Stephen King's Ten Favorite Horror Books or Short Stories

An interesting list I found at Google Books in a volume entitled Stephen King from A to Z. I've provide links for all the pieces, including links to their complete online texts if available.

Ghost Story (1979) - Peter Straub
Dracula (1897) - Bram Stoker
The Haunting of Hill House (1959) - Shirley Jackson
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde* (1886) - Robert Louis Stevenson
Burnt Offerings (1973) - Robert Marasco
"Casting the Runes" (1911) - M.R. James
"The Two Bottles Of Relish" (1932) - Lord Dunsany
"The Great God Pan" (1894) - Arthur Machen
"The Upper Berth" (1894) - F. Marion Crawford
"The Colour Out of Space" (1927) - H.P. Lovecraft

*The link is to a very thoroughly annotated version of the novella at Wikisource




Poster for the 1931 film version of Stevenson's tale.


(Anybody know the artist on this one? It's signed, but I can't quite make it out ("Norley", maybe?))


Ms. Jackson's long-awaited first volume in the Library of America

The Horror Writers Association's Horror Reading List

Well, this has to be one of the longest-gestating posts in the history of this blog, but now it's finally done. What I've done here is taken the reading list from the Horror Writers Association website and put the books on it in order from most popular to least popular. Why, you ask? Well, I really like the HWA's list, in spite of some strange quirks (the absence of anything authored by Edgar Allan Poe springs to mind as one of the stranger ones), but the fact that the list is in alphabetical order drove me crazy. For a list that's supposed to for the neophyte horror fan looking to expand his or her literary horizons, it seems to me that you would want to at least rank them in terms of availability if not necessarily merit. Hence the following, ranked in terms of popularity (and correspondingly, I assume, availability) based on the number of owned by the members of LibraryThing (that's the second number you see in parentheses; the first is original date of publication).


(01) Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818) (16,918)
(02) Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897) (16,332)
(03) The Stand by Stephen King (1978) (10,421)
(04) The Shining by Stephen King (1977) (9,057)
(05) The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886) (6,090)
(06) Pet Semetary by Stephen King (1983) (5,882)
(07) I Am Legend by Richard Matheson (1954) (5,622)
(08) Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury (1962) (4,820)
(09) Turn of the Screw by Henry James (1898) (3,065)
(10) The Metamorphosis and Other Stories by Franz Kafka (1915)(2,708)
(11) Relic by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child (1995) (2,386)
(12) The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959) (2,321)
(13) The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty (1971) (2,016)
(14) Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin (1967) (1,657)
(15) Lost Souls by Poppy Z. Brite (1992) (1,600)
(16) The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson (1949) (1,331)
(17) At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft (1931) (846)
(18) The Dunwich Horror and Others by H.P. Lovecraft (1963) (461)
(19) Sacrifice by Andrew Vachss (1991) (284)
(20) Dark Dance by Tanith Lee (1992) (257)
(21) Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber (1943) (249)
(22) Some of Your Blood by Theodore Sturgeon (1961) (237)
(23) Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood (1973) (209)
(24) Book of the Dead edited by John Skipp and Craig Spector (1989)(170)
(25) Songs of a Dead Dreamer by Thomas Ligotti (1989) (161)
(26) The Hungry Moon by Ramsey Campbell (1986) (155)
(27) Dr. Adder by K.W. Jeter (1984) (154)
(28) The Between by Tananarive Due (1995) (137)
(28) Vampire Junction by S.P. Somtow (1984) (137)
(30) The Hill of Dreams by Arthur Machen (1907) (127)
(31) Ghoul by Michael Slade (1987) (123)
(32) Skin by Kathe Koja (1993) (116)
(33) Tales of Horror and the Supernatural by Arthur Machen (1948) (109)
(34) The Ghost Stories of M.R. James (1973) (70)
(35) Sineater by Elizabeth Massie (1992) (52)
(36) Darklands (The Dark Country?) by Dennis Etchison (1982) (47)*
(37) Dead in the Water by Nancy Holder (1994) (22)
(38) Raven by Charles L Grant (1993) (21)
(39) Phantom by Thomas Tessier (1982) (14)
(40) Lovers Living, Lovers Dead by Richard Lortz (1977) (11)


*The listing for this on the HWA site is as "DARKLANDS by Dennis Etchinson". However, having been all over the interwebs in the last few days looking for said title, I am in fact pretty much convinced that no such beast exists, and the in fact the list's authors mean THE DARK COUNTRY, Etchison's acclaimed 1982 short story collection.

Free E-Book On Hemingway's Library

Found a link to a free e-book on Ernest Hemingway's library and since I am seemingly unable to post it on Facebook, I will put it up here instead.


Hemingway's Library

Goodbye, Summer Reading

Looks like my fellow LibraryThing members are (for the most part) putting aside the beach reads and cracking open a lot of Serious Literature for the fall.

