The older the work, the less likely you'll find it "scary." Yesterday's fears can have been so absorbed into the culture that their expression is now common-place. It's a rare writer who can still provoke unease or a sense of the eerie fifty or more years after their death; Poe, I think, and M. R. James at least in some stories (probably different stories for different readers at that), maybe Lovecraft in some of his works for some readers, ditto Shirley Jackson, probably Robert Aickman. I think Ramsey Campbell has a chance to be one of those writers. But then, I usually don't look for scary from books/stories tagged as horror; what I'm hoping for is eerie or disturbing at least and at best thought-provokingly disturbing.
As for Matheson, for years I've thought of him as the writer whose work you're likely to know even though you don't know the author's name: Hell House, I am Legend, The [Incredible] Shrinking Man, "Duel" (story/movie), "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," Trilogy of Terror, The Night Stalker, several Corman/Price Poe movies, Somewhere in Time (book/movie), Bid Time Return (book/movie), A Stir of Echoes (book/movie), etc., etc., etc. With that much exposure over half a century or more, anything once scary in his stories has been wrung dry. What's left is whether or not you enjoy the writing and story-telling. Over the last couple of years I've read collections of stories by E. Nesbit and the writing partnership of Erkmann-Chatrian and what I enjoyed was the prose and how they went about deploying their story elements. The scary that might have affected their contemporary audience was discernible but pretty much de-fanged. Still, I enjoyed them and recommend them to anyone with a taste for older works.
Randy M.
(geez! I do go on ...)
As for Matheson, for years I've thought of him as the writer whose work you're likely to know even though you don't know the author's name: Hell House, I am Legend, The [Incredible] Shrinking Man, "Duel" (story/movie), "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," Trilogy of Terror, The Night Stalker, several Corman/Price Poe movies, Somewhere in Time (book/movie), Bid Time Return (book/movie), A Stir of Echoes (book/movie), etc., etc., etc. With that much exposure over half a century or more, anything once scary in his stories has been wrung dry. What's left is whether or not you enjoy the writing and story-telling. Over the last couple of years I've read collections of stories by E. Nesbit and the writing partnership of Erkmann-Chatrian and what I enjoyed was the prose and how they went about deploying their story elements. The scary that might have affected their contemporary audience was discernible but pretty much de-fanged. Still, I enjoyed them and recommend them to anyone with a taste for older works.
Randy M.
(geez! I do go on ...)
