The skeleton crew

Some of the scariest people on the planet live in L.A.

And no, I don’t mean the trophy wife at the next table with lips the size of futons, or the kid you passed on Melrose covered with more tattoos than Dennis Rodman

I mean the people who write the books and stories that send chills down your spine or persuade you to sleep with the lights on. The men and women who labor in relative obscurity (compared with their local TV and movie counterparts), crafting the tales of terror and supernatural suspense that keep the nightmare industry thriving. Believe it or not, more of these spooky storytellers live and work right here in L.A. -- perhaps behind those unclipped hedges across the street, in that curious little house just up the canyon or even, God forbid, in that gloomy, shuttered apartment right next-door to yours -- than anywhere else on Earth.

Who are they? To name just a few: There’s Clive Barker, who reigns over the dark side from his perch in Beverly Hills. There’s Richard Matheson, the man who gave us the incredible shrinking man and the walking dead, still spinning his web from out Calabasas way. There’s Ray Bradbury, churning out fresh tales of the fantastic at a rate that would make a man half his age (84) darn proud. There’s Karen E. Taylor, chronicling the vampire legacies, from Mar Vista, and Andy Neiderman, in the heart of Brentwood, offering such chilling fare as “The Devil’s Advocate.” Dan Vining in Studio City following up his eerie “The Quick” with another supernatural noir tale of L.A. called “The Next” (Hint: If the driver beside you at the stoplight gives off a blue aura, run the light).

Just about anywhere in town you go, under any palm tree or in any cloistered courtyard, there’s somebody making L.A. out to be even scarier than it is.

But why? And why, of all places, have they gravitated here? How has Los Angeles -- the sun and fun capital of the world, lampooned for its superficiality -- become the locus of horror and the ghouls’ favorite hideaway? How has a city renowned not for its dark, rainy nights but for its bright, balmy days become the veritable epicenter of scary?

“I think we have to own up,” English expat Clive Barker confesses, with a laugh, “and say that Hollywood does exercise an unnatural pull on our souls.” In Barker’s case, that pull has compelled him to buy three houses high above Beverly Hills and create a private compound for himself, his partner, his daughter and five dogs -- a setting he used, to horrific effect, for his recent bestseller, “Coldheart Canyon.”

“It was a test for me, really, to write something based on this kind of life, lived behind secure gates in the lap of luxury. What comes to visit,” he asks portentously, “the person who has everything?”

Inspiration, apparently. Barker believes that writing about L.A. is both hard and easy. “Easy because people already have a received image of the city from movies and TV,” he says. “And hard because you don’t want that imagery to be at the center of your narrative. I find it’s both a test, and a goad, to my imagination. The cliches beloved of most horror writers -- dark and stormy nights, cold and snow -- they’re simply not to be seen here.”

Which suits some writers just fine. Bradbury, a grand master of the spooky, the surreal and the fantastic, was born here and grew up riding the “big red streetcars that sailed across the Venice flats. They were like giant monsters, running on their tracks late at night, the sparks flying like lightning from the wires overhead.” Bradbury, whose monumental oeuvre includes such harrowing fare as “Something Wicked This Way Comes” and “The Illustrated Man,” remembers the glistening black oil wells, looking “like pterodactyls,” pumping in the backyards of Venice, and the rolling fog that engulfed the city every night: “Some days it went on so long I’d take the streetcar to Culver City just to sit on a bench in the sun.”

But it was more than the ocean fog that helped to raise a bumper crop of imaginative writers here. It was something in the air (and we don’t mean smog).

“I’m a free spirit, and L.A. is a country of free spirits,” he declares from the same Cheviot Hills house he has lived in for the last 45 years. “There are no intellectuals here looking down their noses at you, snobs who want you to write their way, to please the New Yorker. To hell with them.”

Sun, sun, sun -- eee!

This freedom -- coupled with the fine weather and the proximity of the movie studios -- has proven to be a potent lure for more than 50 years now.

Del Howison, co-owner with his wife of the horror bookshop Dark Delicacies in Burbank, observes that “in L.A., you can see darn near anything just by walking along the beachfront from Venice to Malibu. All kinds of people have moved here, from all over the country, for the sun -- but then, once they get here, they find out that nothing drives you nuttier than sun all the time.”

