Peter Galen Massey

Halloween is an excellent time to read a scary book, but you don’t have to read dreadful trash written by semi-literate hacks – although honestly, that can be pretty fun too.

So I’ve chosen my favorite works of “horror” from famous writers for this personal “best of” list, and treated each to my 100 Word Review format. Hope you find something in here you like!

Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights (1847). Heathcliff and Cathy’s fierce love survives betrayal and lives on beyond death in this superb novel. Wuthering Heights tests the reader’s patience through its long middle section, but rewards this patience in the end, when Heathcliff either embraces an ecstatic vision or succumbs to insanity.

Cormac McCarthy: Blood Meridian (1985). Sam Peckinpah meets the Old Testament in this nightmare Western by the author of No Country for Old Men. Although the story follows a young boy through the Indian wars of the 1850s, its central figure is “the judge,” who seems to be neither man, demon, nor god, but the embodiment of the endless violence fixed deep in the human soul.

Henry James: The Turn of The Screw (1898). A country house, two small children, a young governess, and the appearance of menacing apparitions. You’ve seen this set-up before. But James is a master storyteller, and the ambiguity at the center of his tale – whether the children are haunted by the ghosts of former servants or by their governess’ furious delusions – make this work particularly effective and frightening.

Bram Stoker: Dracula (1897). Stoker’s novel makes the list because it’s a vampire novel actually worth reading. Dracula is a predator, not a seducer, and Stoker’s work surprises by resembling a detective novel as much as it does a horror story.

William Shakespeare: MacBeth (1606). An obvious choice, but it bears repeating that a play featuring regicide (among other murders), witches, ghosts, sleepwalking, suicide, a severed head, and blood everywhere and continuous, is a good choice for Halloween.

Nikolai Gogol: The Nose (1836). In this Russian short story, a minor civil servant wakes up one morning to discover his nose has been replaced by blank skin as flat as a “freshly cooked pancake”. The missing nose is an embarrassment, an inconvenience, an annoyance, a source of curiosity or indifference, but never the cause of wonder or fear. Similar in many ways to The Metamorphosis, Gogol wrote this story nearly 80 years before the appearance of Kafka’s famous beetle.

Shirley Jackson: The Lottery (1948). Jackson’s much-anthologized short story packs a wallop with its renowned gimmick ending. Whether it’s anything more than Children of the Corn for the Proust set is another matter.

Matthew Gregory Lewis: The Monk (1796). For lurid trash with a pedigree, it’s hard to beat The Monk. The novel tells the story of a pious Capuchin who succumbs to lust and features black magic, rape, incest, torture, murder, and behind it all, the machinations of the Devil himself. The Monk is one of the key novels of the Gothic genre. It is also an urtext for the mass-market bestseller, in which a book that lacks coherent plot, internal logic, human insight, or a glimmer of writerly craft can become wildly popular by sheer force of sensationalism.