Recommend a Horror book
 

Any recommendations? I'll start:

- "White Shark" a.k.a. "Creature" by Peter Benchley

- "The Damnation Game" by Clive Barker

- "Blue World" by Robert McCammon

Just a few that few have probably read.

Please don't make this into a list of the obvious. We all know "Salem's Lot", "The Shining" and "Jaws" are very good books. How about something you read that was good, but few have ever really heard of?

I would recoment:
Black Easter by James Blish. really creepy story.

The Ruins by Scott Smith soon to be a tweeny movie in april2008

Three great books are Year Zero, The Descent and Deeper (Part 2 of The Descent) all by Jeff Long. I read a few books every week and these three stand out. He's written other books also but none close to these three.
The Descent has nothing to do with the movie with the same name.

It - Stephen King
Book of the Dead - Various, ed. Skipp & Spector
The Undead - Various (inc. me; I'm shameless but it's a good'un) ed. D. L. Snell & Elijah Hall

Boy's Life by Robert R. Mc Cammon
20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill (MUCH better than Heartshaped Box, some of his stories outdo his dad)
Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

Tick Tock - Dean Koontz

One of his more overlooked novels, but its awesome. Dies in the end (just like ALL Koontz books), but the plot is pretty straight forward and the characters are cool. Nice quick, light horror read - well worth checking out.

I read "Book of the Dead" a while back. Some good early splatterpunk stories in that one.

I just read "The Island" by Peter Benchley. I am on "The Hellfire Club" by Straub.

i have an author to recommend. brian keene. perhaps the best horror stuff i have read...ever.

his books include:
the rising
city of the dead
dead sea
dark hollow
the conqueror worms
ghoul
terminal

all of them are very good reads. i highly recommend them. i wouldnt dream of comparing him to anyone i have ever read but if i was forced to i would say a mash up of early king and koontz with a little robert laymon and bently little thrown in for good measure.

i am in the middle of duma key by stephen king right now and it is pretty good. kings last couple of books (well..that i have read. i havent read liseys story yet) have been very good and remind me of some of his earlier stuff.

"Flesh Gothic" by Edward Lee

Beach House, By R.L. Stein.

I recommended this a while back. I know it's the same guy who wrote the Goosebumps books, but this story is a seriously good read for what it is. You could probably read it on one long car trip or something, and it's easy and thrilling.

this isn't a horror book, but it's a story i came across in various books over the years, so i fanally found it, read it, and fell in love. watership down by richard adams.

The book is pretty horrific, in it's own way. Definitely memorable and a true classic.

...

The last book that scared the hell out of me was The Shining, by Stephen King.

I also know that it was mentioned earlier, but I definitely recommend The Ruins.

That was definitely a fantastic little read.

I also recommend...

• Salem's Lot by Stephen King - Easy and guiltfree vampire read.
• The Mist by Stephen King - Quick read and significantly better than the movie.
• Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood - Not horror per se, but an absolutely brilliant bleak post-apocalyptic story. Brilliantly written and she is now one of my favorite authors.
• The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks - Comical, but well-researched how-to book on fighting zombies. A must for all zombie enthusiasts.
• Devil in the White City by Erik Larson - Slightly higher art historical fiction tale of the horrible serial killings at the Chicago World's Fair. Absolutely amazing writing, but not exactly an easy summer read.
• October Country by Ray Bradbury - Good little collection of creepy short stories. See especially "The Small Assassin."

re: It - Possibly one of the more overrated books that I have tried to engage myself with. Couldn't get into it. Might have been more interested had I not seen the movie first. Pity.

And I honestly think that every good horror enthusiast should indulge in Poe as much as possible.

i recently found an author i like (so far) - an englishman by the name of William Hope Hodgson.

he is sort of a contempory of Lovecraft...
Hodgson was a seaman which greatly influenced his writing. Most of his horror stories are related to things nautical.
Where Lovecraft had his Cthulhu Mythos, Hodgson wrote about a Sargasso Mythos.

Dont know how easy it is to find - i just found a book of short stories - it looks like it might be worth tracking down his novels.

Definitely. His the Ghost Pirates is rated in the second volume of Horror's 100 Greatest Books and it's also mentioned as recommended reading in the HWA's On Writing Horror.

Hope this is okay to post this here...

Which authors are closest to King and Koontz? Those are my favorite and I've exhausted their works. Well of course Joe Hill, but he doesn't produce fast enough. (impatient I am)

if thats the kind of stuff you like ..

try Graham MAsterson
Robert McCammon
James Herbert
brian lumley
Clive BArker
Peter Straub

Thanks! :D

Any particular books for each?

not really ..


some of the authors do non horror as well ..
but you can easily tell those from the others .


try to find Swan Song by Robert McCammon.

if you liked King's The Stand, then you'll like Swan Song

I have read Swan Song..many, many years ago...was great!

