Top 70 Horror Authors and Their Work (According to Google)
This big list includes Stephen King, Tananarive Due, Ray Bradbury, Koji Suzuki, Mary Shelley, V Castro, Linda D. Addison, Clive Barker, Victor LaValle, Shirley Jackson, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Grady Hendrix, Daphne du Maurier, Neil Gaiman, H.G. Wells, Jonathan Maberry, Octavia E. Butler, and Ania Ahlborn.
Looking for a scare? Here are the 70 most-searched-for horror storytellers—ranging from classic horror to modern supernatural fiction.
Why do you find yourself fascinated with horror fiction? Therapy? The adrenaline rush? Fun? Whatever your reason for seeking out horror fiction, listed below are the most popular horror authors to send shivers up your spine.
Whether you’re looking for a classic ghost story or something more violent, we have a list featuring 70 of Google’s most-searched-for horror story authors. They are a great option to keep you up at night—and maybe even leave you unnerved during the day.
For this list, we worked hard to spotlight a variety of eras and cultures. As such, we are featuring the likes of Stephen King, Tananarive Due, Mary Shelley, Koji Suzuki, Ray Bradbury, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Clive Barker, Kiran Manral, Victor LaValle, Shirley Jackson, Owl Goingback, Neil Gaiman, Octavia E. Butler, Daphne du Maurier, Neil D’Silva, Jonathan Maberry, Jessica Faleiro, and many more! (We’ll also continue updating this list over time.)
Right below is the clickable list. For more info on these authors, you can either click on an author name—or scroll down for their bios, book lists, and links for even more about them!
Who are YOUR favorite horror authors? Tell us in the comments below!
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Top 70 Horror Authors (according to Google)
Janet Berliner (1939-2012)
Shirley Jackson (1916-1965)
Peter Straub (1943-2022)
Bram Stoker (1847-1912)
Anne Rice (1941-2021)
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
Mary Shelley (1797-1851)
H.G. Wells (1866-1946)
Jack Ketchum (1946-2018)
Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006)
Richard Matheson (1926-2013)
William Peter Blatty (1928-2017)
Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989)
Richard Laymon (1947-2001)
Robert Bloch (1917-1994)
James Herbert (1943-2013)
M.R. James (1862-1936)
Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951)
Ray Bradbury (1920-2012)
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937)
More info about these horror authors!
1
Stephen King
The author of such popular horror novels as The Stand and The Shining and ’Salem’s Lot (not to mention the epic Dark Towers series) and SO MANY MORE, Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine in 1947. He made his first professional short story sale in 1967 to Startling Mystery Stories.
In the fall of 1971, he began teaching high school English classes at Hampden Academy, the public high school in Hampden, Maine. Writing in the evenings and on the weekends, he continued to produce short stories and to work on novels.
In the spring of 1973, Doubleday & Co., accepted the novel Carrie for publication, providing him the means to leave teaching and write full-time. He has since published over 50 books and has become one of the world's most successful writers.
King is the recipient of the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to the American Letters and the 2014 National Medal of Arts. Stephen lives in Maine and Florida with his wife, novelist Tabitha King. They are regular contributors to a number of charities including many libraries and have been honored locally for their philanthropic activities.
More about Stephen King online
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2
Tananarive Due
Tananarive Due is an American Book Award–winning, Essence bestselling author of more than a dozen books, including The Between, her African Immortals series, The Good House, Joplin’s Ghost, and her new anthology The Wishing Pool and Other Stories.
Due also took part in the anthology Hex Life: Wicked New Tales of Witchery, featuring brand-new stories of witches and witchcraft from popular female fantasy authors writing in their own bestselling universes. Also in the book are Alma Katsu, Kelley Armstrong, Rachel Caine, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Rachel Deering, Ania Ahlborn, Amber Benson, Chesya Burke, Rachel Caine, Kristin Dearborn, Theodora Goss, Kat Howard, Sarah Langan, Helen Marshall, Jennifer McMahon, Hillary Monahan, Mary SanGiovanni, and Angela Slatter.
