Silence of the Lambs. Very scary, because Lecter and agent Starling are people you can like. Lechter is a maniac, and yet you kind of like him. He’d make an interesting dinner guest as long as you don’t turn your back on him. Life can be very dark. One day you reach down to scratch where it itches and you find a lump down there. You’re driving in the dark at night and some kid runs out in front of your car and you can’t stop. Your life hangs on an edge and can fall apart very suddenly. We think of ourselves as good people, but maybe we’ve never been pushed to the limit. We don’t know the things lurking inside our own souls.
Horror stories are fun because you can turn them off. They’re fun because vampires are fun and interesting, but what the guy who lives next door to you is doing to his wife when he gets drunk isn’t fun at all. There’s horror and then there’s horror.
Did you have any favorite scary books during your teenage years?
My literary heroes were pretty diverse. Looking back on what I read then, I had good taste. I’ve always been a fan of Richard Matheson and Ray Bradbury. They’re old school, but their stories have stood the test of time. Names to conjure with. Any beginning writer who wants to study plot should spend some time watching those old Twilight Zone stories from the sixties written by Matheson and Rod Serling. Those two were very strong plotters. It's hard to tell a good story in a half an hour and they knew how to make every scene and word count. Matheson especially had the knack of making simple plot structures that were straight forward and powerful. The guy on the plane who thinks he sees a Gremlin. The convict on an asteroid who’s given a robot woman as a companion. Very powerful stories, and those characters had a lot of soul, so you hung around to see how things turned out for them.
Bradbury tends to write vignettes like Anton Chekov did. Little puffs of story, like opening a window and closing it. His novel Fahrenheit 451 is still one of my favorites after all these years. I pop it open once in awhile and study the paragraphs and sentence structures, to try to understand how he does what he does.
Bradbury knows how to make a beautiful punchy sentence that does the work of a whole paragraph. “The blowing of a single autumn leaf. He turned, and the electric hound was there.” If you've been reading the novel up to that point, those two lines are enough to make you go "Oh shit!". A few pages of stuff like that makes you jump at shadows.
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