Some of my favourite horror books

Books! Who doesn’t love them? Lots of people, apparently, but I’m not going to tell them how to live their lives. Regarding my love of books, I’ll be completely honest here - while I do enjoy horror books and have read a good number of them, I wouldn’t actually say that it’s my favourite genre - I’m more of a fantasy kind of guy, with a dash of sci-fi on the side when the premise is good and the plot moves along at a good pace.

Regardless of that, I obviously do like horror stories, or I wouldn’t be, y’know, writing this list up. While horror can be a very visual medium, when you find a good book that knows how to create an evocative image or sensation, it’ll stick with you for a long time, and is equally as effective as a gruesome murder in a film or game. Here are some books that managed to pull that off when I read them.

Dracula

Confession time: I love love love a good vampire story, which now that I think about it is reflected in this overall list quite a bit. As such, I think that I do tend to excuse some of the slower or more dated parts of Dracula, but at the same time, can you blame me? It’s friggin’ Dracula! There’s a reason that it’s the story that consolidated various vampire myths and made them into memorable foes, and that the man himself is a classic villain - it’s because it’s really good!

There are two sections of the book that I vividly remember filling me with tension and anticipation, eager to find out what happens next. The first is the first part of the book, when protagonist Jonathan Harker is at the castle of the count himself. While contemporary readers were probably enjoying the book on its own merits, as readers from the far-flung future, we know that Dracula is a vampire and almost certainly has nefarious plans for Jonathan. As such, there’s this fantastic sense of unease the entire time as we wait - when will Jonathan find out that his host is a vampire? Is it when he speaks of his ancestry and the things he’s seen? Is it when his reflection fails to appear in Jonathan’s shaving mirror? It’s engaging and thrilling, and knowledge of Dracula’s true nature only enhances the experience.

The other standout part of the novel to me is when Lucy, Jonathan’s fiance’s friend, is bitten by Dracula and starts acting strangely. Again, while what exactly is going on would have been a bit of a mystery to contemporary readers, it’s only more thrilling to a modern reader, who can’t help but wonder what will happen next when protective garlic is removed from Lucy’s room. From the initial strange mannerisms to Lucy’s funeral, followed by exhuming her body to stop her once and for all, the entire sequence is engaging and entertaining, and holds up excellently in the modern day.

Some of Grady Hendrix’s output

I wish that this entry was “All of Grady Hendrix’s output”, but unfortunately I’ve only read four of his books. Horrorstör was alright if a bit gimmicky, and We Sold Our Souls didn’t do anything for me - maybe I need to be more into heavy metal to really get it. The remaining two novels of his that I’ve read though, were both fucking brilliant, reaching some of the heights of horror and disgust that I have yet to find elsewhere.

I had a great introduction to his work when I started with The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Killing Vampires, which is an absolute masterpiece when it comes to tension. One scene midway through the book has the protagonist’s daughter hear someone standing on the roof, and what follows manages to be one of the scariest sections of the entire book, in spite of what happens later. There’s a real horror of the unknown and of what could happen, and it’s executed perfectly.

The other book of Hendrix’s that I really enjoyed was My Best Friend’s Exorcism - I’ve spoken before about how it helped to inspire quite a bit of The Many Deaths of Lily Kosen, which it did by telling an absolutely stellar story. It’s ultimately a story about friendship and how that triumphs over evil, told very well, but the moments in which evil is winning are absolutely terrifying. There’s gaslighting, there’s body horror revolving around anorexia, there’s a mysterious house that we never really learn the truth about…My Best Friend’s Exorcism is a masterclass in how to write good horror, and it’s a story I’ll be going back to for lessons many times.

Necroscope

What do the Cold War, vampires, the ability to speak to the dead, and teleportation powered by the power of maths have in common? They’re all key elements of the novel Necroscope, and while I was a bit iffy about how some of them were going to fit together - looking at you, teleportation - by the end of the novel I was very satisfied with all of them and how they contributed to the plot. With the exception of the immediate sequel to the novel, the rest of the series unfortunately fails to keep up the quality and I dropped off around the fifth or sixth book, but the first book in the adventures of Harry Keogh is a brilliant take on vampires, which I believe helped inspire the Tzimisce of Vampire: The Masquerade.

The story parallels the development of Keogh with that of a vampire, and we learn about both of their histories and abilities before their paths inevitably clash. The two of them reflect each other nicely - while Keogh can speak to the dead as easily and naturally as he would the living, the vampire does so by carefully slicing open corpses and smearing their organs and blood all over himself, allowing him to read their history. The first scene after the story’s brief prologue is a showcase of this ability, and it sets the tone of the book brilliantly.

From here we get the histories of the two characters, showing Keogh’s learning to speak to the dead in his youth and the vampire’s transformation from an ordinary human to a monster. Of course, vampires aren’t just born out of nowhere, so in the process we also set up a future antagonist of the series. While the series does, as mentioned, get weaker as it goes along, the core concepts of the vampires in it are consistently strong, and provide an interesting and entertaining update to the classic myth.

