Gateways

 

By F. Paul Wilson

A Repairman Jack novel

Jack hasn't been as close to his dad as he probably should be. He knows his dad was disappointed that Jack didn't come home for his sister's funeral. Even so, when he gets word that his dad was in a vehicle crash, he wants his brother Tom Jr to be the one to go down to Florida to check on their father. But Tom Jr says he's tied up with business and it's up to Jack to step in.

Tom Sr has been in a coma since the crash, which happened on an unfrequented rural road. The circumstances of the crash are mysterious and will remain so until Tom Sr comes out of his coma.

Jack flies down to Florida and visits his dad in the hospital. The dad is not conscious but still has a visitor, his next door neighbor, an elderly lady named Anya. She and Tom Sr live in a community for retirees called Gateways.

After stopping by the hospital, Jack goes to his dad's house to stay while his dad is in the hospital. He notices that his dad's neighbor Anya's house is surrounded by lush green vegetation even though everyone's lawn in the community is brown and dead because of an extended drought. When he asks Anya about it, she has no explanation but assures him she is not watering her plants on the sly, against the water conservation orders.

Anya is not the only odd duck in this story. A group of strange, deformed people live in the swamp, led by a young woman with a mob of pure white hair who goes by the name of Semelee. She and her gang of thugs are somehow involved with the dad's accident. She also has weird, uncanny powers that enable her to control animals and insects. She is aware of Jack's arrival to Gateways and she has decided he is the man she fated to be with. Which is going to come as a surprise to Jack, who doesn't even know of her existence. And he already has a wife and child waiting for him back home.

I really enjoyed this story up to almost the end. It's part of a series but this was my first read of a book from the series. I found that, even though I hadn't read the previous novels, knowledge of the previous books was not needed to enjoy this story.

However, the ending was disappointing as it ends in a big battle with the bad guys. Bullets are flying, people are getting hurt. I just skimmed through the battle stuff to get to the results. 

I guess we're supposed to hate little Semelee but I just felt sorry for her. I wish the author had come up with a better fate for her than what he did. The same for Devil, the alligator, who was given a cruel and painful fate simply because he was a big, dangerous gator. His crimes weren't even of his own creation, he was simply a tool used by a pathetic, confused child. 

Our Share of Night

 

By Mariana Enriquez

Translated by Megan McDowell

This really isn't going to be a review but a reminder to myself to not ever get this book again. Fine words are spoken about it that may fool me again, just like they did this time. 

So, I didn't care for it from the very beginning. It just wasn't interesting. Plus there was too much untranslated Spanish in it. But mainly I put it down after I read the passage where the person I think is the main character, Juan, abuses his young son:

"Juan got up and said, Do as I say, go, right now, and when Gaspar refused again, sniffling with his arms crossed, Juan slapped him on the cheek with his open palm, a blow that swung Gaspar's face around, making him wobble on the stool and finally lose his balance. He fell and landed on his side with a dry thump, and the stool also toppled to the floor, barely missing him. Juan went over to him and yanked him roughly up, ignoring his cries, and saw the red mark on his cheek and his swollen lip. The pang of regret disappeared as soon as Gaspar started to cry. Stop it, he said. He grabbed his son's hair and forced him to meet his eyes, straining his neck backward. He shook the boy's head, and felt the soft, sweaty hair get tangled in his fingers. Don't be weak, nothing happened. Gaspar tried to say something: the chair, the slap; Juan raised his hand threateningly again, and the boy stopped crying. Go get changed, he repeated, and don't make me tell you again."

So when I read that, I thought, fuck you, Juan. And I decided I didn't give a shit about Juan and whatever happened to him. And I gave the book away. I didn't rate it a bad read because I didn't read it and the consensus seems to be that it is a good read.

Kirkus Reviews has a review of the novel.

John Dies at the End

 

By Jason Pargin aka David Wong

David Wong was just an ordinary man with a rather nutty friend, John. But ordinary soon goes away when John and David are exposed to a magician who calls himself Robert Marley. Robert has a drug called soy sauce due to a similarity in its appearance to actual soy sauce. It gives users, including David and John, the ability to perceive the supernatural beings intruding on our world. 

Soon after this revelation, David and John have their world turned upside down. Joined by a dog, Molly, who is also on the soy sauce and Jennifer Lopez, David's high school unrequited crush (not the famous Jennifer Lopez) and later Amy Sullivan, the sister of the man who was Molly's owner, they mainly fight to stay alive while dealing with the agents of the enemy, an lunatic being from another dimension or universe with a penchant for mindless cruelty who goes by various forms of the name Korrok.

