I’d suggest Daryl Gregory’s We Are All Completely Fine from 2014.
He’s written other novels I like a lot which could be considered horror but this is the one!
I recommend Richard Laymon.
I entered the thread to post the same book.
I kept a cross made from toothpicks next to my bed for a few weeks after I read it. Granted, I was only in middle school, but it still remains the scariest book I’ve read.
Huh. I remember quite enjoying this one. I even thought it would have made a great movie or TV show…
Anything else good by Gregory?
I don’t.
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- **The Sorcerer’s House **by Gene Wolfe - a book that immediately demands you go back and re-read it to see if you…well, I won’t go further. Probably the best horror book I’ve read in the past few years, though I am not a huge reader of this genre.
- **Bones of the Moon **by Jonathan Carroll (no audiobook, sorry)
- Doctor Sleep by Stephen King(a surprisingly good folllow-up to the Shining)
-
Lockwood and Co. - a young adult horror series that is actually quite good. I’ve read 3 of 5 of them and love them
I love Jonathan Carroll. One that’s just creepy as hell is The Land of Laughs.
I recommend checking out some of Graham Masterton’s books, if you don’t mind a lot of gore to go with your scary stuff. A few of my favorites include:
- Mirror
- *Ritual *(very gory, with cannibalism)
- The Doorkeepers
- The Devil in Gray
- Edgewise
- The Manitou (there are several books in the Manitou series)
I don’t think Masterton gets the respect in the U.S. horror market that he should, and I’m not sure why. He writes good stuff.
Edit to add: I do not recommend Unspeakable. It has a throw-the-book-across-the room ending that I hated.
Ooo, I have this one in my to-be-read pile. I’ll have to dig it out.
I am surprised that no one has mentioned Charles Stross. His “Laundry” series can attain Lovecraftian peaks:
From Wiki:
The Atrocity Archives (2004)
The Jennifer Morgue (2006)
Down on the Farm (2008 novelette)
Overtime (2009 novelette)
The Fuller Memorandum (2010)
The Apocalypse Codex (2012)
Equoid (2013 novelette)
The Rhesus Chart (2014)
The Annihilation Score (2015)
The Nightmare Stacks (2016)
The Delirium Brief (2017)
The Labyrinth Index (2018)
Dead Lies Dreaming (forthcoming 2020-10-27, start of a new series in the Laundry universe)I read a lot of horror, not a lot gets to me any more but I’ll see what I can recommend.
Song of Kali by Dan Simmons was really good.
The Troop by Nick Cutter. I’ve head some of his other works are good but I’ve not read them. His real name is Craig Davidson.
Final Girls by Riley Sager was ok.
The Keep by F Paul Wilson.
Not sure how many of those are on audio books or not though.
Harrison Squared is a fun, almost YA Lovecraftian novel, Afterparty is a great Phil Dick-ian take on 3D-printed designer drugs, Raising Stoney Mayhall is a weird take on zombies and Spoonbenders is a convoluted book about a retired family of Carnival acts and performers who may or may not have special talents. Very good, but it takes it’s time.
And for completeness sake, The Devil’s Alphabet is set in a small, quarantined town some years after a chemical spill has resulted in a series of weird mutations - strange but good, as a refugee returns for a funeral.
I’ve not read his first novel, Pandemonium, but it got good reviews when it first appeared and it’s on my list!
He’s on my order on sight list and I’ve not been disappointed yet. I nearly didn’t persevere with We Are All Completely Fine as it was pretty intense, but I’m glad i did.
Spoonbenders picked up a fair mount of attention iirc, even in the UK where it was a book of the month choice by some bookclub/shop? I don’t recall.
I’ll second Song of Kali (and maybe The Hollow Man) as genuinely horrifying novels by Dan Simmons. I haven’t read them for over 10 years, though, but I remember finding them about as scary as books get.
If you haven’t read it already, let me recommend The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. For me, it’s the scariest book of all time.
And this would be the second scariest! The realistic parts are bad enough, but the supernatural stuff really doesn’t bear thinking about after lights out!
Since you’ve specifically asked for novels, my favorite horror novel I’ve read is The Last Days of Jack Sparks by Jason Arnopp. It’s bizarre, genre-bending, and scary enough that I wanted my dog snuggling on the couch with me while I read it. I’ve found that the horror genre is often better suited to short stories rather than novels; since the endings are often the crucial part, short stories have tighter plots and less filler. Some short story writers who write good horror are Karen Russell, John Connolly, and Thomas Ligotti.
Oh, definitely. Thanks for the reminder. German troops vs. a supernatural threat in a mysterious Romanian castle during WWII. *Very *good stuff.
I was freaked out by The Shining even though I’d already seen the movie.
Probably shouldn’t have gotten deeply into it late at night and then had to ascend the stairs to our mildly spooky upper floor when everyone else was asleep.*
*for real fun I should’ve tried going up into the attic, which was an unsettling place even in broad daylight. You never knew what might emerge from those hanging garment bags…:eek:
**going down to our dimly lit basement after seeing a 10 p.m. showing of Psycho wasn’t a good idea either.
I read one or two of the laundry books, and while they had horror tropes in them, I don’t remember anything in the ones I read being remotely scary or unsettling. They were, if I’m remembering correctly, fairly light in style. Wikipedia describes the series as mixing “the genres of Lovecraftian horror, spy thriller, science fiction, and workplace humour,” which matches my memory.
OOH! OOH! OOH! If we can move out of pure genre horror but stick with scary stuff, there’s the amazing Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer, starting with Annihilation. He works in the “New Weird” subgenre, sort of horror, sort of fantasy, sort of science fiction, sort of surrealism. The Old Weird was Lovecraft and Burroughs and Machen.
Anyway, Vandermeer’s works, and especially this series, are obliquely and profoundly unsettling and disturbing. If King splatters blood across your face, Vandermeer gives you a diagnosis of parasite infection while you’re having a bad reaction to an anesthetic.
I was going to bring up Vandermeer as well. The first two books of the Southern Reach really scared me. The third book went off in a different direction, and his other books that I’ve read (Borne and Veniss Underground) didn’t really do it for me. But those first two books of Southern Reach are very worth it. I’d go so far as to say they scared me more than any Stephen King that I’ve ever read.
I will second this. Really really good.