Interesting book links and my Top 10 Ghost Stories

In keeping with the current theme of all things dark and scary, here are two things that I found today that I really liked:

- if you're looking for a ghost story treasury to read, possibly one for a 8 years or up child also, this one sounds so good that I might get it for our spooky night stories:  from Bookslut:  Stories to Tell in the Dark post.

- I was looking for a listing of the Byrant and May mystery series to make sure I had bought the right one next in line, and came across Christopher Fowler's wonderful blog.  Filled with writing tips, publishing stories, all kinds of cool things, including this wonderful photograph that is just a little bizarre and oh so cool and very in keeping with RIP themes..  Very Dickensian too, and now I'm longing to go see London again. 

When did it become a stigma to read?
Yesterday, Chris at Book-a-rama had this lovely rant post about an article that appeared in the NY Times in August about people who read books.  I can see why she ranted.  Reading it, I am incensed too. What do you mean, there is a stigma against reading alone in public?  I am left shaking my head at this one.  If there is social stigma against reading a book, I'm not aware of it.  Since reading is intrinsically a pleasure for the self, it is of course going to be done alone.  I do know we have the 'book nerd' thing attached - at least I have.  But I lost any care about that long ago.  I didn't know I had a social stigma against me for reading.  I feel kind of cool anyway.  In my little corner of the world, books are cool and interesting, and best of all, I can take a book almost anywhere and open it up and read.  Plus, I've had people approach me and ask about the book, and go away to find a copy for themselves. Personally, I think talking on cell phones in public is far more intrusive, invasive, and socially unacceptable.  I'm quiet when I read, whereas you, young woman with your phone on your ear today on the bus talking incessantly beside me to someone -and really, if she drew a breath in ten minutes I didn't hear it - oh yes, give me a book any time.  If there's a stigma against reading alone in public (and is this an oxymoron too?), then there should be a taboo against talking loudly and in public on your cell phone in spaces where people can't get away from you.

If you're still looking for some horror books to read for Carl's RIP V challenge, then  here is a top 10 list from Charlie Higson over at Guardian Unlimited.  I agree with some of his choices, and I think I'm one of the few people to have read Daphne Du Maurier's Don't Look Now, as well as seen the movie, and they both scare me very much.  I would have put The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, and The Woman in Black by Susan Hill on the list. So.......this made me think:  what are my current top 10 of horror books?


Susan's Top 10 Horror Ghost stories books

1. The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson - my all time personal favourite ghost story.  Whatever walks at Hill House, walks alone.  Just writing those words makes goosebumps appear on me.
2. The Shining - Stephen King - I still hold this up as the best of his, although Duma Key is a very close second.  I might have to read them both again and compare........
3. The Terror - Dan Simmons - my book of the year two years ago.  Scared me, and still does. 
4. The Night Country - Stewart O'Nan - haunting and sad and beautiful.
5. Tamsin - Peter S. Beagle - my favourite ghost story featuring a ghost cat and ghost girl. 
6. The Prayer of the Night Shepherd - Phil Rickman (I swear, there are a couple of scenes in this book where I could feel the hair lifting on the back of my neck).  The scariest, so far, for me, in the series, just because that sense of the ghost was so authentic, and frightening for Merrily and for me.  Every book has eerie moments though, and is filled with a delicious sense of haunting and atmoshere.  Plus there is the ghost of Lucy. 
7. Swan Song - Robert R McCammon - still the best of the end of the world books, with evil stalking a lovely little girl, and the heroes who stand guard over her.  Due for a re-read
8. The Bone Doll's Twin series - Lyn Flewelling - it's not often a fantasy series uses a ghost so believably, and to such good purpose. Very dark fantasy and very very good.
9. The Uncanny - Andrew Klavan - gothic ghost horror story that is very good.
10. The Harrowing - Alexandra Sokoloff - classic ghost story setting: five young people, alone for the holidays in a university campus, and an ouija board.  What could go wrong?

