Gothic castles and suburban houses, vampires and possessions, cosmic dread and quiet dread, from the novels that set the rules to this decade. 381 books so far, across 82 series, plus 235 titles with no series listed. This is page 2 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonAlex Easton, a retired soldier, is summoned to Ruravia because Madeline Usher, a friend from childhood, is dying in the house she has never left. What Easton finds is fungus spreading over everything, a lake that seems to be alive, animals behaving wrongly and Roderick Usher losing his nerves. A mycologist and an American doctor help, and together they have to work out what is actually wrong with the House of Usher.
Rating coming soonMiranda is a twin, and both of them grew up in a Dover house their father has since turned into a guest house. She has pica, a hunger for things that are not food, which runs in the women of the family and worsened after her mother died. The house is sentient, it dislikes strangers, and it is not a safe place to be a guest.
Rating coming soonMr Lockwood takes a lease on Thrushcross Grange and rides over to meet his landlord at Wuthering Heights, a farmhouse on the moors where nobody seems pleased to see him. Snow forces him to stay the night, and what he sees and hears in the house sends him home to ask his housekeeper, Nelly Dean, what happened in that family. Nelly tells him about Catherine Earnshaw and the foundling Heathcliff, who grew up together on the moors as something between siblings and conspirators, and about the marriage, the grudge and the cruelty that separated them. Her account runs across two generations of two families.
Rating coming soonCoraline Jones moves into a large old house that has been divided into flats, with parents who are busy and neighbours who keep to themselves. There is a door in the drawing room that opens onto a bricked-up wall, and one day it does not. Behind it is a flat that looks like her own and is better in every way, with a mother and father who have buttons for eyes and who want Coraline to stay. They have been waiting for her, and the parents she left behind are still in the real house.
Rating coming soonLouis Creed takes a job as a doctor at the university in Maine and moves his family into a house beside a road where trucks run all night. Behind the house, down a path through the woods, the local children keep a pet cemetery for animals killed on that road. Their neighbour, an old man called Jud Crandall, shows Louis something further on, past a deadfall of branches, and explains what the ground there is for. When the family's cat is killed, Jud takes Louis up the path and the novel stops being about grief and starts being about what Louis does with it.
Rating coming soonPaul Edgecombe runs E Block at Cold Mountain penitentiary, which is where the state keeps the men it intends to execute, and the walk from the cells to the chair is a green linoleum floor the guards call the Green Mile. In 1932 a new prisoner arrives: John Coffey, a very large man convicted of murdering two girls, who is quiet, frightened of the dark and able to heal the illnesses he touches. The guards on the block are ordinary men doing a job they have mostly made peace with, and Coffey's arrival changes what that job means to them.
Rating coming soonA large Saint Bernard belonging to a family of mechanics is bitten by a bat in a field and contracts rabies, and the novel follows the disease through the dog over the weeks while the people around him get on with their lives. The family at the centre of the book has its own problems: the marriage is in trouble, the wife has been seeing somebody else, and a decision to have the car serviced is made for reasons that have nothing to do with the animal. By the time the dog is dangerous, the only people who do not know it are the ones closest to him.
Rating coming soonA great white shark begins attacking swimmers off a summer resort town on the coast of Long Island, and the town has a problem that has nothing to do with the animal: the season is starting, the businesses depend on it, and closing the beaches would ruin the people who vote for the officials making the decision. The police chief who wants the water closed is overruled, the attacks continue, and the novel's second half leaves the shore behind for a boat and three men who do not like each other. The shark is hunted by a police officer, a scientist and a professional fisherman.
Rating coming soonThe Benson family moves from the city to an old house in a town called Dark Falls, which the parents have chosen because the house was cheap and the air is supposed to be healthier. Amanda and her younger brother Josh are the only members of the family who can see that something is wrong with the place, and their parents put the complaints down to the move. The neighbours are friendly in a way that does not quite work, and the children who want to be friends with Amanda and Josh are extremely persistent about it. The town's name turns out to be a clue.
Rating coming soonLindy finds a ventriloquist's dummy in a dumpster behind the family's house and teaches herself to work it, which turns out to be something she is good at. Her twin sister, Kris, is annoyed enough by the attention to want a dummy of her own, and the second one comes with a different personality attached. The pranks between the sisters get worse, and the tricks that cannot be explained get worse than that. The novel is the book that introduced Slappy, and it keeps the possibility open for most of its length that the trouble is one of the girls rather than the wood.
Rating coming soonThe United States and the Soviet Union go to war, and within hours the country has been turned into a wasteland under a sky that will not clear. The novel follows a group of survivors across the years after the exchange: a girl with a glass ring and a talent nobody can explain, a professional wrestler who has been travelling the country, and a former soldier who finds that the end of the world has given him permission to be himself. Meanwhile something older than the bombs is moving through the ruins, hunting for the child.
