I'm often asked about my favorite books and my favorite authors. I'll generally say that Joe Lansdale or Robert McCammon takes the top spot. Stephen King, perhaps, but it's so trite to drop his name. Peter Straub. Harlan Ellison.

As for favorite books, I have a lot. To put them into a concise list might be too limiting, but I figured I'd give it a shot.


The first, foremost, and most obvious is Boy's Life, by Robert McCammon. I'm hardly alone in this case. More readers I know cite Boy's Life as their favorite of any book I know of.

Boy's Life is the perfect novel for anyone who grew up with a vivid imagination and a overpowering love of monsters and magic. No other book I have encountered captures the awe and beauty, not to mention the sometimes difficult times, of being a child with an overactive fantasy life.

I call Boy's Life my very favorite book and I am unlikely to change my position in this life.



I read Robert A. Heinlein's Farmer in the Sky when I was around twelve years old. I will never forget the thrill I felt as I went along with Bill Lermer as his family on a trip to help colonize Ganymede, a moon of Jupiter. Heinlein knew that technology was crucial to science fiction, but humanity was just as important. Many writers know that now, but it was revolutionary in the nineteen-forties when he hit his prime.

If the number of re-readings alone indicate a favorite book, Farmer in the Sky would take my top spot. Hands down. I have read this novel at least fifteen times and I could easily read it fifteen more.



You don't like romance novels? Pity, because you might never read David Lozell Martin's Crazy Love. This novel defies all expectations of what constitutes a romantic story. It's achingly real, with sequences that will make your heart soar. And ones that will break it. Crazy Love is perhaps the most powerful novel of the human heart I have ever read.

It seemed like the publisher dumped Crazy Love, with little or no fanfare. Several of us at Shocklines read it and we all praised it with the greatest enthusiasm. Those wise enough to take our advice and read it were all blown away.

Crazy Love is the first book I gave to my wife, when we first began to date. She and I are a perfect match, and I know we would have eventually gotten married without the book, but I can't help but think it made a difference.


When I began reading Stephen King, around nineteen eighty-two, I raced through every one of his books and there has never been a more rewarding and enjoyable reading jag in my life. I could easily put The Shining, Different Seasons, It, The Long Walk, The Dead Zone, or The Stand in this list, but none has touched my heart as profoundly as Christine.

Yes, a story of a haunted car is silly, but the true core of Christine is the friendship of Arnie Cunningham and Dennis Guilder. My best friend and I were roughly the same age as they were when the story takes place, and I felt so many parallels between is.

King has often dealt in metaphor, and Arnie's assimilation by LeBay/Christine can be interpreted as one friend being consumed by addiction while the other helplessly witnesses the whole painful thing.

I read Christine for the fourth time last year and I will hopefully read it again and again in my life.



Other Bells For Us To Ring is a children's book. It is a simple story of a little girl who is overwhelmed by the pressures of life and its challenges. She ponders the possibility of miracles and she ultimately experiences one.

Many writers have trod in this territory, but none have done so with as much conviction as did Robert Cormier. His novels for teens are uncompromising and they deal in harsh situations. Other Bells For Us To Ring is gentle, yet it is also emotionally devastating.

I was a devout atheist in nineteen ninety, when I read this book, and I was telling a friend about it. He chastised me for loving a book that deals heavily in Christian faith. I replied that I did not believe in werewolves either, but I liked good books about them. Other Bells For Us To Ring helped open my heart to the possibilities of something beyond the world our senses perceive.



Upon completion of Stephen King's entertaining and informative Danse Macabre, I began to read the books and authors he recommended. I believe the first was Peter Straub's Ghost Story. I had seen the movie, and I rather liked it, even knowing it didn't really work as a whole. Parts of the movie are extremely effective, especially the four elderly actors.

Ghost Story was immediately a giant favorite, and one of the best books I had ever read. Peter Straub took elements of the Gothic ghost story, shook them up, and poured them onto the pages. I read Shadowland right away, and I liked it even more. Then I tackled Floating Dragon.

