Horror Another 100 Best Books

Horror Another 100 Best Books

Edited by Stephen Jones & Kim Newman

A couple of months ago, I posted Horror 100 Best Books. I finally got my hands on the sequel Another Horror 100 Best Books. Of course, I wanted to share this list with all the devoted horror enthusiast on the web. However, I recommend borrowing or buying a copy to thoroughly enjoy. Further delving into the book, you might stumble across your favorite author writing an explanatory essay about one of the books listed. Alternatively, get it for the list of recommended readings.
Again, this is not a definitive ranking of the best horror novels but should be approached as a guide.  

The List:

1. The Revenger's Tragedy by Cyril Tourneur

2. Pikovaia Dama/The Queen of Spades by Aleksandr Pushkin

3. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

4. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë 

5. Rekopiz Znaleziony w Saragossie/ The Manuscrit Found in Saragossa by Jan, Count Potocki

6. New Grub Street by George Gissing

7. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

8. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells

9. The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

10. The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" by William Hope Hodgson

11. Le fantôme de l'Opéra/ The Phantome of the Opera by Gaston Leroux

12. Fantômas by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain

13. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward by H. P. Lovecraft

14. They Return at Evening by H. R. Wakefield

15. Creep, Shadow! by A. Merritt

16. The Trail of Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer

17. The Devil Rides Out by Dennis Wheatley

18. The Haunted Omnibus edited by Alexander Laing

19. The Edge of Running Water by William Sloane

20. L'Étranger/The Stranger by Albert Camus

21. Sleep No More: Twenty Masterpieces of Horror for the Connoisseur edited by August Derleth

22. Lost Worlds by Clark Ashton Smith

23. Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales by Henry S. Whitehead

24. Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural edited by Herbert A. Wise and Phyllis Fraser

25. The Opener of the Way by Robert Bloch

26. Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake

27. Carnacki the Ghost-Finder by William Hope Hodgson

28. Darker Than You Think by Jack Williamson

29. Tales of Horror and the Supernatural by Arthur Machen

30. Nineteen Eighty-four by George Orwell

31. House of Flesh by Bruno Fischer

32. Fancies and Goodnights by John Collier

33. The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson

34. The Third Ghost Book edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith

35. The Body Snatcher by Jack Finney

36. The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

37. The Hunger and Other Stories by Charles Beaumont 

38. The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat

39. The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham

40. A Scent of New-Mown Hay by John Blackburn

41. A Stir of Echoes by Richard Matheson

42. The Weirdstone of Brinsingamen by Alan Garner

43. Tales of Terror edited by Charles Higham

44. Some of Your Blood by Theordore Sturgeon

45. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

46. The Case Against Satan by Ray Russell

47. Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

48. The Collector by John Fowles

49. Who Fears the Devil? by Manly Wade Wellman

50. A Wrinkle in the Skin by John Christopher

51. Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin

52. The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural edited by the Editors of Playboy

53. Pages from Cold Point by Paul Bowles 

54. Outer Dark by Cormac Mccarthy

55. The Book of Skulls by Rober Silverberg

56. Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon

57. The Night Stalker by Jeff Rice

58. Blood Sport by Robert F. Jones

59. Nightshade by Derek Marlowe

60. Peace by Gene Wolfe

61. The Year of the Sex Olympics: Three TV Plays by Nigel Kneale

62. Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber

63. The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan

64. Darkness Weaves With Many Shades by Karl Edward Wagner

65. The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter

66. Sweeney Todd by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler

67. The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen by Elizabeth Bowen

68. Dark Forces: New Stories of Suspense and Supernatural Horror edited by Kirby McCauley

69. Tales from the Nightside by Charles L. Grant

70. The Thirst by Robert R. McCammon 

71. The Face That Must Die by Ramsey Campbell

72. The Woman in Black by Susan Hill

73. Pet Sematary by Stephen King

74. Clive Barker's Books of Blood Volumes One, Two, and Three by Clive Barker

75. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind

76. Finishing Touches by Thomas Tessier

77. Strange Toy by Patricia Geary

78. The Dark Decent edited by David G. Hartwell

79. Misery by Stephen King

80. The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris

81. Prime Evil edited by Douglas E. Winter

82. By Bizarre Hands: Stories by Joe R. Lansdale 

83. The Grotesque by Patrick McGrath

84. Carrion Comfort by Dan Simmons 

85. From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell

86. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

87. Lost Souls by Poppy Z. Brite

88. The Course of the Heart by John Harrison

89. Flicker by Theodore Roszak

90. X, Y by Michael Blumlein

91. Skin by Kathe Koja

92. Throat Sprockets: A Novel of Erotic Obsession by Tim Lucas

93. The Off Season: A Victorian Sequel by Jack Cady

94. The Nightmare Factory by Thomas Ligotti

95. A Sight for Sore Eyes by Ruth Rendell

96. Reprisal by Mitchell Smith 

97. A Haunting Beauty by Sir Charles Birkin

98. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

99. Feesters in the Lake & Other Stories by Bob Leman

100. More Tomorrow & Other Stories by Michael Marshall Smith

Reading on your iPhone

If you are an iPhone user, and love reading, you will be delighted with version 2.0 apps. A long time ago, I was a PC user, but after my hard drive crashed, and I lost irreplaceable files, I switched to an Apple and never looked back. The only thing that I miss about a PC is Microsoft Reader. Nevertheless, I was still able to use Reader with my Hewlett Packard phone. After giving up my HP phone for an iPhone, I soon started to miss my digital reading device on the train, or while stuck in traffic.

