Gareth Roberts has narrated this article for you to listen to.
Looking for a light, breezy read? If you happened to be browsing the bestseller bookshelves this summer your eye might be drawn to a cover that shows two colourful beach chairs under wafting palms on a bright, sandy shore. The shadows cast by the chairs become those of two children – maybe it’s a story about a holiday romance, a couple who knew each other when they were younger and reunite under the Seychelles sun. If you somehow didn’t know that Stephen King was a horror writer you might not realise that this book, You Like It Darker, is his most recent short story collection.
One of those stories is a sequel to Cujo, King’s 1981 shocker about a family’s amiable dog who gets nipped by a bat and embarks on a rabies rampage. There was no doubt about the genre of Cujo; the cover of its first edition depicted blood dripping from the beast’s slavering jaws.
Book covers have become far too bland and far too tasteful, even when the content is blood-spattered offal. When I was a lad in the 1970s, a trip to the horror shelf of a bookshop was a lurid treat. This was before video games and video rentals, just, when some forms of reading could, according to adults, still be bad for you. (It will sound incredible to the young, but grown-ups often tried to stop you reading.) Schlocky thrills were all out on show and were passed from fetid hand to fetid hand in samizdat school libraries.
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