Friday, July 8, 2016

Ten top novels about deranged killers

Chet Williamson has written horror, science fiction, and suspense since 1981. Among his novels are Second Chance, Hunters, Defenders of the Faith, Ash Wednesday, Reign, Dreamthorp, and the recently released Psycho Sanitarium, an authorized sequel to Robert Bloch's classic Psycho.

One of Williamson's top ten novels about deranged killers, as shared at the Guardian:
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (1985)

Though Anton Chigurh of No Country for Old Men is generally considered to be McCarthy’s supreme bogeyman, the huge, hairless and horrifying Judge Holden, who leads a band of renegade scalp hunters, is equally unpredictable and dangerous. Not so much a man as a force of nature, he haunts “the kid”, the book’s protagonist, over a period of the early years of the American west, with “War is god” as his motto.
Read about the other entries on the list.

Blood Meridian is one authority's pick for the Great Texas novel; it is among Callan Wink's ten best books set in the American West, Simon Sebag Montefiore's six favorite books, Richard Kadrey's five books about awful, awful people, Jason Sizemore's top five books that will entertain and drop you into the depths of despair, Robert Allison's top ten novels of desert war, Alexandra Silverman's top fourteen wrathful stories, James Franco's six favorite books, Philipp Meyer's five best books that explain America, Peter Murphy's top ten literary preachers, David Vann's six favorite books, Robert Olmstead's six favorite books, Michael Crummey's top ten literary feuds, Philip Connors's top ten wilderness books, six books that made a difference to Kazuo Ishiguro, Clive Sinclair's top 10 westerns, Maile Meloy's six best books, and David Foster Wallace's five direly underappreciated post-1960 U.S. novels. It appears on the New York Times list of the best American fiction of the last 25 years and among the top ten works of literature according to Stephen King.

--Marshal Zeringue