Rating coming soonLestat de Lioncourt has been a vampire for two hundred years and has decided that he is bored of it. He is rich, powerful, protected and miserable, and when a man who claims to be able to move a consciousness from one body to another offers him a trade, he takes it. The body he gets is human, mortal and unwell, and the man who took his body has plans of his own that do not involve giving it back. The novel follows Lestat through the consequences of the most careless decision he has made in a long career of them.
Rating coming soonLestat has been following a mortal woman he cannot explain his interest in, and the Devil has been following Lestat. The novel begins with an offer: the being who calls himself Memnoch wants a companion, and what he proposes is not a bargain over power or money but an argument about the whole arrangement of the world. To make the case he takes Lestat through the history he claims to have been part of. The result is a vampire novel that spends most of its length inside a theological dispute, with heaven, hell and the reader's patience all tested.
Rating coming soonIn an alternate version of the 1860s, Russian prospectors bring in an inventor called Leviticus Blue to build a machine that can mine through the ice of Alaska, and the machine instead tears a path through Seattle, collapses the city's foundations and releases a gas that turns people into the walking dead. Sixteen years later the survivors live behind a wall, and Blue's widow Briar keeps her head down and works in the factory. Her son, who was a baby when the disaster happened, decides to find out what his father was doing, and goes over the wall.
Rating coming soonJudas Coyne is a retired heavy metal singer with a ranch, a bad back and a long-running habit of collecting objects associated with death. When his assistant shows him an online auction for a dead man's suit, advertised as haunted, he buys it for a thousand dollars because he cannot resist the gesture. The suit arrives in a heart-shaped box, and so does its owner: an old man who is now living in Jude's house, who has a reason to be there, and who is not going to be bought off, reburied or reasoned with. Jude takes his girlfriend and his dogs and runs.
Rating coming soonMoonlight Cove is a small town on the California coast where people have started dying and where the streets are not safe after dark. Four people arrive in the middle of it from different directions: a woman who does not believe that her sister killed herself, a federal agent working undercover, a young girl who has run away from her parents, and a veteran who uses a wheelchair and has reasons of his own for being there. What is happening in Moonlight Cove is not supernatural, and the novel's horror comes from what a group of ordinary citizens agreed to have done to themselves.
Rating coming soonNorman Bates runs a small motel on a back road, and his mother lives with him in the house on the hill behind it. A woman who has taken money from her employer and left town stops for the night, and the motel's register gets its first guest in a long time. What follows is the novel that introduced one of the most recognisable figures in American horror, and it does its work in fewer than two hundred pages, with a plot that turns on what the reader has been told about a family rather than on what they have seen.
Rating coming soonThe second Dollanganger novel picks up where Flowers in the Attic leaves off, with the four children out of the attic and on a bus heading south. Cathy narrates what follows: a decade of trying to build ordinary lives while the inheritance, the family that imprisoned them and the brother she loves all remain unresolved. The book runs from their escape in November 1960 to 1975, and it moves through a ballet career, a marriage and a plan for revenge that takes years to carry out.
Rating coming soonPatrick Bateman is twenty-six, works in mergers and acquisitions on Wall Street, and spends his evenings in restaurants where the food and the reservations matter more than the people eating it. He is also a killer, and the novel gives both lives in the same flat, detailed register: the suits, the tapes, the grooming routine and the violence are described with identical care. The narration is his own and is not reliable. The book is a satire of a particular version of the 1980s, delivered in the voice of the man it is describing.
Rating coming soonRalph Roberts is a retired widower whose sleep is steadily shortening. The insomnia turns out to have a consequence: it lets him perceive auras and other things that are normally hidden, and it draws him into a conflict between the forces of the Purpose and the Random. The novel is set in Derry, Maine, and connects to King's other work. His sleeplessness is treated throughout as a medical problem before it becomes anything else, which is what gives the book its slow pressure.
Rating coming soonDuring a family hiking trip, nine-year-old Trisha's mother and brother argue constantly about the divorce, and Trisha falls back to avoid listening. She wanders off the trail to find somewhere to relieve herself and cannot find her family again. Taking a shortcut to catch up, she slips and falls down a steep embankment and ends up hopelessly lost, heading deeper into the forest with only what she is carrying.
Rating coming soonFour lifelong friends reunite for their annual hunting trip at an isolated lodge in the Jefferson Tract, and there they find themselves caught between an alien invasion and an insane retired Air Force colonel. The four men share something they have kept since childhood, when they saved an older boy from a group of bullies: telepathy, shared dreaming and the ability to see a trace left behind by human movement.
