I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this is the Book Review Podcast.Tis the season, which is what I assume everyone says every October.I certainly do.It's Halloween month.There's really no better time in my opinion.
And this week, I talked to two authors who are experts when it comes to horror and scary stories.The first is Stephen Graham Jones.The second is Joe Hill.They've both written a lot.They've read even more.
And they came with a bunch of recommendations for great books for you to check out.Let's turn to my conversation first with Stephen Graham Jones.Stephen, welcome to the Book Review Podcast.Thrilled to be here.Thanks for having me.
What is your relationship to Halloween or what has it been?Before we start digging into some book recommendations.
My relationship to Halloween is that ever since before I was even reading and watching horror, it was my favorite holiday because you get to be somebody else for the night.And that was so wonderful.You get to hide behind a mask.
You don't have to worry about how to hold your face.And that's always been a big issue for me.
So being able to dress up is a dream.Do you, you're, you're a grownup, you're a grown man now.Is it still something you've partaken? It is, yeah.
I've got a costume being delivered to my door momentarily, and I've got so many masks queued up for the season right now.
That's awesome.Can I ask what you're going as?My plan right now is to be a scary nun. It's the year of scary nuns.You got the first omen, the movie with Sidney Sweeney.Immaculate, yeah.Yeah.
So is it, so you're dressing as a nun and then it's a scary face.
Yes, correct.And probably scary hands too.And I think I'll have, my hair is all gray now, so it'll be fun and scary, hopefully.
Great, great, great choice.Stephen, you have written many books.You listeners, you cannot see what I'm saying, but Stephen has many books behind him.
I feel like you're a great person to have on the Book Review Podcast to give our readers some recommendations for the season.And so I want to guide you through some of the ones that you sent me in an email beforehand, if that's okay.
Let's talk about some recent ones, and then maybe we can go to some of your all-time favorites.Sure.Mean Spirited by Nick Roberts.Tell me about this book.
That's a possession novel.Possession novels are sometimes exorcism novels.This one is mostly possession and it involved dogs a lot.And it is one of the few books from lately to really put the scare in me.
It made me have a difficult time getting upstairs to my bed at night because how am I going to turn these lights off?How am I going to get past this open doorway?It really scares me.
And I'm about to have to read it again for a class I'm teaching and it's got me nervous.I don't want to read it again.
What does it mean that a book can still scare a person like you who is really steeped in the horror space?
I am steeped in the horror space, but that doesn't mean I ever got calluses or I ever got tired of being scared.I think that's why I'm drawn to horror, actually, is because I'm scared of everything.
And if I can keep the scary stuff in front of me, that means it's not behind me.
That's a good coping mechanism.I think that might actually be the reason I like heart too, or at least part of that.What is it about Nick Roberts that appeals to you?Is he, have you read many of his books and why this one?
This is the only one so far.
It's the only one I've had nerve for so far, but he's got a few others that I'm interested to look into.What I like about Nick's writing about the way he tells stories is he doesn't forget that we need an injection of terror.We need a blood gag.
We need stuff every few pages as readers to keep us interested.We're not going to extend the story, the narrative, a whole lot of leap to do 85 pages of setup.He just hits the ground running and does not stop writing.And I love that in a book.
Do you feel that the things that appeal to you in horror are different when it comes to movies and books in terms of the pacing, in terms of the setup, in terms of scares versus gore?
I have high expectations of both and I make a lot of allowances as well for both just because I love the genre. But I do think that in horror, scares in horror novels, scares work a little bit differently because the reader can control the pace.
The reader, if they feel the tension mounting too highly, they can go look out the window and drink a glass of tea for a while and reset and then come back. And they're suddenly not on that fear ramp.So it's harder to scare them.
So what you have to do on the page is that ramp that leads up to the spike of terror in a movie, it can be steeper, but because the movie is clocking forward at this pace that you can't stop as an audience member as for readers, though, that
ramp up to terror is more gradual.You have to trick them into getting on that ramp and then trick them that they're walking up and just trick them the whole way and do a lot of misleads and fake outs.
And if you do all of that just right, you can really stage a good scare on the page.
How many good scares are there in your next book?Maeve Fly by C.J.Leed.
Oh, they start probably about page six, maybe page eight, and they keep going the whole way through.CJ is a really good writer.And what I liked about CJ's stories, her novels, is that she doesn't flinch.
And that's, I greatly respect that on the horror page is about. Mayfly is a woman in Los Angeles who works at a theme park as a Disney princess, basically, and kind of like plastic and mannequin-y.
But in her private time, at her downtime, and also sometimes during work, she is, and this isn't spoiling anything, I think this is probably on the book jacket by now, she's like Patrick Bateman from Bred Easton Ellis' American Psycho.She is brutal.
