100 Favorite Horror Books: October 2025 Edition

Continuing a new annual tradition. Titles organized by author name.

Hawksmoor, by Peter Ackroyd (1989)
Dark Entries, by Robert Aickman (1964)
We Are Here to Hurt Each Other, by Paula D. Ashe (2022)
This Mortal Coil, by Cynthia Asquith (1947)
The Damnation Game, by Clive Barker (1985)
Tender is the Flesh, by Agustina Bazterrica (2017; 2020 translation by Sarah Moses)
The Listener and Other Stories, by Algernon Blackwood (1907)
The Scarf, by Robert Bloch (1947/1966)
Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury (1962)
Long After Midnight: 22 Hauntings and Celebrations, by Ray Bradbury (1976)
Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale, by Charles Brockden Brown (1798)
Ancient Images, by Ramsey Campbell (1989)
The King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers (1895)
The Juniper Tree, by Barbara Comyns (1985)
The Breaking Point, by Daphne du Maurier (1959)
Don’t Look Now, by Daphne du Maurier (1971)
The Between, by Tananarive Due (1995)
The Pines, by Robert Dunbar (1989)
American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis (1991)
Lunar Park, by Bret Easton Ellis (2005)
I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream, by Harlan Ellison (1967)
The Collector, by John Fowles (1963)
Aura, by Carlos Fuentes (1962; 1986 translation by Lysander Kemp)
Something Stirs, by Charles L. Grant (1991)
Red Dragon, by Thomas Harris (1981)
Twice-Told Tales, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1837)
The House of the Seven Gables, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1851)
The Woman in Black, by Susan Hill (1983)
The House on the Borderland, by William Hope Hodgson (1908)
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, by James Hogg (1824)
The Damned, by Joris-Karl Huysmans (1891)
The Lottery and Other Stories, by Shirley Jackson (1949)
Hangsaman, by Shirley Jackson (1951)
The Sundial, by Shirley Jackson (1958)
The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson (1959)
We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson (1962)
Ghost Stories of Henry James, by Henry James (2008, edited by Martin Schofield)
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, by M. R. James (1904)
Blood Secrets, by Craig Jones (1978)
Uzumaki, by Junji Ito (2000; 2013 translation by Yuji Oniki)
The Girl Next Door, by Jack Ketchum (1989)
The Red Tree, by Caitlín R. Kiernan (2009)
Carrie, by Stephen King (1974)
‘Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King (1975)
The Shining, by Stephen King (1977)
Cujo, by Stephen King (1981)
Pet Sematary, by Stephen King (1983)
It, by Stephen King (1986)
Full Dark, No Stars, by Stephen King (2010)
And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe, by Gwendolyn Kiste (2017)
The Ceremonies, by T. E. D. Klein (1984)
The Cipher, by Kathe Koja (1991)
Bad Brains, by Kathe Koja (1992)
Skin, by Kathe Koja (1993)
Conjure Wife, by Fritz Leiber (1943)
The Fifth Child, by Doris Lessing (1988)
Rosemary’s Baby, by Ira Levin (1967)
The Stepford Wives, by Ira Levin (1972)
The Monk: A Romance, by Matthew Gregory Lewis (1796)
Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe, by Thomas Ligotti (2015)
The Hounds of Tindalos, by Frank Belknap Long (1946)
Tales of H. P. Lovecraft, by H. P. Lovecraft (2007, edited by Joyce Carol Oates)
The House of Souls, by Arthur Machen (1906)
Burnt Offerings, by Robert Marasco (1973)
The Beetle, by Richard Marsh (1897)
I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson (1954)
Shock!, by Richard Matheson (1961)
Melmoth the Wanderer, by Charles Robert Maturin (1820)
Child of God, by Cormac McCarthy (1973)
Toplin, by Michael McDowell, (1985)
Heartbreaker, by Maryse Meijer (2016)
The Seventh Mansion, by Maryse Meijer (2020)
Strange is the Night, by S. P. Miskowski (2017)
Beloved, by Toni Morrison (1987)
Zombie, by Joyce Carol Oates (1995)
Jack of Spades, by Joyce Carol Oates (2015)
Widdershins, by Oliver Onions (1911)
Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, by Edgar Allan Poe (1956, edited by Edward H. Davidson)
The Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe (1794)
Interview with the Vampire, by Anne Rice (1976)
Traplines, by Eden Robinson (1996)
The Subjugated Beast, by R. R. Ryan (1938)
The Room, by Hubert Selby Jr. (1971)
The Demon, by Hubert Selby Jr. (1976)
New Stories from the Twilight Zone, by Rod Serling (1965)
Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, by Mary Shelley (1818)
The House Next Door, by Anne Rivers Siddons (1978)
The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies, by Clark Ashton Smith (2014, edited by S. T. Joshi)
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
Dracula, by Bram Stoker (1897)
Julia, by Peter Straub (1975)
Ghost Story, by Peter Straub (1979)
Koko, by Peter Straub (1988)
Houses without Doors, by Peter Straub (1990)
The Other, by Thomas Tryon (1971)
Ghosts, by Edith Wharton (1937)
The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde (1890)
The Island of Doctor Moreau, by H. G. Wells (1896)
The Invisible Man, by H. G. Wells (1897)
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, by Yukio Mishima (1963)