Rating coming soonGerald and Jessie Burlingame have gone to their summer house on a warm weekday in October for a romantic interlude. Handcuffed to her bedposts, Jessie tires of her husband's games; when Gerald refuses to stop, she lashes out with deadly consequences. Still cuffed, she is trapped and alone, with painful memories from her childhood for company and her only living visitor a hungry stray dog. The novel stays inside one room for most of its length, and Jessie's company is a stray dog and the voices in her own head.
Rating coming soonRosie Daniels leaves her husband after fourteen years of an abusive marriage. A beating while she was four months pregnant had caused her to miscarry their only child, and the man she is running from is a police officer who specialises in finding missing people. She escapes to a distant city to build a new life and new relationships, while Norman Daniels uses his professional contacts to track her down.
Rating coming soonA new shop opens in the small town of Castle Rock, Maine, and its proprietor, Leland Gaunt, always seems to have exactly the object any customer wants, at a price that looks like a bargain. The price is not only money. Each customer is asked to play a prank on somebody else in town, and as the pranks accumulate the townspeople turn on one another with increasing aggression. The escalation is deliberate and cumulative, and the town's own long-running grudges supply the material the shopkeeper works with.
Rating coming soonThad Beaumont is a novelist and recovering alcoholic whose own books, cerebral literary fiction, have not sold well. Under the pen name George Stark he writes successful crime novels about a psychopathic killer. When his authorship of the Stark books becomes public, he and his wife stage a mock burial for the alter ego, and the figure they bury does not stay in the ground. The dead author behaves exactly as Thad wrote him, which leaves Thad responsible for acts he did not commit and cannot explain to anyone.
Rating coming soonIn Pennsylvania in 1979, a stranger drives into a petrol station in a 1954 Buick in perfect condition, goes to the bathroom and never reappears. The state police take charge of the car, which no longer runs, and store it in a shed behind the barracks. The car turns out to have a life of its own, and it begins to intervene: radios and telephones fail, the car moves, and the boot opens to expel things that cannot be described.
Rating coming soonIt begins with strange howling at night, and then a rabbit is found torn to shreds. Everyone assumes Grady's new dog is responsible, since the animal looks like a wolf and behaves as though it is partly wild. Grady is certain his dog is an ordinary pet, and most dogs do not howl at the moon or change into something else when it is full.
Rating coming soonFreddy Martinez and his friend Cara find an empty coffin in Freddy's basement, and beside it a small blue bottle labelled Vampire Breath. They open it, and quickly discover that this was a mistake, since the contents of the bottle are a good deal more consequential than the label suggests. Neither child knows what the bottle is for, and the story follows what they have released.
Rating coming soonThe novel takes place seven years after the events of The Silence of the Lambs and follows the intended revenge of one of Hannibal Lecter's victims. It is the third book in the series featuring Lecter and the second to feature the FBI agent Clarice Starling, and it centres on a pursuit rather than on a single investigation. It follows The Silence of the Lambs as a direct sequel.
Rating coming soonThe novel travels back to meet Malcolm Foxworth as a young and ambitious man. On a trip to Connecticut he meets Olivia Winfield, who is tall, stern and bookish and has resigned herself to remaining unmarried, until he proposes. Soon after she arrives at Foxworth Hall the shadows gather and his darker side appears, and the children born to the house include one beautiful girl who will change everything. The house itself becomes the explanation for everything the series later describes.
Rating coming soonBranded a traitor, betrayed by a friend and hunted by the vampire clan, Darren Shan faces what looks like certain death. His initiation on Vampire Mountain is drawing to a bloody conclusion, and the question is whether he can reverse the odds and outwit a Vampire Prince, or whether thousands of years of vampire rule end in this book.
Rating coming soonOf all the families in the mountain shacks, the Casteels were the lowest, and Heaven Leigh Casteel was the prettiest and cleverest girl in the backwoods despite ragged clothes and a father meaner than ten vipers. Then her stepmother ran off, and her father devised a scheme that threatened to destroy everything Heaven had been holding on to for her brothers and sisters.
Rating coming soonIn an old toy shop near his great-aunt's house, twelve-year-old Evan buys a dusty can of Monster Blood, which he thinks will be fun to play with. The can is not what it appears to be, and the book follows what happens once the contents are out of it, and how far the consequences spread beyond the boy who bought it.
Rating coming soonAmy's ventriloquist dummy, Dennis, keeps losing his head, so she asks her family for a new one. Her father finds Slappy in a local pawnshop. Slappy is ugly, but Amy has fun practising her new routine, and then horrible things begin to happen, just as they did the first time, because there is something odd about Slappy.
Rating coming soonTrina's father used to be a ventriloquist, and his dummies are stored in the attic of the family house. Trina and her brother Dan hear voices coming from up there, and they begin to wonder whether the dummies are alive, and what they would want if they were, and what happens to a family that keeps them in the house.