Howison, 51, notable for his mane of long white hair parted in the middle and matching mustache, set about creating the perfect refuge. His store is easy enough to find at 4213 W. Burbank Blvd. (the life-size Frankenstein statue outside should help). But it’s once you’re inside, past the walls covered with murals of teetering tombstones and haunted houses, surrounded by the posters and book covers of classic horror titles, that you realize you have entered the inner sanctum.

Dark Del, as it has been known to its aficionados for the last 10 years, is perhaps the only “All Horror Book and Gift Store” in the United States. And it is, indisputably, the unofficial clubhouse for L.A. horror writers, the place where they can meet fans, sign books and bump into their ink-stained compatriots whenever they too happen to stumble, blinking, into the light of day.

I have met many of the most successful practitioners of terror there, including Tamara Thorne, an amateur investigator of the paranormal with an unquenchable taste for the macabre, whose many novels often twist the local landscape into strange and forbidding forms. Thorne, who lives in the shadow of Mt. Baldy, just over the San Bernardino County line, grew up well aware of the dark side of the California dream. “When I was a kid, we’d frequently drive to Griffith Park, and at the time there was a ‘trash can serial killer’ on the loose, who was leaving body parts neatly wrapped up in black plastic in garbage cans throughout the park. That made such an impact -- looking out the car window, experiencing a thrill of horror as we passed each can. To this day, I have a sort of Pavlovian response to trash receptacles in Griffith Park.”

When she wasn’t touring the park, she and her dad were visiting gloomy old hotels, like the Ambassador, or the Bradbury Building downtown, with its endless shadowy staircases, the Inglewood Mausoleum or the famed La Brea Tar Pits. “I continually wondered what got buried in those pits besides the dinosaurs,” she says. “It was absolute heaven to me, spooky and titillating.”

Her books tend to take place in made-up burgs on the edge of L.A. proper. The town of Santa Verde, in “Bad Things,” bears a suspicious resemblance to Redlands, which too was once the weekend home of many Hollywood stars. The eponymous village of “Moonfall” is an awful lot like Oak Glen, where many Angelenos go to pick apples at this time of year. “Thunder Road” takes us to a scary high desert retreat that calls to mind the Calico Ghost Town, halfway between L.A. and Las Vegas on Interstate 15, which was restored by Walter Knott -- the man whose amusement park is turned into Knott’s Scary Farm every Halloween.

“My natural mind-set is bound to Los Angeles and the Inland Empire,” Thorne admits, “and in my books I like to use history and folklore from the real places.”

The haunted streets

Richard Matheson, the man who terrorized us with everything from “Hell House” to “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” has generally made a point of using his actual home for the setting of his stories. In the case of the vampire tale “I Am Legend” (which became the movie “The Omega Man”) or “A Stir of Echoes” (which wed a murder mystery to a ghost story), that meant using Gardena.

“I even gave the right street names,” Matheson says. “When I write, I have to use the actual physical environment I’m living in, or I can’t keep everything straight.”

Today Matheson lives in Calabasas -- in the same house, as it turns out, also inhabited by the protagonist of his suspenseful novel “What Dreams May Come.”

“I describe the house as it is in this life,” he says, “and as it might be in a hellish afterlife.” For “Hell House,” which was meant to take place in a veritable palace, a hulking monstrosity of unimaginable size and scope, he traveled to San Simeon and used Hearst Castle as his model.

But if you know what’s good for you, don’t ever use the word “horror” around him: “Even when I’m writing scary material,” Matheson huffs, “it’s not horror. Horror is blood and guts and people rotting in front of you: It’s the creature exploding out of John Hurt’s stomach in ‘Alien.’ A better word for what I do is ‘terror.’ Horror is visceral; terror is cerebral.”

For Pete Atkins, a Los Feliz resident by way of Liverpool, England, the decision to move here was largely pragmatic. “I make most of my living from my screenplays, not my books,” he confesses in a lilting accent that makes you feel you’ve got a Beatle on the line. “Despite all the smog and traffic, you can still catch ghostly glimpses of the paradise this place must have been a century ago.”