 I can't remember if Swan Song has a ghost or not, though it's still one of the scariest books because it's so real, so possible, and the evil - yes, I dare you to read it, dear Gentle Reader, and tell me if you don't have a nightmare or two. 

So, have you read any of these? Do you agree with my list?  Do you have your own list?

The Terror - Dan Simmons

As you know, when I first began this book, I could barely stop reading it. About half-way through I took a break, it was so intense, and I had been reading it non-stop. When I was ready, I picked it up again, and finished it in 24 hours. Again, I could not put it down! It is that good. I could not stop reading it.

So what was so gripping, you ask? How could a polar expedition to find the Northwest Passage - Franklin's 1845 expedition - be so thrilling an adventure in horror that I was left gasping for air sometimes? Because it is a story that is based in part on real events, and Simmons is a master at recreating prosaic details of life at sea. In this case, they are encased in ice, for almost the entire novel. And for someone like me, who dreads the onslaught of winter, just the idea of being stuck in the arctic where it is colder beyond anything - anywhere - else on earth, an unrelenting cold for 8 months of the year, with snow 10 months of the year - and where they are it only melts on the land so there is always blinding light then - this would be my hell on earth. So from the opening line: 'Captain Crozier comes up on deck to find his ship under attack by celestial ghosts.' to Paragraph 2 beginning: 'The temperature is -50 Fahrenheit and dropping fast.' my attention was caught, spell-bound.

I have to admit that at the beginning, I was desperately afraid this was going to be about polar bears, and for the first 40 pages despite the hypnotic storytelling, I almost put the book down because I wasn't going to read a 700 page novel about polar bears eating people - not scary to someone who every winter hears stories of the polar bears coming down to eat the garbage in Churchill Manitoba, and the bears have to be tranquilized and returned up North - they do eat people, which is real-life horrifying enough. I wanted a supernatural thriller, and the back blurb had led me to believe it was. So, despite my misgivings and because of the amazing storytelling, I presevered, and by page 75 I began to relax. There ARE polar bears, but they are not the threat at all. There is very much a supernatural presence here, and how it is explained is part of the almost unearthly beauty of this book. Because this book is about more than facing the supernatural, it's about survival. Survival in inhuman conditions, with over 100 other men. There - I saw you shiver. You know what I mean. Anything can happen with that many people trapped on two ships for two years, slowly going nowhere, living off what they brought with them.

This is such a satisfying horror novel. The men on the ships are each characters in their own right, whether they get a paragraph or chapters to themselves. The ice and snow and temperatures - the North - is another prominent feature. If you are like me, and dislike winter, then make sure you have plenty of hot things around you. (Hmm, I wonder if this is why I began drinking hot chocolate at night, late last week?)

I have mentioned earlier that this is a gripping read. It is. The tension is stretched taut in this book, so much so that I read long into the night, over meals, whenever I could, skipping whatever wasn't necessary to do - and disliking what I had to do that took me away from reading! - I had to get back as quickly as I could to the story, and the characters. I liked some of them so much - Capt Crozier, Lt Irving were among my favourites - and the revelation of what happens as they lay trapped in the ice is riveting.

Shadowing everything is the realization that this is the voyage that Franklin and his men did not come back from. This book is a blend of fact - the voyage, the ship life, a real-life expedition to the North - and fiction - the creature that is killing them off, the Inuit people who may or may not save them, the fictionalization of many of the characters. Just because the book is based on the expedition does not mean all the characters are real - and unlike many real-life 'memoirs' that have the book community examining veracity vs story, this is a novel,unabashedly so, and the blend of the real with pure imagination makes for an unforgettable horror novel.

I loved it.

