Horror Roundtable Discussion

Four librarians, one table, lots of horror books (and movies)! Find out what Ryan, Jenny, Matt, and Mike think will scare your socks off this Halloween season.

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Michael Pierry: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Hamden Library Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Pierry, and this month we have another roundtable discussion for you. Since it's almost Halloween, this time we focused on all things horror. In addition to myself, you will hear the voices of Matt McGregor, Jenny Nicolelli, and Ryan Keeler.

It's a fun and light hearted discussion with a fairly wide variety of recommendations. So even if horror isn't your favorite genre, hopefully you'll get something out of it. Now let's listen. 

Matt, what was the first story you read that scared you? 

Matt McGregor: The first story I read that scared me was Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. I had a copy and I read it in bed and it was a mistake. 

Michael Pierry: What happens in that story that scared you? 

Matt McGregor: It's a collection of like single page horror stories. And it's things like being offered a place on an elevator and denying it. And then the elevator goes crashing to the bottom of the building and everybody dies. Or you go out to dinner with your friends and you have the fish and they have the meat and the meat was people and everybody dies. 

Michael Pierry: Oh my goodness!

Matt McGregor: Yep. Or you're, you're eating the sandwich, but the sandwich was you!

Michael Pierry: So how old are you reading this? 

Matt McGregor: I don't know, like eight. 

Michael Pierry: Yeah, that's about right. I never had that. I just remember having this, uh, this little paperback of like ghost stories or something. I think it was called Hauntings or something like that. And there was one about Spring-Heeled Jack that used to scare me. Spring-Heeled Jack was a, was a folk tale, I think in England, before Jack the Ripper. And he had like, kind of springs for legs and he was like, really tall and had like, this scary face. And something about the description of him just really haunted me as a child. And I don't know why I kept reading that book, but I did. There's something compelling about being scared. Anybody else? 

Jenny Nicolelli: So I had identified myself as someone who can't.. couldn't handle anything scary very early in my life. Basically because of The Twilight Zone, like, marathons and stuff that would be on the Sci Fi Network, like, particularly on New Year's Day, I think. While most of them I was fine with, because they more dealt with just, you know, absolute, I don't know, cerebral horror, the one that really terrified me was "Talking Tina". And if anyone remembers that, it's the talking doll. Which, side note, I had an American Girl doll and my dad would go in my room when I wasn't there and move her around and tell me -- the line in the "Talking Tina" episode is, "I'm talking Tina and you better be nice to me." So my dad would be like, "you better be nice to your doll."

So anyway, definitely what scared me in terms of reading first were the Fear Street books by R. L. Stine, which was an upgrade from Goosebumps. And I wasn't really allowed to read Goosebumps because I had already determined I couldn't handle anything scary, but I just stole my sister's Fear Street books and read those, and they were terrifying. And there's like a lot of one offs in the Fear Street series, but there's like, there'll be specific trilogies or specific sets of books that do go together. And they were all terrifying, and I got nightmares and didn't sleep because of every single one that I read. 

Michael Pierry: Yeah, I think, see, you can't, you can't stop yourself. I think subconsciously you want to get over it or conquer it or something. Maybe. 

Matt McGregor: Would it be fair to say that scary stories have you hooked?

Michael Pierry: Sure. [laughter] So what's everybody's favorite scary story? I can go first. I really think IT is an amazing novel and genuinely creeps me out. And the movies were really scary too. So... there's others. I mean, I really like Lovecraft, but that's a different kind of thing. Not usually even, well, sometimes considered cosmic horror, but sometimes just weird, but yeah, I would say IT. 

Jenny Nicolelli: Mike, what do you think of the IT miniseries that was on TV in the 90s? 

Michael Pierry: You know, I've never seen it. I've only seen like memes from it. 

Jenny Nicolelli: It's terrifying. Or at least I thought it was terrifying. 

Michael Pierry: Yeah.

