Horror Stories

For Halloween weekend, match the horror-fiction author with his or her work. Answers: Below. 1. L.A. Banks. 2. Stephen King. 3. Ira Levin. 4. Susie Moloney. 5. Edgar Allan Poe. 6. Horacio Quiroga. 7. Anne Rice. 8. Mary Shelley. 9. Bram Stoker. 10. Koji Suzuki a. The Dark Tower, The Gunslinger . b. Dracula . c. A Dry Spell . d. Frankenstein . e. Interview With the Vampire . f. Ring . g. Rosemary's Baby . h. Stories of Love, Madness, and Death . i. Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque . j. The Vampire Huntress Legend series.

IN RESPONSE to Fatima Lewis' letter on Section 8 housing (Sept. 5): My parents own three rental properties, one of which is approved for Section 8. There are certain specifications for Section 8 approval and in order to get that, money has to be invested - my father's money. Then the Section 8'ers move in. My father has always been good to his tenants, who in turn have ripped doors and hinges out of the walls, removed every doorknob (who needs a doorknob when you don't see the need to have doors)

RE JENICE Armstrong's column on "The Help": Yes, many of our mothers, aunts, grandmothers and their friends were domestics and many of their experiences were indeed horror stories. Those fortunate to still be among us declined to see the movie for the same reason your mother did - "Why would I want to relive that?" Was this movie really necessary? Is there some untold story that we haven't already heard? If there's a moral to be depicted, I certainly missed it. I saw the movie with five sister friends, and none of us were impressed.

TWO WEEKS before Halloween, the People's Choice Movement Coalition went trick-or-treating at the Berean Institute, 19th and Girard. It was Saturday, it was a town meeting, and the Grand Goblin was the Philadelphia Parking Authority, the most ruthlessly efficient (albeit sometimes errant) arm of government. Organized by People's Choice - a grass-roots community-organizing group - the town meeting was a Gripe-O-Rama for anyone feeling abused by the PPA, which was described by WURD (900-AM)

I read the recent news on the destruction of human embryos for embryonic stem cell research, harvesting of fetuses, and cloning of human beings with a great sense of alarm. That these issues are now being debated by our state and federal lawmakers - when before they were the subject of only horror movies - is even more shocking. I am not strong enough to enter this brave new world of cannibalized human embryos, harvested body parts, and eugenically engineered human beings that is being forced on me. And I don't believe that we, as a moral people and a civilized society, are brave enough to go where no man has gone before, except in the other worlds of science fiction.

Journalists always remark with surprise at how normal writers of horror fiction seem to them. Just as Stephen King catches them off guard with his boyish, guileless enthusiasm, Peter Straub impresses with his intellectual self-possession. What this usually means is that they're not wild-eyed and don't gibber, as their interviewers seem to expect. So let's get that out of the way right now: Clive Barker seems normal - is about as normal as any writer can claim to be. A youngish 34, smiling and happy, he has a quality of diffident eagerness that so many of the nicer English seem to display.

Recently I've been reading horror novels at bedtime. I'm talking about those paperbacks with names like "The Brainsucker," full of scenes like this: "As Marge stepped through the doorway into the darkening mansion, she felt a sense of foreboding, caused, perhaps, by the moaning of the wind, or the creaking of the door, or possibly the Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket full of eyeballs. " Of course if Marge had the intelligence of paint, she'd stop right there. "Wait a minute," she'd say. "I'm getting the hell out of this novel.

When Kurt Magda realized he had found the house of his dreams, he started to worry. He had heard horror stories from friends and relatives about the unseen problems a house could hold, as though the walls and beams, the roof and ceilings would somehow conspire to conceal any number of costly sins. "It's pretty unnerving," said Magda, 28, who is spending more than $130,000 on a 75-year-old, seven-room, brick house with aluminum siding in Conshohocken. "I'm worried about structural soundness, the flooring, termites.

DEAR GOV. CORBETT: You'll be hearing from a lot of frightened social-service advocates in the coming months about your draconian budget, which proposes $41 million in cuts to the worst-off Philadelphians - among them the homeless, the mentally ill and the intellectually disabled. By the time the budget gets voted upon this summer, everyone's stories will have blurred into one anguished, tear-stained cry for help, and you won't recall the details of why everyone was so desperate in the first place.

ASENIOR-CITIZEN friend asked my help. Urban Cableworks had suspended her service, and she'd been trying to get through to them from 8:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. for a day and a half for some explanation. Her $43 check was a day late, she conceded, but it had been mailed. It took me more than three hours to get a warm body on the phone. I was astounded to learn that her service had been suspended for nonpayment of a $13.30 late charge. I took the $13.30 over to Urban Cableworks, at 49th and Parkside, to save her an unnecessary trip on the overpriced SEPTA system.

