Horror novels

You never cease to amaze me, SnowDog. I could somehow understand your insisting on King being a great author; after all, de gustibus non est disputandum. However, off-handedly dismissing all the other authors on the list is somewhat keen. Maybe you have read them all and thus you do have an opinion on them, but somehow I doubt that. You would at least have been a bit more careful in choosing your words then, because there is some really excellent horror in these novels. But no, you act like a stubborn fanboy who feels hurt because someone has a different opinion about his favourite author. That's a bit puerile, in my opinion.
"Number of sold books" does by far not equal "excellency", else authors like James Joyce, Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust would be the most bestselling authors in the world. Not that I think that I do have the final word on what "excellency" means. As I mentioned before, "de gustibus non est disputandum". Some people will be ultimately bored by the likes of Mann and Joyce. But I sincerely doubt any serious person would dismiss them as "bad authors". These people knew how to deal with language. As did the people on my list. And I even grant King that he knows how to deal with language. Yet I have my own opinions about his splatter feasts on the last pages of his novels, at least of those two I read so far (which didn't encourage me to rad more of him). In a way Kubin surpasses King when it comes to outright violence in his novel "Die andere Seite" ("The other Side"), but he does it with a grim kind of humour. Sentences like "So endete der Doktor als ein Spießbraten, und zwar als ein schlechter. Auf der einen Seite war er ganz verkohlt, auf der anderen Seite noch ganz roh. Nur in der Mitte war er schön knusprig." ("Thus the doctor ended as a barbecue, and as a bad one too. He was completely charcoaled on one side and almost raw on the other. Only in the middle was he nicely crisp.") are grim as well as funny, a quality which I miss in King.

stonebeard wrote: I personally don't think Frankenstein is a horror novel. It's intriguing, in a way, and perhaps was scary to people back when it was first released, but it's more philosophical/social commentary than anything else. In many ways, I think it's stupid. As another member said, Frankenstein's monster's transition from beast to enlightened thinker is so sudden, it's hilarious.

I disagree; "Frankenstein" is a classic horror tale, and it is still as scary today as it was back then. the splatter feasts which are offered to us as "horror movies" in cinema today may have immunized some people against the more subtle horrors of the original Gothic novel though.
as to the monster changing from beast to enlightened "suddenly": ahem, have you noticed the time span of Frankenstein?

stonebeard wrote: Compared to E.A. Poe tales, Frankenstein is like Sesame Street.

Interesting; I had no idea that Sesame Street was all about killing someone's whole family. I have to watch the program again.

BaldJean wrote: stonebeard wrote: Compared to E.A. Poe tales, Frankenstein is like Sesame Street. Interesting; I had no idea that Sesame Street was all about killing someone's whole family. I have to watch the program again.

No one plays Frankenstein's monster better than Peter Boyle

Poe's "Pym" is a fascinating novel, not really a horror novel, more of a fantasy work along the lines of Lovecraft stuff that came later. However, what I find truly disturbing isn't Poe's storyline, but the racism that seems encoded in it.

Edited by bluetailfly - July 23 2007 at 00:34

H.P. Lovecraft:: At the Mountains of Madness, altough i have read some other storys by him that was even more creepy. And yes some of the racist stuff in his novels are realy disturbing and i found it realy wierd at first that he culd write stuff like that and get away with it. But i gues thats how it was back in that time.  

I will go for a short story (not the excellent "The Picture of Dorian Gray", which I agree did not feel as a horror to me), Charles Dickens' "The Signal-man".

It is not a horror novel per se though, but it is one of the a handful of prose I have read that disturbed me at the time.

I have not read any Steven King, but from what I have heard, the film adaptation of The Green Mile is not completely different from the novel.  I have the novel upstairs somewhere, so I shall read that one day.


Edited by Geck0 - July 23 2007 at 10:31

bluetailfly wrote: BaldJean wrote: bluetailfly wrote: Poe's "Pym" is a fascinating novel, not really a horror novel, more of a fantasy work along the lines of Lovecraft stuff that came later. However, what I find truly disturbing isn't Poe's storyline, but the racism that seems encoded in it. this kind of racism was common belief back then. to the modern eye it may seem astonishing and even horrifying, but literally every white person was convinced of the "superiority of the white race" at that time. no-one would have understood the accusation of racism back then; this superiority was considered to be obvious   I beg to differ. I'm not taking a "modern eye" view here. This story was written when slavery was being hotly debated, debated because many, if not most, people believed slavery was wrong, and believed that the black race wasn't inferior or "evil" and deserved rights as fully invested citizens of the U.S. Other contemporaries of Poe's---Whitman, Emerson, Melville, Stowe, and many others---wrote stories that worked to tear down the southern racist belief systems (e.g., Benito Cereno, Song of Myself)   It seems to me that Poe was contributing and supporting, albeit in a rather indirect way, the self-serving, race-based belief systems that many southern slave holders (and others invested in the continuation of slavery) put forth to justify slavery. And it's some pretty ugly logic.   I think many people of Poe's time would have understood the accusation, and many would have been appalled by Poe's encoded racist viewpoint.

you are confusing two things with each other. certainly the abolishment of slavery was in discussion. but that did by no means mean that the white man was of the opinion he was not superior to the black. or did introducing a law for the prevention of cruelty against animals mean that animals suddenly became equal to us? no, the superiority of the white race was still firmly planted in the white man's brain at that time.
I am not trying to defend racism (Goddess beware; where would that leave me with my mixed gene pool?), but one really has to see the "racism" in Poe's writing with the right perspective. It is something else with the racism in the writings of Lovecraft though, because he was a writer of the 20th century.
just think about how long it took the civil rights movement in the USA needed before black people where considered to be equal. Martin Luther held his "I have a dream speech" in the 60s of the last ; he would not have needed to hold it if not most white people still had been of the opinion they were superior to the black at that time. and if you go into certain areas of the USA this mentality will still be planted deep inside the mind of people there

BaldJean wrote: stonebeard wrote: Compared to E.A. Poe tales, Frankenstein is like Sesame Street. Interesting; I had no idea that Sesame Street was all about killing someone's whole family. I have to watch the program again.

Obviously I'm talking about horror content. I got more chills reading the Raven, The Fall of the House of Usher, and the Tell-Tale Heart are so much more intense than any time in Frankenstein. Killing is not necessarily scary.