Ryan Keeler: I've got to second you on IT. I love, like, allegorical horror, and that one about your inner demons developing in childhood that you then have to deal with as an adult is brilliant. But my all time favorite is The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and that dystopian horror, the monsters are humans and the, the whole theme of preparing your child to be eventually on their own is really moving.

Matt McGregor: My favorite scary story collection is Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman, which it, just, there are a bunch of different stories but my very favorite short story is about a person who's being tortured in hell. And sort of him coming to terms with who he was through this, like, vile physical torture. The whole thing is, it's very compelling. King is too much for me. I started reading The Stand during the pandemic, and one, that book is like a thousand pages, and it started giving me nightmares, so I stopped reading it.

Michael Pierry: Yeah, it might not have been the best time for that. 

Matt McGregor: Not great. I mean, I had all this extra time, so I figured... No, it was, it was a mistake. 

Michael Pierry: The best time to have read The Stand was, was a couple of years before the pandemic, so you could be ready. 

Matt McGregor: I think the best time to read it might be never. That's the best time for me.

Michael Pierry: Fair enough. 

Jenny Nicolelli: So I'll throw out an author who's not a dude and say The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. I'm a firm believer that Shirley Jackson is one of the best American authors of the 20th century. That, I read that in one night. Stayed up late finishing it. And that final couple paragraphs just are horrifying and haunting. And a shout out to, you know, her other really amazing horror book, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, just really excellent writing, you know. This, these scary, haunting, tension filled stories that are really grounded in kind of the horror of being a woman or a girl and moving through society. 

Matt McGregor: I actually, I want to change my answer. You can leave my first answer in. But Hyperion by Dan Simmons is a science fiction sort of retelling The Canterbury Tales, except the cast is being chased by a horrifying thorn demon who spikes people on the trees. 

Michael Pierry: Wow. 

Matt McGregor: Yeah, it's awesome, and grisly, and really unsettling, and it's so good. 

Michael Pierry: Awesome. What's a scary story or movie that didn't scare you? Supposed to be scary, but didn't scare you? 

Jenny Nicolelli: The Poltergeist? If I had seen it as a child, that definitely would have terrified me. Or, like, even probably up until, like, age 20. By the time I saw it, I thought it was just really cheesy. 

Michael Pierry: Yeah. 

Jenny Nicolelli: Sorry to all the Spielberg heads out there. I just, that didn't really scare me. It probably also has something to do with by the time I saw it, I had already seen The Ring. So I was already terrified of the television set in a much deeper way. 

Matt McGregor: Poltergeist is the one, there's the scary clown, drags the kid under the bed, right? 

Ryan Keeler: That's one scene in it, yeah.

Matt McGregor: Yeah. Well, that's part of the movie. No, that one definitely got me, what with the scary clown and the dragging under the bed, yeah. 

Michael Pierry: Yeah. So what's your favorite book-to-movie horror? 

Jenny Nicolelli: Uh, so I would definitely say the 1976 original Carrie directed by Brian De Palma. I'd seen the film before I read the book. I just always assumed Stephen King wasn't for me, probably because I just didn't read scary books until I became an adult. So I'd seen Carrie. I just think that film is amazing and perfect. And then I finally read Carrie a few years ago and I had no idea it was an epistolary story. I had no clue that it, you know, it was mostly told through, like, articles and all these other means, and I thought it was awesome. A different voice than I expected in some ways, but... Different, but also excellent.

Ryan Keeler: So, I have two here. So, first, Annihilation by VanderMeer. It's a short book. And it's a, it's a nature horror story, which is really interesting, so it lends itself better to the visual format, so the movie takes it to a much more terrifying level, and it's definitely worth a watch. And then I have Let the Right One In by Lindquist. Not the American version of Let Me In, but the actual Swedish version, Let the Right One In. Just an incredible book and an incredible film, both equally excellent.

Jenny Nicolelli: I love Annihilation. I didn't finish the.. it's the Southern Reach trilogy, right? I didn't finish it, but I read Annihilation when it first came out. I think I read it twice, actually, back to back, because it just, there seemed to be so much to pick up every single time you read it. And then, even though the film is very different in a lot of ways, I think Alex Garland was a perfect person to direct it. It's awesome. 