WHAT LIBRARYTHING MEMBERS ARE READING - SEPTEMBER 2010:
1. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins 58
2. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson 41
3. The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson 34
4. The Passage by Justin Cronin 29
5. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert 21
6. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert 18
7. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins 17
8. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel 15
9. The Pillars of The Earth by Ken Follett 15
10. Freedom: A Novel by Jonathan Franzen 14
11. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson 14
12. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy 13
13. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë 13
14. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell 12
15. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee 12
16. Kraken by China Miéville 11
17. The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi 11
18. The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery 11
19. Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen 11
20. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak 11
21. Faithful Place by Tana French 10
22. The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton 10
23. Under the Dome by Stephen King 10
24. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace 10
25. The Help by Kathryn Stockett 10
26. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë 10
27. The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters 9
28. The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown 9
29. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins 9
30. Dracula by Bram Stoker 9
31. On the Road by Jack Kerouac 9
32. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley 9
33. Odyssey by Homer 9
34. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez 9
35. One Day by David Nicholls 8
36. The Children's Book by A. S. Byatt 8
37. The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver 8
38. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen 8
39. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami 8
40. A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin 8
41. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón 8
42. The Road by Cormac McCarthy 8
43. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov 8
44. Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer 8
45. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger 8
46. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling 8
47. Nightshade by Andrea Cremer 7
48. The Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare 7
49. The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova 7
50. The City & The City by China Miéville 7

Okay - Either It's Recommended Or It's Not

LibraryThing is one of my favorite sites on the Internets, but as of late their automatic recommendations feature has been driving me crazy. This is how it works: LibraryThing lets you catalogue all your books (up to 200 titles that is - if you want to catalogue more, there's a nominal annual fee) and then helps you find people that are interested in the same authors as you, gives you recommendations on what to read next (usually much more accurately than say, Amazon, unless of course you rate your whole library there), allows you to check the contents of your library from anything that has an Internets connection, including your mobile phone (a feature that would be quite helpful to me if I, in fact, owned a mobile phone), and so on and so forth. Basically, it's social networking for book geeks, and it's about goddamn time somebody thought of it, I say.

So the deal with the recommendations is this - you catalogue all (or most) (or some) of your books, and LibraryThing gives you back a big-ass (like 1,000 titles) list of recommended books that aren't already in your library. It's usually pretty accurate - for example, LT has recommended titles by authors like Salinger, Golding, and Bradbury, all of whom I like, and none of whom they know I've read. Having said that, there's sometimes a little systemic programming glitch that drives me crazy. To wit: every other time I log onto the site, I look down at the list of automatic recommendations and I'll see listed there, along with 2 or 3 other titles, Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche.


Cover courtesy Penguin Books. Cover image: Detail from Sunset, Mont Blanc by Wenzel Hablik, in the Wenzel Hablik Museum. Copyright Wenzel Hablik Museum, Itzahoe.

This is great, and I'm very flattered that LibraryThing thinks that I may be able to read the infamously difficult and ambiguous Nietzsche with something approaching comprehension, I wish they would decided whether they really want to recommend this to me our not, because the next time I log on to the site, it isn't there. I don't see it on the home page, and when I click on the link to the recommendations page, it's nowhere to be found; but then I log on again a couple of days later and it's back. A couple of days later, it's gone again. A couple of days later... you get the idea.

The fascinating thing to me is I'm now much more interested in reading this book than I would be if it had just come up as a recommendation and stayed there. But I still wanna know... what's the deal, LT? Am I worthy of reading Nietzsche or not? I guess I'll have to take the plunge and find out for myself.

The Experts Pick The Best Robert E. Howard Conan Stories

Hi, folks. I've been spending the last few weeks getting re-acquainted with the work of Conan creator Robert E. Howard, and I thought it might be fun to surf around the Internets and see if I could find if there's any kind of consensus regarding what are the best of his Conan tales. Basically what I've done here compiled the selections from three main sources: the stories that John Clute selected for the Penguin Modern Classics anthology Heroes in the Wind: From Kull To Conan; the stories selected for the two Best of Robert E. Howard volumes, edited by noted REH scholar Rusty Burke; and the top five stories selected by forum posters at Conan.com, the official REH website.

Here are the results:

Stories selected for HEROES IN THE WIND: FROM KULL TO CONAN (Penguin; John Clute, ed.):
TOWER OF THE ELEPHANT
QUEEN OF THE BLACK COAST
A WITCH SHALL BE BORN
RED NAILS

Stories selected for THE BEST OF ROBERT E. HOWARD VOLUME 1: CRIMSON SHADOWS and VOLUME 2: GRIM LANDS (Del Rey; Rusty Burke, ed.):
PEOPLE OF THE BLACK CIRCLE
BEYOND THE BLACK RIVER
TOWER OF THE ELEPHANT
RED NAILS

Top 5 REH Conan stories as selected by forum posters at Conan.com (and % of votes obtained):
1) BEYOND THE BLACK RIVER (19%)
2) HOUR OF THE DRAGON (12%)
3) RED NAILS (10%)
4) PEOPLE OF THE BLACK CIRCLE (9.5%)
5) QUEEN OF THE BLACK COAST (9.1%)

So the final tally is something like this -

On all 3 lists:
RED NAILS

Selected by Clute and Burke only:
TOWER OF THE ELEPHANT

Selected by Clute and posters only:
QUEEN OF THE BLACK COAST

Selected by Burke and posters only:
PEOPLE OF THE BLACK CIRCLE
BEYOND THE BLACK RIVER

Selected by Clute only:
A WITCH SHALL BE BORN

Selected by posters only:
HOUR OF THE DRAGON

So what do you think, Howard fans? Is this a pretty good sample of the best of REH's Conan, or is there some glaring omission that newbies should be made aware of? Let me know.

PS If you're rarin' to start reading some of these Conan yarns, most of Howard's fiction (as well as a decent chunk of his letters, poetry, essays, etc.) can be found online here.