She was also a contributor to Jonathan Maberry’s middle grade anthology, Don’t Turn Out the Lights: A Tribute to Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. (That book also includes R.L. Stine, Madeleine Roux, Linda D. Addison, Christopher Golden, Luis Alberto Urrea, and more!)
Due has won an American Book Award, an NAACP Image Award, and a British Fantasy Award. She teaches Black Horror and Afrofuturism at UCLA. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
More about Tananarive Due online
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3
Clive Barker
Clive Barker is a man of astonishing creativity—novelist, director, screenwriter and dramatist—who has taken the worlds of the fantastique and horror and made them his own. Born in Liverpool in 1952, Barker studied English and Philosophy at Liverpool University before moving to London.
Barker began writing horror early in his career with short stories (collected in Books of Blood 1–6) and the Faustian novel The Damnation Game (1985). His fiction also includes The Hellbound Heart (1986), the classic tale of supernatural obsession that inspired the cult classic film Hellraiser, as well as the modern-day fantasy and urban fantasy with horror elements in Weaveworld (1987), The Great and Secret Show (1989), and the world-spanning Imajica (1991).
Running parallel with his publishing successes is a flourishing career as a film-maker. Barker’s directorial debut, HELLRAISER, touched new heights of horror and earned him world-wide recognition.
More about Clive Barker online
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4
Koji Suzuki
Often called the “Stephen King of Japan,” Koji Suzuki has played a crucial role in establishing mainstream credentials for horror novels in his own country.
Born in 1957 in Hamamatsu, southwest of Tokyo, he attended Keio University where he majored in French. After graduating he held numerous odd jobs, including a stint as a cram school teacher—an unorthodox one who loved telling scary stories to entertain his students. He holds a first-class yachting licence and has crossed the US from Key West to Los Angeles on his motorcycle.
In 1990 Suzuki’s first full-length work Rakuen (Paradise), won the Japanese Fantasy Novel Award and launched his career as a fiction writer. Ring, written with a baby on his lap, catapulted him to fame, selling 2.3 million copies in Japan alone, and the sequels Spiral and Loop cemented his reputation as a world-class talent. (Find the whole RING trilogy here.) He is based in Tokyo, but loves to travel.
More about Koji Suzuki online
5
Dean Koontz
Dean Koontz is the author of many #1 New York Times bestsellers, including suspense thrillers that frequently touch on elements of horror, fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and satire. His books include The House at the End of the World, From the Corner of His Eye, After Death, The Big Dark Sky, the Odd Thomas series, By the Light of the Moon, and the Frankenstein series.
He lives in Southern California with his wife, Gerda, their golden retriever, Elsa, and the enduring spirits of their goldens, Trixie and Anna.
More about Dean Koontz online
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6
Victor LaValle
Victor LaValle is the author of several works of fiction—including novels, novellas, and short stories. His novels include The Changeling, The Ballad of Black Tom, Lone Women, and The Devil in Silver. His novels have been included in best-of-the-year lists by The New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, The Nation, and Publishers Weekly, among others.
He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the Key to Southeast Queens. He lives in New York City with his wife and kids and teaches at Columbia University.
More about Victor LaValle online
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13 Updates: Victor LaValle—author of Lone Women, The Changeling, and Destroyer
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7
Janet Berliner (1939-2012)
Janet Berliner was a Bram Stoker Award-winning author who served as president of the Horror Writers Association 1997-1998. She was also a member of Authors Guild, the International Thriller Writers, and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
Her fiction includes the Madagascar Manifesto series and the novels Rite of the Dragon (1981) and Artifact: The Daredevils Club (2003) (with Kevin J. Anderson, Matthew J. Costello and F. Paul Wilson). She also contributed to the horror comedy anthology Blood Lite: An Anthology of Humorous Horror Stories Presented by the Horror Writers Association.
Berliner was born in Cape Town, South Africa, but moved to America with her husband in 1960.
More about Janet Berliner online
8
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Silvia Moreno-Garcia is the author of the novels Mexican Gothic, The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, Gods of Jade and Shadow, Certain Dark Things, and a bunch of other books. She has also edited several anthologies, including the World Fantasy Award–winning She Walks in Shadows (a.k.a. Cthulhu’s Daughters). She has been nominated for the Locus Award for her work as an editor and has won the British Fantasy Award and the Locus Award for her work as a novelist.