In addition to writing three of the “Hellraiser” screenplays for the film series created by his fellow expat, Barker, Atkins has written a novel, “Big Thunder,” featuring a pulp fiction writer who’s concocted a story Hollywood is about to make into a movie -- with apocalyptic results. “The conceit of the novel is that ideas have power, that the imagined is just as real as the actual,” he says. “It seemed perfectly appropriate that the story take place in the city where dreams, and nightmares, are made real on a daily basis.”

Atkins, a devoted student of the genre, believes that “L.A. has had a tradition now, for several generations, of being a center for writers of the fantastic.” Besides such big names as Bradbury and Matheson and Robert Heinlein, he cites such sci-fi and fantasy pioneers as Leigh Brackett (“The Ginger Star”), William Nolan and George Clayton Johnson (who co-wrote “Logan’s Run”), Fritz Leiber (“Conjure Wife”) -- all of whom were based here since the ‘50s. “Once you widen the net to include mystery and suspense, you get Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Ross McDonald,” he says. “That in itself, leaving Hollywood out of it completely, becomes a kind of draw for succeeding generations of writers.”

All this month, Atkins has been touring West Coast bookstores with two other local writers in what they’ve dubbed the Rolling Darkness Revue.

One of the writers is Dennis Etchison, whom Atkins describes as the “master of L.A. gothic, whose stories catch the haunted and haunting aspects of this city better than anyone else.” After reading his famous, and famously anthologized short story “The Late Shift,” you’ll never look at the clerk at the all-night mart the same way again.

Driven by mystery

The third member of the Rolling Darkness triumvirate is often spoken of as the next big thing in supernatural fiction, a mild-mannered, boyish 38-year-old named Glen Hirshberg, whose collection of novellas, “The Two Sams,” won the International Horror Guild Award for 2003-04, and a nomination for the World Fantasy Award too (the winner hasn’t been announced yet).

By day, Hirshberg teaches at the prestigious private school Campbell Hall in Studio City, but by night he is the author of stories that are as unsettling as they are scary, as disturbing as they are profound. Stillborn children come to claim the one about to be born. A lonely professor of American folk tales makes the discovery of his lifetime on Halloween night. A Holocaust survivor imposes a grim and unforgettable rite of passage on his descendants.

“L.A. has inspired several pieces of my work directly,” Hirshberg observes. “When I think of the city, I think of relentless sun, desert, Santa Anas, ocean, the shuddering ground, the air and the particles floating loose in it. For me, at least, landscape is critical to the creation of an effective supernatural story.”

But stories aren’t anything without characters, and in Hirshberg’s view, that’s just one more area where L.A. excels. “There are so many people’s ghosts and legends and superstitions and memories drifting past each other here, so many people of all kinds checking each other out from passing cars or eyeing one another uneasily on street corners and in the neighborhood markets.”

Things are beginning to sound scary indeed. Hirshberg nods, and smiles. “There’s that hunger in the air -- for fame, money, love, maybe just a permanent place in an impermanent landscape, a landscape that rejects you -- that has to inform any story at all that’s written about Southern California.”

*

Clive Barker, ‘Coldheart Canyon’

“There are even a few trespassers over the years who have found their way here intentionally, guided to this place by hints dropped in obscure accounts of Old Hollywood. They venture curiously, these few. Indeed, there is often something close to reverence in the way they enter Coldheart Canyon. But however these visitors arrive, they always leave the same way: hurriedly, with many a nervous backward glance .... Only when they have outrun the all-too-eager shadows of the Canyon and they are back in the glare of the billboards on Sunset Boulevard, do they wipe their clammy palms, and wonder to themselves how it was that in such a harmless spot they could have been so very afraid.”

--

Glen Hirshberg, ‘Flowers on Their Bridles, Hooves in the Air’

“Not until I was off the freeways again, just pulling into our little driveway, did it occur to me to wonder where, exactly, Rooff’s last merry-go-round had stopped. At the edge of the white curtain? At the end of the pier?

