Paperback horror novels, especially those of Stephen King and Anne Rice, were a vital part of my introduction to independent literacy.
Tommyknockers was the first Stephen King book I read, after finding a weather-beaten copy of it on a grandmother's shelf, nestled between her cookbooks and Danielle Steel romances. I read it in three days, hiding it behind my textbooks in class at school while pretending to study. Then I read it again. I was in seventh grade, and it changed my life. I followed that up with
The Shining, then
The Stand. Simultaneously, I found
The Vampire Lestat on a
different grandmother's shelf, and became hooked on
Vampire Chronicles series.
Over the next few years, I found every book by Stephen King and Anne Rice that my local library owned, then moved on to Clive Barker (who is my favorite author to this day). I read voraciously: in fact, I learned words like "voracious" and "insatiable" from the very books I was consuming. As a child, then a young man, I had no interest in literary fiction, but if it was science fiction, fantasy or horror, I was hooked. Later, I read more traditional literature and mainstream popular fiction by way of the classic gothic works of Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker. These days, my reading tastes are much more varied, but my roots will always be in 20th Century horror.
Imagine my happy surprise, then, when I discovered that we've been receiving a lot of new paperback editions of some of my old childhood favorites:
By Stephen King;
Misery, It, The Stand and
Skeleton Crew
By Anne Rice;
Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, and
Queen of the DamnedI invite you to share my horror-heydey nostalgia, and to that end I've created a special shelf in our New Arrivals section for paperback books of all genres, horror or otherwise. Other titles on the shelf so far include
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck,
To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee and
The Source, by James Michener (incidentally, my great-grandmother's favorite novel). New additions to that collection will make their way to that shelf.
So what are
your favorite paperbacks?
Thanks to the generous folks at Toyota, and the hard work of the American Library Association, Watha T. Daniel has become one of the over 200 libraries in the country to receive a set of 50 new books by Japanese authors translated into English. Today we got our Manga portion of the order which includes