She is carving her own bloody path through Los Angeles, and she is taking the prisoners.But then, in Mayfly, she has a chance at love.
And that greatly complicates everything. I'm happy for her.I was worried.The next book on your list is one that I've heard a lot of people talk about.This is The Reformatory.It's by Tananarive Due.She's a horror expert.
I feel like whenever I watch a documentary about horror movies, which I watch way too many of, she's always one of the talking heads because she knows so much.Tell us a little bit about this book.
The Reformatory, for me, The Reformatory is the horror novel of the decade.I think Narnia Rave just hits it, not just out of the park, but like out of the whole state.It's just such a powerful book.
And it's got, it's got ghosts, which it calls haints, I believe, the Southern pronunciation of haints.A black boy, he gets sent to the Reformatory to this, this like punishment school, I guess you would call it.
I'm not sure what the, out of the whole state.It's just such a powerful book. And it's got Ghost, which it calls Hainz, I believe, like, you know, the Southern pronunciation of Hainz.
A black boy, he gets sent to the reformatory, to this punishment school, I guess you would call it.I'm not sure what the accepted name for them was or is.And he suffers all kinds of terrible things.
And the whole time, his sister, who is not that much older than him, is trying to get him out, trying to save his life. I don't want to spoil anything, where it goes, how it gets there, but Tenari did this one right.
And it's got an emotional kind of upsweep at the end, which I would have paid six times what I paid for the book for, maybe 10.
It uses the same real life reformatory that Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys was based on. Obviously, you could take a real-life event and write 10 different takes on it.
Tell me a little bit about the way that she balances this sense of historicity with still being an incredibly effective horror novel.
She had some family members who actually got pulled into that school.And so I think she feels an intense loyalty to portraying the events with all the brutality that was actually going on at the time.
And I really appreciate that, that she's not cleaning things up.Why clean things up?We need to look at this bad history.We don't need to pretend it didn't happen.We don't need to sensationalize it, but Teutonomy doesn't do that at all.
No, as for how she balances it though, she inserts the horror elements, the supernatural elements in such a way that they don't mess with what feels like the accuracy of the era, the time, the place, which is to say, reading the reformatory, I feel like there probably were haunts there.
It doesn't feel like this is like an extra thing she added on.It feels like she's pulling a curtain back and say, this was also going on.
You have talked about a book that our deputy editor, Tina Jordan, has told me a couple of times this week is the scariest book she's ever read.And that is Come Closer by Sarah Grant.
It's a book that after seeing you recommend it to hear and hearing her talk about it, I'm ashamed not to have read, but tell me a little bit about it.
Oh, come closer is a woman, I believe her name is Amanda, who is happily married.She works in an architecture farm.Life is going good, but she starts to have dreams about being on a bloody beach with someone who is speaking very fetchingly to her.
And it turns out that either she has a demon inside her, you finally gain access to her, or she's slipping in her life.And the novel really plays with that. to terrifying effect.
You don't know whether she, after years of being treated poorly in the world in various ways, I mean, she has, she has a good life, but she's a woman in America in professional fields.So she's had a lot of pressures and stuff put on her.
You're not sure if she is letting herself seek vengeance on the world around her or if she's actually possessed.And it's punctuated periodically by these quizzes that feel ripped out of Cosmopolitan magazine.Are you possessed?
And as the novel progresses, she initially scores low and she starts scoring higher and higher and things get bloodier and wilder and more over the top.
And this novel, Come Closer, has one scene, I won't spoil when it is, I don't want to set people's expectations in a weird way, but it has one scene that always gives me the shivers and make me remember, this is why I read horror.
This is probably why I write horror.
Come Closer is one of the ones that you characterize as an old timer.It came out 20 years ago or a little more than 20 years ago, 2003.
I'd like to take a couple steps back and just get a sense of what do you remember as being the first books that when you were younger gave you this entryway, this tingle?
The first horror novel I ever read, and I think I must've been 11 or 12, was Whitley Treiber's Wolfen, the werewolf's novel.
And there's chapters in there that are from the grandfather wolf, who is putatively the, I guess we'd call him the alpha wolf, if we don't really understand wolfen society.He's the leader of this, this big pack.
But we get these point of view chapters in his voice.And I remember being a kid and reading that and. being so in awe how anyone could write as if they are a monster.
And I really feel like my whole career has been chasing that high of reading those Grandfather Wolf chapters.I'm always trying to access that, to bounce off it, to do something with it.
But yeah, so I started with a wolfen, and I didn't discover King until, this must have been about 88, until Tommyknockers.That was my first King I ever read.And that was my gateway to him.
And after I found that, I went and read everything I could backwards, and I stayed with him going forwards.My favorite from him, it changes every day.I've read The Shining, I don't know, probably 10 times.I love that novel.
