Tag Archives: horror book

The Six Pillars of Horror

Posted on by under culture, E-books, language, movies

What makes a great horror story? Of course, many people will argue that the answer is self-evident. There’s not much to analyze; you just sense it. The reader feels their heart pounding fast; a cold sweat dampening their hands; a shiver down their spine. Suddenly, they’re afraid to turn the page, their ears prick up at the faintest noises around them.

These are the reactions that reading a great horror book bring about, but they only tell half the story. To get the full picture, we must identify what it is in the book that causes these feelings of anxiety, discomfort, fear, and excitement!

The most powerful horror books are sustained by the following pillars:

1.The Familiar Made Strange

It’s terrifying when something close to the reader or the character starts to look or act differently. The more familiar the setting, the greater the impact on the reader if it is twisted. This is what happens in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis; Gregor Samsa, the main character, wakes up one day in the comfort of his own bedroom to find out he’s become a disgusting insect-like monster. His family and coworkers will have to deal with it.

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2.Tapping into the Reader’s Darkest Fears

Mothers, for example, are terrified at the prospect of something going wrong with their children. How is that cute little baby going to turn out? What lurks in his future? That is the chilling scenario of We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver. Eva Khatchadourian is confronted with the terrible fact that her little son grew up to become a mass murderer.

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3. Verisimilitude 

This does not mean that the story needs to be realistic. It means that the universe created by the author follows precise and specified rules, which are maintained throughout the story. There is consistency in the internal laws of the novel. The demon that possesses the little girl in the shocking The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty, for example, has limited powers. Although he claims to be the Devil himself, he cannot untie Regan from the bed or make her fly around at night.

4. A Sense of Claustrophobia

Confined spaces make the ideal setting for horror stories. The fact that you cannot leave a place enhances the feeling or powerlessness that a horror book must instill in the reader. In Peter Benchley’s Jaws, for example, three men battle a fierce shark in the middle of the ocean. All the space they have is a small boat, which starts to crumble to pieces as the predator attacks it. In Stephen King’s The Shining, the main character’s mental health starts to deteriorate. As he becomes progressively more unhinged and violent, his wife and little son cannot escape the isolated and weather-beaten hotel they are stranded in.

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5. A Sense of Paranoia 

The main character feels that all around are plotting his downfall. In Ira Levin’s horrific Rosemary’s Baby the pregnant mother doesn’t feel she can trust anyone. Everyone around seems to be in on a conspiracy to hurt her baby, including her doctor. In fact, those people are members of a coven of evil witches and all of them have the baby’s best interests in mind. The problem is the baby himself.

6. Violence

An element of horror books that never fails to cause extreme discomfort in readers, and, at the same time, makes this literary genre very attractive to so many, is the amount of physical of psychological violence depicted in horror stories. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, a classic of the yuppie era, is soaked in gore. Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs details an unbearably tense relationship between a young FBI agent, Clarice Starling, and her mentor in the solution of a crime, Hannibal Lecter, a brilliant psychiatrist and cannibalistic serial killer kept in high-security prison.

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American Psycho (from the movie based on the novel)

What is your all-time favorite horror novel? Which of the traits above does it use to scare the living daylights out of its readers.

Au revoir

Jorge Sette

Stephen King’s The Shining: Like Father, Like Son.

Posted on by under Aprender inglês, art, culture, E-books, Famous books, language, movies, Writing

Looking for the perfect book to read on Father’s Day? The Shining by Stephen King is a classic: one of the scariest books ever written. One reason for its popularity is the novel was turned into a celebrated movie directed by Stanley Kubrick, starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duval in the main roles, back in the 1980s.

Rumor has it that King himself was not entirely happy with the movie adaptation. If you read the book, you will probably understand why. Although the movie is heavily inspired by the book, it takes a lot of detours from the original plot and skips important themes that play an essential subtext.

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In broad strokes, the novel tells the story of Jack Torrance, a recovering alcoholic with a short temper, who – unable to find a job anywhere else, after beating up a student at the school he used to work as a writing teacher – is hired, with the help of a friend, as the caretaker of the sinister Overlook hotel for the winter months, taking his young wife, Wendy, and their 5-year-old son, Danny, with him.

The hotel is completely empty and isolated. To spice things up, Danny has the gift of precognition, popularly known, among the initiated, as the shining: he can read people’s thoughts, foresee the future, and have glimpses of violent incidents that took place a long time ago. Weird things start happening at the hotel. The family, especially the father and the son, are haunted by ghosts and unusual experiences.

Among the strange ocurrences that contribute to its sense of horror, the novel depicts a topiary – bushes and trees trimmed in the form of a rabbit, two lions and a dog – that seems to come to life occasionally; a dead woman who rises from a bathtub in room 217 (to this day, guests in many real hotels are said to turn down the offer to occupy the room with this number because of the novel); images of a mob murder that happened years before materialize in vivid form in front of the kid; in addition, mufffled sounds of a mask ball from the past are heard continually at night.images-2

Could all this be a metaphor for a darker link between father and son? The symptoms of something terrible lurking inside the boy and ready to blossom?

As the months go by and the winter becomes harsher, the claustrophobic atmosphere of the hotel inevitably starts to unhinge Jack Torrance, whose madness slowly sets in. He becomes a deadly menace to his own family.

(Watch the clip of one of the best scenes of the movie below. Warning: strong language is used)

Stephen King is not only a bestselling and prolific author, but he’s also really talented. His books are not just airport thrillers made out of a schematic formula meant to provide a couple of hours  of entertainement before being thrown out in the trash can at the end of your flight. The Shining, for example, can be read on at least two different levels. On a simpler, more straightforward level, we have the chilling mystery tale of a family stranded by heavy snow and lack of telecommunications, living alone in a more than 50-year-old luxurious hotel up in the mountains of Colorado.

An even more disturbing way of interpreting The Shining, however, is to read it as a vigorous metaphor for alcoholism, its genetic origins and terrible consequences: the story would consist of hyperbolic images translating the symptoms of that powerful disease that can be handed down from father to son to grandson, causing extreme anxiety, cravings, hallucinations, madness, violence, and, ultimately, death.

As backstory, the reader learns that Jack’s own father was an alcoholic. He would come home from his job as a nurse, smelling of booze and abusing his wife and kids. Despite being very fond of his father, Jack’s love wears out, as he witnesses a vicious beating his Dad administers to his Mom, for no reason at all.

Danny and Jack, for their turn, are quite close too. As a matter of fact, the bond between father and son is so strong that Wendy sometimes feels left out of their peculiar masculine world, and, as a result, even gets a bit jealous.

In an alternative interpretation of the novel, therefore, the closeness between father and son, Jack’s increasing madness at the hotel and Danny’s precognition gift can be easily understood as the addictive genetic inheritance handed down to the next generation, the beginning of what will become for Danny a full-blown disease in the future.

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Steven King himself was an alcoholic at the time he wrote the novel and the theme in The Shining reflects his own worries and unhappiness about the problem. Writing, after all, has always been a potent way of purging one’s own demons.

Whatever layer of the story you choose, rest assured it will scare the living daylights out of you, which is why the book is such a great thriller in all respects.The book sustains a very oppressive atmosphere, making it rather dark. Perhaps you should put off the experience until Halloween rather than reading it now, on Father’s Day! The tension in the story grows progressively unbearable, culminating in a gruesome climactic sequence. Not to be missed.

Jorge Sette.