What's a little puzzling about these avatars is that being Peter Straub seems pretty darn sweet all on its own. A modest, eminently amiable bear of a man, Straub lives on the Upper West Side with Susan, his wife of 43 years, in a five-story brownstone stuffed with books, art, photographs and the biggest collection of jazz LPs and CDs you're likely to see outside a library or radio station. Tucked into every nook of the place is some memento of an interesting experience, literary passion or brilliant friend, from a set of Raymond Chandler first editions (gifts from Otto Penzler) to a framed photo of Straub and King on the day they decided to collaborate on "The Talisman" to the Boorum & Pease notebooks in which Straub wrote "Lost Boy Lost Girl," "In the Night Room" and other novels -- each decorated with an enigmatic collage reflecting the book's themes. There are awards on the mantel, Palomino pencils on the desk, stacks of poetry volumes by C.P. Cavafy and C.D. Wright in the study, Paul Desmond on the stereo and a sleek, friendly tabby named Hector on the living room sofa. When people fantasize about "being a writer," chances are the life they're imagining looks a lot like Peter Straub's.

Straub's literary specialty, however, is not dreams but nightmares; many people name "Ghost Story" as the scariest book they've ever read. He's particularly adept at the kind of creepy psychological yarn pioneered by Henry James and modernized by Shirley Jackson, two of Straub's writerly touchstones. That's the taste Straub has brought to bear on his latest project, editing the two-volume anthology "American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny," just published by Library of America. (Straub also edited the LOA's H.P. Lovecraft collection.) The project has given him a century-spanning perspective on the art of making readers squirm uneasily in their chairs.

Most of the stories you include in this anthology don't involve a tremendous amount of violence.

No, that's less interesting to me. A lot of books on the horror shelves now, for example, are totally exterior. Take Thomas Harris' Hannibal Lecter novels. The one I like best is [the first book] "Red Dragon," because it's more interior, and shows you more of what's going on inside someone like that. It's more complex, more nuanced.

A few years back I guest-edited an issue of the literary journal Conjunctions, focusing on what we called the New Wave Fabulists. And I realized that most of the stories people sent me had to do with loss and grief. To me those are the defining emotions of the genre of horror.

When I was working on that issue, I was excited by what Kelly Link, Dan Chaon and a lot of other writers were doing, a somehow unplaceable kind of story that wasn't mainstream, wasn't realistic exactly, that had a fantastic tone like science fiction or fantasy but it wasn't any of those things. It was out there by itself. I liked that definitions of genre that I'd grown up with as a young man seemed to be dissolving. And this is purely pretentious, but I thought I'd done something to help that along. Dan Chaon sent me a high school photo of himself reading "Ghost Story." Take a writer like Brian Evenson, whose work is very serious and smart, with a high literary quality, but definitely, it's horror.

Did you learn any new secrets about scaring readers from going through so many stories for this new anthology?

I'm not sure I can explain exactly how it works. It has to do with creating believable people for whom the reader can feel affection, then putting them in danger of the unnameable and unseen. And it has to be suspended. You can't just pull a gun out and have them get shot. You have to allow the sense of underlying unease to intensify over time. As crucial as fear is dread. Dread is essential.

How would you distinguish the two?

Well, dread leads to fear, to shame and to terror. And before dread comes foreboding.

And foreboding is ...

A prescience that something bad is about to happen. You don't know why you don't like that guy, but you just have a bad feeling about him. Dread is when foreboding shows itself to be justified. Something like foreboding is built into all fiction, I think. Even Barbara Pym novels have a point where you think, "Is that altar cloth going to work or not?"

In your novel "Lost Boy Lost Girl," there's a serial killer antagonist, but there's also this other story line about Tim Underhill's desire to rescue the nephew he loves so much from his own brother, who's just crushing the kid's spirit. In its own way, Tim's powerlessness to save that child is as horrifying as the killer's power to hurt him. The way you weave the fantastic threat in with that realistic emotional dimension makes the book especially devastating. The exterior action mirrors this complex interior danger. It emerges from the psychology of the characters, in a way.

I hope so. For Underhill, of course, all of this started with his Vietnam experience. He had post-traumatic stress disorder. I never had that, but I had its little brother [Straub was in a severe car accident at age 7], which is called adjustment reaction, according to my shrink.

Do you think that you have to have that kind history to write the sorts of things you write, or even to read them? I certainly know people who say, "I can't believe you want to read about such unpleasant stuff!"

I have no patience with people like that. They are deliberately not looking at something right in front of them that they should look at. In my novel "The Throat," Tim Underhill says, "The world is half night." You have to appreciate that, and if you do there is a kind of beauty to it all. There's nothing beautiful about violence and savagery, but there is in the human response, that we can feel ourselves deepened by unhappy things that happen to us. Grief is a very painful emotion because it depends on love. It's the price you pay for love. If you live to have actual experiences, you come face to face with real darkness.