This novel is described as horror/comedy. I found it to be mainly just horror and only mildly amusing occasionally. It is very chaotic, with people being dead and alive at the same time and way too much strange and peculiar events going on all the time. I was glad when I finished it. It was just too gross and gruesome for me.

Kirkus has a review of the book.

It was made into a movie, John Dies at the End that came out in 2012 and stars Chase Williamson (who?) as David and Rob Mayes (?) as John and Paul Giamatti as a secondary character, the only actor in the movie whose name sounded familiar to me.

The Taking

 

By Dean Koontz

Climate change on a grand scale! Huge water spouts pumping water out of the oceans and sending back down over all the lands of the world in the form of torrential rains. But this is only the beginning of everything being turned upside down. It's a tale of a massive scale of death and destruction, but told from the prospective of a small resort town in America. 

The first intimation of the changes to come, beside a strangely scented, glowing downpour, was when Molly saw a pack of coyotes taking shelter under the overhang of her house. She looked out at them and sensed they meant her no harm and so she stepped out to stand among them. They simply ran off into the woods. Her spouse, Neil, woke up after having a terrible nightmare, unusual for him. He wasn't one to give in to irrationality. Together, Molly and Neil turned on the TV to discover the experiences they were having were occurring everywhere and that communications were becoming iffy. A feeling of doom and menace permeated the atmosphere and stories of monsters and murder began to filter through the static that was destroying the airwaves. 

Neil felt that their home was not a safe place for them to stay. So they packed up their car and headed into the nearest town, the small resort town of Black Lake. First they stopped at the home of their friend, Harry, which turned out not to be a good idea when they discovered Harry had killed himself and his reanimated corpse came after them. 

After fleeing from zombie Harry, they continued on to Black Lake but things were just as crazy there. The locals are in various stages of succumbing to whatever doom has fallen upon the world and the only allies Molly and Neil are able to find are the neighborhood dogs who have organized themselves into a troop to protect the local kids. Molly and Neil try to talk the adults into making a stand against the unknown menace but soon realize they are on their own. That's when they set off into town with the dogs to located and secure any children in the town. Doing so, they face the otherworldly horrors who will use all their tricks and attacks to thwart them in their quest, including sending Molly's criminally insane father to attack her.  

This was an OK read. Molly and Neil try to fight the horrors but mostly fail, barely escaping in time. The local people, except a very few, quickly fall under the malign influence and Molly and Neil are left alone to stand against the attackers. The ending was kind of lame, the attack just stops and the menace goes away, leaving everything in shambles and with a few people left alive to pick up the pieces. 

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.

Revelator

 

By Daryl Gregory

When Stella was ten, she was left with her grandmother who had a small farm in the hills of Tennessee. Motty, as everyone called her, was a hard woman who used brute force to discipline her granddaughter. 

It doesn't take Stella long to figure out that Motty and other members of the family have a secret they all share. And that the secret involves a small church located on Motty's property. Sneaking around, Stella discovers that there is a hidden chamber in the church that leads down into a cave. And in that cave is a strange creature that needs and takes and gives, but only to the women of Motty's and Stella's bloodlines.

The story then jumps to the about 10 or so years in the future. Stella no longer goes to the family church and attends its weird "god." She has become estranged from her family after the death of a teenage boy for which she is blamed. But when she finds out a new girl has come to stay with Motty, she feels she must intervene to protect this child, even though the girl, Sunny, seems completely enthralled by the church and its cave creature.

It took me a bit to get into this story, but once I did it really grabbed me. I didn't start out liking Stella much. But I began to understand her view point more and more as the story moved along. At first she seemed a real bitch. But she had her reasons. And her efforts to protect young Sunny were admirable if, it turns out, misguided. 

Here is a review by Publishers Weekly.

Rabbits

 

By Terry Miles

When K was a young teen, he was in a crash that killed one friend and injured himself and the friend's twin sister. The crash happened because the three teens were playing a game known as Rabbits. Rabbits is kind of a treasure hunt, where you get clues and follow them to the prize, said to be wealth beyond belief and your heart's desire. Following the instructions they had figured out, the three were driving down a road in the dark, with their vehicle's headlights turned off as instructed in the clues they deciphered. Not surprisingly, they crashed.