More about Silvia Moreno-Garcia online
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9
Shirley Jackson (1916-1965)
One of the most brilliant and influential authors of the twentieth century, Shirley Jackson is widely acclaimed for her stories and novels of the supernatural, including the well-known short story “The Lottery” and the best-selling novel The Haunting of Hill House.
Shirley Jackson was born in San Francisco on December 14, 1916, and began writing poetry and short stories as a young teen. Her first novel, The Road Through The Wall, was published in 1948.
That same year The New Yorker published Jackson’s iconic story, “The Lottery,” which generated the largest volume of mail ever received by the magazine—before or since—almost all of it hateful. “The Lottery” has since been published in dozens of languages, and is still required reading in U.S. high schools. It is possibly the most well-known short story of the 20th Century.
In 1951 Jackson’s succession of Gothic novels began with the publication of Hangsaman, and her “The Summer People” was chosen for Best American Short Stories.
In 1952, “The Lottery” had its first of several adaptations for television. Jackson continued to be a prolific writer of short stories for popular magazines. “The Lottery” was adapted for stage. In 1959 came The Haunting of Hill House, her best-known novel, generally regarded as the “quintessential haunted house tale.” That novel has twice been adapted for feature films.
In 1961 Jackson received the Edgar Allan Poe Award for “Louisa, Please,” one of the few such awards she ever received during her lifetime. The following year her best-selling novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle was included in the year’s “Ten Best Novels” by Time Magazine.
In 1963, director Robert Wise released The Haunting, the first film adaptation of Jackson’s novel, to superb reviews.
In 1965 Jackson was awarded the Arents Pioneer Medal for Outstanding Achievement from Syracuse University, but illness prevented her from attending. On August 8, at the age of 48, Shirley Jackson died unexpectedly of heart failure during her usual afternoon nap.
The following year came the first of two posthumous anthologies, The Magic of Shirley Jackson, a collection of short stories and three previously-published novels. This was followed in 1968 by Come Along With Me, the unfinished novel that Jackson was working on at the time of her death, along with sixteen short stories and three lectures.
Years later, in 1997, two of Jackson’s children edited Just An Ordinary Day, a collection of many of Jackson’s previously unpublished or uncollected short stories, which received near-unanimous great praise.
More about Shirley Jackson online
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10
Justina Ireland
Justina Ireland is a New York Times bestselling author, professor, and bookish bon vivant with a strong commitment to elevating marginalized voices. She’s written numerous books, including the zombie historical novels Dread Nation and Deathless Divide, as well as the Scott O’Dell Award winning middle-grade book Ophie’s Ghosts. She is also the author of numerous Star Wars books and one of the story architects of Star Wars: The High Republic. She is the former co-editor in chief of FIYAH Literary Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction, for which she won a World Fantasy Award.
More about Justina Ireland online
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11
Peter Straub (1943-2022)
Born in Milwaukee, Peter Straub was a novelist and poet who wrote numerous popular horror and supernatural fiction novels. His books include Ghost Story, Mr. X, Floating Dragon, Shadowland, the Blue Rose trilogy, and Julia. He teamed up with Stephen King to co-write the novels The Talisman and Black House. Straub also wrote a collection of short stories, Magic Terror.
Straub received such literary honors as the International Horror Guild Award. He won the British Fantasy Award, two Bram Stoker Awards and two World Fantasy awards. Straub passed away on September 4, 2022 at the age of 79.
More about Peter Straub online
Further reading
12
Neil D’Silva
Consistently listed among the top horror writers of India, Neil D’Silva was named by UK’s DESIblitz magazine among the Top 7 Indian Horror Writers to be read. His books include bestsellers such as Yakshini, Haunted: Real-life Encounters with Ghosts and Spirits, and the Maya’s New Husband books.
More about Neil D’Silva online
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13
Bram Stoker (1847-1912)
Irish author Bram Stoker is best-known for writing the 1897 Gothic horror novel Dracula. His other horror fiction also included the mummy novel The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), as well as The Lady of the Shroud (1909) and The Lair of the White Worm (1911).
