Top 10 Horror Books
Writer Ben Mears returns to the town of Salem's Lot, where, as a child, he had a disturbing experience at The Marsten House: he saw the body of Hubie Marsten hanging from his neck. Now Ben faces a new horror. A vampire, Barlow, moves into town to open an antique shop and proceeds to unleash a wave of unimaginable terror and horror through the tight-knit community. Dracula comes to modern-day America. One of his best!
Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse move into an ancient Manhattan apartment building and are immediately befriended by a pushy older couple, the Castavets. When Rosemary becomes pregnant, she begins to suspect that the people in her building are Satanists and that she may be carrying a demon's baby. A great middle-class crime story set in the turbulent '60s. This disturbing tale is considered a masterpiece in horror fiction.
First, they found the town silent, apparently abandoned. Then they found the first body strangely swollen and still warm. One hundred fifty were dead, 350 missing. But the terror had just begun in the tiny mountain town of Snowfield, Calif. At first they thought it was the work of a maniac, but then they found the truth. And they saw it in the flesh. And it was worse than anything any of them had ever imagined. After reading this you may never want to walk into a freezer alone.
Something glimmered in that black chasm ... two huge eyes, like silvery green headlights floating slowly in the dark. They blinked ... then vanished ….” More terrifying than any nightmare, something has gashed a very bloody path through the Idaho hills, chased by the echoes of screams. It lives, it hunts and it’s just getting started. This time, the monster is real. Sound scary enough for you?
“It” has waited seven years for someone to come back to the rambling lakeside house called Pinecrest. For upscale Chicago couple Dan and Merrill Brewster, the old Phantom Lake, Wisc., mansion is an ideal retreat, and for their kids, Eric and Marci, it’s the perfect place to spend a lazy summer exploring. The teenagers find a strange room whose contents suggest that the cabin's former inhabitant was a murderer. Soon the strange room is making them do strange things – maybe commit murder themselves.
Robert Neville is the last living man on Earth, but he’s not alone. The world's population has been obliterated by a vampire virus, but somehow Neville was untouched. Every other man, woman and child has become a vampire, and they are all hungry for Neville's blood. By day he stalks the undead, but by night he barricades himself in his home and prays for dawn to come. This book was made into a 2007 Will Smith movie.
Aging rock star Judas Coyne loves to collect macabre things, so when his assistant finds a ghost for sale online, he immediately snaps it up. The black, heart-shaped box that Coyne receives contains the suit of a dead man and his vengeance-obsessed spirit. The ghost, it turns out, is the stepfather of a young groupie who committed suicide after Coyne callously used her and threw her away. Now, determined to kill Coyne and anyone who aids him, the merciless ghost begins his assault on the rocker's sanity. Oh, did I mention that Joe Hill is Stephen King’s son?.
For four aging men in the terror-stricken town of Milburn, N.Y., an act inadvertently carried out in their youth has come back to haunt them. Now they are about to learn what happens to those who believe they can bury the past — and get away with murder. Straub deftly blends all the elements and conventions of supernatural horror. It's all here – demonic possession, ageless evil taking on human form, the walking dead, corpses in the morgue that move (!), spiritual rage and vengeance.
This deeply disturbing tale of possession of a young girl by the devil, resulting from her tampering with her Ouija board, is almost too horrific for words. The book is far more terrifying than the 1973 movie. The readers’ mental images of the possessed girl, Reagan, tied to her bed and uttering demoniacal blasphemies, vomiting green bile and, of course, spinning her head around 360 degrees, will haunt you long after you put down the book.
Newly minted solicitor Jonathan Harker journeys from England to Count Dracula's crumbling, remote castle in the Carpathian Mountains. At first enticed by Dracula's gracious manner, Harker soon discovers he has become a prisoner in the castle. After observing Dracula’s nocturnal activities and realizing what his host really is, Harker barely escapes the castle with his life. The classic story unfolds as entries in the characters’ journals and diaries, and the writing is vividly descriptive.