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The horror genre of writing is viewed by most "serious" critics as pulp or trash. This is bullshit. Serious critics are the worst, and they ruin everything that's fun -- horror is an awesome genre, and "pulp" is not an insult. If you're totally new to the genre, here are the basics -- how to understand it, and some suggestions for what to read.
Why read horror?
I have an ongoing argument with my wife, who adores the crime genre. She could fall asleep watching Law & Order: SVU, whereas I do not particularly find stories of sexual assault conducive to sleep. It gives me nightmares.
For my wife, the nightmares come with horror -- I convinced her to watch Stranger Things and the first It movie with me, and while she enjoyed both, she didn't sleep for a week. For me, the fact that demagorgons and eldritch murderclowns aren't real makes horror easier to watch than, say, Zodiac, a movie about a real-life serial killer they never caught, which gave me some pretty bad nightmares.
It probably comes down to temperament -- some fear the known (like me) and others fear the unknown (like my wife). Regardless of where you fall on that spectrum, horror is useful because it allows you to experience and process your darkest fears in a safe way. Fear is one of our most primal, fundamental emotions, and if we don't understand what we're scared of, it can drive us to do a lot of dumb things.
It should also be said that reading horror is a completely different experience to watching horror. I'm not a particularly big fan of horror movies because I don't care for gore and viscera. There is gore and viscera in horror writing, but it's harder to write splattering guts than it is to film it, and the techniques writers use to scare you on the written page are very different from the techniques filmmakers use to scare you on the screen. The best horror writers are sparing with their descriptions of the monster, because they understand that it's better to let the reader fill in the blanks with their imaginations -- you'll visualize something far scarier than they could ever describe, because you'll fill in the details with the thing you find the scariest. It's why every screen adaptation of It has failed to really make the true form of the monster-clown Pennywise as scary as it was when you read it under the covers when you were 15.
The best horror movies understand this principle as well, and they don't let their cameras linger too long on their monster. The Babadook mostly stays in the shadows, the monster in It Follows takes the form of literally anyone watching you, John Carpenter's The Thing looks like your friend or a cute dog, before it explodes into a gnawing, writhing, all-consuming beast. The greats in all mediums also understand the difference between horror and terror.
Horror vs. Terror
The Horror vs. Terror distinction refers to two different techniques writers will use to scare you. Horror is the easier one to pull off -- it's basically an attempt to shock or surprise you. Think jump scares, think blood and guts, think terrifying images.
Terror is more refined -- it's about setting a mood, and then slowly ratcheting up the unease and tension until the climax.
The pulpier, less skilled writers basically just go for horror. A cockroach crawling out of an eye socket will give anyone a good shudder. The great writers, however, will take the time to build terror. It's a much harder thing to do because it takes a while to build, and one misstep can totally defuse the tension built earlier in the book.
Some writers -- like Shirley Jackson, who is very possibly the GOAT -- rely exclusively on terror. But most are more mercenary, like Stephen King, who admitted in his nonfiction book Danse Macabre:
"I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud."
It's worth understanding the distinction if you're going to dive into horror fiction as a genre, because it'll help you spot the masters.
Classics that are good
So… where to start? The obvious place is the classics, though as older books, these can sometimes be trickier entry points because of outdated language and slower pacing. But some of the classics age well, and others don't. If you're gonna start with the big ones, these are my picks.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley's classic, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus will probably never be topped as the most influential horror story of all time. Shelley wrote it when she was 18 years old, but her youth doesn't stop it from being one of the smartest horror stories of all time -- it's an almost prophetic story about the consequences of man's attempt to conquer nature. Two centuries later and it's more relevant than ever.
It's not like the movies you've seen. Any of them. Karloff's monster is iconic, but he groans and moans his way through the story -- Shelley's monster is eloquent and furious, which makes the story's climax even more horrifying.
Victor LaValle's comic Destroyer is an interesting riff on Frankenstein, but you can't really improve on perfection.
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
I submit, for your consideration, the spookiest opening paragraph to any book ever:
““No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.””
Shirley Jackson's books are gothic and creepy, though rarely horrifying (the end of her classic short story "The Lottery" being an exception). I personally prefer her book We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but it's hard to classify that one as horror.