Now iPhone has different apps that can read electronic books. The free application eReader only read books bought or uploaded from their online eBookstore. Their site does provide a few free books. Another application BookShelf cost $9.99. It supports uploading your own electronic books in various formats such as.txt, .html, .fb2, .pdb, .prc, and, .mobi. However, both apps lack the ability to read .lit format, which is a Microsoft Reader format. Anyway, I am on a budget and I do not want to buy an app to read public domain books, which is not compatible with the .lit format (University of Virginia Library has many free electronic ebooks in .lit, pdb and html). Searching for an app that would read .lit, I found Stanza. Right now Stanza is free on Beta version. Their website LexCycle, has a free library of public domain books that can be uploaded to the iPhone once downloaded to a Mac. Furthermore, there is no restriction where to obtain electronic reading material. Stanza’s supports numerous formats.

Easton Press (50) Great Books of the 20th Century

Yet again another list.... 

1. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin

2. Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges

3. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

4. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

5. The Stranger by Albert Camus

6. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

7. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

8. Light in August by William Faulkner

9. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

10. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

11. The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene

12. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

13. Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

14. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

15. The Ambassadors by Henry James

16. Ulysses by James Joyce

17. The Trial by Franz Kafka

18. On the Road by Jack Kerouac

19. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

20. Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler

21. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence

22. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

23. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

24. The Call of the Wild by Jack London

25. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

26. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

27. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham

28. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

29. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

30. Beloved by Toni Morrison

31. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

32. Nineteen Eighty-four by George Orwell

33. Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

34. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

35. Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

36. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

37. All Quiet On The Western Front by Remarque

38. Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth

39. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

40. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

41. Rabbit, Run by John Updike

42. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

43. The Color Purple by Alice Walker

44. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren

45. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

46. The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells

47. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

48. Night by Elie Wiesel

49. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

50. Native Son by Richard A. Wright

Biting into another vampire novel, and it is oh so good!

Fevre Dream

by George R. R. Martin

There are a plethora of vampire novels out there sitting on the shelves of bookstores and libraries, and it is a difficult task to distinguish between the humdrum and phenomenal. Lately I've been googling noteworthy vampire novels. I wanted to get past the the obvious great vampire novels like Stoker's Dracula, King's Salem's Lot, Rice's Interview with the Vampire, and Simmons' Carrion Comfort. After some searching, I discovered science fiction writer George R. R. Martin's vampire novel Fevre Dream. 

Fevre Dream is an outstanding vampire novel.  The story is unique and wonderfully written capturing the steamboat era's opulence, and abject imperceptibility in conjunction with slavery. From the first chapter Martin seizes my attention. There is no such thing as slow pace in this novel. The suspense is unbearable; I could not read fast enough!

Without revealing too much, the vampires in Fevre Dream are unique. They are an entirely different species. Martin explains the primordial history of the vampire, which makes reasonable sense. The book has a strong undertone theme of morality. The plot is found on an analogous correlation between master/slave and predator/prey. Simply, societies hierarchical system is questioned. Two powerful vampires struggle. Joshua wants to change the way his people live, and Damon sees nothing wrong with the old days even though the red thirst is conquered. Abner, a man of integrity is Joshua's only hope.   

If you're a horror enthusiast, this should be on your list of "to read" books (on the top). I loved it so much, I bought the signature edition. 

To the left is the signature edition, which is limited to 448 copies.

Duma Key

by Stephen King

I went to Florida last week, and I took along Stephen King's Duma Key, which is his most recent publish novel.  It took me a while to read through Duma Key.  The lengthiness of the book, which is a little over 600 pages was not the cause of my slow reading pace, and most definitely the contents of the novel was not the reason but rather my lack of focus.  It was a perfect book to read during my vacation located close to the beach, because the story takes place in the Florida Keys and many of the scenes have an eloquent description of the beach and its sunrise. Stephen King was able to make a tranquil environment of the beach into a place of peril.    

Like in many Stephen King novels the characters and specially the protagonist are well developed.  The novel starts of quite slow paced, but those who are patient will be rewarded. At first, minor supernatural occurrences take place that pique curiosity, and then a bolt from the blue, a paramount ghastly occurrences happens.  Afterward there is a constant contend against the strange force from Duma Key. 

Synopsis:

The novel is narrating through the protagonist perspective, who is Edgar Freemantle. Freemantle struggle physically and emotionally after a calamitous accident.  He is propelled to start a new life, and that new life starts on Duma Key.  However, strange phenomena transpire as he starts a new vocation as an artist.  

Duma Key is so intriguing that after the conclusion, I still wanted to read more about Freemantle.  

What to read?

Tired of trying to find the next enjoyable read in your favorite genre? I've felt that way through the years, but for the past 2 years I've found help in my quest of what next to read.

Suzanne Beecher, a book lover among other things has numerous email book clubs. The email book clubs differ depending on the genre. These are the genres available: nonfiction, business, fiction, good news, horror, mystery, prepublication, romance, teen, science fiction, audio books, classics club, read-it-first from St. Martin's, Christian books, mysteries and thrillers from Bantam. Once signed up to a particular club, emails will be sent during the weekdays. The emails will include a 5-minute sample of the novel highlighted that week, and by the end of the week you should have read at least the first few chapters of the novel, which should allow you to deduce whether the book is worthy for furthering reading. The email also contains a short “Dear Reader” column that is written by Suzanne, and is also pleasant to read.

Okay, signing up is simple, just go to: Dear Reader

Then pick a club, enter your email address, which is where you would like to receive the emails and your zip code. Also, don’t worry about junk mail. I’ve never received any solicitations relating to my Dear Reader book clubs. 

Keep reading my small audience. I hope this helps you, as much as it as helped me.