The Thrill of Fear did not end how I had hoped. It was great at the beginning, but really petered out as I reached the more modern stuff. This is the stuff I like. It didn't seem to get the exhaustive treatment that the earlier stuff did. One reason could be that there is just more of it. I do notice an extreme drop in quotations in the latter half of the book. I liked the talk of genre and how it formed. He touched on many things that I always loved and/or hated. The anthology boom did help the genre. Most of the writers we consider masters wrote shorts. I think the short form lends itself well to the genre. If the genre is meant to invoke fear; it is easier to hold that focus for short periods. I hadn't thought about the origin of the Christmas ghost story before. That was an interesting part that revealed things I knew but never really thought about before.
Then we get into the more modern era. This is where the book really fails. The movie section fro the golden age of Hollywood is cursory. It covers a lot of ground, but doesn't go in depth about much. That said, he talks much more about this earlier age than more modern movies The talk of the comic code was done better by Weinberg. The B-movies and radio was done better by King. There are a few horror filmographies that cover that aspect much better. I wasn't really expecting that from this book though. I knew it would come into play as film has influence fiction. I wasn't prepared for how little discussion there was on fiction in the later section in this book. How can he spend so much time on the earlier stuff and miss the whole horror boom? Perhaps because of the earlier works, this book doesn't have to delve as deep into that area. This is a great book for the formation of the genre. It will come in handy for lectures on that.
I loved the chronological format. It worked very well for an English major type book. It really showed how the genre progressed. The glaring omissions showed themselves more toward the end when he was talking about things that were very influenced by those things he forgot to mention earlier. They seem to spring from nowhere in this book.
The Rising starts out from the first sentence in the macabre world of zombies. There is no boring set up where we get what a normal world is like, we all know what a normal world is like. Bring on the grue! Keene does that. Page 17 sent a shiver down my spine. Damn it's been a long time since that happened. "We are more than infinity." Danny is in trouble now. That tingle that forces you to keep reading, the suspense you don't get in a "suspense" novel. This is why I read horror, this is why I read. This was the feeling I got the first time I read Ketchum. I'm only 50 pages in. Keene has gained a reader for life.
Repo Man is one F-ed up movie. I love cult movies like that. Writers who can take something mundane like auto repossession, and turn it into that are pretty damn creative. Perhaps there is a lot of free time on the job (the writer worked as a repo man). The ending seemed a little forced into absurdity. I think that could have been handled better. The riding around was great. I think I've had some of those exact conversations riding with some of my rugby friends.