The Best Horror Novel You’ve Ever Read? – Bloggin’ on the ETC [Halloween 2012]

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m prone to nightmares, so I’m not a huge fan of being scared. Usually if I read a horror novel, it has to have more than chills going for it. I want to be entertained, I want to be put in a thrall of “then what happened?” — horror novels more than any other kind have to earn their keep with me. Think Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Peter Straub, masters of horror, who know how to both entertain and keep a reader hooked in.

This is the only explanation I can give for why I resisted the work of Tananarive Due for so long, even after my good friend, Tamara, whose taste I trust implicitly, recommended her work to me our senior year of college. By that point I wasn’t even reading King, Koontz, and Straub anymore, having moved on to the then-exploding market of black women’s fiction. As an emerging woman attending an all-women’s college with no romantic prospects in sight, I was most interested in immersing myself in the world of the older black woman’s experience — especially if they were in any way romantic.

As it was, when I finally did read my first Tananarive Due novel in my later twenties, I set myself up for a perfect storm of pure horror. For one, I had very recently returned to Stephen King, having just read and loved the first two books in his DARK TOWER series. I was in the library, scouring the aisles for audiobooks which I might listen to while performing the mundane tasks of my dead-end job, when I came across an audiobook called MY SOUL TO KEEP by Tananarive Due, featuring a blurb from none other than King himself.

I picked up the book, but let it languish in a stack of audiobooks. I was writing what would become my first fully-produced play, and I had decided for the sake of my sanity and my career to ignore the sound of my biological time clock ticking and take a break from dating and concentrate on writing. With so much on my plate, I didn’t get around to listening to this book until it became absolutely necessary, lest I miss the due date for getting it back to the library (after paying the LAPL system a hefty sum in overdue fines, I’d also recently become a very good borrowing citizen). Little did I know that I was setting myself up for horror like I had never known.

What makes MY SOUL TO KEEP so horrific is that it features a black woman finding her perfect mate and having a child with him, only to find out he’s a 500-year-immortal, a being who is on one hand devastatingly attractive but on the other hand a monster, almost too horrible to comprehend. If you are a single woman of any color, searching for love, this will feel like reading your worst nightmare, and you won’t be able to put it down. In many ways Due taps into the underlying fear of happily ever after, making this a particularly horrific read if you have any hope of attaining your own HEA.

Writing this post makes me realize how much horror is dependent not on fear in general, but specific fears. Maybe MY SOUL TO KEEP isn’t truly the scariest novel in the history of scary novels, but to my mind, it always will be, because I read it at the perfect time. Often our experiences with a horror novel are framed not just by the novel itself but the timing of when we read it.

So with that in mind, what is the best horror novel you’ve ever read and why do you think it resonated with you the way it did?