I’m a person who likes to make up things to worry about. What if one day I turned invisible? What if I were stranded on a deserted island with nothing but my wits to keep me alive? What would I do if I were trapped in a horror film? Fortunately, author Seth Grahame-Smith has the answer to this last obsessive question of mine.

How to Survive a Horror Movie teaches you everything you might ever need to know about how to recognize that you are, indeed, in a horror film, the different types of incredibly horrible things that could potentially happen to you, who to stick close with (and of course, who to avoid), and more. This book takes a great look at the themes in horror films, and it pokes fun at it while still holding horror in reverence. Grahame-Smith teaches you what to do if you did something last summer, how to react if there are children in your corn, and that you should always travel on planes with a suitcase full of mongooses (lest there be snakes on your flight). Grahame-Smith is an expert on zombies, as he also wrote Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

How to Survive a Horror Movie is for horror film buffs, the curious, and the obsessive worrier.

Jennifer Johnson – Glenwood Branch

Bram Stoker really started a trend when he wrote Dracula in 1897. Who could have guessed that over the next century, vampire books would become a whole sub-genre of horror literature?  The Strain (the first book of a new trilogy) by Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan is the latest entry in the field.

In recent decades, both movies and books have given us any number of new and different slants on the bloodsuckers we find so fascinating (and scary).  We’ve had comic vampires (remember Love at First Bite?) and romantic vampires (the Stephenie Meyer books). We’ve also had vampires with a yen for self-revelation (see Interview With the Vampire by Anne Rice). You name it, we’ve had it. I’ve not yet run into a book about vampire space aliens, but I’m sure they’re out there somewhere.

As for The Strain, it goes back to original principles. The vampires portrayed in this book are relentlessly predatory and downright terrifying. Humans have blood and vampires drink it. Period. With the crowd of bloodsuckers in The Strain, there’s no such thing as skipping a meal.

Paradoxically though, The Strain is also a remarkably modern take on the vampire myths. The hero is a doctor who works for the Centers for Disease Control.  As a scientist, he begins with no more belief in vampires than he might have in the Tooth Fairy.  However, as a scientist, the existence of the undead becomes utterly logical to him when he discovers there’s nothing magic or supernatural involved in their creation. What is involved is a virus. Unfortunately it is a very powerful and fast acting virus. Neither Holy Water, the Cross, nor antibiotics will work against it.

The book begins with a plane full of dead passengers landing at Kennedy Airport. Only they’re not exactly dead. As this last reality becomes clear, the action spreads to the rest of the New York metropolitan area while the doctor and his associates attempt to contain what has quickly become an epidemic.

How do they deal with it? Can they deal with it? Maybe yes and maybe no. It will take two more books before the reader can know for certain.  Personally, I can’t wait for book two.

Joe McHugh – Administration Office

Teens getting killed. They have been making movies with that very premise for over 30 years. A main character (a female, usually being played by that actress you kind of recognize) and her group of friends (a jock, a nerd, a cheerleader, etc.) are picked off one at a time by a killer in a costume or mask who will reveal his or her identity and motive during the last 20 minutes of the film.

In all honesty, Scream’s plot really isn’t much different than all slasher film plots. The heroine this time is the damaged Sidney Prescot, played by Neve Campbell, whose mother was murdered one year prior to when the movie begins. And while she and her friends fit the typical slasher film archetypes, there is one difference between them and virtually every other character who has ever been written into a horror movie: they have seen horror movies. They know the cliches; they know what not to do; they know the "rules one must abide by in order to successfully survive a scary movie." Screenwriter Kevin Williamson and director Wes Craven cram so much wit, humor, and blood into this simple story that you are guaranteed to have a blast.

Scream was one of the defining movies of the 90s. It was a phenomenon reinventing a genre that hadn’t been marketable since the mid-80s. It spawned two sequels and endless rip-offs. An intelligent spoof on horror movies that is still extremely scary, Scream is one of my all time favorites.

Mike Dwyre – East Columbia Branch

Let’s face it: zombies are not sexy. Their looks have gone to hell (quite literally!), they chew loudly (often with their mouths wide open), and when it comes to their personalities, to quote Gertrude Stein, "there’s no there there!" But they continue to fascinate horror movie and fiction fans alike…often in ways no other "creature feature" can. Whether it’s in the best disaster films (especially George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead) or the most gripping fiction (the wonderful teen novel Generation Dead, comes to mind), there are any number of ways you can make zombies interesting…there HAS to be if you’re going to put out a winning 486 page anthology of zombie stories.