Floating Dragon was my favorite book at that point. I had never read anything quite like it, and I still have not. This time Straub took elements of popular horror, and threw them all together, including the kitchen sink.

In his introduction to the Cemetery Dance edition of Floating Dragon, Peter Straub stated that horror fans were turned off by the book, but the general public ate it up. Well, this horror fan was anything but turned off.

Literary yet explicit, Floating Dragon is still my perfect ideal of a horror novel. Epic in scope, with well-drawn characters, memorable scenes, and a terrifying villain. If the end was kind of anticlimactic for some, well, I forgive it.


Ira Levin has been called "the Swiss watchmaker of suspense". If that is true, and I suppose it is, then John Farris is the journeyman of horror. A solid professional who approaches the genre with workmanlike precision. John Farris published book after book after book in the sixites, seventies, eighties, nineties, and beyond, and never once made a misstep. I can't say that about any other writer.

As a long lapsed Catholic, demonic possession stories are dear to my heart. From Ray Russell's groundbreaking The Case Against Satan to William Peter Blatty's phenomenally successful The Exorcist, right up to A Head Full of Ghosts and My Best Friend's Exorcism, demon horror has always been a favorite subgenre for a legion of horror fans.

Son of the Endless Night ratchets up the odds by featuring a murder committed by someone possessed. But that is merely the start. Farris segues his story into a courtroom apocalypse, as the defense counsel attempts to prove its client innocent due to demonic possession.

I've read a lot of horror. More than most, and I love a lot of books. None more so than Son of the Endless Night. It is, and probably always will be, my single favorite horror novel.



The first time I glimpsed Joe Bob Briggs on TV was in the eighties, on The Movie Channel. My immediate impression was that Joe Bob was another dumb redneck doing corn-pone humor. Then I watched him introduce Cronenberg's The Brood one night, and I was surprised to see that he had some astute things to say about the director and the movie. Then I saw Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In at a WaldenBooks. Seeing that Stephen King had written the intro, I had to buy the book.

I had always loved drive-in theaters and drive-in movies, and this was the perfect book for me. Uproarious, controversial humor mixed with the kind of movie review a budding gorehound craved. You have to understand. It wasn't like today. No journalists were covering drive-in movies at the time. Now it's commonplace, but Joe Bob championed the very ingredients that made the respectable critics irate.

I read Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In over and over again, and I cannot overstate how much it influenced me. Without this book I would never have written He Who Types Between the Rows or even started up Horror Drive-In. My trade paperback is well-worn, and I would love to replace it, but copies have become valuable collector's item.

If I had the wherewithal to start my own small press, the first project I would pursue would be a hardcover omnibus of Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In, and its sequel, Joe Bob Goes Back to the Drive-In.


And speaking of the drive-in, I will conclude this piece with Joe R. Lansdale's breakout novel, The Drive-In. This book came out at the perfect time for me and a perfect time for Lansdale. Horror was breaking out in a big way, and while Joe never limited himself as being just a horror writer, his work fit right in with the no-holds-barred fiction being published in the late eighties.

I don't consider The Drive-in to be Joe's most accomplished book, but in many ways it is one of his most perfect. He had been learning his craft, steadily writing better books and stories, and The Drive-In was a major breakthrough for him.

The Drive-In deals with gory movies, wayward youth, wholesale carnage, aliens, cannibals, and, ultimately, the apocalypse. It is a forerunner to Bizarro and a mad science fiction satire. Mostly it is a Joe R. Lansdale book, and that puts in it its own category.

The Drive-In spawned two cool sequels, but the first is the best and it will always be one of my favorite books.



I could go on and on, and it hurts to leave out writers like Harlan Ellison, Paul Theroux, John Irving, Charles L. Grant, Frederik Pohl, Bill Pronzini, and so many others. Yes, the most recent book in this list is from 2002. I feel that it takes a long time to put these things into perspective. A true favorite has to stand the test of decades.


Written by Mark Sieber

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