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Arts & Culture

WLRN #FridayReads: Are We Scared Yet?

As we near Halloween, witches, ghosts and zombies are escaping from our screens and appearing all around us — on store shelves and at costume parties. But the other place scary stuff lives year-round is on the page. We asked some experts about their favorite scary reads.

Tananarive Due, author of Ghost Summer and The Living Blood

I write, read and watch a lot of horror, so I don't scare easily. But as I was planning the Black Horror course I currently teach at UCLA (Jordan Peele recently surprised my class with a master class on his film Get Out!), someone recommended that I read a novelette called The Devil in America by Kai Ashante Wilson. 

I was mesmerized, literally jumping at shadows as I read it at dusk in my backyard. This story epitomizes the thematic elements that run through much black horror: making sense of racism and racialized violence, even if redemption isn't always possible. The story has haunted me weeks later. 

Luis Hernandez, WLRN afternoon anchor and host of Sundial

It seems this decade has become a fantastical return to the ‘80s. Besides Stranger Things, we've seen this embrace of the corniness and cheesiness of my favorite decade (i.e. reboots of Ghost Busters and a sequel to Blade Runner; television shows like The Americans, reboots of MacGyver and Lethal Weapon and let's not forget again ... Stranger Things.)

I figured I would return to the ‘80s by going back to one of my favorites, actually my first, horror book, IT by Stephen King. I'm just now digging into this 1,000-plus-page story and thoroughly enjoying it. Hopefully, it doesn't swell up any long-forgotten memories of high school that I want to keep hidden in my subconscious, like some monster-like clown that haunts my dreams.

Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald reporter

Song of Kaliwas Dan Simmons' first novel, published in 1985, and remains the most frightening thing he's ever written. An American poet and his Indian wife travel to Calcutta with their infant child in tow on a literary expedition. The ghastly things that befall them are unthinkable — the product of a demonically dark imagination. Out of print for a few years, the book is now readily available again. 

Fade by Robert Cormier was marketed as a YA novel, but I would argue this story of a teenager who discovers he has the power to turn invisible is best enjoyed by adults. Most of Cormier's books were marked by a bleak pessimism that argued good doesn't always trump evil. But he had never suggested human nature was this easily corruptible — or this innately prone to evil.

Ghost Story by Peter Straub is a literary story about vengeance from beyond the grave, but it's packed with all sorts of monsters beyond ghosts — from werewolves to feral children to ordinary men capable of harboring the most awful secrets.

Ill Will by Dan Chaon sounds familiar — a therapist teams up with one of his patients to try to stop a serial killer preying on young men — but the novel is something much more extraordinary than an ordinary thriller. This is a scary, chilling book about the lies we tell ourselves in order to survive a world that seems to resent our existence and harbor us ill will.

As for the requisite Stephen King suggestion, I'd try 2015's Revival, which doesn't suffer from the bloat that has plagued so many of his recent books and is a dive into all-out horror. A preacher who renounces God after a personal tragedy is forced to flee his small town. Decades later, a man who used to attend the minister's services as a boy finds out the preacher has been dabbling in dark sciences worthy of H.P. Lovecraft.

Nancy Klingener was WLRN's Florida Keys reporter until July 2022.
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