|
Horror Author Roundtable
8.
AOTW: What is your favorite contemporary horror novel? Why is it your favorite? What is your favorite contemporary non-genre book? Why?
Gregory Maguire: The Dante Club, more a murder mystery than a horror story --- but who's quibbling?
Fred Saberhagen: That's hard to answer, as I don't read intensely in the category and am sure to miss some fine ones. I think Brian Lumley stands out.
As for books in general --- well, I like a lot of them. What I seem to need is more time to read.
Geoffrey Huntington: I'm unable to name just one. King's Salem's Lot. Blatty's The Exorcist. Tryon's The Other. That's about as contemporary as I get.
Suzy McKee Charnas: I think I'm partial to Carrie and other early King, because he does tend to tie his horror material to real-life stresses and terrors in a way that uses these things, but also honors them rather than trying to trivialize them. And nobody has a better sense of ordinary, modern American life.
As for non-genre fiction, nothing stands out recently except maybe Elizabeth Knox's The Vintner's Luck, which I loved for its openness to the quixotic nature of life in a historical setting which wasn't larded with Great Events but which reflected the sense of how history feels when you are living in it. Quirky, strong, and very unusual --- that's the kind of thing that appeals to me, in horror or elsewhere.
Michael Norman: I don't read many horror novels, so I can't pick out a favorite. I would stick with the classics, however. The Bram Stokers and Mary Shelleys of the world. I read good mystery fiction for relaxation. But I read biography, nonfiction and generally anything that captures my fancy.
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro: As I get older, I have come to realize I have no really favorite authors, or favorite books as such. I reread the Judge Dee novels by Robert van Gulick periodically, and I reread Christopher Moore's work from time to time, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I like them better than others, just that they show me new things when I go over them. There are dozens of books I would probably like to reread, depending on what my literary taste buds may be set for at any given time, but that doesn't mean that I do, or have the opportunity --- a great deal of my reading time is taken up with research, and so my recreational reading is limited, and I try to keep up with new books most of the time. Also, I have had the experience of rereading a book I really loved, many years later, and found it to be no longer the book I remembered. The book hadn't changed, of course, but I have.
F. Paul Wilson: Hands down, The Exorcist. Maybe because I was raised Catholic, maybe because I went to Georgetown and knew the steep stone steps where two people in the novel fell to their deaths, I'm not sure. I knew I'd expected a novel like Rosemary's Baby but instead found myself immersed in something far more profound. It's so deep and so wide . . . no reading experience in my life has disturbed me like The Exorcist. Closing the covers did not put an end to it. The book wouldn't go away; it perched on my shoulder for days, weeks, months.
As for non-horror. . . I read a lot of thrillers and like many of them, especially Jeffery Deaver and Stephen Hunter's work, but as an all-time favorite, The Godfather stands out in my mind. I remember keeping it in my car and reading it at stop lights. That doesn't happen with very many books.
|