“Digital Noir Prophecies in The Canyons and The Counselor” (In Review Online)

The Canyons and The Counselor represent an America unmoored from its own self-aggrandizing mythologies — the capitalist dream as nightmare of anxiety and violence. The films are haunted by symbols rather than subjects, made nowhere clearer than in McCarthy’s naming The Counselor’s title protagonist (played by Michael Fassbender) after his profession — he is a nameless intermediary, a metaphor.”

Read the full article.

“Numbness and Arousal in the Post-Postmodern Apocalypse of Too Old to Die Young” (Vague Visages)

“Bound up in taboo fetishism and constantly oscillating commitments between the base and the transcendent, and between comedy and horror (much like Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return), Too Old to Die Young uses its genre-codified landscape of moral corruption as an allegorical mirror for America’s crumbling civilization, and as a space for a far-reaching aesthetic study of eroticism and violence in art. Putting itself in conversation with the cinematic genre signifiers most loudly established by Alfred Hitchcock’s oneiric, perverse California masterpiece Vertigo (1958), Too Old to Die Young constantly scrutinizes the wavering spaces where the tawdry mingles with the sublime, where sexual (re)productivity entangles with morbidity and destruction.”

Read the full essay in Vague Visages.

Mike Thorn’s Favorite First Reads of 2021

Bleedthrough and Other Small Horrors, by Scarlett R. Algee (2020)

The Flowers of Evil, by Charles Baudelaire [edited by Marthiel and Jackson Mathews, multiple editors] (1857)

The Unnamable, by Samuel Beckett (1953)

Selling the Splat Pack: The DVD Revolution and the American Horror Film, by Mark Bernard (2014)

The Brigadier and the Golf Widow, by John Cheever (1964)

On the Heights of Despair, by E. M. Cioran [translated by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston] (1933)

The Trouble with Being Born, by E. M. Cioran [translated by Richard Howard] (1973)

Porno Valley, by Philip Elliott (2021)

Less Than Zero, by Bret Easton Ellis (1985)

The Rules of Attraction, by Bret Easton Ellis (1987)

American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis (1991)

The Informers, by Bret Easton Ellis (1994)

Glamorama, by Bret Easton Ellis (1998)

Lunar Park, by Bret Easton Ellis (2005)

Imperial Bedrooms, by Bret Easton Ellis (2010)

The Shards, by Bret Easton Ellis (2021)

Carmilla, by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1872)

The Queer Art of Failure, by J. Jack Halberstam (2011)

In the Presence of Schopenhauer, by Michel Houellebecq [translated by Andrew Brown] (2017)

Humanimus, by David Huebert (2020)

The Damned, by J. K. Huysmans [translated by Terry Hale] (1891)

The Europeans, by Henry James (1878)

Washington Square, by Henry James (1880)

The Bostonians, by Henry James (1886)

Ghost Stories, by Henry James (1898)

Billy Summers, by Stephen King (2021)

The Wingspan of Severed Hands, by Joe Koch (2020)

Straydog, by Kathe Koja (2002)

The Blue Mirror, by Kathe Koja (2004)

Dark Factory, by Kathe Koja (2022; forthcoming)

I’m from Nowhere, by Lindsay Lerman (2019)

Shock!, by Richard Matheson (1961)

The Birds and Other Stories, by Daphne du Maurier (1952)

The Running Trees, by Amber McMillan (2021)

The Seventh Mansion, by Maryse Meijer (2020)

Circles, by Josiah Morgan (2020)

The Barrens, by Joyce Carol Oates (2001)

1984, by George Orwell (1949)

White is for Witching, by Helen Oyeyemi (2009)

The World as Will and Representation, Volume I, by Arthur Schopenhauer [translated by Judith

Norman and Alistair Welchman] (1818)

Wes Craven: Interviews, edited by Shannon Blake Skelton (2019)

Of One Pure Will, by Farah Rose Smith (2019)

The Secret History, by Donna Tartt (1992)

A History of Touch, by Erin Emily Ann Vance (2022; forthcoming)

Miss Lonelyhearts, by Nathanael West (1933)

The Ax, by Donald E. Westlake (1997)

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