Secondhand bookstores and thrift shops - last refuge for the damned ... horror reader?

A couple of times a year (probably more than that), I visit the thrift shops where I live; St Vincent de Paul, Lifeline, Salvos. Mostly people go in here to look for clothes, but I enter in search of books!
For an avid horror reader like me, living outside a major city, these places are veritable goldmines and often I've come away with a few gems.

Just this week I picked up four books for $6, namely The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, nominated for the 2002 Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel (I've only ever seen the film and have been meaning to read the book); The Lord of the Flies by William Golding; Roofworld by Christopher Fowler and; Blue World by Robert R. McCammon (nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for Best Fiction Collection in '89).

That's just this week, but over the years I've found well-loved copies of The Exorcist, The Great and Secret Show and even a few Graham Masterton novels.

The ironic thing is that the secondhand book store, which understandably has a lot of books, doesnt have much in the way of horror (but has a massive paranormal sparkly romance section!), which is disappointing, but thankfully the thrift shops always seem to deliver.

Of course every year Lifeline hosts an annual book sale and usually I walk away with several arm fulls of horror novels, so I have plenty to read.

Most of the books though are from the 80's and 90's when horror was in its prime. It would be great to see some newer books at these events every now and then.

I'd love to know what gems you guys have found in a thrift shop or secondhand book shop. Do you go hunting for older novels like me, or do you prefer to buy new books online?

Review: Monsters of L.A. by Lisa Morton

Being an Australian, the little I know about Los Angeles comes from the television and films I have digested since I could first understand the idiot box, but after reading Lisa Morton's stellar horror collection, Monsters of L.A., I have an appreciation of the City of Angels and its raw emotional texture.
Morton uses the very apsect LA is famous for (movies and movie icons) to reveal L.A's true spirit and in most cases the horror elements take a back seat to the true focus of the work.
Morton takes the silver screen horror monsters (Dracula, The Hunchback, The Werewolf, Phamtom of the Opera etc) and contemporises them - making them more human.
Frankenstein for example, is not a corpse remanimated by a mad scientist, but rather a disfigured war veteran roaming the streets of LA. Dracula is a movie star at the end of his reign about to be replaced by younger model. The Hunchback is an allegory for homophobia. Dr Jekyll is actually a scientist with transgender issues and so on.
Therefore the collection succeeds in what all good horror should seek to do - explore the human condition.
My favourite stories were Frankenstein, Dracula, The Alien, The Devil, The Creature, Zombie and The Hunchback.
Highly recommended.

From the back of the desk drawer

When I was at university studying journalism in the late 90’s I enrolled in Literary Theory as an elective. After the first lecture I questioned whether I should drop out of the course. What I really hoped to get out of the course was to learn the art of writing (as if it had a recipe). How wrong I was. The course was all about pulling apart a story, looking for hidden meaning; to examine what the story was saying about the author. I’ll admit I was a bit disappointed.

Until I found The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe in one of the textbooks. Given my own dark musings, I fell in love with that story and its author and my desire to write horror professionally was kicked into first gear.

Thankfully my final assignment for the course was to write a short story and of course I wrote what was essentially my first horror tale.

Entitled Lamentation, the story concerns a young woman who discovers she is carrying the child of her narcissistic lover – a child that is the reincarnated soul of a man her lover supposedly killed a year before.

While searching my old CDs I found this story and gave it a re-read. It certainly wasn’t the best story in the world, but it was my first after all. My initial thought was to put the CD and the story back in the drawer, but then I wondered if I could improve it, by giving it a rewrite. I’m still in process of doing that and maybe it will see the light of day soon.

This also got me thinking about another story lying neglected in my drawer – a thriller novel entitled The Passion Play, which I wrote before I went to university. As the name suggests, the book is about a serial killer who  forces his victims to relive the last moments of Christ. It might be a little bit too religious, but I wonder if it might be worth revisiting as well. A professional manuscript appraisal thought the story would be worth the revision so why not?

I guess that begs the question – what unpublished stories do you have lying in your drawer and would you ever consider bringing them out of the dark for the world to see?

Paper or Pixels?

Just last week I had to clean out my office so it could be painted. Amongst all the dog-eared paperbacks, art materials, blank notebooks, Doctor Who figurines, hand-crafted Father’s Day presents and old photographs there were fragments of notepaper, all bearing the scrawl of me, the mad writer.

Seeing all those pieces of paper scattered like leaves around the room, I suddenly realised how much of a hoarder I am. Not just of paraphernalia, but of ideas. I never have any trouble coming up with story ideas, what I do have trouble with is actually getting around to bringing all of them to life.

My wife’s solution was simple – write the ideas down yes, but then transcribe them into the computer and throw the piece of paper away. Makes sense doesn’t it? I guess this comes back to my aversion to typing stories into the computer. Personally I hate it, but I know many authors who write that way. I find writing freehand is cathartic and the story seems to flow out of me as I run my hand across the page. My handwriting is hard to read sometimes, but it’s mine.

The prospect of throwing those notes away is daunting because I’d feel like I was throwing pieces of myself away. The same goes for my collection of books – if I put them in a box to go to Lifeline or elsewhere, I’m not just throwing pieces of me away, but the ideas of the authors I admire as well. Is that disrespectful? I believe it would be, therefore those novels will always have a place on my shelf.

Amidst all this reflection and re-organising, I was having a problem with my new e-reader, a Pico Life. It was a good e-reader; colour screen for one, but then it just stopped holding its charge. I always wanted to get a Kindle, but couldn’t afford one at the time. I took the e-reader back for a refund and bought myself a Refurbished (secondhand) Kindle. Even without the colour screen, it’s still fantastic. Books are downloaded in 20 seconds and it feels so good and light in your hands.

But when I was reading from the Kindle the other night, that twinge of betrayal crept into my subconscious again. I was lying there reading from a machine, while next to me my wife was reading a paperback copy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. This is the eternal argument – how is a book meant to be read – via a screen or from the page?

For a moment I felt like I was throwing away a piece of myself again by not indulging in the printed page, the smell of ink on paper. I’ve always said that e-books and e-readers are simply new tools for writers to reach their audience, but is it better to hoard as many books as we can in case the screen becomes the norm?

I’d love to know what you think.