Alright,
we're officially into fall and the Halloween season! Of course that
didn't quite stop be from getting my horror on with September's book
challenge (still ongoing between Nicole D'Amato and myself – and
any friends that care to partake as sort of a self-challenge).
Strangely, my first book book of the month was only the second novel
I've ever read by the brilliant Peter Straub. Well, possibly the
first novel, as the previous book I'd read had actually been his
short story collection Houses
Without Doors, and
I'd read that way back in the 90s after having finished the
Straub/King collaboration The
Talisman. Anyway,
I'd been in a used bookstore in Santa Monica when I accidentally came
across a bent-up recent publication of Peter Straub's 70s thriller If
You Could See Me Now. Reading
this murder-mystery for the first time, with its dangerous smalltown
redneck flavour and supernatural creep-factor, it struck me just how
influential this novel might have been to the works of upcoming
horror authors and filmmakers – and I say might
have been, because
in truth I'm not sure what the critical or commercial response to
this book was when it was first published in the 70s, but I wouldn't
be surprised to find out that it actually had a direct influence on
other genre works. Moving from If
You Could See Me Now to
a weirdly similarly-toned The
Wasp
Factory by
Iain Banks, the prose in the latter novel was far more contemporary
(and should I even use the word “clever”? – I suppose that
would be subjective) yet both novels retained the same tense,
engagingly creepy, and mysterious gothic atmosphere that continually
signaled that there was so much more going on beneath the surface of
these novels' main plots. Following these two novels, I finally read
a book that I had purchased back in the 1990s (around the same time
as I'd purchased Straub's Houses
Without Doors,
it would be extremely safe to assume), Dan Simmons' LoveDeath
– LoveDeath is
a collection of novellas dealing with the often horrifying and always
tantalizing themes of love, sex, death, and violent bloodshed. Some
of the works in this book are existentially haunting, other parts are
terrorizing, and of course, there are some decent doses of humour,
because really, what's sex and death without a little bit of nervous
laughter? Everything in Simmons' book is extremely readable, although
Simmons' prose is such that it quite literally demands and
simultaneously commands the reader's attention. Not concentration,
just attention,
and
thereby the reading of LoveDeath
felt
more intense to me than the other horror literature I'd consumed this
month – and of course, all of these books were so very appropriate
in leading into the fall/Halloween season. Finishing my three books a
couple of days before the monthly deadline, I once again went back to
Preacher
(as
season three is still not available on Prime! Come on, Amazon!!) and
I've now gone all linear – last month, I'd read the fourth book in
the originally-compiled 9-book series (the series has since been
re-compiled and re-published in a slightly different order and
context over six books), and now I've firmly placed myself in the
proper order, having devoured Preacher
Vol. 1 – Gone to Texas, which
collected the first seven comics in the long-running series.
Hopefully, I'll have Vol.
2 in
my hands by the end of October.
--V.
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