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Something wicked this way comes
Chicago mystery writers share their scariest reads for Halloween.
By Laura Pearson
Published: October 25, 2012
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Bryan Gruley “Two classic stories come quickly to mind. Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ reminds us that true horror lies not in the supernatural or the macabre but in the recesses of the human heart. The other is the title story of Flannery O’Connor’s collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find. The suspense is terrible and the grandmother’s naïveté is reminiscent of the stereotypical movie couple who stay in their new home even after finding a severed arm in the bathtub.”
Gruley’s The Skeleton Box, the third Starvation Lake mystery, was published in June.
Jamie Freveletti “I love Stephen King’s The Stand because it deals with an apocalyptic future and addresses the big issues: death, spirituality, evil and good. Thinner, which he wrote under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, is an interesting novel about a lawyer on a desperate search for the Gypsy who put a death curse on him. King writes a terrifying series of events that culminates in a defining, terrible choice for the protagonist, which I won’t reveal as it’s a spoiler.”
Freveletti celebrates the release of her latest thriller, Dead Asleep, Tuesday 30.
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Kevin Guilfoile “As a kid, there were two books that became almost totems of fear for me. One was Strangely Enough by C.B. Colby, and the other was Stranger than Science by Frank Edwards. Originally published in the 1940s and ’50s, they were basically compilations of old urban legends, ghost stories and UFO/monster sightings. I read and reread them throughout my preteen years until eventually I could scare myself at night just by looking at their spines on the shelf. In their pages, I learned to love being scared.”
Guilfoile’s most recent book is a short memoir, A Drive into the Gap.
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Laura Caldwell “The scariest book I’ve read recently was Gone Girl by my friend Gillian Flynn. There isn’t gratuitous violence, and the characters are not just people we might know—they could be us. With every word, you mistrust them more. I had such anxiety reading the book (which I did in about 48 hours) and loved every minute of it.”
Caldwell’s latest Izzy McNeil mystery, False Impressions, was published in August.
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Sara Paretsky “I have a very low fear threshold, so I don’t read a lot of horror or fem-jep [female in jeopardy] novels. However, any book where you can feel a terrible event about to happen is frightening. Recently I put aside The People of Forever Are Not Afraid by Shani Boianjiu because I can tell that one of the three narrators is about to describe murdering an unarmed civilian at a checkpoint. I find this so frightening that I can’t bear to read it right now, even though the book is an engrossing character study of contemporary Israeli women.”
Paretsky’s latest book is the V.I. Warshawski mystery Breakdown.
Bryan Gruley “Two classic stories come quickly to mind. Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ reminds us that true horror lies not in the supernatural or the macabre but in the recesses of the human heart. The other is the title story of Flannery O’Connor’s collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find. The suspense is terrible and the grandmother’s naïveté is reminiscent of the stereotypical movie couple who stay in their new home even after finding a severed arm in the bathtub.”
Gruley’s The Skeleton Box, the third Starvation Lake mystery, was published in June.
It's okay to be a show-off.
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