But I think my favorite, just for the nostalgia, is It.
I'll never not be living in It, I feel like. And what is it?I've, it's a quite a large book.It's over a thousand pages and I've, I've read it at least three times.So I'm familiar with, with its appeal.
What is, what is the thing that you draw out of it?Either just enjoying it as a person or, or drawing from it as a writer.
probably both, is the cyclicity.Is that a word?The cycleness?How things move in cycle.That is so appealing to me.And it's so appealing to me that my very first novel that I did back in 2000 is about cycles repeating themselves.
And I think if I were to put all my books on a table and clump them together, more of them would be expressing cycles and not expressing cycles.I think that
cycleness, for lack of an actual good word, is very core to what I understand about how life works and life is.And so it, to me, feels like a living, breathing thing.
And I think that's why I can go back to it over and over, and it feels like hanging out with a person.And that's comfortable.It's terrifying, but it's comfortable too.
For those listeners who have not had the opportunity to read it or see any of the TV or feature films that have been made, it's about an evil spirit in a main town that takes the form primarily of a clown who comes back every 28 or so years to murder children.
I won't put a gloss on it. Talk to me a little bit more about the cyclical nature of this and what it is about it that appeals to you.Is it something about your life?Is it something about history?
Is it something about the way the world works that you think horror works in cycles?And even if you think you have tackled something, it always comes back.
It's that old, what is it, Cynthia?That old thing about we've got to learn from history or else we risk repeating it after some fashion.I think we as a society, as a species, can comport ourselves better if we are aware of these cycles.
If we remember that Oh, our grandparents went through this as well.We can go and ask them for how to navigate it.
And just on an individual level, I think if you can understand your own patterns and predispositions and the stuff that you keep repeating that gets you in trouble or gets you accolades or whatever it is, then you can adjust accordingly and maybe get left bad things happening more good things happening.
So I think the cyclical nature, thank you for that.That's so much cleaner. the cyclical nature of it is, it's like, it's a, it's a training for us all, I think.And that's what I always feel like narrative is in the first place.
Like all narrative is, is selection of this event, that event, that event, make an argument to make us feel or think a thing.But the selection is the important part.And if we read enough novels,
then we understand how narrative worked and we get a better sense of it anyways.We work out our muscles better and we can pick events from our lives which we can choose to characterize who we are now so we can change who we are.
And I think that's amazing and magical.I'll never stop reading for that reason.I never, I never won't need that training.
The next book that you characterized loosely, sorry if I'm overusing your phraseology here as an old timer, is Experimental Film by Gemma Files.
Oh, that novel, what is it, 2012 or something around there?That novel to me is just a model of exactly how a horror novel can work when it's firing on every single cylinder and a few more cylinders as well.
It's about a noonday witch that was brought over to the American continents with immigrants.And the noonday witch, she appears when the sun is high and people are working in the fields and she makes you an offer.
And this gemophiles mixes this with someone who is the specialist in old film, the old silver nitrate stuff.And it cross wires in a way which I never would have expected.And it ends just magically for me, terrifyingly, but magically.
And I don't want to spoil it.I want everyone to read this novel.It's one that should go even wider than it has.And it's gone fairly wide.
Oh, man, that book sounds great.I am going to get that one.I haven't heard of it.One more I definitely want to focus on just because he also had a book about this year.That book was called Horror Movie, and this is A Head Full of Ghosts.
The author is Paul Tremblay.
Oh man, Head Full of Ghosts.Paul was at the top of his game with that book and his game is already the top of everybody's game.So that's definitely saying something.
Head Full of Ghosts is, I think it's three narratives intertwined with each other, handing the story baton back and forth. about a position that may or may not have happened, what is it, 15 years ago or something?
And it is the story, I guess you could say it's about an American family falling apart and It could be demons are happening.It could be mental illness is happening.It could be there's other motivations.
And Paul really situates this whole story in a form, in an ambiguity that is productive.There's ambiguities that aren't productive, that just end up being vague.
But in this one, I think it's actually productive because it requires us as the reader to invest in yes or no, demon or no demon. And I think which door we choose to walk through at the end of this book says a lot about us.
And that's what art should do.It should teach us about ourselves, I think.And Paul's novel does that.
Steven, as we head towards the end of our conversation here, I love horror books.I love horror movies.And maybe like you, I talk to people who are just like, eh, it's not for me.Why would I ever want to be scared?Why try?Blah, blah, blah.
What do you, before saying, Everyone has their own preferences.What do you say to them when you try to explain why you think it's valuable?
I mean, number one, Aura, of course, offers up a mirror to, in funhouse fashion, reflect back our own fears, anxieties, issues of the current era.
Everybody knows that, but on a more species level for me, I think horror activates that in us, which is most human.We grew up on the Savannah being chicken nuggets of the grasslands.We had lost our speed.