Rating coming soonRoland's group remains intact but scattered across different places and times. Susannah has been carried from the Dixie Pig to a chamber in Thunderclap; Jake and Father Callahan have entered a restaurant on Lexington and Sixty-first with weapons drawn, not knowing how many enemies are waiting; Roland and Eddie are in Maine in 1977, looking for where the walk-ins have been seen. They want to get back to each other.
Rating coming soonScotty has what looks like the perfect girlfriend: Lora is smart, beautiful and popular. When Lora leaves town, Scotty spends a secret weekend with Shannon, a girl he has just met. On Monday he wants to go back to Lora, but Shannon intends to keep him whatever it takes, and some of the ways she has in mind are not survivable.
Rating coming soonDarren Shan and Mr Crepsley set out on a dangerous trek to the heart of the vampire world, and they face more than the cold on the way, because the vampaneze have been there before them. A meeting with the Vampire Princes may restore Darren's human side or push him further towards the darkness, and his initiation into the clan is more deadly than he imagined.
Rating coming soonMark and Cara Burroughs' parents do not come home, do not call and leave no note. At first the children are not badly alarmed, because their parents have stayed out late before. Then other things begin going wrong: Mark's girlfriend breaks up with him and disappears, the police show no interest in finding the adults, and the cousin boarding with them seems to be watching.
Rating coming soonJanie and her friends make bets about which of them will be the first to date Ross, the mysterious new boy in town. He is good looking, he is interesting, and nobody knows anything about where he came from. Then the murders begin, and the competition between the girls stops being a game and starts being a question about who is safe to be near.
Rating coming soonTerri and Jerry try to solve a mystery about a ghost with their friends, in a story set near a cave where the ghosts are said to live. The question the book keeps returning to is whether their friends will turn against them. The legend is local and the children investigate it themselves, without much adult help.
Rating coming soonOn a classified dive into the deepest canyon of the Pacific, Jonas Taylor comes face to face with the largest predator in the history of the animal kingdom. He survives, and is haunted by what he is certain he saw but cannot prove: a megalodon, twenty tons of prehistoric shark. Written off as a casualty of post-traumatic stress, he spends years arguing that it still exists.
Rating coming soonAfter travelling with Mr Crepsley, the vampire who made him into a half-vampire, Darren returns to the freak show known as the Cirque du Freak. There he continues to fight his need to drink human blood, and the book follows his attempt to live among the performers while managing what he has become.
Rating coming soonDarren Shan, now a Vampire Prince and a killer of vampaneze, is obliged to attend school. Homework turns out to be the least of his problems, because bodies are piling up, time is running out and the past is catching up with the hunters. The school is cover for an investigation into whether the vampaneze have taken territory in the town.
Rating coming soonVivian Gandillon relishes the change, the sweet and fierce ache that carries her from girl to wolf. At sixteen she is beautiful and strong, and the young wolves are all after her, but she still grieves for her dead father, her pack is leaderless and in disarray, and she feels lost in the Maryland suburbs. She longs for a normal life, and then falls in love with a human.
Rating coming soonPaul Edgecombe has been suffering from a bladder infection that will not clear, and in this instalment he discovers that John Coffey can heal with his touch. Meanwhile Eduard Delacroix has been teaching a mouse called Mr Jingles tricks and has become attached to it, almost as much as the guard Percy Wetmore despises it.
Rating coming soonCarrie White is a friendless high school girl from an abusive religious household in the town of Chamberlain, Maine, and she has telekinetic powers she is only beginning to understand. Repressed at home and tormented at school, she tries to fit in, and the attempt leads to a confrontation on prom night after a cruel prank pushed by one of her bullies.
The horror shelf runs from the eighteenth and nineteenth-century gothic novels that invented the furniture - the castle, the diary, the thing that will not stay buried - through the twentieth-century paperbacks and film-era classics to books published this decade. Ghost stories and haunted houses sit beside vampire and possession novels, cosmic and weird fiction, folk horror, body horror and quiet psychological dread.
A book lands here when it is built to unsettle: a haunting, a monster, a curse, an appetite, or a wrongness the characters cannot name. Crime and horror overlap at the edges, and a thriller that stays on the crime side of the line sits on the mystery shelf instead. Cross-over titles that genuinely belong on both shelves reuse one page and are listed on each.
The love story is the plot: fantasy courts, dragon academies and modern cities all count.
676 booksPrimary genreEpic quests, grimdark cities, retold myths and a few very stubborn rabbits.
685 booksPrimary genreGeneration ships, dying empires, robots with opinions and one very unlucky astronaut.
536 booksPrimary genreDetectives, spies, locked rooms and the people who lie to the police.
599 booksPrimary genreCathedrals, courts, trenches and revolutions, all of it set in a past that is doing the work.
580 booksPrimary genreNovels where the prose carries the book: families, cities, memory and the modern self.
575 booksPrimary genreShipwrecks, expeditions, chases, frontiers and people who should have turned back.
324 books