Interested in reading more suspense and horror?
Here are a few to get you started.
If you’re a fan of the dark and disturbed, well, you already know Stephen King is a master of literary nightmares. We are lucky to have so much more access now to the many authors who strive to generate such twisted tales of horror than ever before.
Anyone who grew up addicted to scary stories and monster movies knows that it takes something special to give substance to terror. You adapt, it wears off, and now what? We want the gripping, mind numbing, nail biting expectation that all of our fears are alive and coming for us.
These highly recommended books by some of my favorite authors in horror are guaranteed to make you scream.
“Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”
– Stephen King
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John Saul suspends belief with every morbidly unique reading experience.
Prepare to be sucked into the shadowy face of evil as each sinister web he weaves highlight what make his books so original.
The dark history and dire secrets of a peaceful small town are summoned from the shadows of the past. Unholy forces are stirred from long slumber to monstrous new life. And two young misfits discover the chilling art of turning persecution into retribution. With these eerie ingredients, bestselling master John Saul once again works his unique brand of sinister magic to conjure an unforgettable tale of unspeakable terror.
For most of her young life, thirteen-year-old Angel Sullivan has been on the outside looking in, enduring the taunts of cruel schoolmates and the angry abuse of a bitter father. Then Angel’s family moves to the quaint town of Roundtree, Massachusetts—where a charming home is available, a promising job awaits Angel’s unemployed father, and most of all, the chance to make a new start beckons to the shy, hopeful teenager. But when she is shunned by her new classmates, Angel falls deeper into despair. Until she meets Seth Baker, a fellow outcast—and a fateful kinship is forged.
It’s Seth who tells Angel the unspoken truth about the legacy of murder that hangs over her family’s home—and the whispered rumors that something supernatural still dwells there. Uncertain whether the stories are true, and desperate to escape the torment of their daily lives, Angel and Seth devote themselves to contacting whatever restless soul haunts the dark recesses of Black Creek Crossing. But once they have begun, there is no turning back.
Guided by an anguished and vengeful spirit, they uncover the shocking events and centuries-old horrors that lay buried beneath the placid veneer of Roundtree. And along with the ghastly revelations comes a terrifying power—one that feeds upon the rage of the victimized, turning the basest impulses and most dangerous desires into devastating weapons. Now, the closer Angel and Seth are pushed toward the edge by their tormentors, the deeper they descend into the maelstrom of dark forces they’ve unleashed . . . and the more unspeakable the hour of reckoning will be.
A powerful high-tech company. A postcard-pretty company town. Families. Children. Sunshine. Happiness. A high school football team that never-ever loses. And something else. Something horrible … Now, there is a new family in town. A shy, nature-loving teenager. A new hometown. A new set of bullies. Maybe the team’s sports clinic can help him. Rebuild him. They won’t hurt him again. They won’t dare.
“What it would be like to simply disappear into the blackness, to float forever in silence and nothingness.”
― John Saul, “Black Creek Crossing”
Anne Rice writes with a haunting conviction that captures the mind.. and touches the soul.
The rich and lavish worlds she designs are second only to the beautifully tormented characters she painstakingly breathes to life.
Most often recognized for“Interview With the Vampire”, Anne Rice exceptional other series such as ‘Lives of the Mayfair Witches‘ and more recently ‘The Wolf Gift’ intelligently blend reality and the unbelievable.
From the author of the extraordinary Vampire Chronicles comes a huge, hypnotic novel of witchcraft and the occult through four centuries.
Demonstrating, once again, her gift for spellbinding storytelling and the creation of legend, Anne Rice makes real for us a great dynasty of witches–a family given to poetry and to incest, to murder and to philosophy; a family that, over the ages, is itself haunted by a powerful, dangerous, and seductive being.
On the veranda of a great New Orleans house, now faded, a mute and fragile woman sits rocking . . . and The Witching Hour begins.
It begins in our time with a rescue at sea. Rowan Mayfair, a beautiful woman, a brilliant practitioner of neurosurgery–aware that she has special powers but unaware that she comes from an ancient line of witches–finds the drowned body of a man off the coast of California and brings him to life. He is Michael Curry, who was born in New Orleans and orphaned in childhood by fire on Christmas Eve, who pulled himself up from poverty, and who now, in his brief interval of death, has acquired a sensory power that mystifies and frightens him.
As these two, fiercely drawn to each other, fall in love and–in passionate alliance–set out to solve the mystery of her past and his unwelcome gift, the novel moves backward and forward in time from today’s New Orleans and San Francisco to long-ago Amsterdam and a château in the France of Louis XIV. An intricate tale of evil unfolds–an evil unleashed in seventeenth-century Scotland, where the first “witch,” Suzanne of the Mayfair, conjures up the spirit she names Lasher . . . a creation that spells her own destruction and torments each of her descendants in turn.
From the coffee plantations of Port au Prince, where the great Mayfair fortune is made and the legacy of their dark power is almost destroyed, to Civil War New Orleans, as Julien–the clan’s only male to be endowed with occult powers–provides for the dynasty its foothold in America, the dark, luminous story encompasses dramas of seduction and death, episodes of tenderness and healing. And always–through peril and escape, tension and release–there swirl around us the echoes of eternal war: innocence versus the corruption of the spirit, sanity against madness, life against death. With a dreamlike power, the novel draws us, through circuitous, twilight paths, to the present and Rowan’s increasingly inspired and risky moves inner the merciless game that binds her to her heritage. And in New Orleans, on Christmas Eve, this strangest of family sagas is brought to its startling climax.
The time is the present.
The place, the rugged coast of Northern California. A bluff high above the Pacific. A grand mansion full of beauty and tantalizing history set against a towering redwood forest.
