Books With Staying Power

I accepted a Facebook challenge a few weeks ago: "Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers."

It was an enjoyable exercise that made me think about titles and authors and what has given them longevity in my life. But it was hard not to comment on my rationales. So I decided to do that here, hopeful it might inspire others to do the same. 

My first choice is I Am Legend (1954) by Richard Matheson, a stone-cold classic I reread every few years. In very few pages—it's more of a novella—Matheson creates a world ravaged by a virus that turns most of the population into vampires. The protagonist, Robert Neville, is one of the few survivors. He lives a life of isolation, foraging for supplies and killing vampires by day, hiding in his fortified house by night as his neighbors surround the house and taunt him. 

I love the new twist on classic vampire stories, including a pseudo-scientific rationale for the creatures, the post-apocalyptic, urban setting, Neville's resourcefulness, and—most of all—the incredible perspective shift at the conclusion that makes the reader recognize that "normal" and "abnormal" are concepts that depend on majority consensus. 

I Am Legend has been adapted into several movies. The best is The Last Man on Earth (1964), with Vincent Price as Neville. Other attempts are The Omega Man (1971), with Charlton Heston, and a 2007 version with Will Smith, the first to keep the novel's title. 

My first edition of the book is the Science Fiction Book Club edition shown above, but I gave it away many years ago. I now have a smaller paperback that includes some of Matheson's short stories. 

The Illustrated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe (1975) features photographs from various American International Pictures adaptations of his work. The book contains no copyright credits, so the provenance is sketchy—appropriate for the stories of villains, scoundrels, and homicidally disturbed people inside. 

Upping the macabre factor, the book came to me through dubious circumstances. It's a former library book that was stolen (not by me) from the stacks. As I read stories like "The Black Cat" and "The Tell-Tale Heart," where criminals were revealed and sometimes met with gruesome fates, Childhood Me dreaded some type of cosmic retribution for not returning the book. (I still have it, as the ratty photo above attests.) Adding to the unsettling vibe is the graffiti of some young Rembrandt who added obscene comments to some of the photos. I didn't know what a "gronk" was until I saw the word issuing from Vincent Price's mouth on page 67. I used my context clues and figured it out.

As a kid, I loved Poe because he expanded my vocabulary. It was a struggle to figure out what was going on in some of his stories (the Latin at the start of "The Fall of the House of Usher" flummoxed me), but the plots were similar to what I was enjoying in various comic books of the time. Ironically, Poe's ambition was to be a great poet and magazine editor. The stories for which he is so famous today, and which make up the bulk of this and many other collections of his work, were quick one-offs written for money, always in short supply for the author. 

When asked to name my favorite short story, "The Cask of Amontillado" is often my answer. It is the perfect example of Poe's famous dictate about the "unity of effect" (see his Philosophy of Composition). Every incident, line, and detail in the story leads to the moment when Montresor buries Fortunato alive in the catacombs beneath the former's home. Why? "For the thousand injuries" that Fortunato has given him, although the reader never learns what these are. The ending also frustrates the hope that good always wins out over evil. Fifty years after the crime, Montresor still hasn't been caught. Not even the Latin at the end—In pace requiescat!—kept me from recognizing the badassery at work here. 

I had hoped to cover all twenty books quickly, but this is taking longer than expected. More titles and reminisces to come! 

'Earth Abides' and our changing mores

I first became aware of George R. Stewart's Earth Abides a few months ago, after hearing a radio adaptation on Escape! That two-part episode aired Nov. 5 and Nov. 12, 1950, just a year after the novel was published. 

Some online sleuthing told me the book had been an influence on Richard Matheson, whose world-ending vampire plague I Am Legend is one of my favorites, and Stephen King, who went all apocalyptic—and post-apocalyptic—in The Stand.

Long story short, I decided to give Earth Abides a shot. A newish re-release from 2020 includes a terrific introduction by sci-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson that provides context for Stewart's story. It also points out the resurgence in the book's popularity in the wake of the COVID pandemic. 

The novel itself has a lot to recommend it. The main character, Isherwood "Ish" Williams, is one of the few survivors of a highly lethal pandemic. He spends the first half of the book wandering from one side of the United States to the other, serving as a human version of Marvel's Uatu the Watcher and chronicling the end times. 

Eventually, he meets some other folks and they form a loose-knit community that survives by pillaging the past—canned food from area grocery stores, clothing from department stores, and the like. Ish finds himself a reluctant leader in this tribe, even though everybody involved goes out of their way for as long as possible to avoid creating laws and rules. It's a be-on-your-best-behavior, honor code type of deal. 

The tribe's successes and failures make up the bulk of the book's remaining pages and are often characterized by collective procrastination, waiting as long as possible before addressing various fundamental issues, like what to do when the water supply peters out. (Today, these survivors would probably be diagnosed as suffering from global trauma.)