DEAR GOV. CORBETT: You'll be hearing from a lot of frightened social-service advocates in the coming months about your draconian budget, which proposes $41 million in cuts to the worst-off Philadelphians - among them the homeless, the mentally ill and the intellectually disabled. By the time the budget gets voted upon this summer, everyone's stories will have blurred into one anguished, tear-stained cry for help, and you won't recall the details of why everyone was so desperate in the first place.

Believe it or not, the title of FX's new series, American Horror Story , is actually an understatement. Grotesque, terrifying, brutal, and kinky, American Horror Story makes The Shining look like The Waltons . "It's really amazing to me that this is on television and not on film," says horror expert Marina Levina, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Memphis. "I've been really surprised at how far they've been able to take things.

For Halloween weekend, match the horror-fiction author with his or her work. Answers: Below. 1. L.A. Banks. 2. Stephen King. 3. Ira Levin. 4. Susie Moloney. 5. Edgar Allan Poe. 6. Horacio Quiroga. 7. Anne Rice. 8. Mary Shelley. 9. Bram Stoker. 10. Koji Suzuki a. The Dark Tower, The Gunslinger . b. Dracula . c. A Dry Spell . d. Frankenstein . e. Interview With the Vampire . f. Ring . g. Rosemary's Baby . h. Stories of Love, Madness, and Death . i. Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque . j. The Vampire Huntress Legend series.

You've never seen anything like American Horror Story on TV before. And you may not want to see it now. But fans of the horror genre - not the splatter trash of the Saw or Chainsaw Massacre series, but the creepy, psychological, and, yes, sexy, gory stuff of classics like Rosemary's Baby or The Shining - won't be disappointed. FX, still No. 1 on basic cable for challenging, edgy material, has teamed up again with Nip/Tuck's Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuck on Horror Story, which premieres Wednesday at 10 p.m. The pair, also responsible for Fox's Glee, have a tendency to start strongly and then get a little lost, but that needn't concern us here, since we're at the beginning, and Horror Story is as gripping as anything on TV. You may find yourself looking for something to grip when the doll (or are they real?

RE JENICE Armstrong's column on "The Help": Yes, many of our mothers, aunts, grandmothers and their friends were domestics and many of their experiences were indeed horror stories. Those fortunate to still be among us declined to see the movie for the same reason your mother did - "Why would I want to relive that?" Was this movie really necessary? Is there some untold story that we haven't already heard? If there's a moral to be depicted, I certainly missed it. I saw the movie with five sister friends, and none of us were impressed.

Q: I've heard horror stories about how sex in marriage dies. I've been married for four years and we both work full time and have a 2-year-old son. I am lucky to have intercourse once a month. How are we going to have another child? Is this common in a marriage or is there something wrong with us? Steve: Getting on the same page as your spouse when it comes to sex is probably the No. 1 challenge in marriage after children enter the picture. You have to talk about it, share ideas on how to find time - and set the mood - more frequently.

If the nonna as master cook has become something of a stereotype (after all, excellent, thrifty, and industrious grandmas can be found in kitchens around the world), American chef Jessica Theroux at least approaches the topic with nuance and plenty of solid evidence. In Cooking with Italian Grandmothers: Recipes and Stories From Tuscany to Sicily (Welcome Books, $40), Theroux documents a year spent traveling the country, gleaning the foodways of 12 accomplished cooks who shared their secrets, some of which were not confined to the cooking.

If you're planning to pull the lever Tuesday for a candidate who promises to fix the economy by easing the burden of regulation on business, you might want to first consider the recent education of Haddonfield lawyer Michael Gaier. Gaier has spent the last nine months digging into more than 140 foreclosures in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Many could be Exhibit No. 1 in a case titled Lax Oversight v. the American People . Take the case of Mark Jones, a construction worker, who paid $130,000 a decade ago for a home in Levittown for himself, his wife, and their three children.

TWO WEEKS before Halloween, the People's Choice Movement Coalition went trick-or-treating at the Berean Institute, 19th and Girard. It was Saturday, it was a town meeting, and the Grand Goblin was the Philadelphia Parking Authority, the most ruthlessly efficient (albeit sometimes errant) arm of government. Organized by People's Choice - a grass-roots community-organizing group - the town meeting was a Gripe-O-Rama for anyone feeling abused by the PPA, which was described by WURD (900-AM)

Johnny Crump has played golf with friends on military bases in England, Germany and Spain. But nothing could prepare him for the experience he had Wednesday when Justin Leonard asked him to putt a 20-footer. "Those girls on The Big Break ," Crump said of the Golf Channel's reality show, "they say their legs are wobbling. I'm like, 'What are your legs wobbling for?' Now I found out. "When the cameras are on you and you're up there with a pro and he's telling you to putt it, it's a whole different story.