Horror.

I can be a real snob. I hate to admit that, but it's the truth; my first instinct is to look down my nose at things that are "popular" (reality TV, Facebook, Star Wars movies, and the like). This attitude has carried over into my reading life as well. Case in point: Stephen King. He might very well qualify as the world's most popular author and yet until very recently I'd never read a word he'd written. Thankfully, I'm aware that my sometimes uppity nature gets in the way and I take steps to work around it. With that in mind, I'm happy to report that I just finished 'Salem's Lot by Stephen King and I'll tell you something that you already know: this guy can write!

Ben Mears, a successful author, returns to the quiet little New England town of Jerusalem's Lot ('Salem's Lot, for short) in order to work on a new novel and hopefully lay some childhood demons to rest. He soon meets and becomes involved with local beauty Susan Norton, much to the disapproval of her mother and her former boyfriend, Floyd Tibbets. Meanwhile, the Marsten House, the dilapidated but imposing structure that that keeps an eery watch over the town, is after many years reoccupied by a pair of eccentric antique dealers, the urbane Mr. Straker and the unseen Mr. Barlow. Suddenly, strange things start to happen. Dogs are impaled on cemetery fences, people become severely ill and then quickly die, and other people...living and dead...disappear outright. Soon it becomes evident to Ben, Susan and a small group of comrades that vampires are in their midst and that the new residents of Marsten House are somehow at the center of the increasingly sinister happenings in the rapidly dwindling town of  'Salem's Lot.

I was surprised how much I liked Stephen King's writing style. The prose is stylish without being contrived or self-consciously hip. The plot unfolds fast enough to keep one's interest but not so fast that we don't get to know the characters; indeed, I was impressed with the level of character-development in this book. As for the horror quotient, I was told by a Stephen King aficionado that this book is tame in comparison to some of his other work (such as Pet Sematary, a book that is now on my list). And its true that 'Salem's Lot is rarely bloody or graphically violent. But that doesn't mean that it's not scary. "Ominous" and "foreboding" are words that well-describe this book; you get this gradually escalating sense of doom as the events unfold and that, I believe, is what makes this book really creepy.

Long story short: I thoroughly enjoyed 'Salem's Lot and look forward to my next excursion into Stephen King's psyche. I hope you check him out, too. 

But I still hate reality TV...  

Who is the Master of the Horror Genre? Edgar Allan Poe. Nearly 165 years after he wrote his final tale, he is still loved--in fact, he is more popular than when he was alive. Nobody does tales of darkness, mystery, and the macabre like Poe. Nobody.

Edgar Allan Poe's Tales Of Death And Dementia is a graphic novel illustrated by Gris Grimly. It is the second Poe collection Grimly has done: the first, Edgar Allan Poe's Tales Of Mystery And Murder, is also awesome. I am looking forward to his third, and I hope more. His illustrations are just as creepy and understated as Poe's tone which adds a beautiful unique dimension to the tales. The tales have been slightly "nipped and tucked" from their original text, but nothing is lost. The tales are just as wonderfully creepy as they were when written.

"The Tell-Tale Heart" has to be one of the creepiest tales ever written. Written from the perspective of a deranged, cold-blooded killer, it will creep you out. As a child, this tale absolutely terrified me; as an adult, it still gets me, even though I have read it many, many times. The rest of the collection includes the scary yet humorous "The System Of Dr. Tarr And Professor Fether," the tragic "The Oblong Box,", and the weird and disgusting "The Facts In The Case Of M. Valdemar."

A wonderful set of classic tales to revisit next the fireplace on a cold night or maybe all alone in your room on a windy night. The wonderful illustrations make this collection of Poe's dark tales even darker. A book that anyone young or young at heart will enjoy...tick tock, tick tock....

A ridiculous number of vampire books have been published lately.  Good ones and not so good ones.  I haven't read much horror in recent years, but when I read about a movie adaptation of a Swedish vampire novel called Let Me In, I checked my usual review sites to see if the novel was any good.  The tone of the reviews in general was somewhat strange: the book was highly recommended, but in serious, intense terms.  Not the "oh, I loved it!" kind of response at all. 

So, I borrowed the book and took it home.  I read, like many of us, right before I go to sleep at night.  Working life has many dictates, and this is one of them.  This circumstance was unfortunate, which I sensed long before I could finally put the book down that first night.  This book is scary.  I feared falling asleep.  I feared shadows in the corners. 

Let Me In, in the best tradition of horror, includes very effective literary techniques (foreshadowing, pacing of the plot, allusion, etc.) for heightening the reader's susceptibility to the shock of the experiences Oskar, a 12-year old boy living in suburban Stockholm, endures.  Oskar is a bit of a dork.  He's socially inept, is overweight, and a favorite target of his school's bullies.  When one of the bullies ends up dead, Oskar is equally horrified and relieved.  A new neighbor has moved into Oskar's building about this time; a girl and a man who could be her father.  Eli doesn't go to school, though, and Oskar only sees her at night.  Oh, yeah, she's definitely a vampire.  Lindqvist develops Eli, Oskar and the other characters not as types, but to the point that you know them like you know real people.  And the things they do are unspeakably grotesque, but for reasons we all understand: love, fear, hunger and the need to belong.  These are vampires of the Anne Rice variety, once human and now monsters of appetites.  Eli befriends Oskar, cares for him as no one else does, and for that he keeps her secret and accepts her terms for their relationship without dispute.  And ghastly terms they are.