When I saw The Living Dead on the new fiction shelf a few weeks ago, I couldn’t help but let out a little yelp…not of fear (after all, zombies don’t scare me!), but of happiness. I was even more delighted when I took the book home and discovered so many impressive short stories inside, one of the best being "Death and Suffrage" by Dale Bailey — a poignant and surprisingly thoughtful look at what the world would be like if the dead tried to vote. The story tackles gun control, self-doubt, messy presidential elections, provocative ad campaigns. It is easily the most captivating and critical story in the collection.

Other tales, such as the chilling "This Year’s Class Picture" by Dan Simmons, are also relevant to contemporary society. Simmon’s eerie, sad tale is about a dedicated (perhaps OVERLY dedicated) teacher who continues to instruct her class long after all the children have become zombies and are no longer capable of learning.

There’s not one boring tale to be found here. In fact, there are so many incredibly riveting, oddly sincere and masterful offerings, I have left out way too much. If I HAD to list five more that were just as amazing, they’d be Stephen King’s "Home Delivery," Douglas E. Winter’s "Less than Zombie," Hannah Wolf Bowen’s "Everything Is Better With Zombies," Jeffrey Ford’s "Malthusian’s Zombie" and Susan Palwick’s "Beautiful Stuff." You don’t have to like zombies to eat this collection up…it’s THAT good!
 
Angie Engles – Central Library

Peter Straub’s Ghost Story tells the tale of the Chowder Society and the horrific events taking place in the small upstate New York town of Milburn. The Chowder Society is a group of four elderly men — Ricky Hawthorne, Sears James, Lewis Beneditk, and John Jaffrey  — who meet often to sip a glass of whiskey, smoke cigars, and tell stories about the worst and most frightening things they have ever seen or done.

As the men begin sharing the same dream, farm animals are slaughtered by an unknown intruder in the middle of the night; a beautiful young girl from New York City moves into the local hotel; and a terrible blizzard blankets the town in gray isolation. Something sinister is happening to the town of Milburn and the men of the Chowder Society believe they know the cause. As the story progresses, the town itself becomes consumed by so much fear and dread that it begins to act like one of the story’s antagonists. The town quarantines its inhabitants from the rest of the world, as they are helplessly toyed by whatever unexplainable force is menacing them.

With Ghost Story Peter Straub has written one of the scariest and most effective horror novels I have ever read. He exploits a fear that anyone of any age can understand. Imagine looking out of your window at a dimly lit street, filled with snow-covered, Victorian-style homes. Now imagine that you see something looking back at you. That idea of being watched and hunted by a presence you cannot understand is at the heart of what makes Ghost Story so terrifying. It deserves a spot next to such classics of modern horror as Salem’s Lot, The Exorcist, and Rosemary’s Baby.

Mike Dwyre – East Columbia Branch

F. Paul Wilson 

Can the tale of a repairman be worth a whole book, let alone a series? It depends on what the man repairs, of course. While his clients tend to be honest enough, Repairman Jack fixes the kinds of problems that they might be extremely reluctant to bring to the police.

The Tomb, the first in a series of Repairman Jack books by F. Paul Wilson, starts off in a deceptively slow and prosaic manner. In The Tomb, Jack is asked to recover a necklace. It sounds like a pretty unrewarding job, and, against his better judgment, Jack accepts with an “I’ll give it a try” shrug.

One thing leads to another and a simple task develops unexpected complications. By the midpoint of the book, the events that are happening get a bit strange and surprisingly dangerous. Meanwhile, the pace of the book has moved from a walk, through a trot, and well into a full-scale gallop. At this point, you just cannot put down The Tomb or any other Repairman Jack book.

As the series progresses, Jack finds himself ever more deeply involved in a struggle with a nonhuman force referred to as the ”Otherness.” Like the peeling of an onion, Jack’s world is gradually revealed volume by volume. Indeed, It’s not until the third book Conspiracies that Jack himself first hears about the Otherness, a force behind the events of The Tomb and its sequel.

Ultimately the series is scheduled to end with some sort of Gotterdammerung. There are a few more Repairman Jack novels to go before we find out the final (and still uncertain) fate of both Jack and the Otherness. I’m dying to find out. If you start reading Wilson’s series, I guarantee you will be hooked, as well.

Joe McHugh – Administration