Hell House was okay, just. Hunted Past Reason was dreadful.Originally Posted by ScribbleScribe
I've enjoyed other things he wrote, sometimes very very much, but in light of the fact that his talent is variable, I can't really put him in the same league as Poe, or even Ramsay Campbell, whose short stories are invariably thrilling and frightening.
Got any suggestion for a specific R. Campbell story i could look into?I haven't read anything by him.
Oh, gosh, yes! I think my favorite is "The Show Goes On" from Dark Companions which is an early collection of his stories.Got any suggestion for a specific R. Campbell story i could look into?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Companions
Out of print, but resellers have it. Can't recommend it highly enough. Just about every story in it is a winner. In my opinion, no other modern writer even comes close to his talent at that form, though I'm open to correction.
Enjoy!
Wait, Hell House = Mad House? I thought those were two different stories.
Hell House was a novel; Mad House was, apparently, one of his short stories. Let me check wiki.
Yes, see above:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Matheson
ooh I love good horror writing. Thank you for this thread!
"You got a lot of attitude for someone going out of style." Danko Jones--I love living in the city
"Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it." --P.J. O'Rourke
Does anyone think that Faust deserves to be listed under horror stories? The whole of the action revolves around a man's pact with the devil, and they even go to a witch's sabbath. It has all of the trappings of the genre story although it never attempts to arouse feelings of fright in it's readers. Likewise, Paradise Lost is a story about the Devil, but it's not a horror story either. The supernatural elements are raised almost in an allegorical way to talk about fate, justice, longing, and man's capacity to sin, whereas in a horror story the supernatural is invoked solely in order to threaten the mortality of a human being.
Also, I organized my list chronologically:
100 Pliny the Younger- Letter to Sura
1200 Marie de France- Bisclavret (The Werewolf)
1764 Horace Walpole- The Castle of Otranto
1766 Pu Songling- Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio
1772 Jacques Cazotte- The Devil in Love
1787 Friedrich Schiller- The Ghost-Seer
1794 Ann Radcliffe- The Mysteries of Udolpho
1796 Matthew Gregory Lewis- The Monk
1798 Samuel Taylor Coleridge- The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
1816 E.T.A. Hoffman- The Sandman
1818 Mary Shelley- Frankenstein
1820 Johann Ludwig Tieck- Wake Not the Dead
1820 Charles Maturin- Melmoth the Wanderer
1820 Washington Irving- The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
1821 Charles Nodier- Smarra
1825 Tsuruya Nanboku IV- Yotsuya Kaidan
1835 Nikolai Gogol- Viy
1835 Nathaniel Hawthorne- Young Goodman Brown
1836 Theophile Gautier- The Dead Leman
1837 Prosper Mérimée- The Venus of Ille
1846 Edgar Allan Poe- The Cask of Amontillado
1849 Alexander Dumas, pere- One Thousand and One Ghosts
1855 Robert Browning- Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came
1859 George Eliot- The Lifted Veil
1859 Edward Bulwer-Lytton- The House and the Brain
1866 Charles Dickens- The Signal Man
1872 Sheridan Le Fanu- Green Tea
1874 Paul Feval, pere- Vampire City
1876 Erckmann-Chatrian- The Man-Wolf
1885 Robert Louis Stevenson- The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
1887 De Maupassant- The Horla
1888 Rudyard Kipling- The Phantom Rickshaw
1890 Arthur Machen- The Great God Pan
1890 Oscar Wilde- The Picture of Dorian Gray
1892 Arthur Conan Doyle- Lot 249
1892 Charlotte Perkins Gilman- The Yellow Wallpaper
1893 Ambrose Bierce- The Death of Halpin Frayser
1895 Robert W. Chambers- The King in Yellow
1896 H.G. Wells- The Island of Dr. Moreau
1897 Bram Stoker- Dracula
1898 Henry James- The Turn of the Screw
1902 W.W. Jacobs- The Monkey's Paw
1904 M.R. James- Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
1904 Lafcadio Hearn- Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things
1907 Algernon Blackwood- The Willows
1907 Horacio Quiroga- The Feather Pillow
1908 William Hope Hodgson- The House on the Borderland
1908 Perceval Landon- Thurnley Abbey
1909 Gaston Leroux- The Phantom of the Opera
1911 Oliver Onions- The Beckoning Fair One
1914 Gustav Meyrink- The Golem
1914 S. Ansky- The Dybbuk
1923 Maurice Level- Those Who Return
1926 H.P. Lovecraft- The Call of Cthulhu
1930 William Faulkner- A Rose For Emily
1934 Isak Dinesen- Monkey
1943 Fritz Leiber- Conjure Wife
1943 Jean Ray- Malpertuis
1946 Ray Bradbury- The Small Assassin
1951 Julio Cortazar- House Taken Over
1954 Richard Matheson- I am Legend
1959 Shirley Jackson- The Haunting of Hill House
1967 Ira Levin- Rosemary's Baby
1971 William Peter Blatty- The Exorcist
1973 Anne Rice- Interview with a Vampire
1977 Stephen King- The Shining
1979 Peter Straub- Ghost Story
1988 Thomas Harris- The Silence of the Lambs
1991 Ramsey Campbell- Alone with the Horrors
1996 Thomas Ligotti- The Nightmare Factory
2006 Max Brooks- World War Z
Last edited by mortalterror; 01-08-2011 at 07:35 AM.
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"This ain't over."- Charles Bronson
Feed the Hungry!
Well, first part certainly. Some years ago, we collected several histories about devil pacts - which are all horror - and Goethe Faust shares elements with all of them. If a oral storyteller use them to scary, why cann't one use Faust? A very (much more fantasy however) similar story lie Peter Schlemihl by Von Chamisso (instead the soul, it is the shadow) is a gothic horror tale, so why not? Plus, all those american moralists stories with Mr.Scratch like The Devil and Daniel Webster, even with some humor, are horror. And Doctor Faustus the intelectual version of it.
Now the fable of genres, Rosa's Grande Sertoes Veredas é a deal with the devil story. And Fernando pessoa has an unfinished poem about Faust too... would them be horror....
Another story which, if one is loose about characterisations, could be called horror, is Kafka's "In the penal colony". Definately the darkest of Kafka's stories (which is something, considering they are all dark) it is violent, relentless in the portrayal of pain, and very powerful writing all-around.
Normally i wouldnt name it as horror though, since it is obviously an allegory about Kafka's self-destruction, with writing (a form of writing plays a crucial part in this story) as a means to bring that about.
Horror or not, it is one of my favourite stories
There's this one book, Sleeping Beauty by Phillip Margolin.
I warn you, if you are sensitive about subjects such as rape, this isn't the book for you.
"I drag myself out of nightmares each morning and find there's no relief in waking."
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