In his life, he was the personal assistant of actor Sir Henry Irving and business manager of the Lyceum Theatre, which Irving owned. Stoker worked as a theatre critic for an Irish newspaper, and wrote stories as well as commentaries. He died in 1912 due to locomotor ataxia and was cremated in north London.
His novel Dracula is, of course, one of the most influential works in English literature. The novel has been adapted lots of times—in fact, the character of Dracula has been done hundreds of times, making him one of (if not the) most adapted figure of all time.
More about Bram Stoker online
Further reading
14
Sumiko Saulson
Sumiko Saulson—Social Media Manager for the Horror Writers Association—is a speculative fiction author whose focus is on horror and science-fiction. An award-winning author of Afrosurrealist and multicultural sci-fi and horror, their work includes The Rat King: A Book of Dark Poetry, the reference book 100+ Black Women in Horror Fiction, and the novels Solitude and Warmth. Their short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies including Tales From the Lake Vol 3, Forever Vacancy: A Colors In Darkness Anthology, and Slay: Tales of the Vampire Noire.
Winner of the Afrosurrealist Writers Award (2018), Grand Prize 2017 BCC Voice “Reframing the Other” contest, 2nd Place Carry The Light Sci-fi/Fantasy Award (2016), 2017 Mixy Award, 6th Place in the Next Great Horror Writers Contest (2017). They are the recipient of the 2002 STAND Grant for First Time Directors, 2016 HWA StokerCon “Scholarship from Hell”, 2018 Ara Joe Grant for Zinemakers, 2020 HWA Diversity Grant recipient, and 2021 Ladies in Horror Fiction grant.
More about Sumiko Saulson online
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15
Ramsey Campbell
Ramsey Campbell is a British horror fiction writer, editor and critic who has been writing for more than 50 years. The author of more than 30 novels, his books include Ancient Images, Fellstones, The Searching Dead, Somebody’s Voice, The Nameless, Pact of the Fathers, and The Influence. He has also written hundreds of short stories.
Campbell has received more awards than any other writer in the genre, including the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association, the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild and the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award.
More about Ramsey Campbell online
Further reading
16
Owl Goingback
Owl Goingback is the pen name of a horror fiction author. Writing professionally for more than 30 years, he has written numerous novels, children’s book, screenplays, magazine articles, comics, and short stories. He is a three-time Bram Stoker Award winner, receiving the award for lifetime achievement, best novel, and best first novel. He is also a Nebula Award nominee, and a Storytelling World Awards Honor recipient.
His fiction includes Coyote Rage (2019), Breed (2002), Evil Whispers (2001), Darker Than Night (1999), and Crota (1996).
In addition to writing under his own name, Owl has ghostwritten several books for Hollywood celebrities. He has also lectured across the country on the customs and folklore of the American Indians, served in the military, owned a restaurant/lounge, and worked as a cemetery caretaker. He is a member of the Authors Guild, Horror Writers Association, International Thriller Writers, and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
More about Owl Goingback online
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17
Anne Rice (1941-2021)
Anne Rice wrote gothic fiction, erotic literature, and Christian literature. Best known for her series of novels The Vampire Chronicles, Rice’s fiction also includes the Lives of the Mayfair Witches, the Wolf Gift Chronicles series, her Ramses the Damned mummy series, her religious Christ the Lord books, Servant of the Bones (also adapted into a graphic novel), and Exit to Eden.
One of the best-selling authors of modern times, Rice’s books have sold more than 150 million copies worldwide. Her books have been adapted into films and TV shows over the years. Her Vampire Chronicles books have been adapted to the screen, including the AMC TV shows Interview With the Vampire and Mayfair Witches. There have also been the movies Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994), Queen of the Damned (2002), and Exit to Eden (1994).
Rice was born in New Orleans in 1941 and grew up there and in Texas. She lived in San Francisco with her husband, the poet and painter, Stan Rice until 1988, when they returned to New Orleans to live with their son, Christopher. Anne and her son Chris co-wrote several books. She died in 2021.
