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Horror Author Roundtable
3.
AOTW: What horror authors inspired you or continue to inspire you?
Fred Saberhagen: There's Poe, first and always. And of course he writes not only horror, but science fiction, mystery, and above all poetry --- and sometimes seems to do them all at once. I felt compelled to use him in a story, and did, in The Black Throne, with the late Roger Zelazny, soon to be reissued by Baen. There's Lovecraft --- but only when I want something to put me to sleep.
Geoffrey Huntington: Stephen King, Tom Tryon, Marilyn Ross, Bram Stoker, Anne Rice, Henry James, Curt Siodmak.
Gregory Maguire: For nail-biting suspense, I couldn't get enough of Turow's Presumed Innocence and Harris's Silence Of The Lambs, but also Hilary Mantel's book set in Saudi Arabia --- the name escapes me at the moment --- was grimly creepy. None of these books involve the supernatural, but as we have learned, the everyday world is horror enough these days.
Suzy McKee Charnas: The oldies: Arthur Machen, M.R. James, F.E. Benson, Edgar Allen Poe, some Hawthorne, some Melville (not strictly horror authors, but they certainly wrote literature that would be marketed as horror today). I consider Thomas Harris and certain other "thriller" authors to be writing horror, and enjoy the occasional dip into those somewhat bloodier waters.
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro: There is no one writer except Shakespeare --- everything I read eventually contributes to what and how I think about writing.
Michael Norman: I generally don't read horror authors, sorry. Horror novels are generally too graphic for me.
F. Paul Wilson: In no particular order: H.P. Lovecraft, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, Sax Rohmer, William Blatty, and so on. Non-horror authors have influenced me as well: Robert Heinlein, Victor Hugo, Robert B. Parker, Poul Anderson, Raymond Chandler, Larry Niven, Charles Dickens, Fred Pohl, C.M. Kornbluth, Henry Kuttner, and lots of others whose names escape me at the moment. And I suppose I shouldn't leave out EC Comics, Captain Video, The Shadow, King Kong, the old Flash Gordon serials. Anyone and anything that grabbed my attention and wouldn't let go.
I'm standing on the shoulders of all of the above, but the one still influencing me thematically (not stylistically), is H. P. Lovecraft. His cosmic horror shook up my worldview when I was in my teens and has stayed with me since. It echoes all through the Repairman Jack novels. I mentioned disturbing and unsettling as essential to the bedrock of horror. Lovecraft's fiction --- not the stories themselves, but their subtexts-deliver both in spades.
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