We had lost our claws, our teeth, our camouflage.We got out of trees.Everything with teeth could make a meal out of us.
And that happened for millions of years while we were evolving our big brains, or the brains we call big anyways, I'm not sure we use them to full effect.
But the result of that is that we got hardwired like at the organic level for teeth in the shadows that want to digest us, that want to eat us.And in our contemporary lives, we sterilize all those purposes.We shine lights into all the dark corners.
We feel like we're past that. The problem is we still have that wiring.We're still hardwired for terror, for fear.And so when we engage horror stories, that can let us be our human selves more authentically, I feel like.
Steven Graham Jones, thank you so much for being on the Book Review podcast.I hope to have you back on at some point in the future.It's been a real delight to talk to you.Thank you, Gilbert.
This has been nothing but fun.
This is the Book Review Podcast, and I'm Gilbert Cruz.You just heard my conversation with Stephen Graham Jones, recommending a bunch of wonderful and scary books to read this season, and I asked author Joe Hill to do the same.
Welcome to the Book Review Podcast.Thanks for having me on.It's wonderful to be here.The first time I read you before interviewing you, I feel like years ago for Time Magazine for Horns.This was a very long time ago.
It was 20th Century Ghosts, which is a short story collection.And I don't know if I said this at the time, but it has stuck with me.I was listening to it.I was listening to the audiobook version of 20th Century Ghosts.
And the first story in 20th Century Ghosts is a story called Best New Horror, if I'm recalling correctly.
And it was so tense that I, I was genuinely sweating on a New York city subway platform and I wasn't sweating cause it was summertime and it gets to be 97 degrees on these platforms.I think it was a different time of year.
It was just, I got, it was very tense, very tense.And then several stories later, there's a book, there's a story called pop art, which was one of the more moving. pieces of short fiction I've read in a horror collection ever, maybe.
It was a great delight to see the range there.
That's very kind.I remember that we spoke in a restaurant in Boston around 2010 for horns.And shortly afterwards, I had a nervous breakdown and a divorce.So Gilbert, I'm hoping this conversation has a better outcome.
I don't want to lay all that on you, but I'm not taking you completely off the hook.You know, it's clearly we had this conversation and two years later I was a divorced guy in therapy.And so anyway, no pressure here.
What happened?I'm so sorry.I, I, I feel like you should have told me this. earlier going into the conversation.Yeah, this might be the first time we've, we've, we've spoken since then.
Well, keep you updated after this conversation.I'll let you know how it goes.
Great.Great.Thank you.This is such a silly question given who you are and how you grew up, but, but what has your relationship to scary books been? from the time you were a child.We're here to talk about scary books.
It is quite literally a lifelong relationship with the scary stuff.The elephant in the room is my dad, Stephen King.A fact that I was able to keep secret for a period of time in the early part of my career while I was...
finding my own voice and starting to publish.But I'm a huge Stephen King fan and fell hard for my dad's work like so many other children of the 1980s. Um, and you know, and, um, and read everything.
And the thing is, is people like, they think of it as a long book, but I read it in second draft and manuscript and that manuscript was like came to my knee.Um, I was shorter then, but I wasn't, I wasn't that short.
It was a huge manuscript and certainly I was swept away by that story.
How old were you when you read that book, which has a lot of
I think I was 12.If you, if you look at the date the book came out and subtract two years.86 maybe?Okay.So I read it in 1984 and I would have been 12.Okay.Yeah.
I was talking to a friend recently and I said, in some ways I feel like I've been trying to write it my whole life. My third book, Nosferatu, was sort of a stab.
My attempt to write it, I've got a new one that'll be out next year called King Sorrow, where I was trying to write it, I think.
I did a short story called The Black Phone that was in 20th Century Ghost, and at the time I wrote it, it was the furthest thing from my mind.But when I look at it now, I see the influence of that book all over that story.
What did you take from from that book?It's a big book.There's a lot to take from it.But what do you think are the elements that sort of keep coming back over and over in your writing?
I learned pretty early on that effective horror is not about sadism.It's not about throwing a pile of guts at the reader.Effective horror is about giving you some characters to fall in love with.
introducing fully rounded characters who feel like you would want to you would want to spend time with them and you're going to spend time with them because it usually takes between 12 and 20 hours to read a book.
You meet some characters and you fall in love with them and then you see them forced to confront the worst that we can imagine. And so in that sense, I think good horror fiction is about sympathy, it's about empathy, not cruelty.
That isn't always so clearly understood.And so I think when you look at the horror movies of the 1980s, the slasher films of the 1980s,
You see a lot of movies that are terrible horror films great slapstick comedies the friday the thirteenth films for example every character in those movies is one dimensional you've got the.