More about Anne Rice online
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18
Walter Mosley
Walter Mosley is is the author of dozens of books, which have won numerous awards and have been translated into more than twenty languages. His book The Tempest Tales follows a man—wrongfully shot by police—who goes into the afterlife and is condemned to hell. Mosley also writes the Crosstown to Oblivion short novels, which explore life’s cosmic questions.
Mosley’s fiction also includes the acclaimed Easy Rawlins series of mysteries, the Leonid McGill series, the Fearless Jones series, and the Socrates Fortlow series.
More about Walter Mosley online
19
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
An American writer, poet, and critic—and one of the country’s earliest writers of the short story—Edgar Allan Poe’s writing has influenced literature in the United States and around the world. He is best remembered for his mysteries and his macabre fiction and poetry.
His important creepy stories include “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” The Masque of the Red Death, The Oval Portrait, “The Premature Burial,” “The Man of the Crowd, ” and “The Black Cat.” They are included in this collection: Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales & Poems
Poe actually invented the detective fiction genre. His 1841 short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” considered to be the first modern detective story, starred detective C. Auguste Dupin solving the mystery of the brutal murder of two women. That was followed by “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” with Poe writing a detective story driven by a real-life murder investigation. This was followed by a third Dupin mystery, “The Purloined Letter,” which Poe considered the best of his “tales of ratiocination.” The three books are included in this collection: C. Auguste Dupin Collection (Illustrated): The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Roget and The Purloined Letter
Poe was also a significant contributor to the emerging genre of science fiction. Examples include “The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfall” and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.”
The first well-known American writer to earn a living through writing alone, Poe suffered a financially difficult life and career. When he died, he left his legacy behind to another author who, sadly, decided to besmirch Poe’s reputation. So, there’s stuff about Poe we keep hearing that’s not actually true.
By the way, you should also read Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and The Invention of Murder by Daniel Stashower. This nonfiction book details the real-life events where Poe worked to solve a real-life murder investigation—by inventing the detective story. It is an amazing account. (I love this book!)
More about Edgar Allan Poe online
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20
Rin Chupeco
Rin Chupeco (they/them) is a Chinese Filipino author who started out as a a graphic designer and writing obscure manuals for complicated computer programs, talking people out of their money at event shows, and doing “many other terrible things.” They now write about ghosts and fairy tales in the likes of the Bone Witch series, the Reaper series, the A Hundred Names for Magic series, the Never-Tilting World series, the Girl from the Well series, and the haunting novel The Sacrifice.
More about Rin Chupeco online
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21
Mary Shelley (1797-1851)
The author of what is considered by many to be the first science fiction novel EVER, Mary Shelley was born to well-known parents author and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and philosopher William Godwin. Unfortunately, Wollstonecraft died as the result of Mary’s birth. Mary was raised by her father and a much resented stepmother.
When Mary was sixteen, she met the young poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, a devotee of her father’s teachings. In 1816, the two of them travelled to Geneva to stay with Lord Byron. One evening, while they shared ghost stories, Lord Byron proposed that they each write a ghost story of their own.
Shelley’s entry was Frankenstein.
Her other works include Mathilda, The Last Man, and The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley died in 1851 at the age of 53.
More about Mary Shelley online
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22
Linda D. Addison
Linda D. Addison is a poet and writer of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. She is the first African-American winner of the Bram Stoker Award—which she has won multiple times. In 2018, Addison received the Horror Writer Association Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2020, she was designated Science Fiction Poetry Association Grand Master of Fantastic Poetry.
“I’m often looking for a different perspective on fear,” Addison says, “while opening my own fear/pain as roots to feed what I’m writing.”
Her books include How To Recognize A Demon Has Become Your Friend, a collection of horror and science fiction short stories and poetry; The Place of Broken Things, a Bram Stoker Award-winning collection of dark, surrealistic poetry from Addison and Alessandro Manzetti; Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes, a Bram Stoker Award-winning poetry collection that captures the path between things gone bad and transformation; and Animated Objects, a collection of science fiction, fantasy and horror poetry and short stories.
