The best horror novels with the most intriguing protagonists facing the most unsettling ghosts

Reading this book made me stop writing my own Southern gothic ghost book in the middle, rethink it completely, and start over again from scratch, and I wasn’t even mad about it. It’s just that good. It’s about thirteen-year-old Jojo and his family—his much-loved and very much dying grandmother, his strong, silent, and protective grandfather, his wild child mother, Leonie, his baby sister, Kayla, who looks to Jojo to keep her safe, and his white father, Michael, who just got out of jail. Everybody has secrets, and everybody sees ghosts. This literary novel won the National Book Award, but I promise you, horror readers, it will scare you silly and break your heart. 

This is the book that got me into Science Fiction in the first place and it remains, perhaps, my favorite novel. The setting is a near-future dystopian society where a subculture of young, roving gangs control the streets through extraordinarily violent antics (ultra-violence). This violent behavior is enhanced by “milk plus,” a drink laced with synthetic drugs available at the Korova Milk Bar, which is where we first encounter our main character, Alex, a 15-year-old gang leader.

When Alex is arrested for murder, he is selected to undergo an experimental therapy (The Ludovico Technique) designed to wean him off violent behavior forever, after which his sentence will be commuted. During these treatments, he is injected with (yet another) drug called Serum 114. This drug induces extreme nausea while he is made to watch horribly violent films. Utterly changed, Alex is released back onto the streets to a world in which he can no longer safely take part. To me, the book poses thoughtful questions about the dangers of interfering with natural human development and what can happen if our nature is too radically altered – either for good, or for evil.

The king of vampires, and arguably the king of Gothic, Bram Stoker’s Dracula is, at minimum, a classic representation of the Gothic. It is also an espionage tale underneath.

Although not elaborated in great detail (it is however, in the Swedish translation/interpretation of Dracula, titled Powers of Darkness), Count Dracula has a world domination plot he intends to enact. The details are vague but do seem to involve the numerous coffins he has placed around London. Are these all for him or for the legion of the undead he is creating, starting with female protagonist Mina Harker’s best friend Lucy?

Other espionage elements mixed in are main protagonist Jonathan Harker’s trip to Transylvania as a solicitor for the mysterious Count Dracula. In the espionage story sense, his “mission” as a solicitor could have been a cover (like James Bond) or truer to the Harker character, an innocent man caught in the web of a spy plot (as in Richard Hannay of The Thirty-Nine Steps). Like Bond and many other spy characters, Harker also finds himself imprisoned by his insincerely polite host.

Then there’s Mina’s own spying, which is essentially psychic in nature, having been derived from her connection to Dracula after being bitten and taken under his thrall. Finally, the climax involves a suspenseful chase across land and sea for the final confrontation.

Dracula is a perfect example of the tropes of both genres mixing and interacting to create a driving memorable storytelling filled with horror, action, and suspense.