Best Horror Books

A young governess at a remote English estate becomes convinced that the children in her charge are in contact with the malevolent spirits of two dead servants.

A friendly St. Bernard contracts rabies and traps a mother and her young son inside a broken-down car on a sweltering summer day in rural Maine. With no supernatural element, King strips horror down to its barest components: an animal, heat, thirst, and time running out.

When a bedroom game goes catastrophically wrong, Jessie Burlingame is left handcuffed to a bed in an isolated lake house — alone, with her husband dead on the floor. Stephen King spins a single, claustrophobic predicament into a harrowing psychological survival story.

Two years after her famous-novelist husband's death, Lisey Landon must sort through his papers — and confront the secret, otherworldly place he visited in life, where wonder and horror wait side by side. Stephen King's most personal novel, and his own favorite.

A teenage girl investigating the strange events in her suburban neighbourhood discovers that her mother and her mother's best friend performed dangerous magical rituals as teenagers — and that the consequences are still running.

A charismatic small-town minister loses his faith after a tragedy and devotes his life to a dangerous obsession with 'secret electricity.' Decades later, his path keeps crossing that of a recovering addict — toward a finale of pure cosmic dread. Stephen King's Lovecraftian masterwork.

William March's chilling 1954 classic of psychological horror. Christine Penmark slowly realizes that her perfect, charming eight-year-old daughter Rhoda may be a remorseless killer — and that the evil may be inherited. A landmark exploration of the 'born bad' child that shaped a genre.

The ka-tet fractures across time and world: Susannah is drawn to New York, 1999, carrying a demonic child that may doom or save the Tower; Roland and Eddie travel to Maine, 1977, where they must obtain the land for a vacant lot and encounter a young writer named Stephen King working on a novel called The Gunslinger. The meta-fictional stakes escalate dramatically.

When the eminent Egyptologist Abel Trelawny falls into a mysterious coma, his daughter Margaret and young barrister Malcolm Ross find themselves drawn into the terrifying legacy of an ancient Egyptian queen — and an experiment in resurrection that may unleash something the modern world is wholly unprepared for.

On a remote Scottish island, a woman takes a commission to paint murals in a lighthouse while her three daughters disappear one by one — and twenty years later, the youngest daughter returns, still a child, without explanation.

An invisible, impenetrable dome descends without warning on the small town of Chester's Mill, Maine, sealing it off from the outside world. As resources dwindle and communication with the exterior becomes impossible, the town's worst political instincts emerge with terrifying speed.

Written in 1819 but suppressed by Shelley's father and unpublished until 1959, Mathilda is a harrowing gothic novella about a young woman destroyed by her father's incestuous obsession and her subsequent withdrawal into grief. Autobiographical in its emotional truth, it is among the most painfully honest works Shelley ever wrote.

Logan Ortega-Barnes arrives in the remote town of Snakebite, Oregon when her fathers' paranormal TV show faces accusations of causing local teenagers' deaths. Partnered unwillingly with Ashley, the daughter of the man everyone blames, Logan discovers that the truth about Snakebite's darkness is stranger than any television episode.

A morbidly obese lawyer accidentally kills an old Romani woman with his car and receives a single word from her ancient father — 'thinner' — triggering an unstoppable supernatural curse that begins to consume him.

Mark Spitz is a sweeper — part of a civilian unit tasked with clearing zombies from lower Manhattan after a plague. The novel covers three days of his work, interspersed with flashbacks to the collapse and his survival of it. A literary zombie novel about grief, memory, and the texture of the American city in ruins.

The Southern Reach trilogy concludes with three parallel timelines: Control and Ghost Bird inside Area X, the former Director on the last expedition she ever launched, and the original lighthouse keeper in the years before Area X appeared.

One afternoon in Boston, a mysterious signal called the Pulse turns every cell-phone user into a mindless, murderous savage. Artist Clay Riddell sets out across a collapsing New England to find his son. Stephen King's breakneck apocalyptic zombie thriller.

The origin story of Hannibal Lecter: from his aristocratic Lithuanian childhood through the traumatic events of the Second World War that broke something fundamental, to the first murders in post-war Europe and Japan. A prequel that traces the specific losses and grievances that created the most celebrated fictional cannibal.

American twins inherit a flat overlooking Highgate Cemetery in London from an aunt they never met — and find themselves entangled with a ghost, the aunt's former lover, and a mystery about the family's past.

Stoker's final novel pits a young Englishman against an ancient, monstrous entity lurking beneath the English countryside — part gothic horror, part folk legend, part fever dream. Lady Arabella March conceals a terrifying secret in her estate, and only Adam Salton can confront the primordial evil coiled beneath Mercy Farm.

Set in fourteenth-century Italy, Valperga follows the rise of the condottiere Castruccio Castracani — a real historical figure — from boyhood idealism to tyrannical power, through the eyes of Euthanasia, the remarkable Countess of Valperga, who loves him and watches him be destroyed by ambition.

The new director of the Southern Reach — the agency that monitors Area X — inherits a dysfunctional organisation, a returned Biologist who cannot remember her expedition, and the dawning realisation that the border between Area X and the outside world may not be where anyone thought.

On the rugged Scottish coast near Cruden Bay, Archibald Hunter is drawn into a web of mystery involving second sight, hidden treasure connected to the Spanish Armada, and dangerous conspirators — as well as a romance with the spirited American Marjory Drake.

Rupert Sent Leger inherits a fortune and travels to a Balkan land called the Land of the Blue Mountains, where he encounters a mysterious woman in a shroud who may be a vampire — or a princess in disguise. Gothic horror merges with Ruritanian adventure in Stoker's politically ambitious late novel.