I don't scare easily, but I was pleasantly surprised to be a little on edge reading Dean Koontz's Midnight.
Beowulf author unknown isn't horror but it is an excellent read. Grendel is my favorite monster.
True crime should scare the shit out of you, so I recommend picking up a book at your library about any crazy you want to know about.

I need some good gore books...ones about torture. Anyone?

check out Jack Ketchum's : Off Season

My favourites...
 

Well, there are just so many to choose from but here are just a few of my favourites.

• The shining (Stephen King)
  Salem's lot (Stephen King
  Dracula (Bram Stoker)
  Book of dead things (Anthology with some new interesting talents)
  The dead will inherit the earth (Thom Olausson)
  Books of blood 1 & 2 (Clive Barker
  The dark tower (excellent tale by Stephen King, mesmerizing)
  Haunting Ghost Stories (an anthology with the old masters such as Poe and Lovecraft

...as I said there are a lot more to mention.

Gore
 

Check out the dead will inherit the earth at amazon, it contains short horror stories that evidently were deemed too extreme.

Thanks..will check them both out:D

This is an absurd and funny kind of horror, but I thoroughly enjoyed "Haunted" by Chuck Palahniuk (writer of 'Fight Club'). I read somewhere that people have actually passed out and thrown up during some of his public readings of this book.

If you're looking for perverse weird stuff, I cannot stress enough the output of Raw Dog Screaming Press and Eraserhead Press or...you could wait a couple days and pick up my book. This is not free advertising.

They are both good, the book the dead SHALL inherit the earth are a zombie story, need I say more?
The other book, the dead WILL inherit the earth are a collection of short horror stories.
Confusing with titles as close to one another...

Some of my favourites:

-Pet Semetary

-Gerald's Game

-The Stand


All three are fuckin' brilliant books by Stephen King.

how pathetic would a person have to be to do that ?

I'm reading The Incredible Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson. Its actually pretty disturbing, right up there with my favorites.

Haha, I'm not sure. Some of things he writes are pretty gross, but they mostly made laugh more than want to puke. Guess some people just have weak stomachs.

Especially Haunted. I actually love Chuck, but that book was so horrible I had to put it down (no offense, Chat). He simply does not have the writer's talent to pull off multiple character voices... I thought that the book would be interesting... But he was just trying to be as repulsive as humanly possible... Which is fine, but I'd like it from someone who can actually write. I felt like I was reading the notes and rantings of a bored sadistic high school boy.

Ouch! Tough crowd.

www.DunbarAuthor.com

Hey, I like Chuck... he was just reaching way too out of his league with Haunted. The concept was locking would-be writers away (not unlike Shelley's writing Frankenstein) and reading all of their stories. If you are going to show "stories" from different character, then each voice has to be different and distinct... But he's just not that talented. Each story had the same voice, the same formula, the same type of twist. And, if I recall correctly, each chapter was introduced with a seriously melodramatic and not well-envisioned poem describing the speaker/character on the stage... I was embarrassed that this book actually got published.

I'll agree with you about the poems that started each chapter. They could have been left out. It definitely had it's flaws, but I was still entertained by it. I actually liked Haunted a lot better than Diary. Those are the only two of his I've read, but I've been meaning to check out Choke and Rant.

Diary I haven't read, though I've been curious about it for quite some time.

I thought that Fight Club was great, but I had seen the movie first and Fincher adapted the book to a T (except for the end and a rather memorable scene in a broken down bus), so I felt that, even though I was reading it for the first time, I had already read it (and, to tell you the truth, I liked the end in the movie better).

Choke was actually really good; if you liked Haunted, I think that you'll love Choke; I find it more inventive (Chuck has this innate knack of just being ridiculously clever) and definitely better-written. And the shock-value parts, to me, seemed to fit in better with Choke than with Haunted (in Haunted I felt as though he were trying too hard just to gross people out as opposed to use torture and gore as a means to an end).

Lullaby is a personal favorite of a friend of mine's, though I have to say that, after he talked it up to me I was rather disappointed... I think that the concept behind it is brilliant, though all of the characters really annoyed me (which I guess is kinda the point)... You might enjoy it, though; if you liked Haunted, I think that you'll like Lullaby (and, again, it's a HUGE favorite of a friend of mine, so I think it's worth recommending to Chuck fans, even though I didn't care for it much myself.

Rant I know nothing about. I'll have to pick it up.

...

Back to book recommendations, Choke made me think of Train Spotting which, as a book was absolutely fantastic. I love the movie, but I thought that the novel itself was colorful and brilliant (Choke makes me think of Train Spotting because I read them consecutively).

Try anything by Brian Keene or Steve Gerlach...both brilliant writers