The Scariest Books Ever Written

Alison Littlewood:

We’ve all seen them – those supposedly haunted artifacts for sale on eBay, everything from rolling pins to china dolls. But when Joe Hill’s protagonist Judas Coyne buys a haunted suit online, its effects are so immediate and disturbing that the story is lifted to a whole other level. Judas is a retired rock star who loves to collect such oddities, but this particular ghost is so clearly malevolent and dangerous that he has little option but to flee. The ghost isn’t likely to let go so easily, however, as it seems that the purchase was not as random as it seemed…

Lamar Giles:

Labels always stump me. Is it horror? Action-fantasy? A buddy comedy? This story of a white ex-special forces officer teaming with a black computer geek to save the black man’s family sounds like the pitch for an 80’s action film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Eddie Murphy. However, there’s a reason I keep coming back to this book 20 years after my initial read: it’s excellent. And reasons–plural–why I still think about the various reveals in the middle of the night and shudder. This book about blood magic, curses, the ripple effect of American Chattel Slavery, and the thirst for eternal life is absolutely chilling. Don’t believe me? I dare you to give this horror-action-fantasy-buddy-comedy a try, then sleep with the lights off.

Kristi DeMeester:

You won’t find a more beautiful opening line in literature. What follows is a terrible, awe-inspiring spiral down into mental illness or supernatural ability that is terrifying in its longing. I’ve always felt that Eleanor’s need for belonging was the more terrifying interpretation. The scene in which Eleanor reaches for Theodora’s hand only to realize it was not Theodora’s is the exact kind of moment that sends chills over the skin. That sense of loneliness and need to belong is the kind of fear that takes deep root and cannot be easily torn out.

Jack Ketchum

“The house was vile.” Period. You got that? Vile. And so it is.

I read this one first as a teenager. Even then I could recognize that this was something special, that nobody else who wrote this stuff had the creepy mastery of pacing, style, character and language that Jackson had. Nor the seriousness of purpose. Because The Haunting of Hill House is as much about our hearts as it is about hauntings. It’s crammed with loneliness and sorrow.

I was not a happy kid back then and longed to be – much like poor Eleanor. But unlike her I had the sense to distrust that which could possibly make me happy, should it appear to come too easily. Perhaps I’d encountered one of the blessings to us readers of truly great literature – and having fallen under Shirley Jackson’s spell, was warned off once and forever.

Ramsey Campbell:

The Unnamable could be a Lovecraft title, but it’s Samuel Beckett’s title for his English version of his novel L’Innomable. Like Lovecraft, Beckett sometimes wrote in the voice of a monstrous or inhuman protagonist. The Unnamable may be narrated by a malformed entity displayed in a jar on a Parisian street, or might this be an especially disturbing vision of an afterlife? In any case, the narrator’s state immerses us in derangement and in his chronic urge to think, the opposite of peace. The novel also epitomises the writer’s compulsion to keep telling tales and maybe Beckett’s bid to deal with his mother’s imminent death, disturbingly reflected in the text. It’s as intense an experience as I know in all literature and demands to be read at a sitting.

Kristi DeMeester:

Blending starkly lovely prose with horrifying realism, this collection of stories will leave you staring into the dark and wondering what may lie beyond. Oates has a natural ability to peel back the layers of everyday fear and make them into something even more deeply unsettling. The logic and fear found in the title story is the kind that will leave your mouth dry and wondering exactly when something like this will happen to you.

Ramsey Campbell:

Pet Sematary found fame as the book Steve King didn’t want to see in print because he felt it lacked all hope. I’ve argued elsewhere that since the unnatural resurrections it depicts are the result of a magical ritual, the afterlife that it implies has been disturbed is surely less threatening. By contrast, King’s recent novel Revival leads to a worse than hellish hereafter – an apparently inescapable fate that awaits every one of us, no matter what we do. None of his tales has conveyed a greater sense of dread. While I didn’t quite have nightmares after finishing the novel, its vision was waiting for me in the dark whenever I awoke.

Lamar Giles:

This is the culmination of Wilson’s 6-part Adversary Cycle, and an apocalypse, unlike anything I’ve ever read. I’ve been told that when trying to get people on board a concept, it’s best to do a comparison. This is H.P. Lovecraft meets The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen if Lovecraft’s prose was razor sharp (“Dawn does not break at this altitude–it shatters.”) and the league consisted exclusively of Wilson’s varied/fascinating characters. Maybe. That’s the best I got. Trying to describe the terror of unexplainable bottomless pits opening all over the world, the heinous creatures that exit those pits when the sun (which is up for less and less time each day) sets, and–the most horrific thing–hopeless humans turning on one another, doesn’t do this book service. Pick up a copy, settle in, and see if you’d survive the night in this world.