Matt McGregor: I was a big fan of the book and the movie of Hellraiser and The Hellbound Heart, which is a very.. It's an adaptation that... the book is, it's a novella, so it's very quick, but it's good. And the adaptation is awesome. Hellraiser is awesome.

Michael Pierry: Well, I already talked about IT, which is up there with my favorite translations onto the screen, but there was a recent adaptation of The Color Out of Space with Nicolas Cage in it that I thought was actually pretty good. Pretty, pretty scary. 

Jenny Nicolelli: So to piggyback off of my favorite horror story, I do think the Netflix first season of The Haunting of Hill House, while very different, walks away with extremely different messages - it's more about horror within a family and trauma - I think it's really excellent. And even though it's, frankly, a completely different story, it's a beautiful interpretation and inspiration from the novel.

Michael Pierry: What's your favorite family-friendly scary story or movie? 

Ryan Keeler: So I watch Halloween scary movies with my kids every year. Um, and we always watch Paranorman. That is.. it's a little more mature. It's not for little, little kids, but you know, school-age kids and up can probably handle it. But it kind of goes into all those Salem witch trial history and tropes and including, you know, a kid who can see the dead kind of like, Sixth Sense style. It's like a good introduction into scary stories, and it is pretty scary, and it's emotional, too, so it's a mature kids film. 

Jenny Nicolelli: As the teen librarian, I will throw out Teen Witch, which is far superior to Hocus Pocus. Um, Teen Witch is incredible. Please watch it. It's just unhinged in the best possible ways and so campy. It's got sexual content, nothing explicit, but.. so it would definitely be, you know, depending on your choices and how you have your family, it would be more probably like, maybe 5th grade, 6th grade and up. 

Michael Pierry: Is that a recent movie? 

Jenny Nicolelli: No! 1989. "Top That"? 

Ryan Keeler: It's got a classic dance scene.

Jenny Nicolelli: Do you not know what I'm talking about? Oh my god. It is just, please watch it.

Michael Pierry: I've never heard of it. 

Jenny Nicolelli: It's about a girl, Louise, who is a big old nerd and everything's terrible and then she ends up becoming a witch because of the lady who's in The Poltergeist, who's also in this movie and is a palm reader-slash-maybe-also-a-witch. And then Louise becomes really popular and it's great. The younger brother is kind of one of the grossest people I've seen on screen. She turns him into a dog at one point. There's, there's a lot to appreciate in that movie. 

Michael Pierry: That sounds awesome. What's the worst horror movie you've ever seen? 

Matt McGregor: So in that direction, I saw Uwe Boll, who is a absolutely abysmal director, Uwe Boll's House of the Dead 2 in high school. And it hit just right. That movie is so funny and it is so bad. It's like the reverse of a masterpiece, whatever that is. But really, all of Uwe Boll's stuff, and he does like almost exclusively video game adaptations, and they are terrible. Terrible. He did Blood Rain, he tried to do a World of Warcraft movie, and they literally laughed him out of the offices. It was, it, it, they're bad. They're bad. 

Ryan Keeler: I have one that is not necessarily bad, but pokes fun at all of the bad horror movies. It's called Cabin in the Woods. 

Jenny Nicolelli: Shut up. That's a great movie. 

Ryan Keeler: It is great. I agree. And it basically...

Matt McGregor: (talking over) There is no bad in that movie.

Ryan Keeler: ...mocks every single trope of horror and it is hilarious and everyone should go see that and don't read anything about it before you watch it. Just go watch it and you'll have a great time.

