The Books That Taught Me To Love Horror Part I: Single Author Story Collections

These are all obvious choices and big names, but there's a reason these guys are big names. They're the best! In general I'll be focusing more on multi-author works than single author collections--I love the latter, but it feels more sporting, sometimes, to have to stumble across their work 'in the wild,' rather than find the stories already collected for you in a literary game preserve. 

Most of these I encountered sometime before my first year of high school. This isn't a list of my all-time favorite single-author horror collections (there's no Charles Birkin or Dennis Etchison or Thomas Ligotti, for example)--this is introductory stuff.  For anyone reading this who doesn't think of themselves as interested in horror, I'd recommend picking one of these up--especially the Bradbury. 

Part II coming later today--that's when we'll get into anthologies and things will get more idiosyncratic. 

1) The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury

 

Impact: My dad has never been a horror guy, but he has read some (mostly King), and when he saw that his fraidy-cat son was diverging from his father's fraidy-cat footsteps to walk the path of horror, he tried to guide me a little. One suggestion was The Illustrated Man, which he pitched as "there's a story in here where a man builds robots based on Edgar Allan Poe stories and they kill people". Be still, my heart. 

Anyway, this was my first prolonged exposure to Bradbury, and I fell in love with Bradbury the horror writer, Bradbury the fantasist, Bradbury the science fiction visionary, Bradbury the social critic, Bradbury the all-American nostalgist, Bradbury the chronicler of intimate human drama...

Stories That Stuck With Me: "The Long Rain", "Usher II," "Kaleidoscope", "The Last Night of the World"

2) Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe

 

Impact: Poe was the first horror writer I became obsessed with. His macabre sensibilities, his fevered depictions of madness, and his very particular sense of humor (Poe wrote about as many funny pieces as he did scary ones) have all stuck with me, as they have generations of writers (and not just genre writers) since then. I think Poe is the one who taught me to revere the short story itself as a form. His powerful use of repetition influenced some of my tastes in poetry, as well.

Stories (and Poems) That Stuck With Me: "Hop-Frog", "Diddling" (no, not that, it's a very funny essay about confidence schemes), "Ulalame", "Masque of the Red Death", "Berenice". But, you know, all of them, really.

3) Skeleton Crew by Stephen King

Impact: I'd already read Night Shift, and enjoyed it, but those stories always seemed to me to take place in a dark, grim, unpleasant world. Skeleton Crew popped with color and energy and verve, and you never knew what was going to come next. This was also one of the first collections I read with author's notes on the stories, something I think enhances the reading experience.

Stories That Stuck With Me : "Paranoid: A Chant," "The Monkey," "The Jaunt," "Survivor Type"

4) Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre by HP Lovecraft

        

Impact: I'd checked out various Lovecraft collections from the library. They were all the Del Ray/Ballantine books with the incredible Michael Whelan covers--gruesome images in grey with little red grace notes--but this one combined them all into one big glorious mural. And that was just the cover. As for the stories themselves, they were like nothing I'd ever read before (other than in the other Lovecraft paperbacks). The ideas, the language, the world-building...his is probably still the longest shadow cast over Anglo-American horror fiction today.

Stories That Stuck With Me: "The Colour Out of Space," "The Dunwich Horror," "The Picture in the House"

5) Nightmare at 20,000 Feet by Richard Matheson

       

Impact: I'd seen Matheson's Twilight Zone episodes and read the scripts, and they were generally the best of the bunch. Still, the Twilight Zone material was tame compared to the rest of what confronted me. Stephen King's introduction mentions how Matheson scraped away the Weird Tales purple prose like so many barnacles, and in its place infused sexuality, the result being "gut-bucket short stories that were like shots of white lightning." This was one of my first introductions to "modern" horror: Stripped-down stories that sometimes use their efficiency to be shockingly direct, and other times exploit that to create uneasy spaces for ambiguity and implication.

Stories That Stuck With Me: "The Likeness of Julie," "The Distributor," "Legion of Plotters", "Dance of the Dead"

6) Collected Ghost Stories by M.R. James

                 

Impact: Cemented my prejudices in favor of the short story as the vehicle for horror fiction, and taught me the use of well-placed humor to in some cases leaven and in other cases heighten the horror. James' stories demonstrate how horror can be classy and restrained, and then still sucker-punch you with a well-timed element of viscerally horrific imagery or the monstrous appearance of a grotesque apparition. These stories paved the way for my appreciation of Ramsey Campbell and, later, Robert Aickman.

Stories That Stuck With Me: "Casting the Runes," "The Mezzotint," "The Haunted Dolls-House"...all of them.