Ring

I never saw any of the Ring movies when I was younger, although they were popular enough that I learned of the premise - you watch the cursed video tape, you die seven days later unless you do a certain action. I had heard of what that action was when I was younger, although I thankfully forgot what it was by the time I read the novel, which was a good thing, as a large part of the plot hinges on how to break the curse.

Before I get into what I did like about Ring and why it’s on this list, I do need to mention a few issues with it. While the book has some really high highs, it’s also got some pretty low lows - primarily, the main supporting character is said to be a rapist, which is just kind of brushed aside by the protagonist in a quite frankly disgusting way. Towards the end of the novel it turns out, wait, it’s okay, he never was a rapist, and just lied about it! So…what was the point of it, then? There’s also some stuff involving a pretty major character being a hermaphrodite which at best is weird, and at worst is making pretty broad statements about gender which I don’t think held up even when the book was first published.

As awful as some of the above is, I do think that the strengths of the book do earn it a place on this list. Ring is, of course, not the only story where the protagonist has a ticking clock which they have to beat, but it’s the most memorable one that I can think of. Throughout the entire story we can feel the anxiety of the protagonist as he tries to research the tape and where it came from, constantly aware that what little clues he finds still aren’t sufficient to save his life. Even without the time limit adding to the tension, there are some great horror moments in the novel - the description of the tape feels creepy and surreal, and the backstory of the antagonist has a few mysterious moments that never really get explained. When it’s effective, Ring is really effective, and the ending is probably the best of the novels on this list.

In the Miso Soup

The protagonist of In the Miso Soup, Kenji, is a pretty ordinary guy. He runs a tourism service in Tokyo on the down-low, showing foreigners the red light district and related services. His life isn’t perfect, but it’s nothing to complain about either. This all changes when he gets a new client, an American named Frank. Nothing about Frank is overtly wrong, but there are a few hints that Kenji just can’t get out of his mind…

In the Miso Soup manages to have a strong undercurrent of tension throughout the entire novel that constantly keeps you on edge. Frank keeps giving conflicting details about his backstory, and there are strong hints that he might have killed someone recently…but is it all just Kenji overthinking? The book keeps things at the perfect level of ambiguity, and it’s thoroughly engaging as a result. One scene in particular, when the duo go to a batting cage in the early hours of the morning, stands out to me as the perfect example of this - it’s strange and off-putting, but there’s nothing technically wrong about what’s happening.

Of course, this is all just in the first half of the novel - a certain event happens midway through the novel which changes things a bit, and while I didn’t find the second half of the novel to be as tense, it’s still enjoyable. Kenji’s reaction to the event is both incredibly selfish and incredibly human, and a lot of his actions feel like he’s still in shock. At its best, In the Miso Soup presents a fantastic tale of tension and ambiguity, of mystery and fear. It’s excellently crafted and is well worth the price of admission.

Anno Dracula

I started the list with Dracula, so it feels kind of appropriate that I’m ending the list with a different book where he’s a major character. The premise of the Anno Dracula series is that the events of the Dracula novel happened in the universe’s backstory, but midway through them Dracula killed almost all of the characters hunting him. He then publicly declared the existence of vampires, married Queen Victoria, and at the start of the series (set in 1888), vampires have more or less integrated themselves into society. 

I’ll admit that the series is more historical fiction than horror, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t plenty of creepy moments, particularly around vampires who try and fail to transform themselves. One of the books, set in Japan, has plenty of traditional yokai being interpreted as shapeshifting vampires - it doesn’t sound like much, until you try and picture what someone would have to do to themselves to become an umbrella. Ech. The fate of Queen Victoria in the first book is also pretty dark, and changes Dracula from a character we’ve been eagerly anticipating meeting to a horrible monster.

The real appeal of the series, however, is picking out the many references and shout-outs that author Kim Newman puts into the stories. If a vampire has appeared in fiction, they’ll either make an appearance here or get a legally distinct reference. It isn’t just vampires, either - the aforementioned book set in Japan has the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles appear as kappa, and one sailor slowly transforms into Popeye in all but name. It’s not very horrifying, true, but horror isn’t always about being scared - sometimes it’s just about seeing cool, monstrous creatures, and the series provides that in spades.

Yes, that’s right - I just wrote out a list of my favourite horror books and didn’t have anything by Stephen King on the list. I have read some of his things and generally enjoyed them, albeit not as much as the current items on this list. Maybe he’ll show up on a hypothetical second post about more horror books I enjoy? Until then, I’m sure that a lot of people will see this as a massive oversight on my part, so feel free to shout at me and tell me why I’m wrong! I’m also always happy to hear book recommendations, so if there’s anything else that you think is missing from this list, I’m all ears.