I grew up in a small town in Northern Florida. My family’s property was bordered by a stretch of forest which served as an adventure playground for my friends and me during the day. However, after dark, it turned into the foreboding landscape of the unknown. Many backyard camping attempts were abandoned with hysteria because of the noises we heard coming from inside those woods. For me, this led to a lifetime fascination with forests and the mysteries they hold. Though I’ve written fiction on a variety of topics, I was most excited about trying my hand at horror, inspired by my childhood proximity to the woods.
An unknown horror stalks a Florida National Park. Charlie Sparks is a small-town sheriff, his career derailed by rampant scandal and corruption. When faced with solving the gruesome campsite murder of a young family, Sparks suspects two recent escape convicts. He also sees a chance to redeem himself. The sheriff and his search party set out into the woods to find the convicts. What they discover instead is an unthinkable terror, driven by a voracious hunger for human flesh.
Of all the Stephen King books I’ve read (and I’ve read over half) this one connects with me the most because the monster is something typically beloved: the family pet. King has this special talent for making something ordinary and loveable seem terrifying. The rabid Saint Bernard dog of the title serves as a metaphor for the existential assault made on the family of an advertising exec
The #1 New York Times bestseller, Cujo “hits the jugular” (The New York Times) with the story of a friendly Saint Bernard that is bitten by a bat. Get ready to meet the most hideous menace ever to terrorize the town of Castle Rock, Maine.
Outside a peaceful town in central Maine, a monster is waiting. Cujo is a two-hundred-pound Saint Bernard, the best friend Brett Camber has ever had. One day, Cujo chases a rabbit into a cave inhabited by sick bats and emerges as something new altogether.
Meanwhile, Vic and Donna Trenton, and their young son Tad, move…
This is the first novel I ever read that made me into a lifelong fan of horror fiction. It’s a werewolf story but set in New York City, which no one had ever done before. Not to my knowledge anyway. Here Streib frequently writes from the werewolves’ point of view which makes the book that much more chilling. I admire a book that can take horror tropes and create something fresh and different from them.
In the dark, they are watching... They are waiting for you.
No one has ever lived to tell the horrifying truth about them. Yet even now the Wolfen are gathered in the night-dark alleys ... unseen, poised ... ready to destroy their helpless human prey. Only one man and one woman, trained cops, willing to risk their lives, stand in the way.
As monumentally terrifying as the film version is, the novel has some moments which easily rival the creepiness and revulsion of its cinematic counterpart. Actually, since reading a book requires extracting the image from the thought (whereas the film does the opposite), this makes The Exorcist novel just about as disturbing of an experience as can be had from reading.
Father Damien Karras: 'Where is Regan?' Regan MacNeil: 'In here. With us.'
The terror begins unobtrusively. Noises in the attic. In the child's room, an odd smell, the displacement of furniture, an icy chill. At first, easy explanations are offered. Then frightening changes begin to appear in eleven-year-old Regan. Medical tests fail to shed any light on her symptoms, but it is as if a different personality has invaded her body.
Father Damien Karras, a Jesuit priest, is called in. Is it possible that a demonic presence has possessed the child? Exorcism seems to be the only answer...
The reader is introduced to a collection of monsters, half-man/half-animal, who are abominations of nature created by the titular Dr. Moreau. He’s a demented scientist who wishes to exert his dominance over nature by perverting it. Wells makes us feel empathy for the monsters who suffer greatly at the hands of their creator. The book eventually makes us question who the true monster is—man or beast?
An unquestionable classic! Stoker’s narrative technique of telling the legendary vampire’s story through the diary and journal entries of its characters creates a realism rarely felt in horror fiction. The reader feels as though they are an investigator learning details of a supernatural phenomenon that can’t be reasonably explained in any other way. It makes for literature gripping enough to spawn decades of imitators.
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'The very best story of diablerie which I have read for many years' Arthur Conan Doyle
A masterpiece of the horror genre, Dracula also probes identity, sanity and the dark corners of Victorian sexuality and desire. It begins when Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula purchase a London house, and makes horrifying discoveries in his client's castle. Soon afterwards, disturbing incidents unfold in England - an unmanned ship is wrecked; strange puncture marks appear on a young woman's neck; a lunatic asylum inmate raves about the imminent arrival of his 'Master' - and a determined group of adversaries…
I write historical crime fiction, and my latest novel is set in a hospital, a real place, now closed. The South London Hospital for Women and Children (1912–1985) was set up by pioneering suffragists and women surgeons Maud Chadburn and Eleanor Davies-Colley (the first woman admitted to the Royal College of Surgeons) and I recreate the now almost-forgotten hospital in my book. Events take place in 1946 when wartime trauma still impacts upon a society exhausted by conflict, and my book choices also reflect this.
A historical thriller set in south London just after World War II, as Britain returns to civilian life and the men return home from the fight, causing the women to leave their wartime roles. The South London Hospital for Women and Children is a hospital, (based on a real place) run by women for women and must make adjustments of its own. As austerity bites, the coldest Winter then on record makes life grim. Then a young nurse goes missing.
Days later, her body is found behind a locked door, and two women from the hospital, unimpressed by the police response, decide to investigate. Highly atmospheric and evocative of a distinct period and place.
One cold dark night, as a devastated London shivers through the transition to post-war life, a young nurse goes missing from the South London Hospital for Women & Children. Her body is discovered hours later behind a locked door.
Two women from the hospital join forces to investigate the case. Determined not to return to the futures laid out for them before the war, the unlikely sleuths must face their own demons and dilemmas as they pursue - The Midnight Man.
‘A mystery that evokes the period – and a recovering London – in…
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