Not long after, a few years maybe, K lost both his parents in a boating accident. This left him alone in the world with no one in his life except a few close friends. Living in Seattle, his closest friend is Baron. His next closest is Chloe, who works at an arcade where K give occasional lectures on the game, Rabbits, helped out by his friend Baron. 

One day a man who showed up at his lecture asked to speak to him afterward. They went to a nearby cafe and the man, Scarpio, asked K about Rabbits. According to Scarpio, the game is messed up and this could lead to serious trouble. They make an agreement to met the next day, but Scarpio never shows up. 

This starts K and Chloe on an adventure to find out what is wrong with Rabbits even though they get warned repeatedly not to have anything to do with the game, as it seems many Rabbits players have died pursuing its clues, just like his friend did when K was a teenager.

This was an OK read if a bit boring. It takes K and Chloe several chapters to finally leave their homes or the arcade where Chloe works and get out in the city to follow the clues, all of which are conveniently located in the area around Seattle. Then it turns out that the threat to the Rabbits game and to the world is being caused by one nutty genius who is on a quest to bring his dead family back to life. Bit underwhelming, in my opinion.

See also the review by Publishers Weekly.

Warm Bodies

By Isaac Marion

R is a zombie. He "lives" in a plane at the airport. He has friend, M, who is also a zombie. They sometimes hang out together. He also has a zombie wife and two zombie kids. But that doesn't stop him from falling for a living, breathing girl, Julie.
One day, feeling a bit peckish, he heads into the city, looking for a bite to eat. He and his zombie companions are lucky enough to find a group of teenage humans out foraging. This is where he first encounters Julie and, for reasons unknown to himself, he saves her from the others and hides her in his airplane.
Julie, of course, is terrified, being held captive by a zombie. But, as they spend more time together, Julie begins to soften toward R. And R begins to feel more alive.
There is only one thing that may come between their burgeoning love: R ate her boyfriend's brain.

This was a cute idea. And it was just a few pages into the story that I realized I had seen it as a movie. I enjoyed the movie and that kind of spoiled the book for me. Also, the movie ending is more upbeat than the novel.  But  I did enjoy the novel too.

The Mist

By Stephen King

Summertime on the lake and a bad thunderstorm knocks down trees and power lines. Waking up to a changed world is bad enough, but what is that strange mist coming in across the lake? Doesn't look like any normal mist, so white and menacing. Never mind, the wife needs some odds and ends at the grocery, so head into town with the kid to the store. Question is, will you be able to get back home? Because the mist has arrived and it is full of terrors.

A gripping, scary story that illustrates the fragile grasp people may have on sanity and civility in a midst of a terrible crisis.

Amazonia

By James Rollins

Nathan Rand's father disappeared on an expedition to discover lost tribes of the Amazon. A few years later, one of the members of that expedition came out of the jungle but died within hours without revealing the fate or location of the rest of the members of the expedition. This man, a former Special Forces soldier, had lost an arm previously but when he came out of the jungle, his arm was back.
News of this miracle sends a new expedition into the Amazon, to attempt to trace the dead man's trail and lead them to find out how the man regrew his arm. And Nathan Rand is part of that expedition and he is determined to discover what happened to his father. Plus they have a new, urgent quest: to discover a cure for a new and terrible disease that apparently came out of the jungle in the tissues of the dead man and is spreading like lightning throughout Brazil and the United States where the man's body was transported for study before anyone new that it was the bearer of a plague.

This story is part adventure story, part horror story and part mystery novel. The expedition has lots of exciting adventures, including encounters with giant piranha who have legs and can walk; gigantic caimans, a kind of alligator; a pack of huge jaguars and with a gang of thugs who want the discovery of a medicine that can regrow human limbs for the unscrupulous pharmaceutical company who has hired them. Heads will roll and so will a lot of other gory stuff but the story is certainly exciting and the source of the cure is simply amazing and fascinating and it is too bad it is just a fantasy. This was a very good read, if you don't mind all the gruesome stuff.

The Hephaestus Plague

By Thomas Page

After an earthquake, strange bugs appear. They are hard, black, beetle-like bugs that chirp like a cricket. And they can start fires. They start fires because they eat pure carbon.
Naturally, people have to eliminate this new threat. But these bugs seem totally resistant to pesticide. Also, since they eat carbon they are quickly transported around the country in vehicle exhaust systems.
Scientists are frantically studying the bugs to figure out how to kill them. But one scientist takes a shine to the bugs. He is the one who discovers that the bugs are not beetles but are a kind of cockroach. He is also the one who figures out how to kill them. But he is also the one who proceeds to breed a new bug, a cross between a hissing roach and the fire roaches. But these hybrid bugs are a whole lot smarter than any bugs humankind has ever encountered. And they don't like people trying to get rid of them.

