In October, many of us storm the streaming apps and our local theaters looking for horror options. Sometimes we’ll go for something familiar, like Halloween or A Nightmare on Elm Street, and sometimes we’ll get a little more niche, maybe Barbarian or The Empty Man. But there’s also plenty for audiences to love in a good horror novel. Personally, nothing hits me harder than a long, spooky read on a crisp autumn night.
For example, one of my favorite novels is Salem’s Lot, a 1970s Stephen King classic about a small town in Maine with a creepy old house where townsfolk start falling suspiciously ill. I don’t want to say too much, except to say that the ideal way to experience the story is through the pages of a book. There’s a new adaptation of the novel on Max right now and it just doesn’t deliver the goods. A 2-hour movie simply doesn’t have the time to fully develop the characters or their relationships, so when the true horrors begin, the audience simply doesn’t care the way King makes readers care in his books. Some other King classics worth a read this October? You can’t go wrong with Carrie, his first published novel, or Pet Sematary, which earns the title of scariest King book in my estimation.
If you’re looking for more classic literature, Bram Stoker’s Dracula is in the public domain, meaning anybody with a Kindle or other e-reader can download it for free right now. Ditto Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. And who’s complaining about reading Dracula or Frankenstein with some hot apple cider on a stormy night? Not me.
Finally, if you’re looking for something more current, one horror author who has been churning out some great books lately is Grady Hendrix. His title The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires kept me absolutely rapt the whole time, and I’m planning to read his 2016 novel My Best Friend’s Exorcism very soon. Another horror novelist who has been hitting the New York times bestseller list in recent years is Stephen Graham Jones, author of I Was a Teenage Slasher, The Only Good Indians, and more.
**My point is this: Don’t limit your horror-mania to just the big screen or the small screen. Even famous legacy titles like Salem’s Lot or Frankenstein can take on a whole new depth when you allow yourself to get lost in the original works.
Leave a Reply