The Haunting of Hill House is a special haunted house book in that the ghosts don't jump out and shout "boo!" It is unclear if they are real spirits, or if the house is just built in an architectural style that drives people insane. Hill House has been adapted several times, and while the recent TV show is genuinely creepy, nothing really compares to the creeping unease of Jackson's masterpiece.
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
I Am Legend has now been adapted at least three times into movies (The Last Man on Earth, The Omega Man, and the Will Smith empty-New-York-dog-scene I Am Legend). All three have become popular in some circles, but all three miss the mark in translating this excellent book, which can be counted either as a great vampire book, or the very first zombie book (due to its direct influence on The Night of the Living Dead).
What makes this book great is its examination of what a human is, what a monster is, and what makes a legend, which is something that the Will Smith movie in particular totally fails to touch on, even while stealing the title.
Richard Matheson, along with Ray Bradbury, is among the most influential post-war horror writers, having been responsible not only for Hell House and The Shrinking Man, but also some of the most influential Twilight Zone episodes, including the famous Shatner episode, "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet."
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Here's the bummer: If you know this story already, then you're missing out on what's actually one of the best surprise twists in fiction. I don't want to say much more if you're one of the like, three people who never watched a Bugs Bunny cartoon, but this book, one of the most successful penny dreadfuls ever written, holds up.
Pro tip — read the copy linked next to it, and you can imagine Dr. Jekyll as Elijah Wood! If you’re feeling fancy, you’ll imagine Mr. Hyde as Gollum.
Classics that suck
Some people may like these! I do not, and would not recommend them.
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Whenever someone complains about the "sexy vampires" in Twilight, it's probably a sign that they aren't familiar with, uh, the entire history of vampires in literature. Vampires have always been sexy, and Bram Stoker's classic Dracula is basically a supernatural bodice-ripper. You can understand why it may have been a hit at the time, but if you don't live in the context of sexually repressed Victorian London, it reads as a kinda silly book where Count Dracula is a sexy, swarthy Eastern European with a personal harem of debauched she-vampires who then goes to terrorize the pure-of-heart Protestant ladies of London, who are totally helpless and must be saved by the men.
Dracula has survived mostly because Bela Lugosi was genuinely spooky, and because F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (a wholesale, unsanctioned rip-off that Stoker's heirs tried to suppress) was an absolutely terrifying silent movie.
If you like gothic romance, you'll like Dracula, and there's an absolute butt-ton of sexy vampire stories from Anne Rice's Lestat novels to Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse novels (which the show True Blood was based on) to, obviously, Twilight.
Read Instead: But if you like your vampires to be actually scary, you're better off reading Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot, which for my money, is his masterpiece and is a major contender for the scariest book ever written. A second actually-scary option is the astoundingly good Let the Right One In, by Swedish writer John Ajvide Lindqvist, which was also adapted into two movies. Both adaptations are great -- the Swedish version is the best, but the American version, titled Let Me In is also solid. Less scary but still brilliant is Octavia Butler’s Fledgling, where the take on vampires is that they are not parasitic towards humans, but actually live in symbiotic relationships with them.
The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty and The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson
The Exorcist movie scared the absolute poop out of me when I saw it at age 11, but the book did not work for me. This is, in part, because I read it when I was 33, and also because I hadn't believed in God or demons for a good 18 years. Neither The Exorcist nor The Amityville Horror (which is even worse, not in the least because it claims to be a true story) is easy to take seriously as an atheist, because the stated respective reasons that the demon gained access to the homes in these books are extreme pagan activities like -- I am not kidding -- yoga and transcendental meditation.
Given that I did yoga every day during the pandemic and not once did my daughter turn her head around 360 degrees (blasphemous swearing was also on the infrequent side), it's hard to read these without rolling your eyes. Which isn't to say that The Exorcist isn't a classic movie -- the mood and special effects make for a deeply creepy film -- but the book just fails to scare.
Read instead: If you are not a believer, haunted house and possession books can be tough to pull off, because what's doing the haunting has to be something other than demons or prosaic ghosts. There are a few of these books that succeed -- the previously mentioned Haunting of Hill House is the gold standard, but the scariest, for my money, is Stephen King's The Shining. It is not at all like the movie, which is a good thing, and it ranks next to 'Salem's Lot and It as one of his scariest books.
