Horror All Too Human
Novels by horror writers where the evil is human and the horror hits too close to home are listed here. Many of these novels fall into a gray area between suspense/thriller genre and horror with both sides claiming them. This list is continued in Horror Most Human.
(This list is alphabetical by title.)
 After Midnight  |
After MidnightAuthor: Laymon, Richard |
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From the Undead Rat: |
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 American Psycho  |
American PsychoAuthor: Ellis, Bret Easton |
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In American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis imaginatively explores the incomprehensible depths of madness and captures the insanity of violence in our time or any other. Patrick Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront. Originally Simon and Schuster was going to publish American Psycho in hardback in 1991 but backed out of the deal. Vintage then purchased the rights and published it in trade paperback in that same year. Although to the best of my knowledge, Simon and Schuster never published it, you can find a page on Amazon.com for it. |
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 The Bad Seed  |
The Bad SeedAuthor: March, William |
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Nominated for the 1955 National Book Award for Fiction What happens to ordinary families into whose midst a child serial killer is born? This is the question at the center of William March’s classic thriller. After its initial publication in 1954, the spine-tingling tale of little Rhoda Penmark had a tremendous impact on the thriller genre and generated a whole perdurable crop of creepy kids. Today, The Bad Seed remains a masterpiece of suspense that’s as chilling, intelligent, and timely as ever before. |
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 Beasts  |
BeastsAuthor: Oates, Joyce Carol |
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A bright, talented junior at Catamount College in the druggy 1970s, Gillian Brauer strives to realize more than a poet’s craft in her workshop with the charismatic, anti-establishment professor Andre Harrow. For Gillian has fallen in love — with Harrow, with his aesthetic sensibility and bohemian lifestyle, with his secluded cottage on Brierly Lane, with the mystique of his imposing, russet-haired French wife, Dorcas. A sculptress, Dorcas has outraged the campus and alumnae with the crude, primitive, larger than life-sized wooden totems that she has exhibited under the motto We are Beasts and This is Our Consolation. As if mesmerized, Gillian enters the rarefied world of the Harrows. She surrenders to their cassoulets, Quaaludes, and intimacies. She is special, even though she knows her classmates Marisa and Sybil and the exotic, mysterious Dominique have preceded her here. She is helpless, she is powerful. And she will learn in full the meaning of Dorcas’s provocative motto. |
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 Billy  |
BillyAuthor: Strieber, Whitley |
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No summary available. |
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 The Captors  |
The CaptorsAuthor: Farris, John |
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No summary available. |
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 Come Out Tonight  |
Come Out TonightAuthor: Laymon, Richard |
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When a young woman’s boyfriend diappears, she heads out to search for him — straight into the path of a psychotic killer. |
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 Control Freak  |
Control FreakAuthor: Faust, Christa |
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The dead girl had called herself Apocrypha. Her real name was Eva, and she had been murdered, then savagely mutilated. Caitlin McCullough, an author of cheap detective novels who has a nose for the sensational, is fascinated by Eva’s murder. As Caitlin’s investigation draws her deeper into New York’s sexual playground, she finds herself perversely attracted to the killing’s prime suspect, a notorious SM club owner. It’s a deadly game of seduction against clever and dangerous opponents. But the darkest truths Caitlin will uncover are the ones hidden inside her own heart. |
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 Crash  |
Crash: A NovelAuthor: Ballard, J. G. |
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In this hallucinatory novel, an automobile provides the hellish tableau in which Vaughan, a “TV scientist” turned “nightmare angel of the highways,” experiments with erotic atrocities among auto crash victims, each more sinister than the last. James Ballard, his friend and fellow obsessive, tells the story of this twisted visionary as he careens rapidly toward his own demise in an internationally orchestrated car crash with Elizabeth Taylor. A classic work of cutting-edge fiction, Crash explores both the disturbing implications and horrific possibilities of contemporary society’s increasing dependence on technology as intermediary in human relations. |
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 The Dante Club  |
The Dante ClubAuthor: Pearl, Matthew |