Yeah, I know.  It's another vampire book.  But before you roll your eyes, sigh, and dismiss The Reformed Vampire Support Group as an unnecessary addition to an already overcrowded genre, you might want to give this one a try.  It's smart, it's funny, and it definitely doesn't subscribe to the dark-n-sexy goth chic you find in most vampire novels.

Nina, perpetually stuck at age 15, was turned into a vampire in 1973 and she's been suffering ever since.  The constant nausea and fatigue alone are enough to drive her mad, not to mention having to dispose of all those guinea pig carcasses every week.  Add to that the mundane task of trying to make a living when you are essentially dead between the hours of sunup to sundown and you've got a fairly miserable existence.  No surprise, then, that all eleven of Australia's vampires meet every Tuesday for a weekly support group; being a vampire is stressful. 

And, until now, life as a vampire has also been fairly mundane.  But when one of them turns up dead at the hands of an obvious vampire killer (who else would use a silver bullet and a stake through the heart?), Nina and her friends must find out who killed him unless they want to be next.

(FYI, this is a great audio book!)

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.  Never was this truth more plain than during the recent attacks at Netherfield Park, in which a household of eighteen was slaughtered and consumed by a hoarde of the living dead."

And so begins a very warped retelling of the Jane Austin classic entitled, appropriately enough, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance - Now With Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem.  In this version, however, the sleepy village of Meryton has been overrun by a mysterious plague that turns the normally quiet and well-mannered dead into flesh-eating zombies of the most unpleasant sort.  Thankfully, due to the forward thinking of their father, the Bennett sisters are highly trained killers.  Having studied with Shaolin Masters and skilled at slaying zombies in a variety of ways, they are now the primary protectors of Meryton.  Elizabeth, in particular, likes nothing more than a sharp blade for taking out the "unmentionables" during a sporting good fight.

While purists may scoff and take offense at such sacrilege, those willing to loosen up and have a little fun with their classics will delight in seeing Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy join forces to fight the never-ending onslaught of the undead.  Never read the original Pride and Prejudice?  No problem!  With almost all the original text intact in the zombiefied version, now you have!   Well, sort of...

I have a killer commute and I don't care. What's my secret? Here it is: whenever I'm stuck in traffic (which is a regular occurence) I pop in a KCLS audiobook (i.e., Book-On-Tape) and enjoy the drive, rather than descend into gridlock-induced frustration. Let's face it: you can only listen to so much classic rock, whereas there is a nearly limitless supply of KCLS audiobooks to make the time go by in a flash.

Case in point: The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. This elegant debut novel, over 10 years in the making, is a multi-generational 20th-century search for Vlad the Impaler, the sadistic medieval ruler of Wallachia (today a province in Romania) who was the inspiration of the Dracula legend and that, in this book, still walks the earth today with his undead minions, looking for blood. There are three main threads within this lengthy work. In the early 1970s, Paul, an American diplomat in Amsterdam, recounts to his teenage daughter the 20-year-old story of the mysterious disappearance of and his desperate search for his beloved mentor, Professor Rossi, guided by a bundle of ominous and seemingly fantastic letters written by Rossi twenty years before that, in the 1930s. These letters describe the sudden appearance of a book, blank except for an ornate woodcut on the cover, depicting a dragon. Unlocking the secret of this book ultimately leads first Rossi, then Paul (along with his partner, Rossi's estranged daughter Helen), and finally Paul's own daughter in search of the resurgent "Drakulya." Their quest to solve the riddle of the book and the disappearance of several characters leads the protagonists not only across time but also across the European continent, from Oxford to Istanbul with stops in Amsterdam, the French Pyrenees, Budapest, Bulgaria and (of course) Romania.

What made this book especially appealing to me was that, instead of reading it, I listened to it. Audiobooks have the capacity to really bring to life a good book and this one is especially successful. The narrators are Justine Eyre and Paul Michael, each of whom spoke with numerous distinct voices to match the abundance of characters. Justine Eyre is very believable as the narrator, Paul's daughter, though a bit less so with her cockney-sounding portrayal of her traveling companion, Barley. Paul Michael is especially effective in his portrayal of Paul, Professor Rossi, Helen (who is credibly feminine) and finally Vlad himself, who by the way bore no audible resemblance to Bela Lugosi. There were no sound effects or musical passages...just the voices from these two gifted narrators. And that was more than enough.

Part horror tale, part historical fiction, part travelogue and part Da Vinci Code-esque mystery, Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian is a unique blend of genres that succeeds on every level. Give it a listen.