Another solid entry is Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves. The core story is about a family that moves into a house that they realize is slightly bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, and the difference becomes greater with time. It's a bizarre book, it's got David Foster Wallace-style footnotes, it contains at least two major side-stories, and sometimes the text rotates and you have to turn the book as you read. It is strange, but it all works.
Cosmic Horror
In the interwar period in the early 20th century, a new type of horror fiction emerged. It branched off from what's called "weird fiction," in the style of Edgar Allan Poe or Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows," in that what haunted the stories were not conventional monsters and ghosts but something uncanny and possibly otherworldly. It was morphed into something totally new by the pulp fiction writers in publications like Weird Tales. The greatest among them was a reclusive, xenophobic New Englander named Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
Lovecraft has since been rightly condemned for the racism pervasive in much of his work, but his influence remains enormous. The comics writer Alan Moore (who has written several Lovecraft-inspired comics) makes the case that Lovecraft was an incredibly sensitive barometer of the anxieties and fears of the average white American in the early 20th century (which, it should be mentioned, are pretty much the same now, 100 years on). Moore also believed Lovecraft actually understood Einstein's theory of relativity, and believed that the new advances in science showed that the universe was not only indifferent to humanity, but that it may in fact be beyond humanity's comprehension.
His most famous short story, "The Call of Cthulhu," begins with this famous paragraph:
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
This story was written in 1928, 17 years before the atomic bomb, but horror has been shifting in this direction ever since — humanity no longer fears ghosts and demons and the wrath of a vengeful god so much as it fears the threat of manmade disasters and the brutal, unforgiving laws of nature.
Lovecraft invented some of the great terrors of 20th century fiction, from his monstrous eldritch Gods like Cthulhu, to squirming, tendril-covered shoggoth terrors, to the evil book The Necronomicon, which has been ripped off by everything from The Evil Dead to Adventure Time.
The problem is that if you’re a barometer for the anxieties of white America, you’re gonna be racist as all hell. Lovecraft connected his very reasonable unease about scientific progress and the weirdness of the universe to an absurd fear of immigrants and racial minorities. This was -- and is, it should be said -- fairly typical of white middle class America. But as a result, his fiction is peppered with overt racism and allusions to "mongrel races" which can make his work unappetizing in the 21st century. Women are virtually absent from his stories. So you could understandably want to pass over the founder of this particular subgenre entirely. The good news is there’s plenty of good stuff still available if you decide to do that. But first, here are my Lovecraft starter recommendations:
"The Call of Cthulhu"
Lovecraft's most famous invention is the octopus-faced, dragon-winged behemoth Cthulhu, one of the "Great Old Ones." This is the original and primary Cthulhu story, though the monster is now virtually ubiquitous, with appearances on The Simpsons and the opening credits of Rick and Morty. And it's genuinely good! It's vintage Lovecraft, with spooky purple prose, a growing sense of terror, and an unwashed, suicidal cult attempting to awaken the monstrous manifestation of chaos that sleeps beneath the waves of the South Pacific.
"The Color Out of Space"
"The Color Out of Space" is another classic, completely bonkers Lovecraft tale -- in it, a small farming family wakes to find a meteorite has crashed into their family well, and it glows with a strange, unnameable color -- "it was only by analogy that they called it a color at all." The color, of course, is evil, and begins to infect the water and the plantlife, turning them into bizarre alien fruits that drive all who eat them mad.
There's a bonus in that this was made into what is, to my mind, the best adaptation of Lovecraft's work, in the form of a completely batshit-insane B-movie starring Nic Cage and Tommy Chong.
"The Shadow Over Innsmouth"
Lovecraft only really wrote short stories and poems. There are no Lovecraft novels. But he did write a handful of novellas, the most acclaimed of which is "At The Mountains of Madness," which introduced his second most famous creation, the formless, betentacled shoggoth.
For my money, though, Lovecraft's best novella is his moody The Shadow Over Innsmouth, in which a man travels to a town to find that the townspeople look and act a bit fishy. I will not say any more. If you don't like this, you won't like Lovecraft.
If you are not interested in reading the works of racists, then you have plenty of other options.
The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor Lavalle
Antiracist deconstructions of Lovecraft have become more and more of a thing in the last decade ago, most prominently through the TV series Lovecraft Country, which was based on a pretty good book by Matt Ruff.
