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I can't remember the website, it may have been BoingBoing, where I found a link to a recommended Best 50 Horror Novels list.

I downloaded several books to my Kindle, and have been working through them as a change of pace from my usual reading diet of SF. These are the ones I chose, in order of reading. (To be clear, I've already read a number of the other books on the list, such as Salem's Lot, so I didn't buy them again.)

The Elementals (Michael McDowell)
American Psycho (Bret Easton Ellis)
The Exorcist (William Peter Blatty)
American Psycho (Bret Easton Ellis)
The Terror (Dan Simmons)
Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier)

The Elementals
An Southern Gothic tale set in the 1980s. Very authentic tone of voice gives a real feeling of the period and geography (AFAIK, being a middle-class Brit born and bred...) It gave me some skin-scrawling moments and that's the key point.

American Psycho
I kind of speed-read this thinking what a complete load of gak it was. But I came back to it later...

The Exorcist
Written by a screen writer it reads much like a screen play, especially the first couple of chapters. However I perservered and was rewarded with the literary version of the filmic experience most people have had. Funnily enough, I've never watched The Exorcist except for brief excerpts, and this must affect my appreciation of the novel.

American Psycho (2nd reading)
Taken at a proper pace, this actually is a very funny book in a lot of the chapters.
The protagonist is a rich yuppie in the New York financial business of the 1980s. Practically every scene involves minute descriptions of the designer clothes the characters are wearing. Another aspect is the detailed analyses of various 1980s music albums, including the complete oeuvre of Hughie Lewis and The News.
Psychopathic scenes of torture and murder increase in frequency as the book progresses, lurid and disgusting in detail.
The ultimate payoff is that it's never clear that these episode exist outside the protagonist's fethed up mind.

The Terror
I'm 2/3rds of the way through this ATM. The Terror is a fictionalised history of the Franklin Expedition of 1845 sent by the Royal Navy to discover the North-west Passage around Canada to the Pacific.
Of course it fails, and the two ships -- HMS Erebus and HMS Terror -- spend two years practically entombed in pack ice, before the crews are forced to abandon them and make a dash by sled for northern Canada.
Simmons has added a supernatural element to the story -- an ice creature of some kind, like a giant bear, which preys on the crews. To some extent I don't know if this was even necessary. The genuine privations of frostbite, scurvy, starvation, and slow descent into madness, make for a completely horrific tale in themselves.
(For contrast, read the historical account of the Donner Party in western USA.)

Rebecca
I've actually had this on my Kindle for several years, as it's my brother's favourite book, but for some reason I've never read it.
I believe it's essentially a story about a young woman being "gaslighted" in her new husband's estate in Cornwall in the south-west of England. I was motivated to buy it partly because my daughter matriculated into University of Exeter this year, which establishes a personal link with that part of the world.
Perhaps part of the power of horror is to challenge our sense of what is right and proper about a familiar setting. Is Cornwall a familiar setting? As a Londoner, I've visited Cornwall a number of times, but it still is a long way away, and takes me somewhere where everyone speaks English and uses £ in the shops, but it's completely removed from the urban/urbane environment I'm familiar with in London and Oxford.
It's a similar feeling I get from The Elementals.

If you got this far, thanks for reading, and I would be grateful to hear your ideas about the books I've mentioned, and other Horror stories you've enjoyed.

I would recommend the John Dies At The End series by David Wong.

They're a little silly in a Douglas Adams-esque way, but they're good.

The Keep. By F. Paul Wilson.

From the back of the book.

The Keep is the first book in the Adversary Cycle from bestselling author F. Paul Wilson

"Something is murdering my men."

Thus reads the message received from a Nazi commander stationed in a small castle high in the remote Transylvanian Alps. Invisible and silent, the enemy selects one victim per night, leaving the bloodless and mutilated corpses behind to terrify its future victims.

When an elite SS extermination squad is dispatched to solve the problem, the men find something that's both powerful and terrifying. Panicked, the Nazis bring in a local expert on folklore--who just happens to be Jewish--to shed some light on the mysterious happenings. And unbeknownst to anyone, there is another visitor on his way--a man who awoke from a nightmare and immediately set out to meet his destiny.

The battle has begun: On one side, the ultimate evil created by man, and on the other...the unthinkable, unstoppable, unknowing terror that man has inevitably awakened.

