Halloween season may be over, but if you want to be scared all year round, author Jason Cavallaro’s new book has a few recommendations.
Horror superfan, drummer for the New Orleans Saints and now-author Jason Cavallaro is the writer of “Cracking Spines: Three Decades of Horror.” He most recently was promoting this book at the Louisiana Book Festival, where he took some time out of long conversations with other horror readers for an interview.
Cavallaro said his book is a love letter to the potentially obscure and forgotten horror books over the years. He lamented that he wished that this book had been around his entire life as someone who grew up reading pre-social media.
“You read terrible books, and then you read good books, and you read good books that frankly no one ever talks about and no one else has read,” said Cavallaro, “And, you know, I’ve just always been sad to the notion of arts being lost through time.”
Recognizing these arts was his mission in crafting this work. But what does it actually look like?
“Cracking Spines: Three Decades of Horror” is a little over 230 pages of lists, sectioned off into 37 subcategories of horror that rank the top 13 best books of each subcategory (with a few exceptions). Surrounding these are blurbs introducing the lists, as well as personal anecdotes from Cavallaro and his friends.
There is no shortage of recommendations included inside of this book. Cavallaro claims over 600 books are mentioned inside, so there is something for everybody. The author said he has read over 3,000 horror books, graphic novels, short stories and the like in the last thirty years, so it is safe to say he knows what he is talking about.
People are often shocked to hear the sheer amount of books that Cavallaro has read. While he understands the commitment a novel takes versus a movie, he believes everyone has the ability to read like he does (or at least get close).
“I have so many hobbies and so many passions, but something as simple as, you know, when you’re eating lunch at work, that’s an hour that you can read. Before you go to bed, you know, that’s 20 minutes you can read,” said Cavallaro. “If you just read in those two times, while you eat and before you go to sleep, you will 100% chance read a book per month, at the least. You will.”
While Cavallaro truly wants more people to read anything and everything, he says he is aware that there are a lot of bad books out there.
Another reason Cavallaro wrote this book was to sift through the mud to find out what is worth your time, rather than wasting your time on said bad stories. There is nothing sadder to him than a reader giving up on art after one bad experience.
“What if someone reads, let’s say, I don’t know, like Stephen King’s worst book, and they think, ‘oh, that’s what Stephen King is,’” proposed Cavallaro, “like, that’s such a tragedy, because now they will never read ‘The Green Mile,’ they will never read ‘Pet Sematary.’”
This is what made the writing process worth it in the end for him. Cavallaro was honest about how little fun he had writing the book, despite it being something he is proud of now. He hopes to influence people to check out at least one of these books, and is happy to get a chance to talk about his passions while marketing at the Book Festival.
“You don’t get to go out and talk about ‘When Evil Lurks’ to, you know, one of your neighbors in your neighborhood. And here I get to,” said Cavallaro.
If you would like to support Cavallaro, you can purchase his book on Amazon and follow him on Instagram to see what he does next.
