Best Horror Books

Frank Cauldhame, 16, lives on a small Scottish island with his father. He has killed three children in the past — all family members — and maintains the island through an elaborate system of rituals centred on the Wasp Factory, a contraption of fate. His brother Eric has escaped from a psychiatric hospital and is coming home.

Harriet and David Lovatt build a perfect large family in the 1960s English countryside, filling their house with children and relatives. Then their fifth child, Ben, is born: strange, immensely strong, and not quite human. The novel tracks what happens to a family—and a marriage—when one member refuses all social and emotional norms.

A death row corrections officer in 1930s Louisiana encounters a gentle giant with miraculous healing powers awaiting execution for a crime he may not have committed.

A recovering alcoholic writer takes a winter caretaker job at a remote Colorado hotel where the building's evil history begins to consume his sanity and endanger his family.

A superflu kills 99% of the human population, and the survivors are drawn into a final confrontation between the forces of good and evil across the ruins of America.

The tempestuous, obsessive love between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw across two generations on the wild Yorkshire moors.

Louis de Pointe du Lac, transformed into a vampire in 1791 New Orleans, tells his centuries-long story to a young journalist — a meditation on immortality, guilt, grief, and what it means to remain human while feeding on the living.

Seven children in a small Maine town band together to fight an ancient evil that preys on their fears — and are called back as adults to finish what they started.

A bestselling novelist is nursed back to health by his self-proclaimed number one fan after a car accident, and discovers that his rescue has become his captivity.

A family moves to rural Maine and discovers a burial ground in the woods with the power to resurrect the dead — with devastating consequences.

Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger, pursues the man in black across a vast desert in the first volume of Stephen King's magnum opus.

A seemingly airtight case against a beloved teacher accused of murder begins to unravel when impossible evidence suggests someone — or something — else was responsible.

A telekinetic teenage girl pushed to the breaking point by her fanatical mother and bullying classmates unleashes catastrophic revenge on her entire town.

A middle-aged Danny Torrance, now a hospice worker battling alcoholism, must protect a young girl with extraordinary psychic powers from a tribe of psychic vampires.

A teenage boy inherits a shed that contains a portal to a dark fairy-tale kingdom, and must enter it to save a world he barely understands.

A mysterious new shop opens in Castle Rock, Maine — and its proprietor offers every customer exactly what they desire, at a price that will destroy the town.

Stephen King's first published short story collection, gathering twenty tales of horror ranging from killer trucks and sentient machinery to possessed children and predatory creatures.

In 1950s Mexico, glamorous socialite Noemí Taboada investigates her cousin's mysterious illness at a decaying English family's remote estate — and uncovers something monstrous.

A young woman discovers her father's cache of documents — a mysterious old book stamped with a dragon and letters from a professor — and begins uncovering a multigenerational quest to find the actual tomb of Vlad the Impaler, who may still be alive.

The twelfth expedition into the mysterious Area X sends four unnamed women scientists into an environment that defies biological and physical understanding.

Victor Frankenstein creates life from dead matter and then abandons his creation. Shelley's 1818 novel, written when she was 18, invented science fiction as a genre and remains the most philosophically profound horror novel ever written: a meditation on creation, abandonment, and what it means to be human.