A young reporter on assignment from the San Francisco Observer . . . An older woman welcoming him into her magnificent family home that he has been sent to write about and that she must sell with some urgency . . . A chance encounter between two unlikely people . . . An idyllic night—shattered by horrific unimaginable violence, the young man inexplicably attacked—bitten—by a beast he cannot see in the rural darkness . . . A violent episode that sets in motion a terrifying yet seductive transformation, as the young man, caught between ecstasy and horror, between embracing who he is evolving into and fearing what he will become, soon experiences the thrill of the wolf gift.
As he resists the paradoxical pleasure and enthrallment of his wolfen savagery and delights in the power and (surprising) capacity for good, he is caught up in a strange and dangerous rescue and is desperately hunted as “the Man Wolf” by authorities, the media, and scientists (evidence of DNA threatens to reveal his dual existence) . . . As a new and profound love enfolds him, questions emerge that propel him deeper into his mysterious new world: questions of why and how he has been given this gift; of its true nature and the curious but satisfying pull towards goodness; of the profound realization that there may be others like him who are watching—guardian creatures who have existed throughout time who possess ancient secrets and alchemical knowledge. And throughout it all, the search for salvation for a soul tormented by a new realm of temptations, and the fraught, exhilarating journey, still to come, of being and becoming, fully, both wolf and man.
“Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a very dangerous enemy indeed.”
― Anne Rice, “The Witching Hour”
Dean Koontz produces psychological masterpieces with an intensity that bleeds from the pages.
Be prepared to question your reality as this author’s eerie fabrications confound the senses time and again.
1 New York Times bestselling author Dean Koontz takes readers into the darkest recesses of the human mind—and into the tempest of a father’s obsession.
A call in the middle of the night summoned psychiatrist Laura McCaffrey out into the rain-swept streets of Los Angeles. The police had found her husband-beaten to death. But what of her daughter, Melanie, whom he had kidnapped six years earlier? At the brutal murder scene, the police lead Laura into her husband’s makeshift lab—and open the door to a rising tide of terror that has trapped Melanie in its midst…
Slim MacKenzie is no ordinary man. With eyes the color of twilight, he’s been blessed with a psychic gift: premonitions. He’s also been cursed, for Slim can see the monsters hiding among us, feeding on our suffering…
And when Slim joins a traveling carnival seeking sanctuary, what he’ll find is a hunting ground—with humanity as the prey.
“Maybe it is better not to know that the beasts are among us. Better than to see… then feel helpless, haunted, and outnumbered. Ignorance would, at least, be good medicine for insomnia.”
― Dean Koontz, Twilight Eyes
Peter Straub reaches deep within the darkest corners of us all.
Often associated with his collaborative work with Stephen King, Peter Straub solidifies a foothold in horror with his own brand of literary madness.
You have been there…
if you have ever been afraid.
Come back. To a dark house deep in the Vermont woods, where two friends are spending a season of horror, apprenticed to a Master Magician.
Learning secrets best left unlearned. Entering a world of incalculable evil more ancient than death itself. More terrifying. And more real.
Only one of them will make it through.
A woman commits suicide for no apparent reason. A week later, her son– fifteen-year-old Mark Underhill–vanishes.
His uncle, novelist Timothy Underhill, searches his hometown of Millhaven for clues that might help unravel this horrible dual mystery. He soon learns that a pedophilic murderer is on the loose in the vicinity, and that shortly before his mother’s suicide, Mark had become obsessed with an abandoned house where he imagined the killer might have taken refuge. No mere empty building, the house whispers from attic to basement with the echoes of a long-hidden true-life horror story, and Tim Underhill comes to fear that in investigating its unspeakable history, Mark stumbled across its last and greatest secret: a ghostly lost girl who may have coaxed the needy, suggestible boy into her mysterious domain.
“Sometimes it is right to fear the dark”
― Peter Straub
Tananarive Due shares with us these artfully unpredictable plots that abandon all reason.
Question everything as Due leaves the expected behind in these promising manipulations of reality.
“An eerie epic. I loved this novel.” — Stephen King
The award-winning master of horror, acclaimed author, screenwriter, and scholar Tananarive Due’s classic African Immortals series starts with an electrifying piece of dark fantasy, My Soul to Keep.
When Jessica marries David, he is everything she wants in a family man: brilliant, attentive, ever youthful. Yet she still feels something about him is just out of reach. Soon, as people close to Jessica begin to meet violent, mysterious deaths, David makes an unimaginable confession: More than 400 years ago, he and other members of an Ethiopian sect traded their humanity so they would never die, a secret he must protect at any cost. Now, his immortal brethren have decided David must return and leave his family in Miami. Instead, David vows to invoke a forbidden ritual to keep Jessica and his daughter with him forever.
Harrowing, engrossing and skillfully rendered, My Soul to Keep traps Jessica between the desperation of immortals who want to rob her of her life and a husband who wants to rob her of her soul. With deft plotting and an unforgettable climax, this tour de force that Stephen King called ‘An eerie epic’ is sure to win Due a legion of new fans.
What happens when an unprecedented infection sweeps the world, leaving the earth on the brink of the Apocalypse?
But this infection goes far beyond disease. Beyond even the nightmare images of walking dead or flesh-eating ghouls. The infected are turning into creatures unlike anything ever dreamed of . . . more complex, more mysterious, and more deadly.
Trapped in the northwestern United States as winter begins to fall, Terry and Kendra have only one choice: they and their friends must cross a thousand miles of no-man’s-land in a rickety school bus, battling ravenous hordes, human raiders, and their own fears.
In the midst of apocalypse, they find something no one could have anticipated . . . love.
Check out these amazing authors and the many more like them to kindle your goosebumps and conjure your fears!
There’s a little something for everyone here.
Pick your poison and find out where it takes you!