Addison has also contributed to such collections as Sycorax’s Daughters, a scary anthology featuring 28 dark stories and 14 poems written by African-American women writers; Dark Thirst, a haunting anthology of vampire fiction from some of the most popular African-American writers; Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda, a ground-breaking prose anthology celebrating Marvel’s beloved Black Panther and his home country; and the chilling Don’t Turn Out the Lights: A Tribute to Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, a middle grade horror anthology.
More about Linda D. Addison online
Related links
Interview: Poetic Voices of Horror: Award Winning Poet Linda D. Addison
Panel: Black Women Who Write Dark Fiction and Poetry [Video]
‘Classic Monsters Unleashed’ by Jonathan Maberry, Seanan McGuire, Owl Goingback, and more
Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda—a ground-breaking anthology with stories from amazing authors
23
Jonathan Maberry
Jonathan Maberry is a New York Times bestselling author, five-time Bram Stoker Award winner, and comic book writer. He writes in multiple genres including suspense, thriller, horror, science fiction, fantasy, and adventure; and he writes for adults, teens, and middle grade.
His works include the Kagen the Damned series, Empty Graves: Tales of the Living Dead, the Rot & Ruin series, the Joe Ledger thrillers, Glimpse, the Dead of Night series, The X-Files Origins: Devil’s Advocate, Mars One, and many others. Several of his works are in development for film and TV, including V Wars, which is a Netflix original series.
He is the editor of high-profile anthologies including the X-Files books, Aliens: Bug Hunt, Out of Tune, Hardboiled Horror, Baker Street Irregulars, Nights of the Living Dead, and others. He lives in Del Mar, California.
More about Jonathan Maberry online
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24
Stephen Graham Jones
Stephen Graham Jones is a Blackfoot Native American author of horror fiction, crime fiction, science fiction, and experimental fiction. He has published more than a couple dozen books, including The Only Good Indians, Don’t Fear the Reaper, My Heart is a Chainsaw, Mongrels, Mapping the Interior, The Last Final Girl, and the apocalypse comic book series Earth Divers.
Jones has been an NEA fellowship recipient. In fact, he has received several awards, including the Ray Bradbury Award from the Los Angeles Times, the Bram Stoker Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Jesse Jones Award for Best Work of Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters, the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction, and the Alex Award from American Library Association.
At the present, he is the Ivena Baldwin Professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder.
More about Stephen Graham Jones online
25
H.G. Wells (1866-1946)
Called by many the “father of science fiction, H.G. Wells (1866-1946) often explored the terror behind brand-new scientific ideas. has been ” Brian Aldiss called Wells the “Shakespeare of science fiction.”
A prolific author in many genres, including fiction and nonfiction, Wells is most remembered for his science fiction novels. His blockbuster SF titles explored the horrific effects of scientific ideas before they were common in the genre—including time travel (in 1895’s The Time Machine), biological engineering (1896’s The Island of Doctor Moreau), invisibility (1897’s The Invisible Man), and alien invasion (1898’s The War of the Worlds).
His science fiction classics also include The First Men in the Moon (1901), The War in the Air (1907), When the Sleeper Wakes (1910), and The Shape of Things to Come (1933). Wells also wrote strange fantasies and supernatural tales like “The Devotee of Art” (1888), “The Moth” (1895), “Pollock and the Porroh Man” (1895), “The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham” (1896), “The Purple Pileus” (1896), “The Red Room” (1897), “The Stolen Body” (1898), “The Door in the Wall” (1911) and “A Dream of Armageddon” (1911).
There have been so many strong screen adaptations of his science fiction, including Island of Lost Souls (1932), The Invisible Man (1933), Things to Come (1936), The Man Who Could Work Miracles (1937), The War of the Worlds (1953), The Time Machine (1960), First Men in the Moon (1964), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), The Time Machine (2002) and War of the Worlds (2005).
More about H.G. Wells online
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26
Eden Royce
Eden Royce is a Black gothic horror writer from Charleston, South Carolina. A member of the Gullah-Geechee nation, she references the Gullah-Geechee culture in her writing.
Her debut novel, Root Magic, was a Walter Dean Myers Award Honoree, an ALA Notable Children’s Book, a Mythopoeic Fantasy Award winner, and a Nebula Award Finalist for outstanding children’s literature.