Stewart's novel is short on action and long on Ish's philosophical musing. He fancies himself an intellectual and often comes off as stuffy or smarmy when he observes, repeatedly, that his post-apocalyptic wife, children, and neighbors are hard workers but not very intelligent. He ranges from sympathetic to insufferable, sometimes on the same page. For example, Ish observes: 

George was a good man, too, in his fashion. He was a first-class carpenter, and had learned to do plumbing and painting and the other odd jobs around the house. He was a very useful man, and had preserved many basic skills. Yet Ish always knew that George was essentially stupid; he had probably never read a book in his life. (p. 187)

The last section of the book chronicles Ish's mental decline and eventual passing, where he is seen as The Last American, a term that carries almost spiritual significance with subsequent generations of survivors, for whom "America" is a nebulous term. 

I like that Stewart intersperses the story of humanity with the resurgence of the natural world. Vignettes every few pages let readers see how various other species adapt to the fall of humanity, and how the world heals. For 1949, this is pioneering eco-friendliness. 

Unfortunately, other parts of the novel have not aged so well. In particular, the way Ish and the rest of the community treat Evie, a mentally challenged woman, is problematic. At one point, an outsider—Charlie— preys on Evie and begins to abuse her sexually. Yet the best charge that Ish and company can devise against him is that "we don't want a lot of little half-witted brats running in on us, the sort of children Evie would have." 

The book also displays a post-apocalyptic vibe similar to Alas Babylon and a few others that intimate how a worldwide pandemic or nuclear disaster might actually be a good thing, a cleansing and rebirth, a chance to live more in touch with one another and the land. Your mileage with such an attitude may vary, but I find it, I don't know, communally condescending? As if the only thing standing between humanity and perfection is a few billion too many people, so why not sacrifice some today? 

I was glad I read the book and appreciative of Stewart's far-ranging imagination. Leaning into a more philosophical take on the end of the world was a gutsy narrative move, and if Isherwood "Ish" Williams is insufferable at times, at least Stewart gives us plenty of evidence to chew on, along with contradictions in character that make him more realistic. 

After all, if each reader had to face pages of his own thoughts written down over decades, wouldn't he or she find more than a few that are troubling, disingenuous, and downright wrong? In Earth Abides, these provide verisimilitude, and no matter what readers think of Ish by the final page, they can't deny knowing him. 

My favorite monsters

Halloween is close at hand, a time when I trot out some of my favorite cinematic and literary horrors.

In the former category is almost every fright film made by Universal Studios in the 1930s and ’40s, black-and-white gems like Bela Lugosi’s “Dracula,” Boris Karloff’s “Frankenstein,” Lon Chaney Jr.’s “Wolf Man” and a boatload of sequels, mostly of lesser quality. They exude atmosphere — crackling bolts of lightning, cobwebbed castles, foggy marshes — and practically define the iconography and conventions of the horror genre.

On the literary side, my tastes run further afield. Many of the early works of Ray Bradbury, especially the short stories “Night Fever” and “The Jar,” eschew the creaky staircases and midnight settings of the Universal front. In the same vein (pun intended), Richard Matheson modernized many of the traditional conventions of horror in the 1950s by finding a pseudo-scientific explanation for vampirism (“I Am Legend”) and placing stories on passenger planes (“Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”) and highways (“Duel”). Stephen King picked up the torch — not to march on Baron Frankenstein’s castle — and shredded nerves with rabies (“Cujo”), a mutated flu virus (“The Stand”) and psychotic fans (“Misery”), to name just three.

But a short novel I read every year — both because I assign it to students and because it never fails to make me think as well as shudder — is Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw.” Originally published in 1898, the novel avoids most of the conventions the cinema would enshrine as standards decades later and anticipates the psychological suspense that drives modern horror.

Like Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” “The Turn of the Screw” is a frame story, beginning on Christmas Eve in an old house where revelers gather to tell ghost stories, a mostly British tradition at Yuletide that I wish would catch on here in the States. The discussion ’round the fire turns to one-upmanship, and a guest notes that ghost stories involving a child give an already frightening subject an additional layer of terror.

“If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw,” he says, “what do you say to two children?”

The story that unfolds from this observation is purportedly from the manuscript of an old governess who, as a young woman, is placed in complete control of two orphans on a rambling country estate. James never gives the governess a name, but allows her story to unspool in first-person, creating a simultaneous sense of familiarity and distance that serves the tale well.

In short order, the governess becomes convinced the children are being haunted by ghosts of their former governess and valet, Miss Jessel and Peter Quint, who were having an affair in the months before their deaths.

For years after the novella’s publication, it was accepted as a quintessential ghost story. But critics soon began digging beneath the surface, questioning the mental state of the children’s second governess, who claims to have saved the two from demonic possession by these spirits. Do the ghosts exist, or are they figments of her imagination?

In a parallel interpretation, critics have found much in James’s portrait to support a reading of catastrophic class differences, as the affair between the first governess and the valet required the crossing of several social strata. Further readings have looked at the novella as a prototypical feminist text, a study in sexual repression and possible pedophilia involving multiple characters, living and dead.

