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…
This climate fiction novel follows four generations of women and their battles against a global giant that controls and manipulates Earth’s water. Told mostly through a diary and drawing on scientific observation and personal reflection, Lynna’s story unfolds incrementally, like climate change itself. Her gritty memoir describes a near-future Toronto in the grips of severe water scarcity.
Single mother and limnologist Lynna witnesses disturbing events as she works for the powerful international utility CanadaCorp. Fearing for the welfare of her rebellious teenage daughter, Lynna sets in motion a series of events that tumble out of her control with calamitous consequence. The novel explores identity, relationship, and our concept of what is “normal”—as a nation and an individual—in a world that is rapidly and incomprehensibly changing.
Centuries from now, in a post-climate change dying boreal forest of what used to be northern Canada, Kyo, a young acolyte called to service in the Exodus, discovers a diary that may provide her with the answers to her yearning for Earth’s past—to the Age of Water, when the “Water Twins” destroyed humanity in hatred—events that have plagued her nightly in dreams. Looking for answers to this holocaust—and disturbed by her macabre longing for connection to the Water Twins—Kyo is led to the diary of a limnologist from the time just prior to the destruction. This gritty memoir describes a…
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