This science fiction horror story was pretty good. The bugs are certainly strange and different, almost like something from another world. The story is mostly about the reclusive scientist who gets way too interested in these bugs and lets his scientific curiosity override his better judgment, wreaking havoc on his town and neighbors in the process. The only problem I had with the book were the rather detailed descriptions of the bug's innards. I don't really want to know about the internal structure of a cockroach, even if it is a superbug. But, overall I enjoyed the book.

First Evidence

By Ken Goddard

Crime scene investigator Colin Cellars has been called in to look into the disappearances of several people in the Pacific Northwest. Before he can even get started on his investigation, he is called to a crime scene of a possible shooting at a cabin deep in the rugged forest landscape. What he doesn't know is that the cabin belongs to an old estranged friend of his named Bobby, the very man who had stood him up just a few hours before. Cellars' first discovery is the mauled body of a large dog. His next is the body of a man whose face is gone. He doesn't realize at first that it is his old friend, Bobby. But as Cellars tries to work the crime scene he realizes that he is not alone at this isolated cabin in the woods. Indeed, whoever killed Bobby is in the vicinity and is not happy that Cellars is collecting evidence of the murder.
Thus starts what is the weirdest case of his career, as Cellars comes face to face with visitors from outer space. Visitors that will do anything, including murder, to protect the secret of their presence on our planet.

This was a pretty good story, even though rather gruesome and creepy. The setting is gloomy and threatening, with the oppressive mountains, dense forests, constant rain and the shadowy aliens lurking at the edge of vision, not clearly seen but ever menacing. This kind of story isn't the sort of thing that I usually enjoy but this one was engrossing and suspenseful.

The Wrath

By David Robbins

On an archaeological dig in the valley of the Dog People in Egypt, a pathogen is released that quickly spreads throughout Egypt and from there to the rest of the world. This disease affects the eyes, making them bulge out; the salivary glands, making the afflicted foam at the mouth; the joints and tendons, forcing the person into a hunched-over-on-all-fours stance; the brain, destroying the cortex and turning the person into a blood-thirsty, ravenous beast; and it causes an intense fever that results in the victim tearing off all their clothes and running around nude: thus the dog people.

As you can tell from the description, this is a rather silly book. Even the front cover of the book is silly, as it shows a hairy beast with huge fangs and pointed dog ears, which does not describe the sufferers of the dog people disease. Going by the cover you would think they turn into werewolves, but not so.
Another silly thing about the book, which was published in 1988, is that the doctors studying the infected people keep catching the disease and turning into dog people themselves. Like doctors in 1988 didn't understand how to deal with infectious diseases without exposing themselves to them.
But besides that, it's a pretty fair story, about struggling against an implacable foe and not always winning. But happily, the calvary arrives in the nick of time and all is not lost.

The Road

By Cormac McCarthy

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2007

Something terrible has happened to the Earth, some huge ecological disaster or perhaps a horrible war. Whatever it was it has left the world, cold, barren and burned.
A few people have managed to survive, hanging on mainly by preying on each other. One man and his young son have clung to survival for as long as they can where they currently live but things are getting very desperate. The man decides to head out to a new locale, some place where food and shelter can be found, southward and to the ocean. He doesn't have much time because he is ill and knows he is probably dying. He just wants to get his son to safety. So they embark on a dangerous trek, hiding out against marauders, stumbling across timely caches of food and supplies. The man does the best he can but sometimes things go really hard for them. But they struggle onward to the promise of some kind of life and security.

Well, isn't this a cheerful little book? People roasting newborn babies over campfires. Charred burned corpses littering the highways. Hopelessness and despair and impending death. Yup, a real hoot.
Lots of readers found this book uplifting and inspiring. To me it was just so depressing and gruesome. I couldn't take it and had to set it aside for several months. I don't need to be hit over the head with a brick, which is exactly what this book does to the reader. Not to my taste at all.

For another review, see The New York Times.

New Words (Apparently the author is fond of unusual words. These definitions may not be accurate as some of these words are very hard to track down.)

