Lee Knowles
asked
Matt Ruff:
Were any 1970s horror anthology series such as Tales of the Expected, Armchair Triller, Beasts etc. a particular influence on your work?
Matt Ruff
I did read a lot of fiction series as a kid, but the ones I recall most fondly were single-author collections focused on a recurring group of characters, and those were usually detective/boy’s adventure type stuff: The Hardy Boys, Encyclopedia Brown, The Three Investigators, the Alvin Fernald books, and my favorite series of all time, The Mad Scientists’ Club by Bertrand R. Brinley. I read and enjoyed horror anthologies as well, but because the quality of the stories varied so widely, I’d typically remember the handful of tales that I liked while forgetting the name of the book I read them in (if the cover art was especially gruesome, I might remember that too, which could be useful when I wanted to go back and find a particular story again).
My favorite source of horror as a kid was “non-fiction” collections of stories about hauntings and other paranormal occurrences. Here, the quality of the writing didn’t matter – the fun came from imagining that the Bermuda Triangle, Gef the Talking Mongoose, the Moving Coffins of Barbados, et. al. were *real,* and if you had the guts to visit the haunted house in Amityville or go camping in Bigfoot’s woods, you might actually see something. Even now that I’m old and skeptical, I still love reading those types of stories and playing the “what if” game.
My favorite source of horror as a kid was “non-fiction” collections of stories about hauntings and other paranormal occurrences. Here, the quality of the writing didn’t matter – the fun came from imagining that the Bermuda Triangle, Gef the Talking Mongoose, the Moving Coffins of Barbados, et. al. were *real,* and if you had the guts to visit the haunted house in Amityville or go camping in Bigfoot’s woods, you might actually see something. Even now that I’m old and skeptical, I still love reading those types of stories and playing the “what if” game.
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Sep 21, 2020 03:13PM · flag