W ho doesn’t love to be scared senseless? Okay, fine, plenty of people. But we know for a fact that a good portion of our readership love to read horror novels . We have scoured our past interviews for recommendations of classic horror books that every fan of the genre should read. And if you’ve read them all already, get in touch via social media to let us know what other firm fan favourites we should make sure to include.
“I’m a Halloween baby so being scared is in my blood, and Stephen King is the first person I ever read who really, really frightened me. The Shining is about a small family who go to stay in a hotel over the winter as caretakers. If you think you know the story because you’ve seen the film then you’d be wrong. This book is an absolute classic and a great way into the vast King oeuvre.” Read more...
Daisy Johnson on Books That Influenced Her
Daisy Johnson ,
Novelist
“It’s a quintessential gothic novel. It’s very short, but packed with this dense prose and disorientating, multi-sensory experiences. As it unravels, you begin to wonder whether the house is haunted or is it actually something more like The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman—a narrative of mental illness, the fallibility of perception. Or is it that Eleanor has a kind of telekinetic ability where she’s creating these disturbances herself, and she’s the supernatural figure? It does all that in a very short span of time, and it toys with everything that we know about the haunted house.” Read more...
The Best Shirley Jackson Books
Joan Passey ,
Literary Scholar
“Shori is a vampire. She’s not human. She’s a vampire who has been genetically modified to have additional melanin, which was taken from people of Black heritage. This allows her to withstand daylight. And that is a big thing for vampires. It gets rid of one really crucial weakness.” Read more...
The Best Books for an Introduction to Octavia Butler
Nisi Shawl ,
Novelist
“The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter is a book that I think everybody should read. It’s essentially a series of feminist retellings of fairy tales. Angela Carter takes the safety of the fairy tale, and she flips it – so in The Company of Wolves , for example, she plays a lot with the Little Red Riding Hood trope (for want of a better word). It’s fun to see what the meaning of fairy tales is, what the use of them is; and we could argue that the Little Red Riding Hood story is a warning for girls who are coming into puberty of the dangers inherent in men, and in not listening to your matriarchs telling you how to avoid those dangers.” Read more...
The Best Dark Fantasy Books
Alex Pheby ,
Novelist
” I can barely read these stories myself. It’s the only literature that gives me nightmares. This collection was read to me by a teacher at school when I was eight years old, on dark autumnal Friday afternoons. I re-read them as an undergraduate, and was absolutely terrified once again.” Read more...
The best books on The Gothic
Nick Groom ,
Literary Scholar
An anthology of classic horror stories, written between 1816 and 1912, from the English speaking world. Writing from celebrated authors including Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, M.R. James, Bram Stoker and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
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“It is not just a science fiction novel, it is part of the ‘invasion’ genre. It is one of thousands of invasion novels that were written from the 1870s onwards, which nearly always featured an anxiety about invasion from the European continent…What Wells does is take that idea of invasion fantasy but give it an astronomical scale. He turns it into what we would understand as a science fictional invasion. In terms of science, Wells was also picking up on various phenomena like a contemporary obsession with Mars.” Read more...
The Best H G Wells Books
Roger Luckhurst ,
Literary Scholar
Mary Shelley started writing the Frankenstein story when she was 18, and it was published in London two years later. Her chilling tale of how Victor Frankenstein put together a creature by sewing together human parts is said to be the first true science fiction story. If you've never read it, or read it a long time ago, it's definitely worth picking up again, as the subtleties of the original book, entitled Frankenstein: the Modern Prometheus, may have been displaced in your mind by the various cartoons and monster-movies connected to the original only by the name 'Frankenstein' (and some people, who haven't read the book, think Frankenstein is the name of the monster, rather than the name of the scientist who put the creature together).
Read below why it's one of the books most frequently recommended by the experts we've interviewed—on subjects as diverse as fear of death, women and society, and transhumanism.
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Dracula by Bram Stoker is the classic 1897 Gothic horror story. The most famous vampire story , Dracula has underlying themes of race, religion, superstition, science, and sexuality. Find out why Dracula is one of Five Books' most recommended books. Also worth looking at are Bram Stoker's Notes for Dracula
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“Lots and lots of people know the phrase, that ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ means a split personality: good on one side, evil on the other. They might even have seen one or two film adaptations of the book. But I think one of the things that would surprise folk who haven’t read the original book, first of all, is that it’s very short. It’s a novella, only about 150 pages long, yet it’s dealing with such amazingly deep themes.” Read more...
Landmarks of Scottish Literature
James Robertson ,
Novelist
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