Booking Through Thursday asks…

“What’s the scariest book you’ve ever read?”

I love horror novels as much or more than I love horror movies, but most of them only affect me in the moment. Like many people of my generation, I grew up reading Stephen King novels as they came out. I was a teenager when I read IT for the first time, on a visit to my grandparents’ house in New Jersey.

While their neighborhood was nothing like small-town Derry, Maine, it did have the same kind of old-style gutters depicted in the novel, and I spent most of that summer crossing the street to avoid the possibility that a killer-clown might be peering up at me from within one.

I’ve often said that Stephen King and Garrison Keillor have the same folksy style, but that the difference is that Keillor isn’t going to have a monster show up to dismember you on page twenty six. I believe one of the reasons King’s work sticks with us isn’t the films, which, let’s face it, are never as scary as the books, but the fact that he sounds like every hometown storyteller, sucking you into small-town life.