Alison Littlewood:

I realise that Margaret Atwood would probably appreciate the ‘horror’ tag even less than that of ‘science fiction’, but if horror fiction is meant to scare, to disturb, to rattle the foundations of our being, this is the closest thing to a horror novel there is. The USA has become Gilead, a fundamentalist regime which takes aspects from its puritan beginnings and pushes them to terrifying extremes. Women are born to serve – either their husbands or the needs of the state – and the few who remain fertile are enslaved to lend their wombs to the authorities, to bear children on their behalf. With issues around plummeting fertility, refugees and migration, environmental ruin and totalitarian regimes, it’s the feeling that the book is becoming more rather than less plausible that makes The Handmaid’s Tale one of the scariest books to read.

Jack Ketchum:

When I was about ten or eleven my dad and I stepped onto a Turbo Jetliner at Newark Airport headed for Los Angeles. My dad had flown before but this was a first for me. He’d booked me a window seat, figuring I’d be as thrilled as he’d been to stare down through the clouds below. But I had something else in mind. Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I remember him leaning across my seat pointing down saying look at that! and me saying quiet, please.

I’d read my share of horror. Pulp stuff by Bloch, Bradbury, Beaumont, Sturgeon, Blackwood, Asimov. And they were great! But they were stories. And here was a full novel. In an epistolary format, I’d never seen before. Trying to scare the shit out of me. And succeeding.

I was right to skip over all those cloud formations. Dracula is as eerie, as creepy, as any book ever written.

Ramsey Campbell:

The Deadly Percheron reads like a paranoid fantasy based on the private-eye genre. George Matthews, the narrator, is a psychiatrist forced to play detective and a narrator who comes to seem as unreliable as any of Poe’s. Hardly has he become embroiled in a plot involving murder and impersonation than he ends up in a mental ward, his identity denied by everyone he knew. A private eye would have talked his way out, but Matthews’ knowledge of schizophrenia only makes him aware of how delusory his claims sound. Even his own reflection is unrecognisably monstrous, and in a scene that (for me at any rate) finally tips the book into sheer horror, his photograph turns into his new monstrous face. He escapes by inventing an identity the doctors will believe in, an identity that then begins to take him over. Eventually, he sets about regaining his old self by sorting out the plot and tracking down the culprit, and it looks as if the conventions of the private-eye genre may finally come to the rescue – but the plot he pieces together is indistinguishable from a schizophrenic fantasy. The whole novel reads as if a noir tale has been overwhelmed by madness.

Lamar Giles:

It’s no surprise that a Stephen King novel would make my list. Though, for those who know me, it’s probably a shock that it’s this King novel, as opposed to IT. These days Pennywise doesn’t need a boost from me, and the truth is the clown scared me when I was a kid, this story of lost faith and mad science scares me even as I type this. A deceptive, slow-burn novel, its depiction of a boy and his preacher through the decades seems more of a tonal sibling to the nostalgic 11/22/63 than, say, Pet Sematary. But my do things change when the quest for forbidden knowledge gets underway. No spoilers here, just know that, sometimes, ignorance really is bliss.

Kristi DeMeester:

This book is the definition of haunted. Haunted by the past. By the things we had to do. By the things that were forced upon us. By sacrifice in the name of love, and how that can grow and grow and grow and become something monstrous. How terrible the forces outside of ourselves can be and how they can birth something that plays again and again in our minds. This is a book that you’ll never be able to shake. Ever.

Jack Ketchum:

What was the worst thing you’ve ever done? I won’t tell you that, but I’ll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me…the most dreadful thing…

So begins Peter Straub’s Ghost Story. If that doesn’t hook you, you’re probably not hookable. But Straub pays off in spades. Elucidating in exquisite prose, and with not a wasted word, what the most dreadful thing is for each fated member of The Chowder Society. And Alma Mobley – read shifting soul – is one of the most seductive, heartbreaking, terrifying creatures ever to appear in the pages of a novel.

Straub broke into the big league with this book and with good reason. Ghost Story is haunting as no other.

Alison Littlewood:

This new novel from Lotz delivers a great sense of place and plenty of atmosphere. The protagonist, Simon, is producing content for a travel website with a difference, filming spooky places – and dead bodies – for its users’ voyeuristic viewing pleasure. He lies about his climbing experience in order to join an expedition to Everest, where the bodies of failed climbers remain frozen in the snow. Stranger things also await him there, but are the visions real, or the result of altitude sickness and exhaustion? It is the opening of the book that I found the most terrifying, however, as Simon attempts to plumb the depths of Cwm Pot caverns in Wales, to discover the remains of those who perished in the attempt. The relentless claustrophobia and tension of this section rivals the atmosphere of Everest itself.