There is true terror among these pages, and a growing horror at the fate that befalls the men. The true horror isn't just the supernatural element but also what happens to the crew on two ships - The Erebus and The Terror - over the long 2 years they have been frozen in the ice. By taking a real-life disastrous expedition and adding another darker element to it, the book is a delicious mix of gut-wrenching horror and creepiness. It is a perfect read for this horror challenge, for the lengthening evenings as fall arrives (tomorrow!) and lurking on the horizon, cold and snowy winter.

The real reason to read horror and ghost stories is to discover how contact with fear, in whatever shape it comes in, can be faced and survived. Whether we create the horror from within or without is an ongoing debate for psychologists, which the next book I am going to review in my next post, The Harrowing by Alexandra Sokoloff, also touches on. The experience of reading horror gives us clues in how to survive the experience of facing horror. At least, that's one reason among many for why I enjoy these stories, and why I am loving this challenge so much. The Terror has an extra dimension to the fear, a mythic fear, but to say anymore would be to give it away. Any contact with the mythic changes us, that's what Joseph Campbell said in A Hero With a Thousand Faces, and The Terror is one well-crafted example of contact with the supernatural.

So, that is 3 books out of 4 that I have completely enjoyed so far. This is better than the last 10 years of trying to find a decent ghost story to read!!

I think The Terror is well worth reading. I love it for so much more than the horror. Above all, it is the characters and their awful starvation that I remember most, and the ice and snow surrounding them. And amongst that, the unknowable, terrorizing them, waiting.

I love really good horror stories!!!

television

So, I got sucked into watching the television for the last week. Lost and Battlestar Galactica began playing every night, on Space channel, from the very beginning of the first season, so I made the mistake of watching one, and then the other. For a whole week, I read nothing. Then, I realized what I was doing, and have made myself not watch these shows - I don't need to see either series quite yet again, I've seen them already - and watch only what I'm really interested in. It's so easy to get involved in watching tv. It requires nothing but attention, just sitting there and getting fed by it. I finally wanted to read again, and finished The Terror tonight, a few minutes ago. I will review it tomorrow - it's fantastic, by the way! - but for now, the battle between watching tv and reading continues......

I'm also working my way through Everything's Eventual, and I am having a very disconcerting feeling with each story that I have read it before. I don't remember reading this book! But when I start each story, I suddenly know what it's about, in a vague way. I am enjoying it - The Terror is too big to carry on the bus, so I read Everything's Eventual to and from work and over lunch. Have you had this experience before, opening a book that you think you have never read, and suddenly realizing you have? I just wish I could remember where and when I read it.

I don't hate tv. I have said this often here, that my goal is to watch less of it, and to read more. This being said, I love good tv - what is to me good tv anyway. And tomorrow night is the new Dr Who Season 4. Finally!!! The first episode...we are all counting down in my family, even the youngest children (who get to stay up for it, but fall asleep long before it's finished).

A date with terror.....

I meant to post at least once this weekend, I keep trying to do a Sunday Salon! Which I love the idea of! But my every waking moment, when not baking cookies, doing laundry, cooking or going to the park for my 3 mile walk and playing with the kids, has been spent reading The Terror, by Dan Simmons. I can't stop reading it, and got really cranky with all the other interruptions. I didn't want to talk on the phone, the kids heard "Let Mommy read, please!" a dozen times, and I barely watched television. It was all reading this weekend, when I could.

This book is so good. Once I got past the polar bear bit - really, I thought it was going to be a horror story featuring the polar bear, and I almost didn't get past page 40, I was so disappointed. I kept reading because Dan Simmons is an amazing writer and I had to know what happened to the characters and if they survive this third winter, even if bears got them. Now it's turned out to NOT be about polar bears (though they are there) and I am now spending my time happily in the Arctic, reading about the trapped ships and the nightmare of something supernatural stalking the crews, and the raging storms and ice, so much ice. I'll be back in a bit, but I must go finish the chapter I'm on before bed! Two out three books so far this challenge, this good - (Wolf Moon was a disappointment and more about that another time) - this is so fun! So no Sunday Salon, no meandering book thoughts. I have a date with The Terror.