Cheerleader you've got the jock you've got the stoner you've got the good girl who who studies.
saving her virginity for marriage all of the tropes that were made fun of in the in the film cabin in the woods absolutely absolutely and and none of these characters have any depth to them you never really care about them as human beings or even see them as fully rounded human beings and and so it actually becomes somewhat entertaining to watch
Jason Voorhees work his way through them with one ghoulish murder after another.We respond to that exactly the same way we respond to a Warner Brothers cartoon where Bugs Bunny smashes a sledgehammer into Daffy Duck's head.
The difference between a Three Stooges film and some of the later Friday the 13th films is very fine. A lot of eyes getting poked.Yeah, exactly.That thing where Mo takes a sledgehammer to Curly's head.You see that scene and you shout with laughter.
You're watching Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Leatherface takes a sledgehammer to some teenager's head and blood flies all over the camera and you scream. But you're responding fundamentally to the same scene.It's actually the same scene.
And I also think it's interesting that in both cases, you respond with this kind of reptile brain vocalization, something that's, that's deeper than, than words, a scream or a laugh.
I was describing this phenomenon or this response mechanism to someone recently I saw. A movie called In a Violent Nature.You haven't seen it yet, but I'm pretty excited for it.Which for many people listening, do not watch this movie.
This movie is not for most people, but I will talk to Joe here about it because it is for him.And there's a scene in that movie I was watching at home alone late at night and where I did the thing you just described where I went.
Oh, I just, I started making sounds that I was not expecting to, and I was not prepared to, but I could not help myself.
That is a mark, of course, of an effective moment because it cut right through your conscious, the fortress of your conscious mind and got to something deeper and has reminded you that we're animals on the face of the planet and terrible things can happen to us if we get in the way of a buzzing chainsaw.
It's a very odd thing to laugh to, but I just.
It is.It is.And it's weird.It's weird that we want this.It's weird that we want to spend a weekend with a frightening novel, someone facing a dreadful scenario.Why?
Why would we want to read these stories of someone lost in a dark basement with a vampire or something and something that's going to make it hard for us to sleep?
There is a writer from a Dutch writer named Matthijs Klassen who's written a book called How Horror Seduces that's one of the better nonfiction works on the genre in the last quarter century.
And he studies horror fiction from the viewpoint of evolutionary psychology.And his attitude about horror fiction is it's much like when children play hide-and-seek or tag.Because hide-and-seek and tag are play versions of predator and prey.
It's chasing and being chased.Children find this terrifically entertaining. But there have been times and places in history when knowing how to hide fast was extremely useful for small human beings.
And by the same token, I think that we read horror fiction as rehearsal, that we study horror fiction because in the safe playground of our imagination,
we can explore frightening questions about our own mortality and our own well-being that in everyday life we normally don't want to confront.
The example I use is there's obviously a terrific passion for stories about vampires of all sorts from, from glittering vampires to drooling Nosferatu.And spoiler alert, you're never going to face a vampire in real life.They don't exist.
No bloodsucker is going to come by your house in the middle of the night, you know, get a pint of blood.I'm slightly disappointed, but continue. I know, I know, I'm a heartbreaker.
But many people in their lives will wrestle with something like cancer.Cancer is an invisible adversary that wants to take your life and will weaken you day by day.And it's not clear how to fight it.
And it's frightening and puts you right up in the face of your own mortality.Cancer is a vampire.And when we read a story about people fighting fighting off a vampire.
I think that we're engaged in a kind of rehearsal about what sort of choices would I make if some invisible adversary was preying on my life and my time was running out.
Well, how would I want to be in the world if I felt, if I felt my strength ebbing away and was in this fight for my life that there was a good chance I might lose.
Also, what, what do moments of, of great stress reveal about a person?What would it reveal about me?Absolutely.
How would I cope?You know, and we're drawn to these questions because, because we want to prepare for the big moments ahead of time.
Before it's too late, we want to have some idea about what is admirable behavior, what is wholesome behavior, what is emotionally healthy behavior, and what's destructive and damaging and useless and counterproductive.
I think most people don't want to go out the Paul Reiser character in Aliens. definitely shutting doors on his fellows and running to save his own ass and everyone else be damned.One of the great cowards.
Yeah, one of the great cowards of horror cinema.
Whereas Bill Paxton, the Bill Paxton character in Aliens who seems like such a coward, actually has this moment at the end when suddenly he grabs his courage with both hands and he's standing there with the aliens running at him saying, you want some?
You want some too?How about you?And I think most of us feel like, OK, If I was in that scenario, I'd be just as terrified as him, but I'd hope in my last moments, I'd make my stand.
That's cool.Don't have me arrested, but I showed my child that movie at nine, I think he was.Wow.Really?He was super into it.Definitely heard a lot of words I would prefer that he would have not heard.