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson is supposedly the inspiration for countless horror stories (and a few movies/tv shows that have almost nothing to do with it's plot apparently). I finally bothered reading it after the Netflix series and...

It's okay. The book is from 59 and kind of shows it's age but it's sufficiently creepy and suspenseful. If nothing else the mystery of what is going on kind of kept me going.

Perhaps it’s a bit obvious, but I’d very much suggest The Turn of the Screw - especially for these dreary early winter months of chill and damp.

I tend to find horror short stories much more effective. Longer novels tend to end up either fizzling out due to the overly slow burn or becoming much more of a dark fantasy story as characters discover the 'rules' at work. Unfortunately, it's difficult to remember which stories were in which anthologies. Some authors I always looked for were Stephen King, David J Schow, Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison (although he was really hit and miss), Clive Barker and James Herbert. Fritz Lieber was famous for his horror, but the stuff of his I read felt a lot like Ray Bradbury's work in tone and execution, so if you like older horror you might like him. (And also Arthur Machen, Lovecraft, Wyndham, Poe, Robert Bloch, etc., etc..)

If you do prefer a slow burn, I recommend Peter Straub's Ghost Story.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Re: The Keep. The sequel to that is The Tomb, which is also very good. It introduces the character of Repairman Jack, the protagonist of a very long, but very entertaining, book series. Repairman Jack is sort of like a one man A-Team, except that he shoots to kill, who ends up getting drawn into supernatural horror situations. If you want to see a paranoid survivalist Jack Reacher kill the gak out of a series of crazy monsters, give the series a try.

In the vein of shorter works there's always H.P. Lovecraft. You can find anthologies of his work pretty cheap these days (or just go to Wikipedia, as many of his works are no longer copyrighted and there's a compendium of them on the site) and many of the stories are less than 10k words. A lot of them though, being from the 30s, might seem kind of tame today.

Gems would be (imo) The Dunwitch Horror, The Lurking Fear, The Call of Cthulu (duh), The Thing on the Doorstep, and The Haunter of the Dark. Even if you don't like Lovecraft I think most horror fans would enjoy those.

The Novella's At the Mountains of Madness, and The Shadow over Innsmouth are also classics and have inspired numerous works by later authors (It, The Thing from Another World, The Mouth of Madness, and even the earlier mentioned The Keep all have traits in common with Lovecrafts work).

I'm a Bradbury fan, so I'll nominate Something Wicked This Way Comes. It's mild horror, but it has a great Autumn seasonal feel.

Four Past Midnight is the only collection of King novellas worth bothering with, IMO.

The Breathing Method, in Different Seasons, is good, but it isn't really 'horror'.

I tend to think of King more as a writer of dark fantasy. The Langoliers from Four Past Midnight, for example, works on a high concept fantasy level more than horror. Don't get me wrong--I love Stephen King('s early work)--but I just don't find his stories to be very scary.

I always found Jonathan Carroll's The Land of Laughs horrific and entertaining.

https://www.amazon.com/Land-Laughs-Jonathan-Carroll/dp/0312873115

Have you ever loved a magical book above all others? Have you ever wished the magic were real? Welcome to The Land of Laughs. A novel about how terrifying that would be.

Schoolteacher Thomas Abbey, unsure son of a film star, doesn't know who he is or what he wants--in life, in love, or in his relationship with the strange and intense Saxony Gardner. What he knows is that in his whole life nothing has touched him so deeply as the novels of Marshall France, a reclusive author of fabulous children's tales who died at forty-four.

Now Thomas and Saxony have come to France's hometown, the dreamy Midwestern town of Galen, Missouri, to write France's biography. Warned in advance that France's family may oppose them, they're surprised to find France's daughter warmly welcoming instead. But slowly they begin to see that something fantastic and horrible is happening. The magic of Marshall France has extended far beyond the printed page...leaving them with a terrifying task to undertake.

If you don't mind the formatting, here's quite a few of Lovecraft's works. http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/

Well worth reading, if nothing else so you can fully appreciate this humorous short story by Neil Gaiman. http://doesstuff.com/files/a/Shoggoth.htm

I always thought Stephen King's short story 'Survivor Type' was one of his most disturbing.

