Today, I am pleased to welcome horror author John Langan to the blog, with his generous list(s) of top horror books. Take it away, John:
My Top Twenty, er, Thirty (three) Horror Novels
I’m a champion of the idea that it’s possible to write great horror stories at novel length. So when I sat down to come up with twenty horror books that have meant a lot to me, I thought it would be fun to focus my list on novels. The list I wound up with, however, was (a lot) longer than I’d anticipated:
Mary Shelley
Frankenstein (1818/1832)
James Hogg
The Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)
Robert Louis Stevenson
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)
Arthur Machen
The Great God Pan (1894)
Henry James
The Turn of the Screw (1898)
H.P. Lovecraft
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927/1943)
Fritz Leiber
Conjure Wife (1943)
Shirley Jackson
The Sundial (1958)
--
The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
Ray Bradbury
Something Wicked This Way Comes (1963)
Philip K. Dick
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964)
Anne Rice
Interview with the Vampire (1976)
Stephen King
The Shining (1977)
--
Pet Sematary (1983)
Peter Straub
Ghost Story (1979)
--
Shadowland (1980)
Thomas Tessier
The Nightwalker (1979)
Ramsey Campbell
Incarnate (1983)
--
The Darkest Part of the Woods (2002)
Ian Banks
The Wasp Factory (1984)
Clive Barker
The Damnation Game (1985)
--
Cabal (1988)
John Skipp & Craig Spector
The Light at the End (1986)
Jonathan Carroll
A Child Across the Sky (1989)
Michael Cisco
The Divinity Student (1999)
Jack Cady
The Hauntings of Hood Canal (2001)
Sara Gran
Come Closer (2003)
Lucius Shepard
Floater (2003)
Steve and Melanie Tem
The Man on the Ceiling (2008)
Sarah Langan
Audrey’s Door (2009)
Colson Whitehead
Zone One (2011)
Laird Barron
The Croning (2012)
Paul Tremblay
A Head Full of Ghosts (2015)
So much for arguments against the horror novel. I also realized that there was another list I should give alongside this one, and that’s of novels I keep meaning to get to but haven’t yet:
Jeremias Gotthelf
The Black Spider (1842)
E.H. Visiak
Medusa (1929)
Jack Williamson
Darker than You Think (1940)
Ray Russell
The Case Against Satan (1962)
Roland Torpor
The Tenant (1966)
Fred Chappell
Dagon (1968)
Ramsey Campbell
The Face That Must Die (1979)
--
The Grin of the Dark (2007)
Anne Rivers Siddons
The House Next Door (1978)
Michael Bishop
Who Made Stevie Cry? (1984)
Thomas Tessier
Finishing Touches (1987)
Mark Danielewski
House of Leaves (2000)
Bennett Sims
A Questionable Shape (2013)
Mea culpa. Finally, I felt I should give a few titles that, while not horror novels in the strictest sense of the term, seemed at least cousins of those I’d already listed.
Charlotte Bronte
Jane Eyre (1847)
Emily Bronte
Wuthering Heights (1847)
Charles Dickens
Dombey and Son (1848)
--
Great Expectations (1861)
Henry James
The American (1877)
--
The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness (1899)
Nathanael West
Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)
William Faulkner
Absalom, Absalom (1936)
William Golding
Lord of the Flies (1954)
Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian (1985)
Toni Morrison
Beloved (1987)
Ian McEwan
Black Dogs (1992)
John Langan
John Langan is the author of two collections, The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies
(Hippocampus 2013) and Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters
(Prime 2008), and a novel, House of Windows
(Night Shade 2009). With Paul Tremblay, he has co-edited Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters
(Prime 2011). He lives in upstate New York with his wife, younger son, and many, many animals.
John Langan keeps an irregular blog at https://johnpaullangan.wordpress.com/