BiblioAddict

From Booking Through Thursday:

What with yesterday being Halloween, and all . . . do you read horror? Stories of things that go bump in the night and keep you from sleeping?….

Without a doubt. I used to read them more often than I do now. I started off at – oh, I don’t remember the age. Ten, maybe? – reading GOOSEBUMPS. Even now I remember my collection of those books with feelings of nostalgia. I was proud to have them all lined up on my meager little bookshelf. At one point I owned at least ten copies and thought I had quite a collection.

Eventually I realized that R.L. Stine, the author of most, if not all, of the GOOSEBUMPS stories, also wrote horror novels for a slightly more mature audience. Soon enough I abandoned Goosebumps and hopped on the R.L. Stine bandwagon. I read quite a few of his books too, although I can’t remember any of them in detail. I do remember reading this one though:

I can’t recall a thing about this book, but I definitely remember owning it. I remember being particularly excited to read this one because the cheerleader on the cover just looked so….menacing. Don’t ask if I read The First or the Third Evil, because I have no idea. Probably.

From there, I eventually migrated to Christopher Pike. Again, I don’t recall the plot of any of these novels either. But I do remember the cover of this one along with a few vague details:

“Pray they don’t find what they’re looking for…” Oh so wonderfully cheesy. I used to love those little one-liners. But, by the time I reached seventh grade, Christopher Pike would no longer do (it was all just entirely too elementary school for me), so I decided it was time to tackle the big dog: Stephen King.

Now that I think about it, some of the material I read in King’s books probably wasn’t appropriate for a thirteen year old. I’m sure if my mother had known just how adult some of Mr. King’s material was, she would have locked them up and said, “Not until you’re sixteen.”

As it was, since no one in my family read, I think most of them assumed that because it was a book, it had some kind of inherent appropriateness (and therefore, readability) that movies of the same ilk (i.e. tv) didn’t. In other words, no one ever questioned me about what I was reading. Not even my teachers.

Now King’s books, I remember. I read the classic King horror stories: CARRIE, CUJO, SALEM’S LOT, THINNER, IT (much, much scarier, I soon learned, than the movie – especially since I’m afraid of clowns), and finally THE SHINING, which scarred me to death. I think I decided that King couldn’t get any scarier. Besides, he’d moved onto THE GREEN MILE novellas, which I wasn’t at all interested in at the time. So, I moved on to another king of horror: Dean Koontz.

The first Koontz novel I read was PHANTOMS. I remember standing in the library, reading the opening two-paged chapter, and feeling it send a shiver of delicious fear down my spine. The first two sentences were:

The scream was distant and brief. A woman’s scream…

After that I gobbled every Koontz novel I could get my hands on – more in fact than I ever read of King: COLD FIRE, THE KEY TO MIDNIGHT, WATCHERS, STRANGERS, DARKFALL,WHISPERS, and many, many more.

Koontz accompanied me through the summer before my freshman year in high school. By the end of the summer, Koontz and I had tired of each other. I then decided that I was ready to read something a little lighter and slightly less depressing than horror stories have the tendency to be. Thus began my love affair with romance literature, which fed my tragically romantic teenage heart. That, however, is another story for a different day.

I do think I should add this though: After nearly a decade of having not read one horror novel, I now find myself innundated with horror, thanks in large part to the R.I.P. II reading challenge, which of course I didn’t finish. In addition to the other two horror books I’m reading now (which I’ve already blogged about, probably too much), I’m also carting around ODD THOMAS by no other than Dean Koontz. It seems I’ve come full circle.

Finally….

I thought about asking you about whether you were participating in NaNoWriMo, but I asked that last year. Although . . . if you want to answer that one, too, please feel free to go ahead and do both, or either, your choice!

My first reaction to this question was, “What the heck is NaNoWriMo?” What can I say? I’m still new to the blogosphere. Now that I know what it is – why yes, I do think I’ll attempt to do this. I’m attempting to ignore the little voice in my head saying, “Get real. You’re writing 3.5 pages a day? Ha!” Instead, I’m paying heed to the optimistic voice in my head which says, “You never know unless you try….”