent force that feeds on the fears of mankind, a young family finds themselves in the crosshairs of a frantic supernatural mystery of global proportions with only one man to turn for their salvation.

Combine the intricate, plot-driven stylings of suspense masters Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum, add a healthy dose of Clive Barker’s dark and brooding occult horror themes, and you get a glimpse into the supernatural world of international espionage that the chilling new horror novel MISTER WHITE is about to reveal.

John C. Foster’s MISTER WHITE is a terrifying genre-busting suspense shocker it was meant to be and will, once and for all, answer the question you dare not ask: “Who is Mister White?”