Gryke: also grike; a fissure. 'He descended into a gryke in the stone and there he crouched coughing and he coughed for a long time.'

Meconium: greenish substance that builds up in the bowels of a growing fetus and is normally discharged shortly after birth. 'The improbable appearance of the small crown of the head. Streaked with blood and lank black hair. The rank meconium.'

Rachitic: of, relating to, or affected by rickets; resembling or suggesting the condition of one suffering from rickets. 'He was lean, wiry, rachitic.'

Siwash camp: a camp out without a tent or supplies. 'When it was a bit lighter he rose and walked out and cut a perimeter about their siwash camp looking for sign but other than their own faint track through the ash he saw nothing.'

Claggy: sticky or tacky. 'The gray and rotting teeth. Claggy with human flesh.'

Parsible also parsable; parse means to break a sentence down into component parts. "He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities.'

Intestate: having no legal will, one who dies without a will. 'He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth.'

Patterans: any of several coded signs left along a road or on a non-gypsy house by one gypsy comrade to another. 'They began to come upon from time to time small cairns of rock by the roadside. They were signs in gypsy language, lost patterans.'

Pampooties: soft shoe, moccasin or slipper, usually made of leather. 'They'd wrapped their feet in sailcloth and bound them up in blue plastic pampooties cut from a tarp and they left strange tracks in their comings and going.'

Salitter: essence of God. 'He walked out into the road and stood. The silence. The salitter drying from the earth.'

Crozzled: crushed, squashed, shrunken. 'The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.'

Hydroptic: swollen. 'The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular.'

Darkfever

By Karen Marie Moning

MacKayla is a typical young American woman, enjoying life, working on her tan, when it all changes with the murder of her sister in Ireland. When the police investigation bogs down for lack of evidence, Mac goes off to Ireland to try to convince the police to not give up. But the police just don't have the time or resources as they are dealing with an epidemic of murders and disappearances.
Mac has a message on her phone from her sister, telling her that she must find the Sinsar Dubh. Not only does Mac not know what the Sinsar Dubh is, she doesn't even know how to spell it. Trying to discover just what it is, she runs into Jericho Barrons, a shady and threatening character with a bunch of secrets. He knows what the Sinsar Dubh is. In fact, he wants to find it for himself.
As she stays in Ireland, trying to chase down her sister's killer for herself, she starts seeing strange, terrifying creatures, creatures that apparently no one else can see. Jericho enlightens her as to what she is seeing and enlists her reluctant help in his efforts to contain these creatures by finding the Sinsar Dubh.

This is a romance story, although it is also a horror story. I don't read romance novels for the most part as they just don't appeal to me. So I wasn't familiar with a branch of romance fiction known as paranormal romance. It was kind of disconcerting to be in the middle of a horror story, only come across a detailed description of the outfits Mac and Jericho are wearing. Despite these typical romance novel aspects, this is a pretty creepy story full of scary monsters and vile characters. I found the story rather depressing and I don't know if I will read the next in the series. This is not surprising since I don't generally enjoy either romances or horror. People who like paranormal romances will probably like reading this series which is exciting and inventive although a bit too much for me.

Review by Chelsea on Vampire Book Club.

New Word:
Metempsychosis: a philosophical term in the Greek language referring to the belief of transmigration of the soul, especially its reincarnation after death. "They believed day followed night, and held to a credo of metempsychosis in which the human soul does not die but is reborn in different forms."

Duma Key

By Stephen King

Edgar Freemantle was almost killed when a crane crushed his pickup truck. He received brain injuries and lost an arm and nearly lost his leg. He spent months in the hospital and, as a result of his brain injury, has violent rages and memory loss. His wife finds his rages terrifying and she leaves him. He becomes depressed and, on the recommendation of his doctor, opts for a change of scenery, so he rents a house on Duma Key.
Duma Key is a small Florida island. The beachfront home Edgar has rented, which he calls "Big Pink", is owned by a rich old woman who lives farther down the beach. The woman, Elizabeth, has lived her whole life on Duma Key. Frail and becoming senile, Elizabeth has a caretaker, Wireman, a man who is also dealing with a tragic past.
Edgar takes up painting to occupy his time and as therapy. He finds that his paintings have the power to change reality. One of the things he does with his paintings is to heal Wireman of the disability caused by a botched suicide attempt that occurred before Wireman came to Duma Key.
Edgar's talent clues him into the mysteries of Duma Key. He starts to realize that some evil force is at work on the key, a force that has smashed lives in the past and is awake again. It wants Edgar Freemantle and it will reach into the lives of those dearest to Edgar, causing death and destruction.

