The book that made me want to be a writer
Lord of the Flies: it was about kids, and I was a kid. The plot was simple and the descent into savagery was believable. I read it at the age of 12 – it was only later that I grasped the symbolism of the severed pig’s head and the sexual subtext. I felt that if I could do something like that, I’d be happy. And guess what? I was right.
Stephen KingThe Guardian, 11 October 2024
| Stephen King |
Author denies Elon Musk kicked him off platform and says he is joining rival Threads
Stephen King has announced he is quitting X after describing the platform as “too toxic”.
In a post on X on Thursday, the author of The Shining and Shawshank Redemption wrote: “I’m leaving Twitter. Tried to stay, but the atmosphere has just become too toxic.” Referring to the rival platform launched by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, he added: “Follow me on Threads, if you
Five of the best
Tackling social issues with often grisly violence, you’ll need a strong stomach for these stories by authors from Han Kang to Stephen King, but they make an indelible impact
Body horror is a genre that features the mutilation or transformation of the human body. Always graphic and usually grotesque, its trademark terrors range from dismemberment to cannibalism, which some authors use as a vehicle for political commentary or social critique.
In my novel, The Eyes Are the Best Part, Ji-won is a seemingly normal college student whose life unravels after her father’s departure and the arrival of her mother’s creepy new Caucasian boyfriend, George. After eating a fish eye for luck during a traditional Korean meal, Ji-won develops a morbid obsession with George’s blue eyes, culminating in acts of violence that confront the white male gaze in a very literal fashion.
If you have the intestinal fortitude for body horror tales, here are five of my favourites.
Yeong-hye is stuck in a nightmare. Against her family’s wishes, she has become a vegetarian. When her family physically forces her to eat meat, they set in motion a series of events that will change her life for ever. Han Kang’s writing is beautiful and evocative, and her ambitious novel tackles mental illness, consent, misogyny and autonomy.
Murata’s novel is compulsively readable in spite of the many disturbing themes it covers. Natsuki, who is neglected by her family, seeks meaning in her existence after a series of traumatic events cause her to question gender norms and societal expectations. Bizarre and unpredictable, Earthlings features plenty of unsettling moments and will stay fixed in your mind long after you turn the last page.
Novelist Paul Sheldon finds himself in a dire situation after waking up from a car accident that left his legs completely shattered. He’s been found by superfan Annie Wilkes, who decides to hold him captive while he rewrites the ending of his bestselling romance series to her liking. Annie goes to great lengths to make sure that Paul behaves – and can never leave. A classic, must-read horror novel with plenty of moments that will leave you squirming.
In this debut novel, we follow an unnamed protagonist working at Holistik, a beauty and wellness store. Her work begins to take over her life, even as she starts to uncover terrible secrets about the cult-like company. Natural Beauty is a sinister and entertaining exploration of the cost of assimilation, toxic beauty culture and capitalism.
Irina is a photographer who focuses on taking explicit images of average-looking men. After being offered an exhibit at a respectable London gallery, she revisits old photographs and begins to descend into madness, leading her down a path of destruction. This dark and unsettling novel looks at power, gender roles, class and sexuality, and is sure to be a hit with fans of Bret Easton Ellis.
The Eyes Are the Best Part by Monika Kim is published by Octopus.
Warning: Contains spoilers for The Shining.
Danny Torrance has been trying hard to shake his childhood memories of the Overlook Hotel. And in the beginning of Doctor Sleep, it seems like he might be able to do just that when he settles down in New Hampshire, joins an AA group, and gets a job at a nursing home where he becomes known as “Doctor Sleep.” But his past isn’t ready to let go of him yet, because Dan is about to meet Abra Stone — who has the gift of “the shining,” just like Dan, and is being hunted by a group of quasi-immortal travelers called the True Knot.
We’ve all got books on the bedside table we’ve been meaning to read for months — but what if the apocalypse were tomorrow? Luckily for those who’d need some quick survival tips, we at Reedsy have compiled a list of the 10 best post-apocalyptic books to read beforethe world ends: so that if it does, you’ll find yourself prepared.
Part One
Morrison was waiting for someone who was hung up in the air traffic jam over Kennedy International when he saw a familiar face at the end of the bar and walked down.
'Jimmy? Jimmy McCann?'
The Ledge
by Stephen King
Narrated by John Glover
https://esl-bits.eu/ESL.English.Listening.Short.Stories/The.Ledge/01/z.mp3
'Go on,' Cressner said again. 'Look in the bag.'
We were in his penthouse apartment, forty-three stories up. The carpet was deep-cut pile, burnt orange. In the middle, between the Basque sling chair where Cressner sat and the genuine leather couch where no one at all sat, there was a brown shopping bag.
The Man in the Black Suit
by Stephen King
I am now a very old man and this is something which happened to me when I was very young—only nine years old. It was 1914, the summer after my brother Dan died in the west field and three years before America got into World War I. I’ve never told anyone about what happened at the fork in the stream that day, and I never will … at least not with my mouth. I’ve decided to write it down, though, in this book which I will leave on the table beside my bed. I can’t write long, because my hands shake so these days and I have next to no strength, but I don’t think it will take long.
| Stephen King |
Did you know that there are over 130 Stephen King short stories in existence? There’s no doubt that the man’s publishing career is impressive, but King was perhaps most prolific with his short stories: starting with "The Glass Floor" in 1967, he continued to write many short stories thereafter to pay the bills.
Last Tuesday, I attended an event held in Founders Hall at St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights that featured Stephen & Owen King and Peter & Emma Straub. The event was co-sponsored by BookCourt, a bookstore where Peter Straub’s daughter Emma worked for several years.