Matt McGregor: So I have some scary graphic novels that I brought that I want to talk about that I just think are awesome and unsettling. Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees is about a bear who is also a serial killer and another serial killer shows up in town but they're not quite as neat as Mrs. Bear and now Mrs. Bear has problems. So that's... I feel like I'm saying "great" too much in this, but it's great. It's great. The Ice Cream Man Sunday Edition. We have it at Brundage and you can also borrow it through our digital collections on Hoopla and it's just very sweet seeming, and then terribly unsettling stories, and vile, and gross, and it is a story that hooks you. It pulls you through, and you keep doing this to yourself by reading because you want to see what the resolution of all of this is going to be, and it's unpleasant. But in a great way. And then my last thing I want to talk about is Dark Nights: Metal, which is another thing that you can borrow through Hoopla, and it's a very horror-themed, almost nihilistic take on the DC Universe where the normal Justice League gets drawn into this dark multiverse where there are seven different evil Batmans, where they're dealing with, the Joker took up... no, it wasn't that the Joker took up the mantle of Batman, it was that Batman turned into the Joker. And another one where like, if Batman was the Flash, or Batman was Aquaman, and it's, it's, it's really grim and painful to read and it's another really good story.

So if you like superheroes, if you like the DC universe, Batman, Superman, and you also want to get some of that dark, spooky, Dark Nights: Metal is going to be right up your alley. 

Jenny Nicolelli: So the first one I'll recommend is Lone Women by Victor LaValle, who wrote Ballad of Black Tom, which is perfect for people who love Lovecraftian horror. Lone Women is a story about... it's based on historical truth, the foundation of the story, which is about a call from the U. S. government for people to settle land in the Midwest, and women were allowed to settle land. And it was like one of these incredible moments of agency for women, but particularly Black women were allowed to settle and own land in the Midwest. And so this is a story about a Black woman who is fleeing from California from a largely Black community and traveling to essentially settle her own plot of land in the Midwest. But with her she brings a great horror that's really grounded in family trauma. It's an excellent book. There's brilliant, you know, supporting characters and you have moments throughout the book where the perspective shifts to.. the horror itself becomes your POV character.

Another one, and I may have talked about this before, is The Weight of Blood by Tiffany D. Jackson, which is currently a Nutmeg nominee. It's a teen book. And it is a riff on Carrie. So it's a very interesting riff on Carrie. If you've read Carrie, if you've seen Carrie, you will still get a lot out of this book. The opening scene of Carrie, for those who might remember it, the opening scene in The Weight of Blood is, is just as chilling in a very different way. 

Anything by Grady Hendrix. I do think some of the books are better than others. My particular favorite is The Final Girl Support Group. But, you know, The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires is excellent. I think some are better than others, but I really think he's generally a three stars out of five and above. 

And finally, I'll plug Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno Garcia, which is also the book discussion book for October, which I am leading. I basically think the best way to summarize that book is Fall of the House of Usher, but the sister is our protagonist.

Michael Pierry: Does anybody else have any other recommendations? 

Matt McGregor: I keep coming back with more recommendations after I've done my thing. 

Michael Pierry: Please. 

Matt McGregor: Gideon the Ninth is...  it's a lot of things. It's like Tamsyn Muir through a bunch of darts at a dartboard and was like, it's going to be all of them. It's lesbian necromancers explore a mystery haunted house in space.

Michael Pierry: Is it scary? 

Matt McGregor: Yeah. Yeah. I would say that it's scary. It's probably more a mystery than anything else, but because we're following around a bunch of necromancers, there's just as much horror as there is mystery. It's a very funny book, though. If you like the voice of the main character, Gideon, you'll be laughing constantly. It was my favorite book of like, whatever year it came out. 2019? Later? 2020? Gideon? Don't look at me! Don't look at me Googling!

Michael Pierry: This is all going in unedited. 

Matt McGregor: Perfect. 

Michael Pierry: I'm going on vacation. 

Matt McGregor: Hey! 2019! Nailed it! Bam! 

Michael Pierry: Say it again. 

Matt McGregor: Gideon the Ninth, which came out in 2019. It was my favorite book of the year and most other years, frankly. 

Michael Pierry: All right. Well, thank you everybody. That's all the time we have this month on the podcast.

We'll see you again in November.