In Duma Key, King has written a compelling story about evil and one man's struggle to do the right thing, even through events that would crush most people. I really enjoyed reading this story. It may not be high art but Stephen King is a great storyteller.

For a synopsis of the novel, check out Wikipedia.

Review by Alison Flood for The Guardian.

New Words:
Juco: An acronym for junior college.
Docent: A docent is officially defined as a professor or university lecturer, but the term has been expanded to designate the corps of volunteer guides who staff many of the museums and other educational institutions in the world.

Odd Thomas

By Dean Koontz

I first became acquainted with Odd Thomas in Koontz's third novel about Odd, Brother Odd. I didn't particularly like that novel and so I was not planning to read any more books by Koontz.
Oddly, though, before I read Brother Odd, I had seen mention of Koontz's character Odd Thomas and decided to read the book, Odd Thomas, as it sounded intriguing. So I put in a request for the book at the library. Years went by and I forgot about the request.
Then a few weeks ago the library informed me that my requested book was in. I didn't know what book they were referring to and was surprised that it was Odd Thomas. Well, since they went to the trouble to fill my years-old request, I decided to go ahead and read it.
So, since some of what I said about Brother Odd applies here also, I will quote from my review:
"It's about a young man named Odd Thomas. He ended up with the name Odd because of a typo on his birth certificate; he was supposed to be named Todd. But the name Odd fits him better because, to paraphrase the movie, he sees dead people.
Ghosts appear to Odd when they need his help dealing with the baggage from their lives that is preventing them from crossing over and entering eternity. The ghosts can't speak, but Odd is very intuitive and is able to figure out what they need from him ... Odd soon discovers that something very sinister is happening when malign spirits that feed on human suffering begin flocking..."
In this story, the malign spirits, called bodachs, are flocking around a customer at the cafe where Odd works. This customer, whom Odd calls Fungus Man because he reminds Odd of a mushroom, captures Odd's attention. Odd decides he needs to take a closer look at Fungus Man because the collection of bodachs around him are portents of violent death in the near future. Odd investigates and comes to the conclusion that something terrible is in store for the town where he lives.

I didn't care for this book anymore than I liked the other Odd Thomas story, Brother Odd. For one thing, Koontz has nothing good to say about modern culture and in fact hates the way the modern world is trending so much that he declares that the bodachs are the twisted, warped essence of voyeurs from the future surfing back through time to feed and glut on the violence and suffering of the past. Also, although Odd can see the lingering spirits of the dead, in this novel, as in Brother Odd, the main part of the story concerns Odd's desire to deal with and prevent whatever impending violence that has drawn the attention of the voyeuristic bodachs. So what could be a look at spirits and ghosts and life after death turns out to be just another thriller-type horror story. If you like that sort of thing then you would probably enjoy Odd Thomas.

Review from Publishers Weekly: https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-553-80249-8.

The Haunted Omnibus

Edited by Alexander Laing

Well, this is just a dandy book of horror stories and ghost stories published in 1937. It has a lot of the old classic stories: "The Yellow Wall Paper", "Perez", "The Wendigo" ("Oh,oh! My feet of fire! My burning feet of fire!"), "The Monkey's Paw", "The Beast with Five Fingers", "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", and "The Tell-Tale Heart" along with many others.
I first read the above-mentioned stories in school so I guess they must have been considered literature. I wonder if students now days are given these stories to read? If so, they probably find them rather tame compared to the gruesome slasher movies that are so popular today.
I enjoyed reading this collection of stories and since it is a long book, about 800 pages, I was enveloped by a solemn and gloomy atmosphere for more than a week, which was rather fun. A couple of the stories are quite amusing, namely, "The Ghost Ship" and "Green Thoughts". In "Ghost Ship" a ghost ship (naturally) gets blown into a town that has a lot of ghosts and ends up corrupting the local ghosts with its supply of excellent ghost rum, much to the disapproval of the town elders. In "Green Thoughts" a fussy old man and his old maid companion get eaten by a rare orchid the man raises in his green house, along with the cat and a mouse. They find themselves reconstituted in the carnivorous orchid as huge blossoms that look just like them.
It really is a marvelous collection of not so scary stories and it was fun revisiting those old stories from my childhood. (Of course, they were a lot scarier back then!)