As a short story writer, Royce is also a Shirley Jackson Award finalist for her short fiction for adults. Her fiction has appeared in two collections of her work, Spook Lights: Southern Gothic Horror and Spook Lights II: Southern Gothic Horror. She has also contributed to anthologies Sycorax’s Daughters, Forever Vacancy: A Colors in Darkness Anthology, Dark Things V, and The Big Bad: An Anthology of Evil, plus magazines like Apex Magazine and Strange Horizons. Royce is also the recipient of the Speculative Literature Foundation’s Diverse Worlds grant.
She now lives in the Garden of England with her husband and cat. When she's not writing or reading, she's probably roller-skating, watching quiz shows, or perfecting her signature dish for Masterchef. Sometimes all at once.
More about Eden Royce online
27
Christopher Golden
Christopher Golden is an author of horror, fantasy, and suspense fiction. He is a Bram Stoker Award-winner for his novel Ararat. His fiction also includes All Hallows, the Ben Walker series, Road of Bones, Uncharted: The Fourth Labyrinth, the Shadow Saga series, and The House of Last Resort, as well as some of the official Hellboy novels, and the Alien novel River of Pain.
Golden has also edited numerous horror and dark fantasy fiction collections such as the vampire story anthology Seize the Night, the zombie anthology The New Dead, and the urban terror anthology Dark Cities.
Golden and Hellboy-creator Mike Mignola co-created the comic book universe called The Outerverse, featuring such characters as Baltimore, Joe Golem: Occult Detective, and Lady Baltimore.
Golden is also the founder of the Merrimack Valley Halloween Book Festival.
More about Christopher Golden online
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28
K. Hari Kumar
K. Hari Kumar is an Indian screenwriter and bestselling author of horror novels and short stories. His 2019 collection India’s Most Haunted was listed among HarperCollins India’s 100 best books written by Indian writers.
His 2018 psychological thriller, The Other Side of Her, spawned the acclaimed Hindi language web series called Bhram (2019). His books also include That Frequent Visitor, Dakhma, and A Game of Gods: The End is Only the Beginning.
More about K. Hari Kumar online
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29
Jack Ketchum (1946-2018)
Horror fiction author Jack Ketchum—the pen name for Dallas William Mayr—was the winner of four Bram Stoker Awards. His novels include The Girl Next Door, Off Season, Stranglehold, Joyride, Ladies’ Night, and more. His novels Offspring and Red were also adapted into movies. Ketchum’s stories were collected in The Exit at Toledo Blade Boulevard, Broken on the Wheel of Sex, and Peaceable Kingdom.
In 2011, Ketchum received the World Horror Convention Grand Master Award for outstanding contribution to horror fiction. His short story “The Box” won a 1994 Bram Stoker Award from the HWA and his story “Gone” won in 2000.
More about Jack Ketchum online
30
Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006)
Often referred to as the “grand dame of science fiction,” Octavia E. Butler was the author of several award-winning novels including Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel. She was also the author of Kindred, which was developed into a TV show. Recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant and numerous literary awards, she has been acclaimed for her lean prose, strong protagonists, and social observations in stories that range from the distant past to the far future. She passed away February 24, 2006.
More about Octavia E. Butler online
Monster Complex articles
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Richard Matheson (1926-2013)
Richard Matheson wrote in several genres including horror, paranormal, fantasy, science fiction, suspense, and western. His works include I Am Legend, Hell House, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” A Stir of Echoes, What Dreams May Come, Somewhere in Time, The Shrinking Man, and more.
Several of Matheson’s novels and stories have been made into movies. He also wrote for TV shows like Star Trek, Twilight Zone, and Night Gallery.
Incredibly, Matheson’s post-apocalyptic science fiction horror film novel I Am Legend was adapted into movies starring Vincent Price (1964’s The Last Man on Earth) AND Charlton Heston (1971’s The Omega Man) AND Will Smith (2007’s I Am Legend). And the novel ALSO inspired George A. Romero’s 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead—which transformed the entire zombie genre.
Matheson’s many awards include the Bram Stoker Award and World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Hugo Award, Edgar Award, Spur Award for Best Western Novel, and Writer’s Guild awards. In 2010, he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.