... I stepped out of the car, and felt the stagnant L.A. air settle around me. The rising sun caught in my neighbor’s windows, releasing tiny prisms of colored light, and somewhere down the street, wind chimes clinked, though there was little wind. And the feeling that whispered through me then was indeed magical, terrible, and almost sweet. Because I realized I might be understanding the power of Rooff’s last carousel, even now. We could be on it, still -- Rebecca, me, the whole crazy homogenizing coast -- bobbing up and down in our prescribed places as our parents die and our friends whirl past and away again and the places we love evaporate out of the world, the way everyone’s favorite people and place inevitably do.”

--

Richard Matheson, ‘What Dreams May Come’

“I watched until he’d disappeared from sight, then turned and started up the driveway toward the house. A sudden thought occurred. Driveway? Did she have a car? And if she did, where could she drive it?

I stopped and looked around, the answer readily apparent. There was no neighborhood, no houses in the distance, no Hidden Hills, no nothing. The house was isolated.

I listened to my footsteps on the driveway as I started up again. The paving was cracked and grimy, I noticed, with tufts of yellow weeds growing through.

I thought, again, of what Albert had said before he’d left me.

‘She won’t believe a word you say; remember that at all times. There is no point in your trying to convince her that she’s not alive. She thinks she is. She thinks that only you are dead.’ ”

--

Tamara Thorne, ‘Eternity’

“ ‘TELL me about the murder,’ Tully said bluntly.

‘Not much to tell. The victim was a former Shady Pines resident. Family died off, so they turned him loose in town. That happens a lot. [The town of] Eternity’s pretty freethinking about indigents and lunatics. They put them up, put them to work, if they’re able. Guess they don’t mind the loonies since most of the working population are half crazy anyway -- “

‘The murder?’ Tully prompted.

‘They found him in the picnic area near the trailhead at the top of Icehouse Road, up on the mountain. He was in the men’s room. And the ladies’ room.

‘And a couple of trash cans.’ ”

--

Dan Vining, ‘The Quick’

“LOS ANGELES still existed, the regular world, wrapped in its regularity and regulations, laws and principalities. It was just outside, down at street level. A cab on Alameda, street people in doorways, Salvadorans a block over getting off a Greyhound, Japanese tourists lifting food to their mouths in the glass restaurant atop the Otani five blocks away, laughter in the Jonathan Club, Dodger Stadium a half mile away.

The regular world was still out there, alive.

But this, starting now, starting here, was something else.”

*

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A night gallery

Here is a guide to the local talent, and some of their more hair-raising works.

Pete Atkins, expat purveyor of high concept horror: “Morningstar,” “Big Thunder.”

Clive Barker, reigning prince of dark fantasy: “Coldheart Canyon,” “The Books of Blood,” “The Damnation Game.”

Ray Bradbury, eminence grise: “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” “The October Country,” “The Halloween Tree.”

Harlan Ellison, eminence only slightly less grise: “Angry Candy,” “Slippage,” “Strange Wine.”

Dennis Etchison, master of L.A. gothic: “California Gothic,” “The Dark Country,” “The Death Artist.”

Glen Hirshberg, literary, chilling, the next big thing: “The Two Sams,” “The Snowman’s Children.”

Dean Koontz, bestselling titan of industry and imagination: “Odd Thomas,” “The Servants of Twilight,” “The Demon Seed.”

Richard Matheson, revered don of terror: “Hell House,” “I Am Legend,” “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.”

Richard Christian Matheson, son of the don: “Created By,” “Dystopia.”

Andy Neiderman, a versatile man for all fears: “The Devil’s Advocate,” “Curse,” “Pin.”

John Skipp, splatterpunk pioneer: “Conscience,” “The Scream” and “Animals” (with Craig Spector).

Craig Spector, fellow splatterpunk pioneer: “To Bury the Dead,” “The Light at the End” and “Dead Lines” (with John Skipp).

Karen E. Taylor, our own Anne Rice: “Blood Red Dawn,” “Blood of My Blood,” “Fangs” and “Angel Wings.”

Tamara Thorne, creepy chronicler of the Inland Empire: “Haunted,” “Thunder Road,” “Eternity.”

Dan Vining, Raymond Chandler meets Stephen King: “The Quick.”

Robert Masello is the author of two nonfiction studies of the occult and several novels of supernatural suspense. His novel “Vigil” will be released in June by Berkley/Jove.