My upcoming novel, The Queen, takes place in my own humble hometown of St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. Though I’ll admit it’s not exactly my hometown. The geography doesn’t quite match, the streets don’t intersect precisely where they do in real life—the names have been changed, but the vibe remains the same.
Writing a book set in the city where I came of age, filled with characters who are three decades younger than myself—teenagers on the cusp of graduating high school—put me in the mind and mood of my own teenage days as a reader. Back to the time when I’d squirrel away in a library carrel with a book for hours: and how, with the very best books, the hands on the clock would vanish, the hours could pass from early afternoon until dusk and I’d remain blissful to that passage of time, locked as I was in the spell that novel cast upon my young mind.
To that end, I thought I’d share five of those formative reads. The ones that set the fundament, you might say, and helped me on my own path as a writer.
Books of Blood Vol 1-6, Clive Barker
Ok, a bit of a cheat I guess, taking an entire series of landmark short story collections. Sue me! When I was a impressionable teenager, these books (much like Pinhead threatened to poor Kristy) tore my soul apart. Fine, perhaps not my almighty soul—not saying I even have one of those!—but my young mind, for sure. Some people would claim Clive’s In the Hills, In the Cities is perhaps the most creative horror story written in the past, ooooh, forty-odd years; I wouldn’t disagree with that assessment, but others like The Midnight Meat Train, The Yattering and Jack, Rawhead Rex, and so many others make these books one of my all time favorites. And if you can get ahold of the old Sphere editions with Clive’s own hand-drawn covers, well, that’s a real find.
Splatterpunks I (Extreme Horror) & II (Over the Edge), edited by Paul M. Sammon
I’ve come to see these linked anthologies as an early indication of my own nascent aesthetic. Was Splatterpunk a movement? I don’t know. I was too young to be paying much attention to how those kinds of labels gain traction, and whether the writers gathered under that banner really want to be tagged with it. As it turned out, a lot of the early splatterpunks kind of rejected it! But in the early 90s it felt very edgy and rock n roll to my teenage self. These books were hard to come by, as I recall. Not sold in a lot of bookstores, and—providing the local librarians consented to having a copy on their shelves at all—they tended to vanish from libraries, purloined by readers with my same tastes. Stories by favorites such as Joe R Lansdale, Barker, Robert R. McCammon, David Schow, Joyce Carol Oates, even George R.R. Martin. If you like your horror red and still twitching, see if you can hunt up these old volumes.
Carrie, Stephen King
I could go with just about any King here—I’ve come to understand that he is by far my biggest influence—but I’ll go with his first novel based on the fact that it has provided inspiration for not one but two of my books. For my first novel, The Troop, I employed the use of newspaper clippings, magazine excerpts, and various other marginalia to help convey the main storyline to readers. This same technique was used by Mr. King, too, though he’s said it was done to expand his first novel’s word count past what would’ve been a novella. For my new book, The Queen, King’s first novel once again provided influence in terms of its focus on bodily change, the preoccupations of teenagers, and a bloodbath at a very public event. But hey, if you’ve got to stand on somebody’s shoulders, why not have them belong to Stephen King?
The Plant People by Dale Carson
A deep cut! This book, written in 1977, was first found in the library of my elementary school. It gained a talismanic grip on the student body, who wouldn’t check it out but would congregate at the back of the library to flip through its photographs. Yes, much like the Guinness World Book of Records, The Plant People was rarely read but frequently … ogled. You see, within this book (which I will forcibly admit that I never read!) are a series of black-and-white photographs not unlike movie stills. They detail the terrifying transformation of the residents of a small dustbowl town from people into … cacti. That’s right, they turn into plants. Does that sound scary? If not, I take it you’re not an impressionable eight-year-old. I can vouch that this strange little tome provided ample nightmares and lost nights’ sleep for me and several of my gradeschool chums, and for that reason earns a spot on this list.
The Haunting Of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
Sure, sure, I get it. Me and everyone else have this book on our list. Again, sue me! It’s fantastic, and incredibly influential for the horror genre. Most every horror writer would give our eye teeth—hell, the whole dang set—to write a book like this. It’s psychologically penetrating, atmospheric, develops some memorable characters and, yeah, is scary as hell to boot. It’s one of those books that anyone seeking to be a well-rounded horror genre reader sort of has to have on their shelves, and one I read at a tender age and have re-read many times over since then.
The Queen by Nick Cutter is out now