Horror Book of Lists
Thursday, September 4, 2008 at 09:59AM Harper's Book of Lists: Horror provides an entertaining and addictive reading experience. The entries range from the academic to the completely absurd. Generally, there is a perverse sense of dark humor throughout the book, which I appreciated, and I laughed out loud numerous times. At the same time, the book inspires me to make my own list of books to special order from the bookstore, especially the books on these lists: "James D. Jenkins's Ten Weirdest Gothic Novels," and "Thomas Ligotti's Ten Classics of Horror Poetry," and these two lists are oddly seated next to each other.
My favorite section of the book is the literary section, which offers interesting trivia and lots of excellent book lists. I found the film portion of the book to be sillier with more twisted humor (the film section didn't inspire the same urge to rush out to the video store like the literary lists made me want to rush out to the bookstore), but both aspects of the book, the humorous and the informative, are appreciated.
As noted in the introduction of the book, "T. E. D. Klein's Twenty-Five Most Familiar Horror Plots" is a wonderful satire about repetitive themes in the genre. Some more personal favorites include, "Joel Lane's Top Ten Weird Landscapes in Horror Fiction" (I want to read all of these), "Vince Churchill's Top Ten List of Films in Which, Wow, the Black Guy Lived," "Five Things Banned by the Comics Code Authority," "Nine Amazing Horror Board Games," and "Andy Diggle's Five Creepiest Moments from Alan Moore's Swamp Thing" (this list really makes me want to start reading Swamp Thing!).
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Reader Comments (3)
And that weirdest Gothic novels list is FANTASTIC! :-)
Yer pal,
Scott Bradley
co-author, THE BOOK OF LISTS: HORROR
-- Michael Arnzen