1) "The Mothman Prophecies" by John A. Keel
To the glassy eye of the unsympathetic reader of books devoted to Unexplained Phenomena -- from Mothmen with ten-foot wing spans and red peepers to the flying saucers, the psychics, the ufologists, the Lost Atlantean crowd, etc., are all in one boozy bagatelle. Not so. Although Keel has had some mysterious phone messages and sighted plenty of those blinking lights, he has harsh words for those who hold with extra-terrestrial intervention via vehicles and ""contactees,"" and skeptics will find his case for hallucinations most convincing. But then after trailing Keel around West Virginia and environs where all sorts of things were reported to have taken place -- dive-bombing Mothmen, swooping lights, odd phone calls and hawk-faced ""strangers"" -- the reader primed to be told it's all bosh, finds that Keel is a believer of sorts. ""They"" are a kind of ""ultra-terrestrial"" -- always around, perhaps even part of our minds. Some psychic push beyond the space-time continuum may answer the question of ""why"" these things are there. Did Keel see Mothman? No, but look! Up there in the sky. . . .
2) "Rosemary's Baby" by Ira Levin
3) "Darwinia" by Robert Charles Wilson
Alternate-historical apocalypse from the author of the fine time-travel adventure A Bridge of Years (1991), etc. In 1912, following a cosmic event known as the Miracle, Europe vanishes, replaced by Darwinia, a physiographically similar continent occupied by alien flora and fauna that somehow are biochemically compatible with those of Earth. The US, fueled by an upsurge in religious faith, declares Darwinia open to all colonists. By 1920, a few settlements have been carved out of the new wilderness; a scientific expedition under the American creationist Preston Finch will proceed up the Rhine and across the Alps, its progress recorded by Boston photographer Guilford Law, who leaves wife Caroline and daughter Lily behind in New London. Soon, attacked by bandits, menaced by the strange local wildlife, the expedition’s in serious trouble; the survivors report weird dreams. Guilford meets himself as he might have existed: a soldier killed in WWI. Eventually, having discovered a vast abandoned city, Guilford emerges from Darwinia to find that Caroline and Lily, thinking him dead, have run off to Australia. Guilford’s doppelgÑnger convinces him that he, and others like him, are troops in some incomprehensible struggle against other demon-ridden humans, such as spiritualist Elias Vale. Billions of years hence, you see, surviving intelligences have built the Archive in order to remember everything that ever happened; but the Archive has been invaded by —psions,— free- living bits of computer code (the demons that ride Vale and company). Guilford and his associates are avatars of the Archive, awaiting a showdown with the psions. A brilliantly imagined but hypercomplicated, undramatizable hodgepodge, whose incoherent narrative is all squirming ends and no graspable substance.
4) "Relic" by Douglas Preston
An eccentric, grisly, thoroughly original thriller sure to please doctoral candidates and gore junkies alike. The real star featured by Preston (Jennie, p. 1080, etc.) and former St. Martin's editor Child isn't the brain-eating, evolutionary aberration, quaintly dubbed the ""Museum Beast,"" that hunts victims in the subterranean catacombs of New York's Museum of Natural History: It's the museum itself. While the creature is never dull, thrill hounds couldn't ask for a creepier environment in which to encounter grad student Margo Green, journalist Bill Smithback, FBI Special Agent Pendergast, and a mob of bureaucrats, genetics geeks, and NYPD cops. On the eve of a heavily promoted megashow, the shredded bodies of two boys are discovered in the museum's basement. As the death toll mounts, Agent Pendergast attempts to postpone the opening of an exhibit called Superstition. But he's vetoed by a publicity-conscious superior. Meanwhile, Green and Smithback combine forces to get the lowdown on some mysterious crates from a failed Amazon expedition that no one wants to talk about. It turns out that the ""Museum Beast"" is really a freak of nature, its DNA half-reptile and half-primate. It followed the crates to New York because they contained the last samples of its only food -- when the supply ran out, the monster began snacking on nutritionally similar human brains. Fast, smart, and almost bulletproof, the beast also served as the central figure in the rituals of a vanished Amazon culture. If this all sounds wildly cool, it's nothing compared to the novel's final third, in which several groups of characters (including the mayor) are trapped in different parts of the museum and must fend off repeated attacks from the lizard-ape, which munches on SWAT teams and socialites before squaring off against Green and Pendergast. A thriller staged in the world's scariest building, with no room for the squeamish.
5) "Red Dragon" by Thomas Harris
It seems as if two out of every three suspense novels in recent years have featured psychopathic mass murderers--but Harris' contribution to the genre stands well above the pulpy crowd. Unlike Lawrence Sanders et al., Harris (Black Sunday) isn't in the vulgar titillation business; his territory is evil, not just violence--and, with unpretentious echoes of William Golding's Darkness Visible, he has written a genuinely frightening but completely un-lurid novel. . . featuring the most quietly convincing psychopath in recent American thriller fiction. The crimes are truly horrible: two whole families in far-apart suburban towns have been slaughtered one month apart--by, medical evidence shows (blood, hair, saliva), the same man. So supremely intuitive FBI-man Will Graham very reluctantly comes out of retirement (he killed someone and was himself nearly killed in recent cases), and while Graham's grim, shrewdly detailed investigation clicks along, Harris introduces us to the killer: Francis Dolarhyde of Gateway Film Laboratory in St. Louis. Facially deformed at birth, abused and abandoned as a child, Dolarhyde--now near-normal-looking thanks to plastic surgery--is a pathetic, sexually repressed, believably motivated madman: like ""Son of Sam,"" he is driven by a demonic voice, a voice he has come to associate with a Blake watercolor that joins sex and evil in the image of a red dragon. But Harris never lays the psychopathology on too thick; the pacing remains acutely taut as Dolarhyde (who selects his victim families from the home movies he processes) plans a third monthly killing. . . but is slowly drawn out into the open by the national publicity the murders are getting. (Graham is forced to cooperate with a National Enquirer-like reporter--who becomes a doomed decoy and dies grotesquely.) And Harris even manages to make something painfully, affectingly plausible out of the oldest horror-story cliche: the monster falls in love--with a blind colleague; and his struggle not to kill her (despite orders from his voices) culminates in a marvelous scene as Dolarhyde charms his way into the Brooklyn Museum and eats that Blake watercolor. Only the novel's final twist (after Graham has tracked Dolarhyde down and witnessed his demise) is too slickly predictable; only the portrayal of Graham's worries over his own capacity for evil seems strained (with some corny lapses into Bogart-ish dialogue). Everywhere else, this is a canny yet uncontrived mixture of deduction, suspense, action, and horror--far better written than most thrillers (Harris is sometimes a fine, lean, ironic stylist), with spine-chills all the way. . . and a fundamental decency and intelligence you won't often find in this usually exploitational genre.
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