Brother Odd

By Dean Koontz

This story is about a young man named Odd Thomas. He ended up with the name Odd because of a typo on his birth certificate; he was supposed to be named Todd. But the name Odd fits him better because, to paraphrase the movie, he sees dead people.
Ghosts appear to Odd when they need his help dealing with the baggage from their lives that is preventing them from crossing over and entering eternity. The ghosts can't speak, but Odd is very intuitive and is able to figure out what they need from him.
In this story, Odd is at a monastery high in the mountains. He is there not only to deal with a wayward spirit but also to deal with the tragic loss of the woman he loved. But Odd soon discovers that something very sinister is happening when malign spirits that feed on human suffering begin flocking to the school for disabled children that is associated with the monastery.

I liked the premise of a man that helps ghosts. Unfortunately, this book is really just a horror or monster story that reminded me a lot of Stephen King's stuff. It's a kind of story that I am not really a fan of. I guess it was OK if you like that sort of thing. I don't plan on reading any more Koontz though.

Review on Horror Novel Reviews:    https://horrornovelreviews.com/2013/09/30/dean-koontz-brother-odd-review/.

Lisey's Story

By Stephen King

Let me start off by saying I am not a big fan of Stephen King. I have read quite a few of his novels: The Shining, Cujo, The Green Mile, The Stand, The Tommyknockers, Desperation, The Dead Zone, It, Dolores Claiborne, Needful Things. I was hoping that this book would be more in the vein of Dolores Claiborne than in that of Desperation. This is because I am not a fan of horror or suspense stories. Well, Lisey's Story combines both, being an insightful look at strong woman, like Dolores Claiborne, but with horror elements too.
Lisey is a woman in her fifties whose successful novelist husband, Scott, died a couple years before. She thinks she is coping with Scott's death OK, but when she finally begins to clean out Scott's office, she has to face her memories of their life together; mainly she has to deal with the craziness that Scott brought with him into their marriage. Craziness runs in both their families, but it runs so strong in Scott's that he refused to ever have children, not wanting to pass on the "bad-gunkies," as he called it. As Lisey is trying to cope with remembering Scott's bad-gunkies, she also has to deal with a catatonic sister and some weirdo who wants to slice and dice her out of pure mean craziness.
The story starts off slow. I didn't really start to get into it until the part where Lisey is attacked by the weirdo. The pace of the story picked up pretty well then. Some of the language was hard to handle, lots of peculiar terms are used like bool, and smucking and SOWISA and puffickly huh-yooge (it took me a while to figure that one out) and they get in the way of the story somewhat, although I think King uses these words because they are so much a part of Lisey's internal dialogue and are part of the language of Lisey's marriage with Scott. Though the novel starts out kind of slow and kind of confusing (I had a hard time remembering what SOWISA was supposed to mean), King is a good story teller and his characters are interesting, charming and worth reading about.

Review from The Guardian:  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/oct/28/stephenking.sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.

Haunted

By Chuck Palahniuk

This is supposed to be a novel but it is really a collection of stories strung together by a premise. The premise is a group of writers locked away from the world to work on their masterpiece for three months. But these people aren't really writers, what they want is a blockbuster that will bring them the big bucks and they will do whatever it takes even if it means cannibalism and self-mutilation.
So that is the framework for the stories, a group of people starving and hurting themselves in order to make their ordeal more salable.
Despite the title, there are no ghost stories. The stories are pretty much straight up horror. They are gruesome and disgusting, full of nasty smells and nasty sights. But not really what you could call shocking. I already knew that those pool pumps can suck your guts out thru your rectum. I already knew that some hot springs are hot enough to cook you alive. I already knew that when you get burned your skin can slough off. I already knew that the process of decay involves insects and liquefaction and bloat. I already knew that a lot of people are perverts so I wasn't surprised to read about men having sex with a CPR dummy or whatever. (The movie "American Pie" pretty much established that men will screw anything.) I already knew that bums stink. I already knew that people like Typhoid Mary who have to be isolated to prevent the spread of disease.
The last story, "Obsolete" is just dumb. Video tape of Venus shows that Paradise is real and everyone on Earth kills themselves so they can get to Paradise. What the hell? No way!
Finally, it is hard to have any sympathy for the writer "victims" because most of them turn out to be homicidal creeps themselves and pretty much deserve what they get.

Review from The Guardian:   https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/jun/11/fiction.chuckpalahniuk.