While some of these analyses range far afield, they can all be supported, more or less, by the ambiguous — and, to my mind, perfect — narrative techniques that James employs, which allow multiple readings without decisively refuting any.

And the final pages, when little Miles and the governess are alone in the house, fending off what she believes to be the Quint’s final attempt to corrupt the boy’s soul, are among the creepiest in literature. James’s ending, soberingly final, allows readers to see the governess as either hero or villain.

For his part, James stolidly maintained that he had written a traditional ghost story, and that alternate readings should be viewed with suspicion. But writers are notoriously reticent to discuss what their work “really means,” and even when they make such pronouncements, their opinions should be taken with a degree of skepticism. Once a work is published, its interpretation belongs no longer to the writer, but to the audience.

And “The Turn of the Screw” is a many-layered delight, one that thumbs its nose at the conventions ascribed to “traditional” horror stories (including my beloved Universal movies), becoming all the more frightening because its monster, if one even exists, lives not in the attic or the basement, but in the human heart.


If this column inspires you to read “The Turn of the Screw,” I’d love to hear your interpretation. Email me at chris.schillig@yahoo.com or tweet me @cschillig on Twitter.

This was originally published in October, 2015, but I'd still welcome comments today. 

Reading aloud

This is a very old column, probably from fifteen years ago. My wife and I resurrected the reading-together habit during the COVID lockdown and continue it today. 

For the last few years, my wife and I have been reading aloud together.

This may seem an unusual twenty-first-century pastime, but it has an honorable pedigree. Before television sucked away society’s soul, books were a primary form of entertainment. What better way to experience them than around crackling fire (or, today, under an electric blanket), bringing a writer’s words to life via voice?

Our modern reading odyssey began with an author apt for Halloween: Stephen King. In the foreword to Part 1 of his 1996 serial novel, “The Green Mile,” King tells how he, his brother, and his mother would take turns reading stories aloud from The Saturday Evening Post.

“It was a rare chance to enjoy a written work as we enjoyed the movies we went to and the TV programs (Rawhide, Bonanza, Route 66) that we watched together; they were a family event,” he writes. He then urges readers to share “The Green Mile” as a read-aloud with a friend.

My wife and I took him up on that, reading each monthly installment and agonizing over the weeks between. When it was over, we were read-aloud addicts.

In the last ten years, we have plowed through dozens of books. Sometimes, our work schedules and outside commitments conflict, and we do not read together for weeks or even months.

However, when a book is compelling enough, we always make time, reading late into the night or early on weekend mornings (weekday mornings are always too hectic) until we reach the final page.

Most of our selections are novels, including many by King and suspense maestro Richard Matheson. For a while, when Matheson’s works had found renewed interest in Hollywood, we battled to stay ahead of the local cinema with “Stir of Echoes” and “What Dreams May Come.” (Both books are better.)

We read Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” but stalled on its precursor, “Angels and Demons” (too similar). We loved Mark Haddon’s “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” told from the point of view of a young man with Asperger’s Disorder, even though the singular way Haddon tells the story – with many pictures and diagrams – made it a challenge to read aloud.

Sometimes, a book fails to catch our attention, at least collectively. We started “Cold Mountain” together, but I finished solo. Holly slogged on to the end of Billie Letts’ “Where the Heart Is” after my interest flagged.

We have tried a few short story collections. Ray Bradbury is a proven winner, especially his early work, like “Small Assassin” and “The Jar,” both recommended for Halloween. Anthologies, by their nature, are more of a mixed bag, and we seldom read one straight through.

In non-fiction, we have read and enjoyed Nathaniel Philbrick’s “In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex,” an excellent account of an incident that may have inspired Herman Melville to write that whale of a novel, “Moby Dick.” We were three chapters into James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces” when the author was publicly shamed for making large parts of it up, and we lost all interest.

Currently, we are enjoying a novel very appropriate for this spooky season, “Creepers” by David Morrell. It tells the story of a group of urban explorers – people who break into abandoned buildings to chronicle the history left behind – and what happens when they discover more than they bargained for in a singular New Jersey hotel.

Like all of Morrell’s books, the author researches his topic meticulously, dropping specific references to methods and tools of urban exploration to create verisimilitude, so that when the inevitable weirdness begins, readers accept it without hesitation.

And, in an odd case of coincidence or synchronicity, one of the writers to whom Morrell dedicates his book is Matheson, another of our read-aloud regulars, whose “Hell House” bears certain thematic similarities. Morrell was also inspired to become a writer after watching “Route 66,” one of the shows King mentions in the “The Green Mile” foreword that started my wife and me on our read-aloud journey.

Those tempted to hum the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” have my permission.

And anybody curious about the read-aloud experience should start with “Creepers” or one of the other titles given thumbs up here. The process is low tech, requires little or no electricity, and beats most anything on TV these days.

A crackling fire is optional but recommended.