In a post on Lit Reactor, Peter Derk, tongue firmly in cheek, suggests that some classics of the horror canon are due for replacement. “The idea of sitting down to replace iconic horror novels with newer, updated versions is, well, incredibly stupid,” he says. Nonetheless, Derk provides some food for thought with a few of his suggested upstarts.
- Replace Frankenstein by Mary Shelley with All That Remains by Sue Black. Derk wonders how society would perceive scientific advancements, if Shelley had written about the possibilities of science, rather than their horror. “I think it’s time to abandon Mary Shelley’s fearful vision of medical science as she imagined it might be 200 years later in favor of a book that gives us science as it is,” he writes. “Sue Black uses somewhat macabre science, described in a detailed way, to figure out what happened during mass death events, murders, accidents, and so on, and she uses science to uncover things about humanity, in general.”
- Replace Dracula by Bram Stoker with Where They Burn Books, They Also Burn People by Marco Antonio Hernandez. Hernandez’ novel shows how “two parallel fictions, one taking place in the past, one in the present, intertwine and combine to show us different sides of the same story, which is also horrifying and has one of those great slow-burn descents into terror,” Derk says.
- Replace The Turn of the Screw by Henry James with A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay. “A Head Full of Ghosts is an update on the classic ghost story,” Derk says. “And it has something to say about reality TV, stardom, all that shit. It’s genuinely creepy, and you’ll get through it without the incentive of needing to in order to pass a class.”
- Replace The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells with The Visible Man by Chuck Klosterman. A creepier, colder version of Wells’ classi, The Visible Man is told from the perspective of a therapist whose client claims he’s invented a process for turning himself invisible. “He uses it to observe average people doing average things, mostly while they’re at home, alone,” Derk writes.
