I never thought of myself as a horror fan.
I grew up with “horror” meaning either 1) gore, like the projectile vomit in “The Exorcist” or bleeding walls in “The Amityville Horror, or 2) something so terrifying it kept me awake. I particularly remember one sleepless week after finishing Stephen King’s “Pet Sematary” (I know, but I was fourteen and lived with a big black cat at the time, after reading that book he was terrifying!)
Then I read through NPR’s 100 best horror stories and realized not only have I read and enjoyed about half the list but that my definition of horror was incredibly narrow.
I’ve read du Maurier’s “Rebecca” and Jackson’s “Haunting of Hill House” multiple times to savor the wrongness creeping in. I didn’t know “psychological horror” was a genre and now I find myself writing it.
Dracula, Carmilla, Lestat and Louis… well, I never found vampires scary. Quite the contrary. Being “the things that others fear” sounded like a good deal to my insecure teenage self. Many years post-goth and I still love vampires.
The inclusion of Strieber’s “Communion” tickles me because while as non-fiction it’s controversial to say the least, it’s compulsive reading if you take it as fiction, with an “extraordinary intruding on ordinary” vibe that still gives me the chills.
So I’m going through this list with my library card (tangential: I forgot how much I loved the library! Online renewal and automatic download of e-books makes them even better!) because it turns out I am something of a horror fan.
What’s a genre you never thought you would (or did) enjoy, until you did?
Thought I’d responded to this one but guess it was all in my head. As a teen I used to stay up late on Saturdays to watch late night movies broadcast by our tiny local TV/radio station; always a themed “double feaure” pairing and the majority of the horror films were more like suspense than horror to me, possibly because I’d taken a great interest in the mechanics of prosthetics, special effects, etc., and knowing at a glance how it was done kinda immunized me to the visual and had me focused on plot & dialogue instead. There was only one film that actually hit my horror button and that was Romero’s original b&w “Night of the Living Dead”
What I recall about “Pet Sematary” is that that’s the book where I quit reading Stephen King because I’d predicted the entire remaining plot when I was about a quarter of the way in. And was already unimpressed at the blantantly-lifted-from-Jackson’s-“The Haunting” bits I’d spotted in “Carrie”. (shouldn’t say I entirely stopped reading King; I did read his Bachman stories & novel & enjoyed them far more than what he wrote under his own name)
Like you, vampires were never scary, not the blood-drinking undead side of it anyway. Their ethics or lack of same tend to be the more interesting side of that sub-genre; I’d have to say that most chilling vampire novel I’ve read is Hambly’s “Darkness On His Bones” and that’s because of what one vampire did to another (immortality reaches a whole new level of being a curse) rather than anything done by the vampires to humans.
A genre I never thought I’d enjoy? After decades of loathing pretty much every one I encountered (except Shute’s “A Town Like Alice” … I ADORE that book) Gail Carriger is making me like romance novels with her recent self-published spin-offs from her “Parasol Protectorate” series. Which somehow led me to Kai Ashante Wilson’s “A Taste of Honey” which I also loved (one masterful and perfect plot twist at the end of that one)
You’re braver than me. I don’t dare watch anything by Romero. Even if I go in knowing the blood is fake I have no stomach for gory horror.
Re: romance: I used to hate the genre because I always associated it with the Harlequin romances I encountered as a kid in the 80s: all tropes of virginal heroine, man of the world hero, “fade to black” sex just put me off. As an adult I’ve found the romance genre to be so huge and varied that there really is something for EVERYONE!
Is Carriger’s “Parasol Protectorate” the ones with titles like Shameless, Blameless, etc.? If so I’ve read a few and they are good – funny too!
I’d even read the novelisation of NotLD before seeing the movie so knew what was coming and the book hadn’t disturbed me at all. I suspect it was the movie being in b&w and low budget/not over the top with the gore, a combo that is often far more effective than colour, lots of effects money and “more gore!” It the only horror movie that I haven’t been able to watch to the end because it was too good (as opposed to the ones I’ve shut off because they were so cringemakingly awful)
My early exposures were the Harlequin types as well –shudder–. My grandmother gave me one as a Christmas gift when I was in tenth grade so that I’d be “reading something decent.” Y’know, instead of the Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, and Richard J. Needham (renowned Canadian journalist) I was devouring at the time. Grandpa got me Ian Fleming (which I still have). Read that in a day, took me three painful months to read the Harlequin (which I don’t still have)
Yes, the “Parasol Protectorate” is “Soulless”, “Changeless”, “Blameless”, “Heartless”, and “Timeless”. The various self-published spin-off romances feature characters within that series, from the “Finishing School” series generation predating those, and also present-day characters within the same universe. I recommend the short story “Marine Biology” as a good start if you want to sample … it’s one of the present-day ones, absolutely hilarious as well as charming, and has a sequel novel “The Sumage Solution” which I loved enough to buy a paper edition after reading it as an ebook.