Stephen King vs. Edgar Allan Poe - Rap Battle

Patton Oswalt, on a Lifetime of Reading Stephen King

He discusses it, here.

Frankenstein...

explained in GIFs.

10 Novels That Will Scare the Hell Out of You

The list, care of the Huffington Post.

Think You Know Stephen King Movie Adaptations?

Take the quiz and find out.

11 Novels That Will Creep You Out

The list, care of the Huffington Post.

Stephen King Profiled

Stephen King's "The Shining" Sequel - "Doctor Sleep"

HP Lovecraft - the Writer Out of Time

He had one of the bleakest worldviews ever committed to paper, was racist – and could be a terrible writer. So why is HP Lovecraft more popular than ever?

From a piece in the Guardian...

 Lovecraft's work is not obviously child-friendly. "I am so beastly tired of mankind and the world," he once wrote, "that nothing can interest me unless it contains a couple of murders on each page, or deals with the horrors unnameable and unaccountable that leer down from the external universes." So why a baby book? "When we first printed Baby's First Mythos a decade ago," says Erica Henderson, "it was meant as more of a novelty for adults. But parents came back to us years later and said they were teaching their children with it. I think people like it when horror is subverted."

Why does she think he is so popular? "Lovecraft made a world where humans are alone, floating on a rock in a terrifying larger universe that we cannot possibly comprehend because our time in it has been so short and we are so insignificant compared to the horrors from the Cthulhu Mythos. So much of modern horror is based on that idea. We wouldn't have Ghostbusters if it weren't for Lovecraft – and that's the best argument I can think of for his work."

Dracula is Coming...

to NBC primetime.

7 Real Life Inspirations for Dracula

Dracula is a pastiche of living historical characters--men who were surrounded by scandals and controversies, larger-than-life personalities who seemed to step from the mists of the nineteenth century and exert their influence, just as Stoker's vampire later seemed to materialize from the shadows of a Transylvanian castle and cast his spell.

The list, care of the Huffington Post.

Under the Dome First Look

Vintage Frankenstein Covers

Boo.

100 Best Horror Books Ever

The list, care of Worlds Without End.

Stephen King's Debt to Horror Comics

PopMatters takes a look at how horror comic books has shaped the writing of the prolific bestselling author.

From the piece...

In Stephen King’s On Writing, he recounts exercises that involved copying text from the comics he was reading as a young man into the pages of a notebook. In his Danse Macabre, King discusses the role that his favorite horror comics played in the development of ‘Salem’s Lot, his 1975 novel about a community of vampires in a small Maine town. King’s early 1980s partnership with horror film icons George Romero and Tom Savini birthed Creepshow, a chilling comics-inspired horror movie built of vignettes about beyond-the-grave vengeance, insect infestations, and more. Spotted with humor as often as it is blood, Creepshow unravels just like early horror comics did, when "pacts with the devil and trips to hell" were common themes. Creepshow‘s opening sequence is mostly animated and the first “chapter” features King’s son Joe, who won the Eisner Award for his IDW comics and recently collaborated with his dad on 2012’s Road Rage comic series.

The Shining...

....the Musical?!

Mary Shelley vs. Frankenstein

The Return of Edward Gorey

Edward Gorey's arch eccentrics are on display in two reissues and a never-before-published story.

From a story in the Los Angeles Times...
 
Twelve years after his death on tax day 2000, Edward Gorey — writer, illustrator, Victorian aesthete born half a century too late — has earned an adjective all his own: "Goreyesque."

The word is used, increasingly, to refer to anything that manages to be amusingly lugubrious, in an arch sort of way. In recent years, Gorey's eccentric shadow has only lengthened across pop culture, his influence apparent in Tim Burton's gothic whimsies; the Lemony Snicket books by Daniel Handler; the emergence of the Gorey tattoo as a hipster fad; crowds thronging to the traveling exhibition of his work, "Elegant Enigmas"; and the resurrection of out-of-print Gorey tales
Three Gorey titles have just landed on bookstore shelves. 

From Pomegranate Press comes "Thoughtful Alphabets: The Just Dessert & the Deadly Blotter" (64 pp., $14.95), previously published only in obscure, limited editions, and "The Osbick Bird" (32 pp., $12.95), a Gorey classic unavailable for four decades, except in poor quality in "Gorey's Amphigorey Too" anthology, but now restored to a clarity so sharp-nibbed it almost hurts the eye.

Bloomsbury is also in on the act with "Saint Melissa the Mottled" (48 pp., $12), an unpublished story that Gorey never got around to illustrating, supplemented here with images from the Gorey archive, some never before published.

10 Novels That Are Scarier Than Most Horror Movies

The list, care of io9.

Stephen King's "Carrie"