Gilbert, I've got protection services online too, and they were hoping they could organize a meeting with you.
Can we cut the call?I think we're done.So we're here to talk about horror fiction, but first I want to ask you, given the season, given that Halloween is part of the reason that we're having this conversation, what is Halloween for you?
The thing about Halloween is it's all about the buildup.The joy is all in the buildup.The leaves are turning, the mornings are crisp, nothing tastes better than the first cup of tea.And every Friday night you watch a new horror film, you plan ahead.
So you've got your whole horror film festival worked out.You, you pick some, some reading that's appropriate for the season. At the moment, I'm reading The Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood.
This is the first time I've read him since I was a teenager.It's all early 20th century.It has a kind of Edwardian, Victorian feel to it.So it's just right.It feels just perfect for the season.Tasteful, but frightening.
And then you have the big night and the kids go out and they get dressed and and run from house to house collecting candy.That's fun.That's fine.
But sort of like opening your, your presents on Christmas morning, the anticipation and the buildup is where all the real pleasure is.
That is perfectly put.I want to talk about some books that you would recommend for the season.You just mentioned the stories of, of Aldrin on Blackwood, but I know you have a few more that you wanted to dip into.
The first one is Lost Man's Lane by Scott Carson.Who is Scott Carson?
Not who he appears to be.Scott Carson is a pen name for the thriller writer Michael Carita.
Michael is probably best known for a novel called Those Who Under His Own Name called Those Who Wish Me Dead, which was made into an intense backwoods thriller starring Angelina Jolie.But he does write other novels under the name Scott Carson.
His Michael Corita thrillers are all mainstream thrillers set in the world as we understand it.But the Scott Carson books indulge in his love of supernatural fiction.Lost Man's Lane is probably the best of the Scott Carson books to date.
It is set, so it has, if you loved Stranger Things, You will love Lost Man's Lane.It has something of the same feel to it.It has it has some of the texture of a young adult novel but is also very much for grownups.Something like Stranger Things.
It is set not the 1980s like Stranger Things but at the at the tail end of the 1990s. and occasional historical events intrude in quite striking ways.They're all plopped in front of the TV on the day that Columbine happens and one of the most moving
moments in the story is when one of the parents says to the kids, we will never let this happen again.And that's the most frightening.That's the most frightening moment.Send a shiver right through me.
But this story is about a young man on the day he gets his driver's license.He's pulled over by the police for going just slightly over the speed limit. The cop who pulls him over is a terrifying bully and there's something off about him.
And gradually we are forced to conclude that he's had an encounter with a police officer who is 50 or 60 or 70 years out of time.Someone who has popped into the 1990s. from all the way back in the 1940s or 1950s.
And that this person who is hop skipping through time is also responsible for a number of murders.There's also, I mentioned it has a little bit of the quality of a young adult story.
There's also the best supernatural snake in this story since the snake in the Harry Potter books.What was the name of the snake?Nagini.
yes yes for for those of you who were missing okay so number one and number two on a list of two yes yeah yeah exactly it's sort of like it's sort of like jaws 2 is the absolute second best shark film
It's not actually a huge list.Yeah.So that's a great recommendation.The writing is light and witty.The pages turn swiftly.Because Michael is a thriller writer in the mold of Harlan Coben, or a Linwood Barclay.
He also has a little dash of Dennis Lehane in him.And because that's the world of writing he comes from, there are a lot of very satisfying twists, a lot of really stunning, oh, I can't believe that just happened.
And the art is in having those reversals and twists, and then getting to the end of the book and feeling like they were all earned.It wasn't just a twist to shock you and keep you moving.
Do you feel as someone who has read more than most perhaps and has written a lot and has to think about plotting and structure and twists and turns and surprises, do you find that when you actually encounter a genuine one in fiction, it remains delightful, the idea that someone can still come up with a twist that can confound even someone who's read hundreds and hundreds of books?
The really good ones, the really good ones are Miraculous.Probably the writer who is best at the mind-blowing twist is the crime and thriller writer Anthony Horowitz. Who also dabbles in horror.Some of his fiction is horror.
Has he written Sherlock Holmes books?Is that the same person?
He has.He wrote a book called Moriarty that I was reading aloud to my wife. And it had one twist that was so ingenious and so stunning.She didn't believe it had really happened.She thought I was making it up just to upset and perturb her.
And she snatched the book out of my hands to read it for herself to make sure it was really on the page.So that's the power of a really good twist.I think in All I can speak of is my own work when it comes to this sort of thing.I'm not an outliner.
I don't plan the books ahead.When I have pulled off a satisfying twist, the first person it surprised was me.Before it ever surprised a reader, it was a decision that one of my characters made or some kind of revelation where
I was completely stunned to, for that to just fly onto the page.
