Word: gothic
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Stranded on the spookiest night of the year, what better way to trick those Hallowed Eve blues than by treating yourself to a good gothic read? We ain't talking Stephen King pulp or Amityville schlock, but serious, tried-and-true, capital "l" Literature. If you intend to read your way through the most macabre and bone-chilling of Holiday vigils, set in store a shelfload of works guaranteed to keep you white-knuckled, wired, and wide-eyed...
...copyright on Gaston Leroux's 1911 thriller The Phantom of the Opera expired this year, plans were announced for no fewer than three competing musical adaptations. The flurry of interest was perplexing. Leroux's tale, part horror melodrama, part bodice-ripping gothic, seemed too grim and kinky for a musical. The central character is, after all, not only hideously ugly but an extortionist, kidnaper, incendiary and megalomaniac -- and the heroine must at least halfway fall in love with...
...conflict begins when the man decides to hitchhike to the nearest town and leaves his wife and son with the car at an outpost in the middle of the desert. Some very spooky cowboy types hang out at the outpost. The story is about betrayal, but it is almost Gothic in the way it renders the stillness of the blank desert and the pink-cheeked yokels grotesque and terrifying...
...land of the dead, where he reported that "pale fear got hold of me" as the spirits rose up to drink blood. Every ethnic group has spun folktales of the ungrateful dead. Even so, horror did not become a literary convention until the late 18th century, when the gothic novel described the exotic terrors of old feudal keeps. In the gaslight era, the supernatural took hold of the public imagination, and British authors quickly dominated the field. Their very names suggest creaking Victorian stairways, forbidden rooms and disembodied spirits: Montague Rhodes James, J.S. Le Fanu, Eden Phillpotts, Algernon Blackwood...
...view, a "political romance," another concerned a Maine woman attacked by ruffians, and the third was an old- fashioned love story. King's sun-washed study, set in a remodeled stable loft, has a hidden stairway leading down to a toy-cluttered indoor swimming pool with a vaulted gothic-style ceiling. Tabitha calls it the Church of the Poisoned Mind. The children drift in and out frequently. Naomi, 16, comes by dressed in a Mickey Mouse T shirt and shorts, a departure from the standard King uniform of work shirt and jeans. She complains that the boys were hogging...