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Duckin’ Covers
Once again, I’m late to post today and Game 5 of the NLCS is starting as I write this. So today’s blogfodder will be a shorty.
On one hand, I’m growing tired of our new Internet List Culture (ILC).
10 Greatest Tonight Show Bloopers! Click Here!
18 Sexiest Lesbians! Click Here!
22 Household Items that Will Make Your Pubes Turn Paisley! Click Here!
On the other hand… I avoid this clickbait about as well as Lindsay Lohan avoids a bong. Lists quantify the reader’s commitment to the article before they click. I guess we like that. I guess I like that.
Or, perhaps my issue with ILC is the slideshow format. They can’t just fucking list the 16 Best Racks in Film on a single scroll page. No. They have to use that stupid-ass slideshow format where you search for the arrow. Click. Wait for the next photo. Find the arrow where it has moved on the new page. Click. Wait.
This design turd gets the site’s click numbers way up for advertising-selling purposes, but it drives me nuts. Gah. Being the World’s Most Impatient Man, I’m always trying to click through the list too fast and inadvertently opening ad pop-ups. God forbid if they try to force me to watch a 30 second ad video in the middle of the list. I will dog cuss the authors entire family lineage as I quit the window.
This list struck me on a primordial DNA level. The 50 Scariest Books of All Time.
There are a thousand of these on the Interwebs, but this one rang a bell because: A. I’ve read 23 and one-half of the fifty, and B. The covers on those novels immediately reverted me to being eleven years old. My older brother was a voracious reader of horror as a teen. He was sixteen. I was eleven. He would leave his discarded Ballentine paperbacks laying around, taunting me with their terrifying covers. Tempting me. Daring me to bend the cover back and drag my eyes across the first sentence. Paragraph. Page.
Nothing more likely to get you to open a cover than the trend of book covers with keyhole cuts in them. The most famous of which had to be Flowers in The Attic. Who could resist opening that mysteriously textured 60# page to see more of the girl? Not this eleven-year-old.
I remember being fascinated by the cover of The Stand. What the hell kind of book is this? It looks like Luke Skywalker in a light saber battle with Heckle Magpie. I remember that I finally opened the cover and read the first page on July 5, 1980. I remember because the First Edition of The Stand began with the “near future” date of July 4, 1980. It’s happening right now! That was a magical week of read-sleep-read.
Anyhoo. I hope you enjoy the list. If you haven’t read The Handmaid’s Tale, that should be first on your list. Not really a horror novel. More Sci-Fi with lots of sex. Not much longer than a long short story. Scott Smith’s The Ruins revisits my dreams from time to time. Incredibly immersive writing. It has been seven or eight years since I read it, but I can still visualize the events as if they actually happened to me.
House of Leaves is a commitment I cannot recommend.
We Need to Talk About Kevin I only count as half a read. The copy I bought at Borders had a shitty font and must have come off the press while quality control was sleeping. The print was a dusty light grey ink that hurt my brain. I gave up and waited for the movie.
Blood Meridian is a real divider of people. You love it or you hate it. It’s out there.
I simply don’t connect with either Ray Bradbury or Harlan Ellison. I respect them both, but they don’t move my needle in the slightest.
Heart-shaped Box was so much fun.
Weigh in. What book gave you the boogety-boogeties as a youngster? Which book covers haunted you?
2 comments
Angela
Stephen King – Skeleton Crew – The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet. I will N-E-V-E-R forget the experience I had reading that short story.
It was late at night, parents were asleep (I wanna say I was 16 or 17?), and I was listening to Pink Floyd The Wall under headphones while reading this story. Not sure if it was the story, itself, or the combination of the two, but by the time I got to end of it, I was now believing that there were fornits living in my typewriter that needed to be fed so I could write good papers and I just KNEW that if I started unplugging things I would think clearer. I remember unplugging my bedside lamp and feeling instantly better. Like I had just gotten rid of a raging headache I didn’t even know I had. These feelings freaked me out so much I had to leave my bedroom and go to the big picture window in the living room to bring me back to reality. I think I just sat looking out the window for about an hour before I felt “normal” again. That was the craziest experience I ever had from reading a story and probably the closest I’ve ever come to what I think an acid trip would be like. Feel free to do this same combo of story/music and let me know if it affects you this way, too. I will forever remember that experience and the full-fledged panic that washed over my body that I don’t think I need to read it ever again but I do still recommend it to everyone and I think it could potentially make a great movie someday!
Gayle Gallagher
“Ghost Story” by Peter Straub still scares me. I read it in 1980 shortly after we moved to St. Louis (I was 13). I’d read in bed before going to sleep, with the clock radio playing quietly.
To this day, when I hear the song “Hey Nineteen” by Steely Dan, it gives me the heebie-jeebies because that song played almost nightly as I read that book!