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Nominated for the 2003 IHG Award Recognizing Outstanding Achievement in a First Novel In 1865 Boston, the members of the Dante Club — poets and Harvard professors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, along with publisher J.T. Fields — are finishing America’s first translation of The Divine Comedy and preparing to unveil Dante’s remarkable visions to the New World. The powerful Boston Brahmins at Harvard College are fighting to keep Dante in obscurity, believing that the infiltration of foreign superstitions onto American bookshelves will prove as corrupting as the immigrants living in Boston Harbor. As they struggle to keep their sacred literary cause alive, the plans of the Dante Club are put in further jeopardy when a serial killer unleashes his terror on the city. Only the scholars realize that the gruesome murders are modeled on the descriptions from Dante’s Inferno and its account of Hell’s torturous punishments. With the lives of the Boston elite and Dante’s literary future in America at stake, the Dante Club must find the killer before the authorities discover their secret. The Dante Club is a magnificent blend of fact and fiction, a brilliantly realized paean to Dante, his mythic genius, and his continued grip on our imaginations. |
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 Different Seasons  |
Different SeasonsAuthor: King, Stephen |
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Nominated for the 1983 World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology/Collection From the Editors of Amazon.com: These first three novellas have been made into well-received movies: “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” into Frank Darabont’s 1994 The Shawshank Redemption, “Apt Pupil” into Bryan Singer’s 1998 film Apt Pupil, and “The Body” into Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me (1986). The final novella, “Breathing Lessons,” is a horror yarn told by a doctor, about a patient whose indomitable spirit keeps her baby alive under extraordinary circumstances. It’s the tightest, most polished tale in the collection. Table of Contents:
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 Exquisite Corpse  |
Exquisite CorpseAuthor: Brite, Poppy Z. |
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Nominated for the 1996 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel To serial slayer Andrew Compton, murder is an art, the most intimate art. After feigning his own death to escape from prison, Compton makes his way to the United States with the sole ambition of bringing his art to new heights. Tortured by his own perverse desires, and drawn to possess and destroy young boys, Compton inadvertently joins forces with Jay Byrne, a dissolute playboy who has pushed his art to limits even Compton hadn’t previously imagined. Together, Compton and Byrne set their sights on an exquisite young Vietnamese-American runaway, Tran, whom they deem to be the perfect victim. |
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 Face  |
FaceAuthor: Lebbon, Tim |
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A family picks up a hitchhiker in the worst blizzard in living memory. It’s a mistake. Brand is not who he seems, to the mother, the father or the daughter. He is something more, something they fear in their own ways, and soon after the thaw they are all seeing him again. They begin to learn things about themselves, and each other, which perhaps would be best left unknown. And they begin to realise other, more painful truths . . . Love blinds. Fear distorts. Hate misleads. |
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 The Face That Must Die  |
The Face That Must DieAuthor: Campbell, Ramsey |
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Ramsey Campbell’s daring look into the mind of a psychotic killer was published in truncated form in 1979; an expanded edition was later published in 1982. The paranoid outlook of the book’s main character, Horridge, is a grim commentary on a bleak Liverpool suburb and Thatcher-era England. Millipede Press is proud to present this masterpiece of paranoia literature in a brand new edition, with the corrected text by Campbell and the compelling photographs of J.K. Potter. |
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 Fever in the Blood  |
Fever in the BloodAuthor: Fleming, Robert |
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Ohio Connection: Robert Fleming was born and grew up in the Cleveland area. Eddie Stevens is burning inside . . . and he’s burning mad at the world. He’s mad at the family he lost — his parents and sisters viciously killed by a gang in their own home; and he’s mad at the foster family that rescued him — headed up by a powerful Harlem congressman who sees Eddie as a campaign ploy. Mainly, Eddie is mad at himself, for getting caught by the cops with blood on his hands. Blood he should have washed off right away. He was sloppy this time. It won’t happen again. Because Eddie knows the fever that ignites his rage is wasted — unless it’s put to use. And he intends to put it to use again and again. . . . |
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 Finishing Touches  |
Finishing TouchesAuthor: Tessier, Thomas |
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An American living in London is seduced by a beautiful woman and slowly drawn into a web of madness and terror. The Leisure/Dorchester edition also contains the novella Father Panic’s Opera Macabre |
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 The Girl Next Door  |
The Girl Next DoorAuthor: Ketchum, Jack |
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A teenage girl is held captive and brutally tortured by neighborhood children. Based on a true story, this shocking novel reveals the depravity of which we are all capable. The Leisure/Dorchester edition also contains: Author’s Note: On Writing the Girl Next Door, and a pair of short stories Do You Love Your Wife? and Returns. |
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 The Homecoming  |
The HomecomingAuthor: Rangel, Kimberly |