For lovecraft suggestions i would add the color out of space, the other, and rats in the walls. Youll have to muscle through his racism a bit with that last one. But its pretty great if you can.

I haven't read horror in a long time, I got a bit fatigued with the way that, as has been touched on, the payoff seldom lived up to the build up.

Shorts are quite a good antidote to that, and I read a few curated collections from some of the horror literary prizes last year which were quite good.

For full length novels it's difficult not to mention James Herbert (RIP) and Clive Barker. For me, Herbert was one of the few authors who relatively consistently managed to balance the payoff, and if he didn't then his build up was generally enjoyable enough that you didn't mind. I remember The Spear being particularly evocative, Then there's classic haunted house tales like Haunted, The Ghosts Of Sleath or The Secret Of Crickley Hall, the classics like The Fog, horror/fantasy like The Magic Cottage and real departures like Fluke. He also appears to have liked calling his books "The something"!

Barker is at the top of my "don't ever want to get stuck in a lift with" list, as someone with a brain as capable of producing weird gak as his has no place being stuck with me in a confined space.

I also have fond memories of Dean Koontz, but have a sneaking suspicion they're actually crap, and I was just too young to know better when I read them.

 Azreal13 wrote:


I also have fond memories of Dean Koontz, but have a sneaking suspicion they're actually crap, and I was just too young to know better when I read them.

Once you've read one Dean Koontz novel, you've read every Dean Koontz novel.

You'll get the same satisfaction from listening to a "hellfire and brimstone" pastor rant about the collapse of Western society into heathenism, except the pastor will only take an hour of your time and won't charge you for the rant

Another HPL recommendation for pure horror is Dreams In The Witch House.

I can recommend :

http://www.blackcoatpress.com/about-us.html

who do some very cool stuff.

I especially like :

http://www.blackcoatpress.com/fiction-the-quest-of-frankenstein.html#4d74549a926996fcca295f22b7b90de6

1914. The Frankenstein Monster moves like a shadowy specter through the bloody trenches of war-torn France. Coming across Herbert West, a scientist as brilliant and insane as his creator, the infamous Victor Frankenstein, the creature secures the promise that West will create a mate for him, but only if he can gather all the bizarre ingredients necessary for the task. Thus begins the Quest of Frankenstein, during which the world's most famous monster will face vampires, werewolves, ghouls and other nightmarish creatures from Beyond.

Based on Mary Shelley's immortal creature, as reinterpreted by Academy-Award winning screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière in the 1950s, The Quest of Frankenstein features a ruthless, demoniacal monster, a cunning killer with a twisted, evil mind and terrifying plans for the world.

http://www.blackcoatpress.com/fiction-the-triumph-of-frankenstein.html#6d339694734feb032a8bc57a2d4ca7cb

1940: The Frankenstein Monster's quest for a mate takes a startling new turn. Deep in the jungles of South America, he discovers a descendent of the infamous Victor Frankenstein: Elizabeth, whose mad genius may be equal to his creator. With the Monster's evil assistance, she agrees to build him an undead mate. As this monstrous labor begins, a crazed monster hunter discovers the creature’s trail. Will he be able to stop Elizabeth's terrible plan?


Based on Mary Shelley's classic work of terror, as reinterpreted by Academy award-winning screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière in the 1950s, The Triumph of Frankenstein tells the story of an evil, violent version of the monster. The creature, known as Gouroull, roams the world, his plans both fiendish and lethal for all life on Earth.

http://www.blackcoatpress.com/fiction-napoleons-vampire-hunters.html#b1ac28419d3c97fbb44e586494f5e21a

November 1804: Napoleon Bonaparte is mere weeks away from being crowned Emperor, when a great evil from his past returns to Paris. The leader of France knows he is engaged in a race against time. To fail would cause the whole of Europe to fall into darkness. To defeat this fearsome threat, Napoleon calls upon the one man who defeated it before, his former fencing teacher, swordmaster Jean-Pierre Séverin, now director of the Paris Morgue; for only he, and a strange exorcist named Karnstein, stand a chance against an ancient fiend and his unholy beasts...

http://www.blackcoatpress.com/fiction-the-devil-plague-of-naples.html#83a685d4f85548dd25f03b0e5b6914c0

Naples, 1806. The new kingdom is under attack from forces that even Napoleon’s mighty army cannot defeat. An antediluvian evil has risen and seeks to regain her lost power. The undead are remaking the city into a land of plague and ashes.


