Horror Stories
When I was a little boy (from around the ages of eight to twelve) I read a lot of horrible stories. Not horrible, low quality, but the other horrible. I just came to this realization while looking around in a used bookstore and coming across “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More” By Roald Dahl.
When I was a grade school kid I must have read the story “The Swan” in this book countless times. It is the story of bullying in rural post-war England and climaxes with the bullied boy being forced to climb a tree at gunpoint with the wings of a recently killed swan strapped to his arms. He is forced to “fly” by the older boys holding the gun. He does so, flying to freedom as Daedalus incarnate, to bask in the sun’s love. Even at that age, I caught the subtext.
Other horrible stories that made an impression on me at a young age were those of an anthology by Zenna Henderson . These included a story about a vacuum like creature that sucked anything that made a sound until they was drained and lifeless, and the story of a nameless shapeless blackness in a hole that would leave anything that ventured near it bloody and frozen.
I was introduced to HP Lovecraft around this time, but found the writing too dense to get into, although I did read the story about the journey into terror at the south pole from front to end. Like a horrible yet less interesting version of “Journey to the Centre of the Earth” by Jules Verne; it was written long ago and the writing did not make an impression on me like that of the previously mentioned works. More impressive was the shocking cover art.
At the latter part of this period of my life, I started reading Stephen King, starting with “Cujo”. Impressive were the vivid descriptions of the mad dog’s slavering jowls. This was followed by “Jaws”, although to be honest, it did not have much of an effect on me.
Finally, throughout this period the graphic and shocking artwork of horror comics and Heavy Metal magazines were always present. Scenes of carnage, blood and grotesque mutations hover at the edges of my memories of this time.
Now here I am holding the Roald Dahl book. But why bother buying it? I already know the whole book front to back. Wait, it includes the nice story, “The Boy Who Talked to Animals”. I will buy it.