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Darby Jayson was just a girl on that horrible night — the night that her slumber party made the news. When the killer’s knife had stopped, three of Darby’s friends were butchered, one of them was driven insane, and Darby was the only witness left to tell the bloody story. Darby’s a grown woman now, but she’s still tortured by nightmares. And they’re getting worse now that the killings have begun again. But they caught that maniac and executed him long ago. Didn’t they? |
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 Hunted Past Reason  |
Hunted Past ReasonAuthor: Matheson, Richard |
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It’s supposed to be just an ordinary camping trip, two old acquaintances hiking through the wilderness toward a remote cabin in the woods of northern California. Bob Hansen, a middle-aged family man and author, isn’t anticipating anything worse than sore muscles and maybe a few chilly nights. But the enforced isolation of the hike soon exposes long-hidden rivalries and resentments between Bob and his guide through the forest, a fading TV actor whom Bob has known for several years. The deeper they get into the primeval wilderness, and the farther from civilization, the greater the tension between the two men becomes — until the simmering hostility erupts into a terrifying life-or-death struggle for survival. |
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 Intensity  |
IntensityAuthor: Koontz, Dean |
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From the Editors of Barnes and Noble: |
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 Kamikaze  |
KamikazeAuthor: Slade, Michael |
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He is a Kamikaze. His target: a survivor of the bomb crew that incinerated Hiroshima more than half a century ago. She is an executioner. Her target: those responsible for her father’s murder during the fall of Hong Kong, 1941. But they have something more frightening in common than revenge. It’s beyond belief. But believing in it is the only way to stop them. |
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 Koko  |
Koko (The Blue Rose Trilogy #1)Author: Straub, Peter |
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KOKO . . . . Only four men knew what it meant. Vietnam vets. One was a doctor. One was a lawyer. One was a working stiff. One was a writer. All were as different as men could be — yet all were bound eternally together by a single shattering secret. And now they joined together again on a quest that could take them from the graveyard and fleshpots of the Far East to the human jungle of New York. . . . hunting an inhuman ghost of the past risen from nightmare darkeness to kill and kill and kill. . . . |
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 The Lake  |
The LakeAuthor: Laymon, Richard |
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From the Editors of Barnes and Noble: When Leigh was a teenager in the ’60s, she was an anti-establishment hippy with a talent for getting into trouble. So her parents decide to ship her off to Wisconsin to spend a summer with her aunt and uncle. The fearless — and oversexed — Californian quickly hooked up with a naive local and, during one of their secret trysts, witnessed his accidental death. Leigh became pregnant and now, 18 years later, she watches as her daughter, Deana, experiences a horror similar to her own. Deep in the woods with her boyfriend, Deana watches as he is murdered by a stranger. Are these two bizarre deaths related, and if so, how? |
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 The Lost  |
The LostAuthor: Ketchum, Jack |
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Nominated for the 2001 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel It was the summer of 1965. Ray, Tim, and Jennifer were just three teenage friends hanging out in the campgrounds, drinking a little. But Tim and Jennifer didn’t know what their friend Ray had in mind. And if they’d known, they wouldn’t have thought he was serious. Then they saw what he did to the two girls at the neighboring campsite — and knew he was dead serious. Four years later, the 60s were drawing to a close. No one ever charged Ray with the murders in the campgrounds, but there was one cop determined to make him pay. Ray figured he was in the clear. Tim and Jennifer thought the worst was behind them, that the horrors were all in the past. They were wrong. The worst was yet to come. |
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 Mine  |
Mine: A Novel of TerrorAuthor: McCammon, Robert |
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Winner of the 1990 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel From the Editors of Amazon.com: |
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 Misery  |
MiseryAuthor: King, Stephen |
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Winner of the 1987 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel (tie) Paul Sheldon. He’s a bestselling novelist who has finally met his biggest fan. Her name is Annie Wilkes and she is more than a rabid reader — she is Paul’s nurse, tending his shattered body after an automobile accident. But she is also his captor, keeping him prisoner in her isolated house. Now Annie wants Paul to write his greatest work — just for her. She has a lot of ways to spur him on. One is a needle. Another is an ax. And if they don’t work, she can get really nasty. |
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 Psycho  |
PsychoAuthor: Bloch, Robert |
