Ah, dear readers, it’s fall. The crisp cool nights and warm-ish days have arrived and I couldn’t be happier to welcome my favorite season. I also couldn’t be happier that our wonderful blogger-in-residence Arabella got the ball rolling on All Hallows Read. For those of you who remember our celebrations last year, I hope that you will enjoy this year’s posts as well as we revel in things spooky, horrific and creepy.
I thought I’d start off the Saturdays @ the South festivities a little lighter. Sometimes horror books can be taken extremely seriously because it is a genre based on the emotion of fear. Horror can tap into some of our deepest fears including death and the unknown. As Arabella has mentioned previously, it’s healthy to explore these fears in a safe space and books give a perfect outlet to do just that. That doesn’t mean, however, that books that scare us can’t have other emotions tied to them. Romance is arguably the closest genre to horror because they both deal with strong emotions and horror books can have a romantic element in them.
A reaction that seems diametrically opposed to horror, however, is laughter. And yet, there are some great books out there that masterfully blend both elements of horror and humor. The two aren’t quite as disparate as they seem. If horror allows us to safely explore our fears and provide an outlet for our worst-case scenarios, humor allows those fears to be put aside and made that much less powerful by making them absurd. Voltaire once prayed “O Lord, make mine enemies ridiculous,” because this is precisely what takes away their power. The marvelous Mel Brooks adapted this philosophy by making the horrible figure of Hitler a ludicrous one in The Producers. Both horror and humor can lessen the impact of something fearsome, loathsome or otherwise horrific.
To that end, I’d like to recommend some books that blend the elements of humor and horror, to varying degrees. Some of them might scare the pants of off you (as a couple of these titles did for me) but give you a chuckle in the process, while others consider humor their job first, and adding horror elements as a way to move the story forward. The spectrum here is broad, so hopefully there will be something for all to enjoy:
A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore
Moore is one of those authors who doesn’t shy away from a silly fart joke but can also make some interesting commentary on the more serious aspects of life. In this book, he takes on death, parenthood and a coming apocalypse all with his characteristic light touch. Charlie Asher has inadvertently become the Grim Reaper and if that wasn’t hard enough, he’s worried that he may end up passing it along to his child. Hilarity ensues as he tries to shield his daughter while saving the world.
Cat Out of Hell by Lynne Truss
If anyone can bring humor to a grim subject, it’s the author of Eats, Shoots and Leaves which brought a sense of humor to a treatise on grammatical mistakes. In this fiction tome, Truss writes of a cat, Roger, who speaks to Alec Charlesworth and tells him frightening tales of recent deaths that may be linked to dark forces. If a talking cat doesn’t undercut a terrifying situation with humor, I don’t know what does.
The Postmortal by Drew Magary
If sarcasm in the face of horrifying events is more your take on humor, then this book may be more your speed. John Farrell gets “The Cure,” a death cure that renders someone impervious to old age and theoretically, won’t die. That is, unless some other outside force kills him. He and several others have taken part in this illicit treatment, but find it increasingly difficult to keep it under wraps as more people try to gain immortality. But can the world handle the load on its resources if an entire population doesn’t die? He’s sure to live long enough to find out. I’ll be honest, this book has some great one-liners in the humor department, but it successfully scared the daylights out of me!
The Last Days of Jack Sparks by Jason Arnopp
Speaking of one-liners and books that terrify me, this take on horror is a non-stop, gripping ride take takes a somewhat epistolary approach to horror. Jack Sparks is a loud-mouthed social media presence who is quick with a quip and was researching a book on the occult when he died. This is the story of how he died in the process of researching that book. The humor here comes in with Sparks, who isn’t shy about mocking much of what he sees (some of these lines made me laugh out loud) and the terrifying part comes in with just about everything else.
The Supernatural Enhancements by Edgar Cantero
This book is similar to The Last Days of Jack Sparks in that it has some fantastic one-liners that can definitely break the tension of a gripping read, it’s told in an epistolary style with records and transcripts from a stay in a haunted house and it scared the pants off of me. I also couldn’t stop thinking about this book long after it ended. A. (we know him as nothing else)inherits a house from a distant relative in West Virginia and stays there with companion Niamh only to discover that the house hides secrets about his family, about the area and about its inhabitants. It’s a bit indescribable. You’ll just have to read it for yourself. But be sure to lock doors before you do…
Till next week, dear readers, I hope you find your own balance of humor and horror during this month of All Hallows Read.