Hello! In the spirit of Halloween, I wanted to see if anyone had some recommendations for good horror books?!

Open to new and classic books. I’ve read quite a bit of Stephen King already. Some classics like Dracula, Turn of the Screw, Shirley Jackson books, etc. Exorcist is probably the scariest book I’ve read.

What else should I try?

  • Elextra@literature.cafeOP
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    2 hours ago

    Thanks everyone for all the recommendations!! It was nice waking up to all these responses!! Definitely will add most of these to my list!

    Also they don’t have to be “scary”. Spooky and eerie vibes also welcome!!

  • alternategait@lemmy.world
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    4 hours ago

    I really enjoy T. Kingfisher in general though most of her horror books don’t effect me that much. That said I read The Hollow Places not too long ago and I was uneasy and spooked the whole time I was reading it.

  • Lacanoodle@literature.cafe
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    8 hours ago

    The Rim of Morning, Two Tales of Cosmic Horror by William Sloane.

    In the 1930s, William Sloane wrote two brilliant novels that gave a whole new meaning to cosmic horror. In To Walk the Night, Bark Jones and his college buddy Jerry Lister, a science whiz, head back to their alma mater to visit a cherished professor of astronomy. They discover his body, consumed by fire, in his laboratory, and an uncannily beautiful young widow in his house—but nothing compares to the revelation that Jerry and Bark encounter in the deserts of Arizona at the end of the book. In The Edge of Running Water, Julian Blair, a brilliant electrophysicist, has retired to a small town in remotest Maine after the death of his wife. His latest experiments threaten to shake up the town, not to mention the universe itself.

  • Lacanoodle@literature.cafe
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    8 hours ago

    The Green Man by Kingsley Amis.

    Maurice Allington has reached middle age and is haunted by death. As he says, “I honestly can’t see why everybody who isn’t a child, everybody who’s theoretically old enough to have understood what death means, doesn’t spend all his time thinking about it. It’s a pretty arresting thought.” He also happens to own and run a country inn that is haunted. The Green Man opens as Maurice’s father drops dead (had he seen something in the room?) and continues as friends and family convene for the funeral.

    Maurice’s problems are many and increasing: How to deal with his own declining health? How to reach out to a teenage daughter who watches TV all the time? How to get his best friend’s wife in the sack? How to find another drink? (And another.) And then there is always death.

    The Green Man is a ghost story that hits a live nerve, a very black comedy with an uncannily happy ending: in other words, Kingsley Amis at his best.

  • Lacanoodle@literature.cafe
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    8 hours ago

    The Black Spider by Jeremias Gotthelf.

    It is a sunny summer Sunday in a remote Swiss village, and a christening is being celebrated at a lovely old farmhouse. One of the guests notes an anomaly in the fabric of the venerable edifice: a blackened post that has been carefully built into a trim new window frame. Thereby hangs a tale, one that, as the wise old grandfather who has lived all his life in the house proceeds to tell it, takes one chilling turn after another, while his audience listens in appalled silence. Featuring a cruelly overbearing lord of the manor and the oppressed villagers who must render him service, an irreverent young woman who will stop at nothing, a mysterious stranger with a red beard and a green hat, and, last but not least, the black spider, the tale is as riveting and appalling today as when Jeremias Gotthelf set it down more than a hundred years ago. The Black Spider can be seen as a parable of evil in the heart or of evil at large in society (Thomas Mann saw it as foretelling the advent of Nazism), or as a vision, anticipating H. P. Lovecraft, of cosmic horror. There’s no question, in any case, that it is unforgettably creepy.

  • afb@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    My usual go-to recommendations for Stephen King readers looking to branch out a bit are The Good House by Tananarive Due, Ghost Story by Peter Straub, and The Kind Folk by Ramsey Campbell.

  • JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl
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    14 hours ago

    Under the Wide Carnivorous Sky is a pretty nice short story collection. More creepy or unsettling than horror necessarily, but I enjoy it.