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This book was featured in an essay in Horror: 100 Best Books. When the Bates Motel loomed up out of the storm, Mary Craine thought it was her salvation. The rooms were musty but clean, and the manager, Norman Bates, seemed like a nice enough fellow, if a little strange. . . . Then Mary met Norman’s mother. And the butcher knife. The nightmare had just begun. . . . |
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 Rapture  |
RaptureAuthor: Tessier, Thomas |
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After 20 years without contact, Jeff rediscovers Georgianne and becomes obsessed with her — destroying her life so that she will turn to him. |
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 Red  |
RedAuthor: Ketchum, Jack |
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No summary available. |
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 Red Dragon  |
Red Dragon (The Hannibal Lecter Series #1)Author: Harris, Thomas |
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This book was featured in an essay in Horror: 100 Best Books. From the Editors of Amazon.com: The sleuth, Will Graham, actually quit the FBI after nearly getting killed by Lecter while nabbing him, but fear isn’t what bugs him about crime busting. It’s just too creepy to get inside a killer’s twisted mind. But he comes back to stop a madman who’s been butchering entire families. The FBI needs Graham’s insight, and Graham needs Lecter’s genius. But Lecter is a clever fiend, and he manipulates both Graham and the killer at large from his cell. That killer, Francis Dolarhyde, works in a film lab, where he picks his victims by studying their home movies. He’s obsessed with William Blake’s bizarre painting The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun, believing there’s a red dragon within him, the personification of his demonic drives. Flashbacks to Dolarhyde’s terrifying childhood and superb stream-of-consciousness prose get us right there inside his head. When Dolarhyde does weird things, we understand why. We sympathize when the voice of the cruel dead grandma who raised and crazed him urges him to mayhem — she’s way scarier than that old bat in Psycho. When he falls in love with a blind girl at the lab, we hope he doesn’t give in to Grandma’s violent advice. This book is awesomely detailed, ingeniously plotted, judiciously gory, and fantastically imagined. If you haven’t read it, you’ve never had the creeps. |
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 Servants of Twilight  |
Servants of TwilightAuthor: Koontz, Dean |
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Originally published under the pseudonym Leigh Nichols and reprinted under Dean Koontz’s name. A strange old woman descends upon Christine and her six-year-old son in an ordinary southern California parking lot and makes violent threats. Suddenly Christine’s only son is targeted by a group of religious fanatics. They want to kill him . . . and they are everywhere! |
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 Shattered  |
ShatteredAuthor: Koontz, Dean |
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Originally published under the pseudonym K.R. Dwyer and reprinted under Dean Koontz’s name. As Alex and Colin speed toward their new home in San Francisco where Courtney awaits them, they are pursued by a madman who is also eager to see Courtney. |
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 Silent Children  |
Silent ChildrenAuthor: Campbell, Ramsey |
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Nominated for the 2000 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel Once upon a time there was a man who loved children. He loved them so much he tried to save them from their imperfect parents. Unfortunately, Hector Woollie didn’t work for Child Protective Services . . . and the children he rescued, he murdered. Once upon a time, Leslie had a happy marriage, a happy son, and a happy life. Now divorced, she is trapped in ongoing battles with her ex-husband, Roger, especially over their newly-adolescent son, Ian. When Ian and his young stepsister disappear, Roger insists the boy kidnapped the girl, while Leslie thinks Ian might have run away. She prays that her son is near and will come home soon. Ian is near — right next door, just on the other side of a shared wall. Ian can hear his parents fighting and his mother’s desperate weeping, but he can’t call for help. Hector Woollie has him and his stepsister, and if either child makes a peep, the madman will slit both their throats. |
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 Slain in the Spirit  |
Slain in the SpiritAuthor: Tem, Melanie |
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Leila Blackwell is a normal person, trying to live a normal life. In her mind, being a nearly blind, atheistic lesbian should have no effect on her ability to do so. Unfortunately, an old high school acquaintance and religious zealot named Russell Gavon sees her keratitis as punishment for all of her life sins, and takes it upon himself to “rescue” her from her affliction through religious intervention. He kidnaps her, and thus begins the most harrowing time of Leila’s life. One of the strengths of Slain in the Spirit lies in the veracity of the characters. We all know Leila and Russell through our interactions with people like them in everyday life, and that’s where the horror creeps in. |
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 The Wasp Factory  |
The Wasp FactoryAuthor: Banks, Iain M. |