Even the more surreal touches in your books do seem to feed back into very real anxieties. Tim Underhill meets a strangely hostile fan/collector in "In the Night Room," and this man tells him that when a book is published, every so often a copy comes off the presses that isn't the book the writer actually wrote but the book that he or she meant to write, sort of the platonic ideal of that book. There are people who collect just these copies, and of course they don't think much of authors because they know just how badly authors mess up their own ideas. Now that's a concept that strikes right at the heart of every writer's fears! You're face to face with this guy who knows what you should have been able to do and totally failed to do. So when you mentioned shame earlier as being part of the progress from foreboding to dread to fear, that really struck me.

It's definitely one of our most powerful, unpleasant emotions.

But shame implies responsibility. If your characters are just these blameless suburban innocents and then bam, something evil pounces on them, it's not the same.

Yes, and after a while I was only interested in the kind of story you're talking about. The external threat only seemed valid to me if there was some connection between the thing and the people perceiving the thing. It's a short hop from there to having everything being a projection from the psyches of the characters.

Do you find that ambiguity more scary?

Probably. Because you have to be really good to make the straightforward supernatural pay off. Stephen King can do it, but I've seen a hundred guys get only halfway there.

So that was the kind of story you were drawn to in putting this new anthology together?

Mostly, although there are some stories in there that are more straightforward. One story, "The Jelly-Fish," is pure pulp about a scientist who shrinks himself to microscopic size and gets eaten by an amoeba. That's just fun. Where I really used my taste is in the last half of the second volume, where story after story is grown-up, complex and surprising. And overall there's a preponderance of stories where everything is implied or ambiguous. It's less obvious and it's more literary.

Frighteningly enough, though, that question about zombies could also be asked of America's political culture.

It was only a year ago that "zombie" first entered the colloquial economic lexicon during the collapse of the financial institutions that were cannibalizing the economy. From a balance-sheet perspective, many of these firms were dead. But they were quickly reanimated as zombie banks with trillions of taxpayer dollars.

Like a typical zombie outbreak, the initial plague spread.

On Wall Street, we have zombie executives -- those who destroyed the economy but nonetheless kept their same jobs and now continue paying themselves huge bonuses. At the White House, President Obama hired zombie advisors whose zombie economic ideologies and records manufacturing recession conditions should have killed their careers, but who now sit in high government office letting out moans in support of the zombie banks.

On Capitol Hill, the scene this Halloween season looks like Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video. Decrepit zombie politicians with the funk of 40,000 years stalk Congress with the very zombie lobbyists that the election was said to disempower. Lately, they are working in tandem to construct zombie health insurance companies -- for-profit corporations eternalized by public subsidies, customer mandates and almost no regulation or competition. At the same time, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that should have already concluded keep plodding on with an unchanging zombie strategy -- all while media zombies push zombie myths about death panels and birth certificates, effectively feasting on the last functioning lobes of the American brain.

Call me a zombie pundit, but I agree with "World War Z" author Max Brooks' suggestion that the concurrent rise of zombie pop and political cultures is no coincidence.

"Zombies are an apocalyptic threat, we are living in times of apocalyptic anxiety (and) we need a vessel in which to coalesce those anxieties," he says.

In fact, I'll go out on a severed limb and take it further: If zombies specifically represent the apocalyptic downsides of immortalized mindlessness, then today’s zombie zeitgeist is not merely a result of scary quandaries created by stupidity. It is a reaction to both those problems and the sense that they can never be thwarted.

Here we are, a year after a financial implosion that should have driven a stake in the heart of free market fundamentalism. Here we are, a year after an election that was supposed to pour holy water on Wall Street vampires, exorcise the economy's demons and challenge the ancient mummies of neoconservative foreign policy. Yet here we are, with virtually nothing changed, watching the same zombie crises indomitably stumble forward.

And so what do we do? We flee to entertainment venues that let us enjoy the campy thrill of confronting the undead -- even though we've lost the ability to do that in real life.

"The zombie is a way for us to explore massive disasters in a safe way," Brooks says. "You can't shoot the financial meltdown in the head, but you can do that with a zombie."

© 2009 Creators.com

“Orphan" star Vera Farmiga postulates that “we’re more emotional creatures and it’s such an emotional experience,” while Spines observers that young girls “like to cuddle” and that horror offers girls “an excuse to inch a little closer to their beloved.”

Not everybody’s buying the snuggle theory, though. “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” remake producer Brad Fuller points out that women have more ticket buying clout in general, while “Orphan” producer Susan Downey cuts to the female empowerment angle: “Girls get the sense ‘I can face my demon.”

While that doesn’t let any of the tackier, more exploitative examples of the genre off the proverbial meat hook, it does get at something interesting. Horror movies almost always rely on a female protagonist. While it never hurts the box office that she’s inevitably a hot babe, the enduring allure of these films hinges on the girl in jeopardy’s ultimate heroism. Contrast the ass kicking women do in horror with the window dressing role they provide in most superhero-driven action films as a reference point. And speaking of opening up the whupass, what the EW story failed to address is how often women in horror are the antagonists as well. From creepy kids to she-devils to run-of-the-mill ax-wielding psychos, horror lets women be very, very bad. However you slice it, scary movies offer cathartic respite, a world where a female who possesses ingenuity and physical prowess isn’t regarded as a domineering bitch. For women looking for strong role modes, sometimes the safest place in the world is the chamber of horrors.

