Best Horror Books

The title story — in which birds throughout England turn on the human population without warning or explanation — gave Hitchcock one of his greatest films. But du Maurier's original is more disturbing than the movie: the birds are never explained and the ending refuses resolution.

Roland Deschain reaches the Dark Tower at last. Every thread of the series converges: the Crimson King rages on the Tower's balcony, the Beams must be defended, Patrick Danville's strange gift is the key to everything, and the fates of every character in the ka-tet are decided. King includes a foreword warning readers that the destination may not be what they expect — a warning that has generated debate ever since.

Johnny Smith wakes from a four-year coma to discover he has psychic powers — a touch reveals things about people and events. When he shakes the hand of a rising politician and sees a future of nuclear catastrophe, Johnny faces the most impossible moral question: is it right to kill one person to prevent mass destruction?

1634. A merchant ship departs Batavia for Amsterdam carrying a disgraced detective, his bodyguard, a mysterious prisoner, and a demon that appears to be killing the passengers. Samuel Pipps must solve an impossible mystery from the ship's hold while his bodyguard Arent Hayes investigates on deck above. Turton's locked-room mystery at sea.

Children with telekinetic and telepathic abilities are abducted from their homes and taken to a facility in rural Maine called The Institute, where their gifts are exploited for purposes they cannot initially understand. Twelve-year-old Luke Ellis, gifted beyond any previous subject, becomes the unlikely center of a resistance.

A high school dropout who can see ghosts is offered a full ride to Yale — in exchange for policing its secret societies and their real, dangerous magic. Leigh Bardugo's first adult novel is a dark, propulsive thriller about privilege, trauma, and the occult beneath the Ivy League.

Lestat's rock concert awakens Akasha, the six-thousand-year-old progenitor of all vampires. She emerges with a plan to create a paradise on Earth — by killing most of the men in it. The ancient vampire world must unite or be annihilated.

Devon is a Book Eater — one of a secret species that literally consumes books rather than food, absorbing their contents. Her son Cai is different: a mind eater who craves the stories inside human minds. She will do anything to protect him.

Set between Wizard and Glass and Wolves of the Calla, the ka-tet takes shelter from a deadly storm called a starkblast. As they wait, Roland tells a story from his early days as a gunslinger, within which young Roland tells a fairy tale to a frightened boy. Three nested narratives — frame, memory, and fable — make this the series' most structurally playful and tonally gentle entry.

Roland and his ka-tet arrive at Calla Bryn Sturgis, a farming village terrorised by the Wolves — armoured riders who sweep in every generation to steal one child from every pair of twins, returning them as 'roont' adults, permanently diminished. King structures the novel as a western, drawing directly on The Magnificent Seven, as the gunslingers agree to help the Calla defend itself.

Sarah Waters's slow-burning Gothic novel. In postwar England, a country doctor becomes entangled with the genteel, declining Ayres family and their crumbling estate, Hundreds Hall — where a series of disturbing events suggests something malevolent, or something all too human, at work.

Twelve-year-old Jack Sawyer journeys across America — and across into a parallel realm called the Territories — to find a talisman that can save his dying mother. Stephen King and Peter Straub fuse epic fantasy quest and horror into a single sprawling road novel.

Rowan Caine writes a letter from prison, claiming to be innocent of the child's death she is accused of. She was a nanny at a remote Scottish smart-house — a high-tech home that watched her every move, recorded every conversation, and whose previous nannies kept leaving without explanation. A locked-room thriller for the surveillance age.

Grief-stricken and unable to write since his wife's sudden death, novelist Mike Noonan retreats to the couple's Maine lake house — only to find it haunted, and himself drawn into a custody battle with deep, malevolent roots. Stephen King's most romantic ghost story.

A nerdy teenager falls obsessively in love with a rusted-out 1958 Plymouth Fury named Christine — a car with a murderous will of its own. Stephen King turns adolescent longing and Detroit chrome into one of his most unsettling parables about possession.

Accused of murdering her elderly employer, blunt Maine housekeeper Dolores Claiborne tells the whole truth — including the far older crime she really did commit. Stephen King delivers the entire novel as a single, unbroken first-person confession of astonishing power.

Andy McGee and his eight-year-old daughter Charlie are on the run from a shadowy government agency called The Shop after years of experiments have left Charlie with pyrokinetic abilities she can barely control. The more frightened Charlie becomes, the larger and less predictable her fires.

Alex Stern is done waiting. To rescue Darlington from hell, she'll break every rule of the secret societies that govern her. Leigh Bardugo's second Alex Stern novel plunges deeper into Yale's occult underworld with a descent-into-hell plot, fresh murders, and demons closing in.

Mary Yellan arrives at Jamaica Inn on the Cornish moors to live with her aunt, and finds a place of terror run by her brutal uncle Joss Merlyn, who is involved in wrecking ships on the coast for their cargo.

Hal is a tarot card reader barely surviving on Brighton pier. When a solicitor's letter arrives informing her she's named in a will she has no right to inherit, Hal travels to Trepassen House — a decaying Cornish mansion where the eccentric Westaway family is gathering — and decides to pretend to be the granddaughter she isn't.

The Pyncheon family has lived for generations under the shadow of a curse laid by a man their ancestor wrongly executed for witchcraft. Hawthorne's second novel is a Gothic meditation on inherited guilt — the way the sins of the ancestors persist in the family's blood, property, and character.

Set in a twenty-first century England that has adopted republican government, Mary Shelley's visionary 1826 novel follows Lionel Verney as a plague sweeps across the world, wiping out humanity one country at a time, until he walks the earth alone — the last human survivor. One of the earliest and most devastating pandemic novels ever written.

Gwynplaine, whose mouth was surgically carved into a permanent grin as a child by a gang called the Comprachicos, grows up as a carnival performer and discovers he is an English peer. Hugo's most melodramatic novel is also his most direct examination of disfigurement, spectacle, and the face made into a mask by forces outside the self.

The third Cemetery of Forgotten Books novel returns to Daniel Sempere and reveals the backstory of Fermín Romero de Torres — his imprisonment in Montjuïc Castle during the early Franco years — connecting the series' mysteries to the specific historical violence of the Spanish Civil War's aftermath.