Any publisher willing to bring it back into print would be performing an invaluable service to literature. The only easy way of getting hold of it these days is, alas, in ebook form. I paid $60 for my mass-market paperback copy of The Cipher, which has never appeared between hardcovers. Koja strips the genre down to the basics: A black hole appears inexplicably in the floor of a couple's apartment in Detroit and dreadful things happen. It is essentially a pastiche of a Jamesian ghost story by a devoted fan, one who had read and watched so many frightening things that he could not use the bathroom alone at night and often woke his children to ask them about their day in the hope of relaxing.īy the '90s, I think it had become clear that the future of horror fiction did not lie in the direction taken by Stephen King and others of doorstopper-sized tomes filled with irritating details, sloppy prose, and too many explanations. The Green Man is something very different. Thanks to the efforts of NYRB Classics, his bitter and affectionate comic novels have made something of a comeback in recent years. Kingsley Amis is finally getting the reputation and coming out from under the shadow of his bratty, far less talented son, Martin. The best way of obtaining The Beckoning Fair One is to track down a copy of Anita Miller's wonderful anthology, 4 Classic Ghostly Tales, in which it appears alongside shorter masterpieces from Robert Hichens, Mrs. The truly frightening thing is that he is happy about it. He discovers - what else? - that he is not alone.
A young down-and-out novelist leases rooms in a decaying house, ostensibly in the hope of completing his masterpiece. These stories are not crude they are slow, subtle, and beautifully written. Oliver Onions' name is not one to conjure with in 2017, but he was among the greatest practitioners of the traditional English ghost story in its silver age. Mine is for subtle intimations of the other-wordly, for haunted houses and ancient forests, for ghosts and witches and demons, rather than for scientific experiments gone wrong or ax murderers or cannibal hillbillies. As with any genre of literature, preferences in horror fiction are largely a matter of taste. In any case, here are 10 lesser-known horror books - most but not all of them novels - that I heartily recommend to all my fellow enthusiasts. Or maybe that's all a lot of windy nonsense, and we enjoy this stuff because being scared is a lot of harmless fun. Why do we do it? Like Eve Tushnet, I have never come up with a "grand theory of horror," but I would observe that these stories serve to remind ludicrous moderns that we are creatures of spirit as well as matter, that there are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in what passes for our philosophy, that the past will never leave us till the last trumps blow. Millions of people could tell similar stories, and just as many will listen on, baffled by our addiction to being frightened.
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