The Emperor dispatches his vampire hunters, the dour swordmaster Jean Pierre Séverin and the Austrian exorcist Franz Karnstein. With the aid of Bartolomeo Dardi and his lovely daughter, Sylvia, they will face the dreaded Neapolitan secret police, undead creatures from the Vampire City of Selene, horrors from beyond, as well as the deadly Michele Bozzo, a.k.a. Fra Diavolo, the future leader of the Black Coats!

full of pulpy horror goodness.

soon to start on

http://www.blackcoatpress.com/fiction-the-empire-of-the-necromancers-1-the-shadow-of-frankenstein.html#1320a7a60289163c4d3088f01030dc66

if you like the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen -- not the abomination of a film -- and that sort of setting then these books might be up your alley.

I'd say Dean Koontz is incredibly similar to Michael Crichton. He talks about what was the dangers of cutting edge science, or abuse of forbidden medical procedures. So more truly speculative fiction than horror, in my mind. Unless of course, you have any kind of hospital stay coming up.

Although in fairness, he is far more grounded than Crichton.

Dean Koontz is lobotomized Stephen King.

Which is some going, since King once decided that the best way for a bunch of eleven year olds to find their way out of a sewer was for five of them to have sex with the one female member of the group.

I read a lot of Herbert when I was younger 'cause Mother Dear was a fan and I'd second the recommendations for The Fog (which is nothing at all to do with the John Carpenter film by the same name, FYI), The Rats (also The Lair), and Magic Cottage. Not so much The Ghosts of Sleath. When I read that I kept getting a mental image of Monty Python's Colonel barging in and declaring it all too silly.

Definitely Clive Barker, the books of blood, the hellbound heart, cabal and weaveworld are all phenomenal reads. A special mention to Cabal, I have never been able to forget the phrase "murder hard"...

 Azreal13 wrote:

For full length novels it's difficult not to mention James Herbert (RIP) and Clive Barker. For me, Herbert was one of the few authors who relatively consistently managed to balance the payoff, and if he didn't then his build up was generally enjoyable enough that you didn't mind. I remember The Spear being particularly evocative, Then there's classic haunted house tales like Haunted, The Ghosts Of Sleath or The Secret Of Crickley Hall, the classics like The Fog, horror/fantasy like The Magic Cottage and real departures like Fluke. He also appears to have liked calling his books "The something"!

My favourite Herbert book is Creed. It's a really good juxtaposition of horror and humour, with an enjoyably antiheroic lead, and some clever stuff in how the supernatural elements of the story work, and how they're fought.

A recent one I've read and greatly enjoyed is Thin Air by Michelle Paver, a ghost story set on an early mountaineering expedition, following in the footsteps of an earlier one where something went very wrong. Take a brutal environment that will kill you if you put a foot wrong or lose your concentration for a moment, and then add something else lurking there....highly recommended.

I tried to read The Terror a while back but ran out of steam about half way through. I enjoyed it but it was pretty slow-moving.

Like a good ghost story like Crickley Hall too, although I found that particular book a little disappointing - felt like it didn't quite go far enough for me.

I have really enjoyed a lot of Richard Laymon's books. The ones I've liked tend to just be ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances - like Island and Quake. They're probably more suspense than genuine horror though.

Stephen Laws is decent too. Chasm, The Frighteners, Somewhere South Of Midnight, Macabre - all worth a look.

Crispy78 wrote:
I tried to read The Terror a while back but ran out of steam about half way through. I enjoyed it but it was pretty slow-moving.

Yeah, thats kind of Dan Simmons thing, in my experience.

For me, his work is more tolerable as an audiobook.

Crispy78 wrote:


Like a good ghost story like Crickley Hall too, although I found that particular book a little disappointing - felt like it didn't quite go far enough for me.
.

Try Haunted if you haven't already. You can only read it once really, because the final act twist is kinda what the whole story pivots on, and it's also been adapted for TV (possibly more than once.) But it's only a couple hundred pages long so it can be dispatched in an evening or two.

Most works by Clive Barker for me, H.P lovecraft is Nice but there is notting about his works that makes me shiver in horror/terror but they are still great books to read