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AOTW: Beyond your own work (of course), what is your all-time favorite horror book and why? And what is your favorite book outside of the horror genre?
Whitley Strieber: My absolute, all-time favorite book outside of the horror genre is James Joyce's Ulysses. I have read and loved and savored that book all of my life. It is more than a novel, it is an interior country, and reading it is like walking in the land of dreams. I also love Anthony Powell's twelve novel series, A Dance to the Music of Time. I am just completing my second reading of this series with the greatest pleasure. Another book that has given me a lot of entertainment is Julian Green's The Distant Lands, the best novel ever written about the antebellum South.
I don't read too much horror, because it needs to get a lot better, just in general. Most attempts to scare people are very unsubtle and, ultimately, boring. I believe that Peter Straub is the best living horror novelist. Some of his recent work has been amazing. The Hellfire Club, for example, is a tremendous achievement, an absolutely stunning horror.
For my money though, Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis is the single scariest thing I have ever read. Why is this true? Sympathy for the roach. As you read the story, you cannot help but become more and more sympathetic toward Gregor Samsa. It is your own sympathy that generates the fear, for as you become more and more identified with this hopelessly destroyed outsider, your subconscious becomes convinced first that it could happen to you...then that it IS happening to you. That is horror at its best. Real horror, important horror, touches the reader in dark places he doesn't even know are there.
I think that the movies have also been a tremendously important part of horror, and even though this is slightly off the subject, I always like to mention the greatest horror film ever made because it is so totally unknown. It's called The Reflecting Skin, and it is a towering achievement. A group of wonderfully savage little boys are stalked by a black Cadillac full of vampires across a haunted prairie landscape in an absolutely riveting psychodrama on a level of emotional intensity that is seldom reached in any form of entertainment. A great and unrecognized achievement by writer/director Philip Ridley.
Tananarive Due: I have a tie for my all-time favorite horror book, and they're both by Stephen King: Pet Cemetery scared me the most, and I think The Stand was his best. Outside of horror --- although I've definitely heard some people term this book as horror because of the awful situation --- the novel I most admire is Toni Morrison's Beloved. More than a ghost story, Beloved is the best literary expression of what I believe it must have felt like to be a newly freed slave in America, with all that poison still coursing through one's system. It's brilliant. The movie version was so authentic that it left me with a stomach ache for two hours.
David Searcy: The Modern Library anthology, Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural whose only significant omission is "The Willows." Moby Dick --- I know, I'm sorry; it's like saying The Bible. But there you are. The only other candidate is Eleanor Cameron's The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet.
Darren Shan: Salem's Lot or It (both by Stephen King) are two of my favorite horror books. Other non-horror writers I love are: Kurt Vonnegut, Jonathan Carroll, John Steinbeck, Roald Dahl, John Irving, James Ellroy, and many, many more. Picking one single favorite book is very hard --- but as a child, my favorite was probably The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett.
R.L. Stine: Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. I grew up in the Midwest, and the story of a Midwestern boy who sneaks out of his house late at night and encounters an evil carnival really gave me chills. Besides Ray Bradbury, my favorite author --- and I know this is bad for my scary imagen --- is P.G. Wodehouse.
Ameilia Atwater-Rhodes: My all-time favorite single horror book... I'm not sure. If I had to pick, it would either be Stephen King's The Stand or Anne Rice's The Vampire Lestat. While plot can suck you into a book and make you read it, it's always the characters that make me love or hate a work. King's strength is in his characters --- vivid, diverse and interesting. Hands down, Lestat is my favorite of Rice's characters --- perhaps my favorite vampire in a published work (outside my own).
Outside the horror genre, the title of favorite has for a long time gone to Heinlin's Stranger in a Strange Land. I don't know why. I read my mother's copy a few years ago, and loved it. I read it again and again, and continued to love it.
Kelley Armstrong: My favorite horror book would have to be a tie between Stephen King's The Shining and Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire. Very different works that affected me in different ways, at different times in my life, so I can't hope to choose between them. I love The Shining because it deals with the horror of what a mind is capable of, how an ordinary man can turn into a homicidal maniac. For me, that's always been King's greatest gift --- the ability to find horror in the everyday. Interview with the Vampire was the first novel I read that showed the 'monster' as protagonist. Until then, I'd always viewed supernatural beings as the villain, the enemy of the 'good' humans trying to overcome them. Rice's work opened my eyes to a whole new possibility.
As for my favorite novel outside the horror genre, I'll have to go with the one I've read more often than any other. Watership Down by Richard Adams.
Douglas Clegg: One of my favorite novels is Set This House On Fire by William Styron. Also, The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford. The Great Gatsby. I find horror in all of them, by the way. I was schooled in dead people's fiction, and I find that I become a necromancer of them all the time: Arthur Machen, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Poe, Matthew Lewis, Charles Brockden Brown, Dickens, M.R. James, Shirley Jackson, and many others. My favorite current horror writers are many. I love King, Koontz, Straub --- the usual suspects --- but there are a lot of others (Bentley Little, Richard Laymon, T.M. Wright, et al) as well as folks from the small press who all have voices that bring different sensibilities to the tale of terror. But my all-time favorite horror novel is probably The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.
Christopher Schildt: Easily my favorite horror book is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It set the standard for the genre. Of course, the interpretation by Universal in its movie certainly influenced me. As to my favorite work of all time, that would have to be H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds.
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