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This book was featured in an essay in Horror: 100 Best Books. From the Editors of Amazon.com: Those lines begin one of the most infamous of contemporary Scottish novels. The narrator, Frank Cauldhame, is a weird teenager who lives on a tiny island connected to mainland Scotland by a bridge. He maintains grisly Sacrifice Poles to serve as his early warning system and deterrent against anyone who might invade his territory. Few novelists have ever burst onto the literary scene with as much controversy as Iain Banks in 1984. The Wasp Factory was reviled by many reviewers on account of its violence and sadism, but applauded by others as a new and Scottish voice–that is, a departure from the English literary tradition. The controversy is a bit puzzling in retrospect, because there is little to object to in this novel, if you’re familiar with genre horror. The Wasp Factory is distinguished by an authentically felt and deftly written first-person style, delicious dark humor, a sense of the surreal, and a serious examination of the psyche of a childhood psychopath. Most readers will find that they sympathize with and even like Frank, despite his three murders (each of which is hilarious in an Edward Gorey fashion). It’s a classic of contemporary horror. |
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 We Have Always Lived in the Castle  |
We Have Always Lived in the CastleAuthor: Jackson, Shirley |
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From the Editors of Amazon.com: Or so she believes. But at last the magic fails. A stranger arrives — cousin Charles, with his eye on the Blackwood fortune. He disturbs the sisters’ careful habits, installing himself at the head of the family table, unearthing Merricat’s treasures, talking privately to Constance about “normal lives” and “boy friends.” Unable to drive him away by either polite or occult means, Merricat adopts more desperate methods. The result is crisis and tragedy, the revelation of a terrible secret, the convergence of the villagers upon the house, and a spectacular unleashing of collective spite. The sisters are propelled further into seclusion and solipsism, abandoning “time and the orderly pattern of our old days” in favor of an ever-narrowing circuit of ritual and shadow. They have themselves become talismans, to be alternately demonized and propitiated, darkly, with gifts. Jackson’s novel emerges less as a study in eccentricity and more — like some of her other fictions — as a powerful critique of the anxious, ruthless processes involved in the maintenance of normality itself. “Poor strangers,” says Merricat contentedly at last, studying trespassers from the darkness behind the barricaded Blackwood windows. “They have so much to be afraid of.” |
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 Whispers  |
WhispersAuthor: Koontz, Dean |
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For 35 years, Bruno Frye has lived in the shadow of the mother who made his heart beat with constant fear. And even though she died five years ago, the whispers still haunt him in the dark . . . enough to make him kill — and kill again. Hilary Thomas is one of his intended victims. And she’s about to learn that even death can’t keep a bad man down. |
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 Wire Mesh Mothers  |
Wire Mesh MothersAuthor: Massie, Elizabeth |
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It all started with the best of intentions. Kate McDolen, an elementary school teacher, knew she had to protect one of her students, little 8-year-old Mistie, from parents who were making her life a living hell. So Kate packed her bags, quietly picked up Mistie after school one day, and set off with her toward what she thought would be a new life. How could she know she was driving headlong into a nightmare? The nightmare began when Tony jumped into the passenger seat of Kate’s car, waving a gun. Tony was a dangerous girl, more dangerous than anyone could have dreamed. She didn’t admire anything except violence and cruelty, and she had very different plans in mind for Kate and little Mistie. The cross-country trip that followed would turn into a one-way journey to fear, desperation . . . and madness. |
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 Zombie  |
ZombieAuthor: Oates, Joyce Carol |
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Winner of the 1995 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel From the Editors of Barnes and Noble: |
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Summary:
Title List:
1. After Midnight by Richard Laymon
2. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
3. The Bad Seed by William March
4. Beasts by Joyce Carol Oates
5. Billy by Whitley Strieber
6. The Captors by John Farris
7. Come Out Tonight by Richard Laymon
8. Control Freak by Christa Faust
9. Crash by J. G. Ballard
10. The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl
11. Different Seasons by Stephen King
12. Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite
13. Face by Tim Lebbon
14. The Face That Must Die by Ramsey Campbell
15. Fever in the Blood by Robert Fleming
16. Finishing Touches by Thomas Tessier
17. The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum
18. Homecoming by Kimberly Rangel
19. Hunted Past Reason by Richard Matheson
20. Intensity by Dean Koontz
21. Kamikaze by Michael Slade
22. Koko by Peter Straub
23. The Lake by Richard Laymon
24. The Lost by Jack Ketchum
25. Mine: A Novel of Terror by Robert McCammon
26. Misery by Stephen King
27. Psycho by Robert Bloch
28. Rapture by Thomas Tessier
29. Red by Jack Ketchum
30. Red Dragon by Thomas Harris
31. Servants of Twilight by Dean Koontz
32. Shattered by Dean Koontz
33. Silent Children by Ramsey Campbell
34. Slain in the Spirit by Melanie Tem
35. Wasp Factory by Iain M. Banks
36. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
37. Whispers by Dean Koontz
38. Wire Mesh Mothers by Elizabeth Massie
39. Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates
