This week Billy asks: Recommend one horror novel for non-horror readers.
This is kind of difficult for me, because I don't really read that many horror novels and most of the ones I have are ones that I probably wouldn't recommend to someone. I read Orson Scott Card's Lost Boys, for example, but I'm not really sure if I would recommend it to someone. Its not a bad book, but it isn't all that good either and it is filled with Card's idiosyncratic asides concerning Mormonism that kind of weigh the book down.
There are some books that I have read that I am not entirely sure are horror. As an example, is Passage by Connie Willis a horror novel? It is about a person researching near death experiences and there is a murder, but it doesn't really seem to be "horror".
The only true horror novel that I have read that I could really recommend is Alan Dean Foster's novelization of Alien, although I do so with some caveats. The novel scared the bejesus out of me when I read it, but there are some qualifiers that need to be made. First, I read the novel when I was thirteen, and haven't read it again since. Second, when I read the novel, I was away from home and recovering from surgery on my hand, so I may not have been feeling all that safe and secure to begin with, and that probably affected my perception of the story.
That said, I'll still go with Alien as my horror novel recommendation.
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Have you seen the movie Alien? If so, which do you think is better, the movie or the book?
ReplyDelete@Billy B: I have seen the movie, but I didn't see it until some years after I read the book, so my comparisons may be warped due to this. My impression is that the book is scarier than the movie, in large part because the movie makes the crew's attempts to deal with the alien seem even more futile than they appear to be in the movie. As I recall, they try a couple more things in the book than they do in the movie, and they all fail miserably. Like I said, there was some time between when I read the book and saw the movie, so the difference in my impression may have been the result of simply being older for the one than I was for the other.
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