Essential Horror Film And Fiction Books For Every Shelf: Summerween Special [Part Three]!
Spoofing The Vampire: Essays On Bloodsucking Comedy
We could have included any number of Simon Bacon's comprehensive list of books analyzing vampires across visual culture, but Spoofing The Vampire is not only the first book dedicated to dissecting the vampire comedy on film and television, it's also a real treat to read.
Distinguishing between parody, satire, and serious-spoofing, it covers everything from defanging Nosferatu in children's media to "Mocking Masculinity" via subversion in women-directed vampire films to "Vampires Clashing with the 21st Century."
Image: McFarland
Image: Pulp-Lit Productions
Varney The Vampire; Or, The Feast Of Blood
Fans of Penny Dreadful (let's just pretend the show ended before the abysmal final showdown...), this one's for you! Varney The Vampire (often attributed to James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett) is a popular example of the penny dreadful, notorious Victorian gothic literature serialized in illustrated pamphlets.
Pulp-Lit Productions collects several issues across two volumes, including original woodcut illustrations and presented as they would have appeared in the 1840s, albeit with larger print for reading ease.
The Horror Sensorium: Media And The Senses
Angela Ndalianis' The Horror Sensorium analyzes how storytelling practices, emotional experiences, cognitive responses, and physicality ignite the sensory mechanics of the body and its connected intellectual and cognitive functions.
Image: McFarland
Image: Dark Moon Books
The Five Senses Of Horror
This unique anthology, edited by Eric J. Guignard, offers sixteen horror stories exploring how our impressions of the world are formed by the five senses.
Each entry is accompanied by cognitive, cultural, and literary insights by psychologist Jessica Bayliss, which, in addition to further academic and fiction reading lists, makes this an essential book for writers of psychological or sensory horror.
Killing For Culture: From Edison To Isis
David Kerekes and David Slater's Killing For Culture offers a detailed history of death on film, broken into three sections: the depiction of death in conventional or feature films (focusing on Roberta and Michael Findlay's exploitation film Snuff — originally filmed in 1971 and loosely based on the Manson murders, later released by Alan Shackleton in 1976 with a new ending and marketed as an actual snuff tape), mondo films (shockumentaries purporting to show real death, often containing real animal cruelty), and death captured on film (focusing on the live broadcast of State Senator R. Budd Dwyer's suicide).
This was the first book in the Critierion Cinema series (see part one of our list for another entry, The Satanic Screen), which has since been expanded in a reprint by Headpress — highly recommend getting both editions if you can!
Image: Headpress Books
Image: Independent
Autumn Gothic
An extreme horror novel involving the gods of death, Brian Bowyer's Autumn Gothic is an unrelenting read that takes you on a violent race across America.
After guitarist Mark learns that ritual murder is to thank for his bandmate Delilah’s musical success, she lets him scram rather than become her next sacrifice — before changing her mind and hunting him down.
As she carves her way from LA to a haunted mansion in West Virginia, arriving just in time for Halloween, she discovers Mark and the mansion’s former resident aren’t alone.
Terror Tracks: Music, Sound And Horror Cinema
Focusing on the post-War period, Terror Tracks, edited by Philip Hayward, explores patterns and inflection in a range of scores — orchestral, popular, rock, and electronic — and how these relate to non-musical sound.
Image: Equinox Publishing Ltd
Image: JournalStone
Out Of Tune
Edited by Jonathan Maberry, Out Of Tune is an anthology series split across two volumes that creatively reimagines folk ballads as short dark fiction.
Accompanying each story, folklorist Nancy Keim Comley comments on each source ballad in this wonderful blend of folkloristics, storytelling, and ethnomusicology.
Also had to mention George R.R. Martin's 1983 novel The Armageddon Rag, in which a journalist’s investigation into the death of a rock promoter reveals that his favorite band, Nazgûl, has returned to the music scene with a little help from a demonic force...
Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, And Representations Of Native Americans In Film
While not horror-specific, Michelle H. Raheja's Reservation Reelism is the first book-length text to explore how the contributions of Indigenous actors, filmmakers, and spectators helped to shape the representation of Indigenous peoples in Hollywood.
A comprehensive study that fully embraces the complexity of this relationship, it attempts to create positive representations in film that reflect the influence and experiences of Native peoples and communities in Hollywood and beyond.
Image: University of Nebraska Press
Image: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Never Whistle At Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology
Edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr., Never Whistle At Night is bursting with 26 stories from Indigenous North American authors.
Featuring a foreword by Stephen Graham Jones, who introduces and frames the importance of the book's Native perspective when he speaks to a specific fear of the "colonized body" in possession narratives, the breadth and range of subjects, style, and sociocultural themes explored resonates beyond literary representation.
