A Singing Barber Does Not a Monster Make

A Singing Barber Does Not a Monster Make

05/10/2006

Jones, Stephen, and Kim Newman, eds. Horror: Another 100 Best Books. New York: Carroll and Graf, 2005. 456 p.

I am not sure I understand the idea behind “the best 100” type books. These books of lists, as they are called in librarian circles, only have merit if the readers can assume that the author responsible for the list share their tastes, or if the creator of the list is a critic considered so far above reproach that anything he (and these “listers” are almost always male) recommends must be brilliant, simply because it was included. A good bit more confusing are those books of lists where the inclusions are not determined by a quote-unquote expert, but by as many popular personalities as there are works included. Jones and Newman have recently produced the sequel to their first list of this latter type, where they had 100 horror authors and critics/scholars each pick his or her favorite story (ostensibly, since if this were done strictly there would be much duplication, which means many must have chosen their second or even third choices for inclusion as a favorite).

I’ve never been accused of not being blunt in my reviews, so I will not start a new trend here. So let’s just say that before I even cracked open Horror: Another 100 Best Books, I knew I was not going to be deeply impressed with its contents. After all, I may like Poppy Z. Brite as a writer and as a person. I may religiously read any fiction that comes from the word processor of Tananarive Due. I might even think that Ellen Datlow is the absolutely best horror and dark fantasy editor around and that no one holds a candle to S.T. Joshi for scholarship in the field. However, I am not going to base my reading list on what any of these respected personalities have included in Jones and Newman, any more than I would expect any one of them would base his or her reading list on what I identify as my favorite texts in these web pages or in my reader’s advisory guides. The reason for this is twofold: First, I doubt seriously that we have identical tastes; and second, logic tells me that it is highly unlikely that more than one-quarter of the persons chosen as judges for this volume actually could have picked a number one choice, which means the list is watered down. After all, the best 100 books were already identified in the first installment of Jones and Newman, and the next best 100 get invited to horror’s version of the NIT¹—and have to be divided up among as many contributors.

But let’s get beyond my belief that the nature of this beast is flawed to begin with. If I had opened this second installment of The Best 100 and found brilliant reviews throughout, I would have had to admit that although I’d never use this text as a reading list, I certainly would consult it for reviews. Sadly, that is not the case. The unfortunately true generalization one can make about the reviews here is that the reviewers and editors—the aforementioned Joshi and Datlow, as well as Bill Sheehan and Allen Koszowski, for example—produced descriptions of the texts under consideration that gave a clear idea what they were about, and explained why they are considered worthy of reading. Most of the entries by fiction writers (though not all, as there are a few notable exceptions) are more about where the writer was when he/she first bought the book or read the book, or what emotions the writers felt when engulfed in the book, or in some cases, are so tangential that one cannot tell what the text under consideration is even about. Perhaps reviewers are more ego-less, or simply have a better knack for finding universally understood methods of communicating in a few words what an entire novel is and does—both what it is about and how it is about a subject. Whatever the case, I was almost uniformly disappointed with the textual descriptions contributed by fiction writers.

My second big problem with this Jones and Newman sequel is in what is included. I am not making this up dear readers: some contributors chose, as their representative pieces, texts such as A Christmas Carol, Jane Eyre, L’Etranger, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Sweeney Todd, the graphic novel From Hell, and other highly questionable pieces as being worthy of ranking between 101-200 on the all time horror list. Obviously, some of these titles are only horror in the farthest stretches of the term (regardless of what Peter Straub’s well-argued introductory essay establishes about genre boundaries and breaking them, if you have no parameters, you have no genre). If there is one saving grace to having 100 different persons identify 100 different favorite “horror” books (yes, by this book’s definition, the term has to be relegated to self-detracting quotes), it does prevent the book from becoming the 100 Most Obvious Choices for Best 100 Horror Tales/Books/Movies, in the vein of the Newman’s film encyclopedia, The BFI Companion to Horror (1996). One would be hard-pressed to find a brave or daring choice there, although I am minded to think this is more the fault of the traditionalist British Film Institute than it is of Newman, as I have heard nothing but praises for his 1988 Nightmare Movies: A Critical Guide to Contemporary Horror Films. Also, I cannot bring myself to believe the creator of the brilliant Anno Dracula series could be so mundane in his choices of or approach to film excellence.

This is not to say that I fail to see the usefulness of Horror: Another 100 Best Books. Perhaps for readers first being introduced to the genre, this book of lists may be of some aid when perusing the countless number of genre and cross genre titles. In fact, I’ve recently helped a patron in my library who would probably be delighted to see this book, as he was aware of the existence of King and Koontz, and little else (I turned him on to Newman’s Anno Dracula series and Suzy McKee Charnas, by the way). But for anyone who is more than a novice in the genre, Horror: Another 100 Best Books offers very few new ideas, and is sure to cause looks of consternation and confusion with its choices. There are, simply stated, better bibliographies out there, as well as better reader’s guides², as these are based on more solid principles than including texts which someone, somewhere, thought were the “best.” And perhaps, finally, that is the real problem with these books of lists. They attempt to establish a list of the best, but offer no criteria, and in the horror genre, this is simply unforgivable, since criteria seem so obvious. To wit, a better idea might be the Scariest 100, or the Most Disgusting 100, or the most Disquieting 100. Then we’d be talking real inclusion criteria—as long as the editor(s) avoid the traps of redefining essential terminology and reconfiguring established boundaries.

¹For those not familiar, this is the acronym of the National Invitational Tournament, the men’s college basketball tournament which takes teams not good enough to make the NCAA top 65. It allows them to get TV time on the ESPN-PleaseGetALife network and play for the bragging rights to yell “We’re number 66!” for an entire year.

²The difference between a reader’s guide (sometimes called a reader’s advisory guide) and a Best 100 list is simple: The latter assumes that the editor or compiler is an expert and can therefore assign value to the term “best,” hopefully based on identifiable criteria. For example, a movie guide by Roger Ebert would be such a creature, since his opinion in and of itself is considered almost infallible. The former simply describes the strengths of texts and allows readers themselves to formulate opinions and create their own lists. For example, a guide would categorize Koontz’s works as being action oriented and mention the ever present conspiracy theories, would note King’s straightforward language (simpler sentence structures) and penchant for characterization, would use the terms experimental and complex to describe Straub’s writing style, and would identify someone like Ramsey Campbell or Thomas Ligotti as a producer of erudite prose and challenging stories—without assigning a hierarchy to any style. Readers then determine their own Best 100 by looking at the criteria, based on their preferences. In other words, a Best list is prescriptive; a reader’s guide list is descriptive.