"Drag Me to Hell" opens with a flashback to 1969 Pasadena, in which a desperate Mexican couple bring their cursed child to a medium (played by Adriana Barraza), who fails to prevent the lad from being swallowed into the abyss of hell. She vows that someday, she'll get another crack at the demon-spirit who caused all the trouble. Cut to present-day Southern California, where we meet spunky farm girl-turned-loan officer Christine (Alison Lohman). Eager to move past her modest, pig-princess roots, Christine hopes to be next in line for a promotion at her bank. But her boss (played by the fine character actor David Paymer) indicates that a brown-nosing colleague, an Asian-American who goes by the intentionally incongruous name Stu Rubin (Reggie Lee), is most likely going to get the job. Christine, wide-eyed and with a perpetually quivering lower lip, thinks her chances for advancement will be improved if she acts like a tough businesslady. So when an elderly woman with ratted hair and a milky eye (played by the fabulous Lorna Raver) shows up at the bank, begging for an extension on her mortgage payments, efficient little Christine, after weighing the options for all of 20 seconds, tells her no.

And that, of course, is where all of Christine's problems begin, and where all of those disgusting bodily fluids start flowing freely. Not even Christine's sweet, caring, academic boyfriend (Justin Long) is of much use, though he tries. Raimi keeps making the gags broader and broader, as if to see how much he can get away with. And he gets away with just about everything, although cat lovers, in particular, might be dismayed by one scene. (For those who want to keep every plot detail a surprise, the following constitutes a spoiler, so you might want to stop reading here.) Raimi apparently scoured the earth to find the cutest, stripiest kitten ever, only to give him an ignoble end. But even so, Raimi advances through the scene discreetly (nothing happens on-camera). And the idea, writ comically large, is that he's contrasting the kitten's complete innocence -- plus, did I mention, his amazing cuteness? -- with a human character's ugliness and depravity. So Raimi's transgression against kittenkind is forgiven. But just this once.

As for the rest, "Drag Me to Hell" is somewhat plotless, though like many horror movies it does have a strong moral underpinning. As the clueless and, really, not-very-nice Christine learns the hard way, we must treat others with compassion and maintain a sense of humility. Because if we don't, someone's yellowy, oozing eyeball is going to show up in the piece of cake we're trying to eat. If that isn't motivation enough for trying to be a good person, then I don't know what is.

"The Uninvited," a horror-thriller that's neither horrifying nor thrilling, is the debut feature by the Guard brothers, Charles and Thomas, an English duo whose previous credits include several shorts made with the actress Lena Headey. The picture is ostensibly a remake of South Korean filmmaker Ji-woon Kim's 2003 "A Tale of Two Sisters," an elegant, haunting picture that is, unfortunately, now out of print and a bit difficult to find (although I urge you to seek it out, if only so you can explain to me what the hell the stuff toward the end means -- "Sisters" is a creepy and poetic piece of work, if not a particularly coherent one). "The Uninvited" doesn't, of course, have the same creepy glow as its inspiration: Instead of making allusions, it offers up specifics. Lots of stuff jumps out at us in "The Uninvited." At one point we catch a glimpse of a spooky, unseen something in a dark corner, but in the context of the rest of the movie's obviousness, the eerie indirectness of that moment just seems like a mistake.

This is your standard, straight-up mainstream supernatural entertainment, although, to its credit, it's low on gore and sadism. What's more, its plot (the script is by Craig Rosenberg, Doug Miro and Carlo Bernard) pretty much makes sense, in a hallucinatory kind of way. Anna (Emily Browning, who played Violet in "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events") is a sweet-faced teen who's just been sprung from the loony bin. A kindly psychiatrist there urges her to go out into the world, "kiss a boy, get into trouble." There's been some trauma in her past, involving the death of her mother, and it has made her home life a nightmare. Her father's new girlfriend, Rachel (Banks), alternates between menacing her and lavishing an unsettling degree of motherly attention on her. Her father (David Strathairn) stands by, looking like a beaten dog. Her only friend and confidante is her older sister, Alex (Arielle Kebbel), a leggy troublemaker who also sees that something's not quite right with stepmommy-wannabe Rachel.

Anna wakes in the middle of the night to find dark, slimy specters crawling around her bedroom floor. She keeps seeing a mysterious little redheaded girl with dead-looking eyes; garbage bags that are supposedly filled with garbage begin ... moving. Is she dreaming this stuff? Has the household been invaded by ghosties and beasties? Or could it be that she was sprung from the hospital a tad too early? Nothing in "The Uninvited" makes you care enough to want to find out. As is generally the case with Hollywood movies that use Asian horror films as their inspiration, the Guard brothers seem to have glanced at the original, borrowed a few images and then made the movie according to some preconceived template of what makes audiences jump -- instead of burrowing into the stuff that haunts our dreams. Banks, whose character is a nurse, gets a speech about having served her time wiping the bums of elderly patients. But that's about as close to scary as "The Uninvited" gets.