 Hi there. Today on Typical Books I'm going to talk about Top 5 Horror. This is the most influential. I'm going to do a couple videos like this I've been asked before to do Top 5s of various kinds, and I'm going to do something like this where it's Top 5 20th Century Most Influential, which is a very long title I know. So it'll probably just be like Top 5 Most Influential Horror to me, right? And then I'm going to do a Top 5 Most Extreme, Top 5 Classic, Top 5 Haunted House, but I want to stick to books I know, books I love, books I have, and of course books that were most influential. So all the mystery, right? You can tell one thing about these books. They are trade paperbacks. They are little tiny pocket books as it were. These are probably from the 70s or 80s, maybe 60s, judging by the color. We're going to say 70s and 80s. So mostly late 70s. And it does really ran the gamut of authors, but there will be some names you're very familiar with. I've talked about these books before, I've talked about these authors before, and I'm going to continue talking about these authors, right? There's something to be said for these yellowed paperbacks, isn't there? So the number one on my list is J. Anson's Amityville Horror. You've heard me talk about this book before. It is super influential. And you've also heard me say before, yeah, it's a true story. Yeah, it's being debunked. But I treat it as a haunted house. Number one, it is a house gone berserk that wants people out. And it is just a fantastic fount of ghost stories, poltergeist stories. And of course, the, you know, sort of warped thing that happens with teenage people or the madness that can infect one another. It is a fantastic tale and it's written like a ghost story. It's not so much a true crime book. So yeah, I count it as number five in my most influential horror. Number four, my most influential horror is Robert Block's Psycho. I love this book. I love this story. I love the movie. And that's one thing you'll notice about these. They've all been made into movies. And when we get to number five, which is kind of a wild card, we'll talk about how many movies come out of these books. Now of course, this is written kind of based on Ed Gein, you'd say. But Robert Block would say that he wrote it before he heard of Ed Gein. So it could be just a serendipitous thing. It could be some synchronicitous thing. But be that as it may, it can also be that sort of thing where like Nightmare Downstreet was written about a story in a newspaper that no one could put their finger on at first because it just became something of the cultural zeitgeist. But who knows, maybe being psycho at this time was part of the zeitgeist. It is a classic tale of those evil seeds being sown in one another. It's those weird things where somebody can be taken over to do the most unspeakable horrors to other people around them to preserve their madness, so to speak. And the character that is written in this book is totally different than the film and 10 times more terrifying. It's a very scary book. The third one is by an author that you may expect to be on this list, but maybe not this title, Stepford Wives I-11. Now Rosemary's Baby is a fine little book. It is a drama, tragedy. It doesn't sit into horror as much for me. This, however, maybe because I'm a woman or maybe because I'm just terrified of the power other people can have over one another, or it's an uncanny valley of these creatures the wives have become. It is 10 times more terrifying. And the film, of course, sticks with me. It's so scary. It really is. And I only wish that I could write something this powerful and so insidious because it sort of sits in the background of all of our memories, right? Rosemary's Baby takes the center stage, but this is waiting in the wings. Now number two in top five horror is Hell House. It also is my number one most haunted house story. It, you know, definitely beats out Amityville horror. This is somewhere where we've taken the classic haunted house stories and put it into the now, the now of Richard Matheson's Hell House, because at the time it was very modern to be having these ghost hunters in. We were talking about the Warrens, Hans Holzer, people that were investigating these stories. Now we've sexed them up a little bit made this house actually fucking dangerous. So yeah, Hell House is a wonderful tale. I again wish I could write something this powerful. And it has been like number one influence, I think of all of these Blumhousean films that are coming out these days. Really, honestly, this and the entity are really like some of the scariest things out there. Again, the film, I love this film so much. And the book, you know, it is a wonderful read. I could read it every single year and it is terrifying. And the number one of my top five most influential horror books is Stephen King's Night Shift. And it could go right up along with Skeleton Crew. It could go with Pet Cemetery if you want just the novel or the shining. This particular book though does encompass a lot of his juvenilia as it were and stories that he wrote in magazines. It was one of the collections that is the definitive Stephen King when you're talking about early King. And almost every single story in here has become a movie. So it does say something about the power of these stories. And there's some that have stuck with me so long. I read this as a young young girl and survivor type scared the shit out of me. And Trucks, the trailer for Maximum Overdrive, scared me so much. It's still a great read. And survivor type in particular will make it onto another list that I do of these top fives. But it was recently redone in the creep show format. So if you subscribe to Shutter, you can check out survivor type. They finally adapted it for the screen. Crazy. So yes, Stephen King's Night Shift, my number one of five most influential horror books. So it's kind of hard for me to talk about all of these and not talk about this. This is Clive Barker's Cabal. Any Clive Barker will do. The only reason that he's not in here is because he's a little later. Stephen King himself had said he saw the future of horror and his name was Clive Barker. He wasn't kidding. He was the guy that sort of does what I am trying to get across with this list. He took all of these writers and distilled them into his style. He was doing what we're doing now with more contemporary horror as writers and readers and grabbing what's around us, making it our own. He had been grabbing what's around him. No doubt some of these books and making it his own and his horror too. So he'll have to make it onto another list of the contemporary modern, late contemporary, postmodern, via V late 20th century. I don't even know how to categorize that but he is a classic horror master in and of himself. These are beyond the classic horror into the late 20th century and definitely the sort of books that have shaped my writing, the writing of my peers and a lot of the films and books that we're reading right now. So thank you very much for watching this top five. Do you agree? Disagree? Let me know in the comments and have a new key. Spooky day.