And how, how does that come to you?It's you're, you're sitting there and it, and it, it happens.Are you in the shower and it, are you on a walk?Is it?
It usually happens.It usually happens while you're writing.So it's usually, it's not something that just occurs to you while you're out for a walk.It's.
What happens, my view of it is, you have a situation, I wrote a story about a man who has a collection of disturbing artifacts, so he has a tray-panned human skull, he has a witch's confession, he has a snuff film, he has a whole cabinet of curiosities of disturbing artifacts, and he hears about a woman selling a ghost online, and he decides he has to have it first collection.
And if you ever read even a single horror story, you know what a terrible idea this is.But the guy buys it.In my case, it was this death metal rocker named Judas Kooling, who's in his mid-60s.And this was my first book, Heart-Shaped Box.
And when I wrote this story, I thought it was going to be a short story called Dead Man's Suit, because I was sure that he was the guy.When we first meet Jude, he's sort of an angry creep. and a belligerent creep.
And I thought he would buy this ghost online and it would eat him for breakfast by page 30 and I'd tell another short story for 500 bucks.But Jude turned out to be like a cockroach every time I stepped on him.
I'd lift my shoe and he'd scuttle away again.Every time he survived. It surprised me all over again.But the reason he surprised is because I was projecting myself into his psychology and his and his his views, his whole sort of persona.
And he kept making choices that were perfectly natural for him, but were surprising to me because they were never the choices that I would have made in the same situation.
So I think that's how, that's how a reveal or a shock can work if you don't outline for it.Maybe, maybe Michael outlines.I'd have to, I'd have to ask him.I've spoken to him a few times.
The next two books on your list, Fever House and The Devil by Name are by Keith Rawson.And the first one in particular has a classic. The classic conceit, which is that there's an evil severed hand.
We've all been there.Every scene, every chapter is more bananas than the one before.And somehow it all works and is impulsive and tremendously exciting.When Fever House begins, we're with two enforcers, two goons who work for a criminal syndicate.
And they've come to collect some money from a meth head. But when they go to collect, they discover a severed hand in his icebox.And the severed hand works on you a little bit like bath salts.
It's drug-like and has power over your reactions in your mind.There's something addictive about being close to it.But it also makes you incredibly violent.
It makes you want to hurt everyone around you and respond to the slightest setback by reaching for the closest baseball bat.
And on one endless rainy night in Portland, Oregon, this severed hand, which might be the severed hand of a devil, begins to move across Portland, move across the city, being passed from one person to another and creating more and more chaos.
It turns out that the severed hand is one of three remnants.There's also a tape recording that drives people crazy, a voice, tape recording of a voice that drives people crazy to hear it.Uh, there's an eyeball, uh, an eyeball, the devil.
And if you look, if you look into this eyeball, you see how you yourself will die.Somehow I knew this conversation would be very different from the interviews I've had throughout the rest of the year. Fever House is an ingenious work of writing.
It has the energy of early punk rock.It has something of a punk rock ethos.It's very in your face.It has a tremendous cast of characters.There is a pair of feds that read like a twisted version of Mulder and Scully.
From the X-Files, there is an angel that's being held under conditions that make Guantanamo Bay look like the Hilton.Did you say an angel?Yes, an angel.
And occasionally people with a secretive government agency take a hacksaw to his wings to force him to talk.That's fairly savage.I don't know what to make of this.This is all in one book? This is all in one book.This is all in one book.
There is a former rock and roll singer who is now almost incapable of leaving her apartment.And she's a bit like she's a bit like Patti Smith.She's she's tough and highly intelligent.And and but in this case, she's also crippled by her anxieties.
You have this whole world.It actually I have actually sometimes described it as the pulp fiction of horror novels. In the sense that we have this kaleidoscopic ensemble of characters on a whole spectrum of scumminess.
And all of them are whirling about in this one city, in this one incredibly rainy night, while our whole world spins out of control.And this hand spreads rage, madness, and chaos across Portland, Oregon.
The ending, the ending is so outrageous, I won't speak of it.Thank you.I will say, I will say the devil by name, the follow up presents us with a world that has been profoundly changed.
The fever house is set in our world as we understand it with the supernatural intruding on life as we know it.And the devil by name is something of the reverse where the real world is now intruding on
on a world that has been changed by the power of the supernatural.
That was a superb recommendation.I think you should do this for a living.Just recommend books.
I heard the exam was taken. But the last thing I'll say about it is because I think this matters to a lot of readers.
The last thing I'll say about is the pages of Fever House and the Devil by Name fly by so quickly you're in constant danger of paper cuts.And I think that matters because I think good horror fiction needs to move.Stuff has got to happen.
And there's certainly not time for a lot of introspection in the work of Keith Rawson.There's some though.
