The God of the Puritans...was a monster too horrible to contemplate.
The basis of all true cosmic horror is violation of the order of nature, and the profoundest violations are always the least concrete and describable.
Horror is the badge of humanity, worn proudly, self-righteously, and often falsely.
And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished, for the small hours were rent with the screams of nightmare.
Terrifying. . . . A Dark Matter is populated with vivid, sympathetic characters, and driven by terrors both human and supernatural. It's the kind of book that's impossible to put down once it has been picked up. It kept me reading far into the night. Straub builds otherworldly terror without ever losing touch with his attractive cast of youngsters, who age beautifully. Put this one high on your list.
I am so beastly tired of mankind and the world that nothing can interest me unless it contains a couple of murders on each page or deals with the horrors unnameable and unaccountable that leer down from the external universes.
In junior high I read a lot of Stephen King, whose Americana approach to writing was often about "the terror next door" and at the same time I was reading a lot of Clive Barker, who was on the other end of the horror pendulum: insidious and disturbingly psychological. I found it fascinating how these two authors came at horror from two totally different perspectives.
I know what I miss as a cinemagoer is that balance of films that actually scare me, they're so few and far between. I loved ghost stories, I love horror stories, I love all of that stuff, but I really yearn for something to actually frighten me.
There aren't a lot of supernatural things that I'm scared or super terrified of, but clowns are definitely on that list.
