The Best Horror Books: 9 Classics Worth Reading
Horror covers a lot of ground. A pandemic that wipes out most of humanity, a nurse with an axe, vampires in Renaissance Venice, a house that is bigger inside than out. This list gathers nine titles that have shaped the genre, with a short, factual summary of each so you can work out which one suits you.
The books are ordered by how much interest readers show in them on our site. The selection leans on evidence rather than opinion: New York Times bestseller status, sales records, awards given to the adaptations, and the lasting influence each title has had on writers who came after.
The Stand
Stephen King's 1978 epic follows a weaponised influenza strain that escapes a secret Mojave Desert lab and kills roughly 99.4% of the world's population within a month. The survivors gather into two camps, one led by the 108-year-old Mother Abagail, the other by Randall Flagg, the antagonist King would return to again and again in later books. King set out to write an epic in the spirit of The Lord of the Rings, and the 1990 Complete & Uncut Edition restored over 300 pages cut from the original manuscript. At 1,152 pages it is his longest stand-alone work.
Misery
Novelist Paul Sheldon crashes his car in a Colorado snowstorm and is pulled from the wreck by Annie Wilkes, a former nurse who calls herself his number one fan. She keeps him in her farmhouse with two broken legs, hooked on her stash of painkillers, and forces him to resurrect the heroine he killed off in his last book. Misery took fourth place on the 1987 bestseller list and became an Academy Award-winning film directed by Rob Reiner in 1990. It was also staged in 2015 with Laurie Metcalf and Bruce Willis.
The Queen Of The Damned
The third book in Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles picks up the cliffhanger left by The Vampire Lestat. Lestat's rock music wakes the ancient Egyptian vampire queen Akasha, who begins destroying vampires worldwide by spontaneous combustion and plans to kill most of the world's men and rule what remains. The novel traces vampire origins back to Ancient Egypt and the story of the red-haired twins Maharet and Mekare. A film based mostly on this book was released in 2002.
The Vampire Armand
The sixth Vampire Chronicles novel hands the narration to Armand, who tells his life story to David Talbot while Lestat lies dormant. Born in the Kyivan Rus in the late 15th century, he is an icon painter in a monastery before slave traders take him to Constantinople and then a Venetian brothel, where the vampire Marius de Romanus buys him. Much of the book covers their years together in Renaissance Venice. Rice's themes here are love, identity and the cost of immortality.
Rosemary's Baby
Ira Levin's second novel follows Rosemary Woodhouse and her struggling actor husband Guy as they move into the Bramford, a Gothic Revival apartment building in New York with a history of witchcraft and murder. Their elderly neighbours, Minnie and Roman Castevet, take an unusual interest once Rosemary falls pregnant. It was the best-selling horror novel of the 1960s with over four million copies sold, and its success helped trigger the commercial boom in horror fiction that followed. Roman Polanski adapted it for film in 1968.
Ghost Story
Four men in their seventies in the upstate New York town of Milburn have met weekly for 50 years to tell stories, calling themselves the Chowder Society. After the death of a fifth member, they are plagued by nightmares, and the dead man's nephew Don Wanderley arrives to find out why. Straub published it in 1979 and it became a national bestseller, the book that cemented his reputation. John Irvin directed the 1981 film version.
The Call Of Cthulhu
Lovecraft wrote this short story in the summer of 1926 and Weird Tales published it in February 1928. The narrator pieces together his dead grand-uncle's notes on a sculpture of a scaly creature, a New Orleans police raid on a swamp cult, and the log of a ship that found an uncharted island in the South Pacific. It is the founding document of the Cthulhu Mythos, the shared fictional universe later expanded by Lovecraft and many other writers. A good starting point if you want to see where cosmic horror began.
At The Mountains Of Madness
Geologist William Dyer writes up the real events of a 1930 Antarctic expedition in order to stop another one going. His party found fourteen prehistoric lifeforms, a vast abandoned stone city beyond mountains higher than the Himalayas, and murals telling the history of the Elder Things and the shoggoths they created. Lovecraft wrote the novella in early 1931 and drew explicitly on Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Weird Tales rejected it for length, so it was serialised in Astounding Stories in 1936.
House of Leaves
Danielewski's debut is built as a book within a book within a book. A dead blind academic called Zampanò has written a scholarly study of a documentary film, The Navidson Record, about a family whose house turns out to be larger on the inside than the outside. Johnny Truant, who found the manuscript, fills the margins with footnotes about his own unravelling life, and the typography itself twists and fractures across the page. It was a bestseller and has been translated into a number of languages.
Nine books, four decades apart at the extremes, and no two scary in quite the same way. If you want slow dread, start with Straub or Levin. If you want scale, start with King.