I feel like the next and last book you're going to talk about probably has a little bit of that.It's totally, completely different, quite serious, quite frightening.This is a book called The Reformatory.
Yeah, The Reformatory by Tananarive Due is just out in paperback.It also just won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. I think that's wonderful, but hardly surprising.
The Reformatory is probably one of the two or three best horror novels published in this century so far.It is set in the early 1950s in the South, and it's about a black kid who gets in a tussling match with a white kid after his sister is insulted.
This black kid winds up in a reformatory that is as terrifying as the Overlook Hotel and just as haunted.And gradually it becomes clear that if this kid doesn't get out of the reformatory in a hurry, he will not live to be 15.
It's the book is has a lot to say about the early civil rights movement and about what it was like to be black in the South in the middle of the 20th century.I thought I knew that story and it turned out there was a whole bunch I did not know.
It's also just a. Damn fine horror novel.Scary, zippy, full of fraught, tense set pieces.Our lead character encounters a number of ghosts in the reformatory and those encounters are chilling and also emotionally powerful.
These are moments that have something to say. about the tragedy of so many of the kids who were sent to, for example, the Dozier School of Boys for Boys, who never left, who walked into those, walked through that door and never walked back out.
And I, probably the highest praise I can give the book just about is, boy, it reads like a Stephen King novel.It's got that energy, that vividness, and that heart, and I was completely blown away.I thought it was,
probably a year ago, and I think about it all the time.
Those are all great recommendations.I have one more question for you that I didn't prepare you for, but I am curious, given that you have, you have kids, what, what do you think are good entry points?
Goosebumps aside, we all, we know, we know the work of R.L.Stine as a gateway drug for, for kids into horror, but what, what do you, what do you give younger people maybe who want to, that's not it, but who want to dip into, into this stuff?
I think the gateway drug for horror fiction for kids who are maybe 10, 11.And and to any parents listening, I am not the parent of your kid and you have to make your own decisions about where your kid is appropriate for.
So take any advice from me with a grain of salt.You're protected.Thank you.Yeah.You know what your kid can handle and I don't.
That said, there is there is a work of dark fantasy by a writer named John Blair's called The House with a Clock in its Walls.There was a film
haven't seen the film because because I desperately wanted to write the screenplay and I never got a chance to.And I'm so disgusted someone else got to have that pleasure instead that just I'm just rejecting the film.
I'm pretending the film doesn't exist on personal grounds.The book is a masterpiece of dark fantasy.
And I would look for I would look for any of the additions that were illustrated by Edward Gorey, who illustrated the original edition as part of the part of the joy of the book.
But it is about a young boy named Louis Barnevelt who, like so many kids in young adult novels, has been orphaned.And he goes to live with his uncle in, I want to say, New Zebedee, Connecticut.It turns out that his uncle is a sorcerer.
and that the house is full of magical artifacts.And in the course of trying to impress another boy, Lewis accidentally gets involved with necromancy and raises the spirit of an evil, terrible person.And I've read that book.
I've probably read House with a Clock on its Walls a dozen times over the course of my life.And I think it has some incredibly chilling scenes. but still within the range of what an imaginative, good-humored 11-year-old can cope with.
It's the masterpiece of fantasy that J.K.Rowling never wrote.I would put House of Clock and its Walt comfortably ahead of any of the Harry Potter novels.
Do you think John Belair's, and I read those books in those editions that you're describing, I remember the illustrations quite well.
I think there was one John Belair's book, not illustrated by Edward Gorey, that genuinely gave me bad dreams for years.I think it was from The Letter of the Witch in the Ring. But do you think John Bel Air's is still discussed these days?
I feel like you don't hear it as much about him as maybe you should.
I think he's mostly dropped out of the conversation and that's too bad.He's he's someone who deserves to be rediscovered because because the work is so great.
That book, in particular, The House with the Clock and Bulls, in particular, is really one of the classics of childhood fantasy, just as much as The Phantom Tollbooth. or the Black Cauldron, the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
It is in that class, that very elite class of lasting, timeless stories of childhood wonder, darkness, and the fantastic.And I'm pretty sure that House with a Clock on its Walls, at least, is still in print.
Yeah, I think so.I mean, I have seen the movie.You know, it stars Jack Black and Cate Blanchett.It's definitely made for a younger audience.
I just failed myself by admitting I know who's in it.What I meant to say is, there's a movie?Gilbert, I love you, don't you?Oh, I'm sure you're wrong.I don't think that happened.
Joe Hill.Thank you so much for coming on the Book Review Podcast to recommend a bunch of great scary books for the season.This was a real delight.Gilbert, it was a pleasure.Thanks for talking to me.
Those were my conversations with authors Stephen Graham Jones and Joe Hill.I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and I wish October could last forever.Thanks for listening.
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