The best entry into this subgenre though is easily Victor Lavalle's brilliant The Ballad of Black Tom. Lavalle takes one of Lovecraft's most repulsively racist short stories, "The Horror at Red Hook," and flips it on its head by telling the story from the perspective of one of its black characters. It could've just been a preachy gimmick, but it's not. It's great, and it pays homage to Lovecraft's brand of horror while absolutely eviscerating his views on race.
The Mist by Stephen King
The only director who knows how to adapt Stephen King is Frank Darabont, who turned two of his best novellas ("Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" and "The Mist") and turned them into the only two King movies that actually improved on the source material. With that said -- King's novella The Mist is creepy Lovecraftian horror at its best. In short, a mist descends over a small Maine town, and inside the fog are unseen horrors that annihilate everything they touch. When a small group holes up in a grocery story, things start to go bad fast.
The Fisherman by John Langan
One of my best reads of 2021 so far — Langan’s story starts as a folksy tale of a man who finds solace in fishing after losing his wife to cancer. When a coworker undergoes a similar tragedy, the two start fishing together. But his coworker has heard of a stream where you can catch something… different. A stream that the locals seem to really, really, really think you shouldn’t go fishing in.
Modern Horror
The Changeling by Victor Lavalle
Victor Lavalle is probably the most exciting name in modern horror, and his best novel-length work is The Changeling. It's about Apollo Kagwa, a New York City book buyer who falls in love, has a baby, and then finds his wife is convinced that the baby has been… switched. I don't want to say anything else about what happens beyond that, because it is horrifying and weird and genuinely great, and it has the perfect monster for a book that came out in 2017.
The Terror by Dan Simmons
Dan Simmons' 2007 book The Terror is based on a true story -- in 1845, the explorer Sir John Franklin embarked on an Arctic sea voyage to discover the northwest passage. On the way, his two ships, the HMS Erebus, and the HMS Terror, got caught in the ice, and couldn't get loose for two years. That much we know is true -- what we don't know is what happened to the ships after that, as they disappeared off the face of the earth. Simmons retelling of this story introduces a supernatural element, and is one of the most effectively creepy books of the century so far. It was also made into a pretty decent TV series.
The Stephen King Trifecta
Stephen King is the undisputed master of modern horror for a reason -- he's objectively great at writing spooky, terrifying stories. Over the course of his career, he's dabbled in fantasy (The Dark Tower series and his collaboration with Peter Straub, The Talisman are both excellent) and crime (Mr. Mercedes), but his wheelhouse is horror, and his best work was done in the first decade or so of his long career. While different people have different favorites, I would make the fairly uncontroversial case that these three books are his scariest and also his best. They are:
Salem's Lot (1975)
The Shining (1977)
It (1986)
Salem's Lot, as I've already mentioned, is probably the best vampire book ever written, and is also the scariest book I've ever read (though to be clear, I first read it when I was 12). The Shining as a book is quite different from the Kubrick movie, which King himself low-key hated. It's also way scarier as a book, as the monster is not spooky girls and elevators of blood, but the slowly-unraveling Jack Torrance -- especially post-pandemic, you will recognize the man slowly losing it due to seclusion and deteriorating alcoholism.
And It has haunted the dreams of several generations of kids for a reason. King took FDR's "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," and turned fear itself into a befanged eldritch clown that preys on the innocent. While the recent movie versions did a respectable job of adapting the unadaptable, this, too, is best read in book form (though there's a scene at the end which could generously be called "problematic").
A couple other King books could jostle for position on this list (Carrie and The Stand being the best two contenders), but if you're going to start, start with these three. If you're hooked, you have plenty of options laid out in front of you.
Short story collections
I would contend that the short story is the best format in which to read horror -- the best horror writers are all excellent in the short story format, from King to Lovecraft to Poe to Jackson. Here are some of the best collections.
American Supernatural Tales edited by S.T. Joshi
This is my number one recommendation if you are new to horror and want to dip your toes in. S.T. Joshi is one of the few literary critics to take the horror genre seriously, and his collection here about as good a cross-section of American horror as you can find. It includes "The Call of Cthulhu" and "The Fall of the House of Usher," but also titles from lesser known authors like T.E.D. Klein's "The Events at Poroth Farm," which for my money is one of the best horror shorts ever.
Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez
Mariana Enriquez has had two of her short story collections, and both of them -- Things We Lost in the Fire and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed are delightfully creepy. Enriquez is an Argentine writer, and that country's recent violent history is the backdrop for her dread-inducing short stories -- "Under the Black Water" is the best entry, for my money, into the Cthulhu Mythos this century.
The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers
The King in Yellow is one of the most important horror short story collections of all time, which is surprising, given that only the first four stories are horror stories. The rest are kind of boring purple romance tales that do not at all fit the tone of the rest of the book. But goddamn, are those first four killer -- the title of the collection is in reference to a play which drives the viewer or the reader mad, which would be cribbed later on by Lovecraft with his Necronomicon. Vague references to the malign character The King in Yellow and his Yellow Sign in Lost Carcosa are repeated in the first four stories, which not only influenced Lovecraft but also the first season of True Detective.
Night Shift by Stephen King
Stephen King is best known for his thousand page horror epics like It and The Stand, but the man can write short horror extremely well. You could pick up any of his collections (Different Seasons is particularly impressive: it includes "The Body," which became the classic movie Stand by Me, and "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption," which became, well, you know).
For my money, his best work is his early work, and Night Shift is his first short story collection and his spookiest. It includes now-classic stories like "The Children of the Corn," "The Lawnmower Man," "Trucks" (which became Maximum Overdrive), and “Night Surf,” which would take place in the same universe as his future epic, The Stand.
Horror comics
If you like horror movies, you are undoubtedly aware that the genre works really well as a visual medium, but horror comics have a stylized element that horror movies simply can't replicate. What follows are not only some of the best horror comics I've read, but some of the best comics period.
Hellboy by Mike Mignola
The best artist and writer in the horror comic genre is, without a question, Mike Mignola. Hellboy has been made into several movies of varying quality (the Guillermo del Toro ones did a surprisingly good job visually), but his comics are breathtaking.
The premise of Hellboy is simple: Rasputin, resurrected and working with the Nazis, attempts to bring about the apocalypse by summoning a demon child. He succeeds in summoning the child, but the child is taken into custody by American scientists, and is dubbed Hellboy. He is still fated to bring about the end of the universe, but instead of fighting for evil, he fights off the monsters that threaten his human friends.
Mignola's comic is funny, spooky, and just unbelievably beautiful. He pulls on old myths for his short stories, and he has a drawing style that Alan Moore astutely described as "German expressionism meets Jack Kirby."
This is, for my money, the most beautiful comic book period, and never, ever misses a beat. All of it is great.
Dracula, Motherf**er! by Alex de Campi
The Dracula story, as I've mentioned, bores the shit out of me -- but the ultra-stylized Dracula, Motherf**er! is actually pretty great. It's a retelling of the story in 1970's Los Angeles, with the premise of a burned out actress resurrecting the legendary vampire so she can suck some more youth out of life. It's short and uncomplicated, but the art is colorful and awesome.
Through the Woods by Emily Carroll
Em Carroll is the first great horror comic artist of the webcomic era -- her excellent story "His Face All Red" went viral in 2010, and it was compiled in the collection Through the Woods in 2014. You can find that original comic here. She's since published a few more spooky books, including the sexy When I Arrived at the Castle, but Through the Woods remains her best.
Saga of the Swamp Thing by Alan Moore
Alan Moore is widely considered the best comics writer of all time for a reason -- in the 80's, he was hired to revive the Swamp Thing character, which had been a pulpy poorly-selling horror comic until then. He turned it into a trippy exploration of environmentalism, America's demons, and the nature of good and evil. And it's still a lot of fun -- some of Moore's run kept the monster-of-the-week approach, but he also dabbled in plant-on-human love and on psychedelic drugs. It's maybe the best thing Moore's ever written, and that's saying something.
Baltimore by Mike Mignola
We have to start and end with Mike Mignola -- his Hellboy universe spun off into several side series, including the BPRD and the Lobster Johnson storylines, but for my money, his best non-Hellboy work is Baltimore. It follows Lord Henry Baltimore, a WWI soldier who suddenly finds himself battling vampires in the trenches. When a plague of blood-suckers and monsters, empowered by the hate and violence of the war, effectively ends the fighting, Baltimore decides to fight a new war against the rising tide of evil.