I couldn't remember a word of this. It was bound to happen sooner or later: a book I'd read which had slipped entirely through my memory. Sometimes I find a book is loose and hazy in my memory – I have a bad memory, and while overarching plots usually stick for everything I've read, details are often significantly more vague – but for The Talisman, I couldn't remember anything. I have the original copy; I know it had a sequel, in 2001's Black House; and I know that, since it was written, it's become more and more entwined within the Dark Tower mythos that runs through so many of King's novels. But everything else? Gone.
From Stephen King to Oscar Wilde and Tana French, novelist Gabriel Bergmoser chooses Halloween reading that does more than simply shock and scare
Gabriel Bergmoser1. Red Dragon by Thomas Harris
The Silence of the Lambs gets all the attention, but the best Hannibal Lecter novel is still the first; a book that suggests the most horrifying of evils can grow from an all too human place, and that even heroes can carry something monstrous inside them. Every Lecter story on some level features an implicit Faustian bargain and none is more tragic than FBI crimimal profiler Will Graham’s knowing choice to sacrifice his own fragile peace of mind to stop a killer he understands all too well.
2. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
There are no real villains in Oscar Wilde’s first and only novel. The lurking danger of this book is our capacity for vanity and how it can literally and metaphorically disfigure us, how obsession with retaining beauty will inevitably lead to its destruction. Even Wilde’s central monster, Dorian himself, is more tragic idiot than conniving mastermind, a youthful dope consumed by a pathological belief that the only thing worth having is beauty at any cost. His descent would almost be funny if it wasn’t so chillingly believable.
3. Horns by Joe Hill
Sometimes horror, even at its darkest, is the window dressing for something more tender. That’s the case with the unique and entirely enrapturing Horns, a book that starts out as a twisted revenge story before slowly becoming something more sprawling, knotty, and ultimately hopeful. Horns is by turns a gothic romance, a murder mystery, a supernatural thriller and a biting satire on how quick we can be to judge despite the darkness we all harbour.
4. The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty
Often the best horror stories are the ones that believe, through all the death, jump-scares and creepiness, in the fundamental triumph of goodness. That The Exorcist was long considered one of the most terrifying novels ever is in large part is down to how deeply we are led to care about the desperate plight of its central characters, and how carefully detailed every one of them is. The evil they face is huge and incomprehensible, but not, in the end, insurmountable, and much of the book’s (and film’s) power comes from the ultimate hard-won victory of a small group who sacrifice everything for an innocent child.
5. Ring by Koji Suzuki, translated by Robert B Rohmer and Glynne Walley
Successive film adaptations have not managed to capture the true power of this relatively demure tale of a cursed videotape, a chilling and all too human story of coming to understand your own insignificance in the face of forces beyond your comprehension. While Ring is a classic, it’s in its two sequels that Suzuki revealed the scope of his ambition, organically building on his horror fable to craft something far more epic and transcendent than any filmed version has yet realised.
6. Psycho by Robert Bloch
To be clear, like Jaws, the film is better; Hitchcock having made a series of clever tweaks to find new ways of manipulating the audience by making them care. But everything that turned Psycho into an enduring cultural lightning rod originated in Bloch’s novel; the shower scene, the house on the hill, the twist ending and the sense of gothic dread dripping from every moment. The gleeful subversion of conventions that Hitchcock gets all the credit for originated here, and without this book, horror – and cinema – wouldn’t be the same.
7. The Passage by Justin Cronin
Justin Cronin’s epic vampire saga is a sprawling tale of love, loss and societies destroyed, rebuilt and destroyed again, centred not only on characters we could care deeply for, but a slowly growing sense of insidious evil whispering from the shadows, a terror so unknowable that it was always going to lose a little menace once it was explained. But like the best horror writers, Cronin uses that inevitability to make his point – that all too often evil grows from a place that is a little more understandable than we might care to confront. The whole trilogy is fantastic, but for its singular atmosphere of growing dread the first will always be the best.
8. Misery by Stephen King
There’s an intoxicating combination of anger, sadness and catharsis at the heart of Misery; a book written by an author trying to move away from horror only to find that his vast readership wouldn’t accept that. Cue the story of a writer literally held hostage by a fan torturing him into writing what she wants, facilitating the writer’s slow realisation that the genre he was so desperate to move on from may be the only one that’s right for him. It’s an intensely personal and ambivalent book, and one of the best explorations of the highs and lows of creativity ever written.
9. From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
I don’t know whether it’s cheating to include a graphic novel on this list, but this is a horror masterpiece unlike anything else I’ve ever read, a sprawling, phonebook-heavy exploration of not just the Jack the Ripper murders, but the society that allowed them to happen. Unflinching and harsh, grim and deliberate, the book is an almost forensic dissection of Victorian England, suggesting that the motives for the murders, caused by a collision of dogma, classism and puritanical propriety, were the inevitable result of the true human horrors that made up a seemingly polite society.
10. In the Woods by Tana French
I know; this is not horror, at least not insofar as where it sits in bookstores. But I would also argue it’s not a traditional crime novel or literary character study either. In the Woods uses the structure of a whodunnit to craft one of the most haunting explorations of fear I’ve ever read and, in doing so, includes the only written scene to ever make me jump, a scene so infused with the force of an unshakable nightmare that it transforms the book around it, leaving readers with the sense that some evils can never be truly understood and some trauma is too great to move on from. If that doesn’t encapsulate horror at its most evocative, I have no idea what does.