More about Richard Matheson online
Further reading
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Samanta Schweblin
Samanta Schweblin is an Argentine author currently based in Berlin, Germany. She has published three collections of short stories, a novella and a novel, besides stories that have appeared in anthologies and magazines such as The New Yorker, Granta, The Drawbridge, Harper’s Magazine and McSweeney’s.
Her fiction includes the novel Fever Dream, a finalist for the International Booker Prize, the story collection A Mouthful of Birds, longlisted for the same prize, plus the novel Little Eyes.
Chosen by Granta as one of the 22 best writers in Spanish under the age of 35, Schweblin has won numerous prestigious awards around the world. Her books have been translated into thirty-five languages.
More about Samanta Schweblin online
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William Peter Blatty (1928-2017)
William Peter Blatty was a writer, director and producer best known for his 1971 novel The Exorcist and his 1973 screenplay for the movie. Blatty won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Exorcist, and was nominated for Best Picture as its producer. The film also earned Blatty a Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture—Drama as producer.
The son of immigrant parents, Blatty was a comic novelist before embarking on a four decade career as a Hollywood writer, penning the screenplays for the great Inspector Clousseau movie mystery comedy A Shot in the Dark, plus What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?, the Julie Andrews romantic comedy Darling Lili, and The Ninth Configuration (which he also directed), among others.
Blatty refused to have any involvement with the first sequel to The Exorcist, which was ultimately critically panned. However, he wrote and directed the second sequel, The Exorcist III (1990), adapted from his 1983 novel Legion. His second film as a director, The Exorcist III would turn out to be both his final directorial credit and his final screenplay credit.
Blatty was active as a novelist for the rest of his life. His later novels include Elsewhere (2009), Dimiter (2010), and Crazy (2010). Blatty died on January 12, 2017.
More about William Peter Blatty online
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Nicole Givens Kurtz
Nicole Givens Kurtz has been called “a genre polymath who does crime, horror, and SFF (Book Riot).” Her fiction includes the Death Violations cybernoir series; the weird western anthology, Sisters of the Wild Sage: A Weird West Collection; the Cybil Lewis science fiction mysteries; and the Kingdom of Aves fantasy mystery series.
Kurtz is also the editor of SLAY: Stories of the Vampire Noire, a revolutionary anthology with stories by multiple authors set in a world of horror and wonder where Black protagonists take center stage as vampires, hunters, or heroes.
A two-time Atomacon Palmetto Scribe Award winner, Kurtz has published more than 50 short stories. She’s been published by Pseudopod, Fiyah, Apex Magazine, White Wolf, The Realm (formerly Serial Box), Subsume, and Baen.
Kurtz is a member of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and Horror Writers Association. She is the owner of Mocha Memoirs Press. She has conducted workshops for Clarion and is an active instructor at Speculative Fiction Academy.
More about Nicole Givens Kurtz online
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Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989)
Daphne du Maurier has been called one of the great shapers of popular culture and the modern imagination. Among her more famous works are The Scapegoat, Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, and the short story “The Birds,” all of which were subsequently made into films—the latter three directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
More about Daphne du Maurier online
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Mariana Enríquez
Mariana Enríquez is an Argentine journalist, novelist, and short story writer. Her horror novel Our Share of Night got plugs from the likes of Silvia Moreno-Garcia (“One of Latin America’s most exciting authors.”), Publishers Weekly (“A masterpiece of literary horror.”), and Alan Moore (“A magnificent accomplishment.”).
Her short fiction collections include Things We Lost in the Fire and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, which was a finalist for the International Booker Prize, the Kirkus Prize, the Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Fiction.
Enríquez works as a journalist and is the deputy editor of the arts and culture section of a newspaper, and she dictates literature workshops.
More about Mariana Enríquez online
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Richard Laymon (1947-2001)
Richard Laymon wrote suspense and horror fiction, especially in the splatterpunk subgenre. His works include more than 60 short stories and more than 30 novels, some published under the pseudonym Richard Kelly.
His novel Flesh was named Best Horror Novel of 1988 by Science Fiction Chronicle. He won the Bram Stoker Award in 2001 for The Traveling Vampire Show. His other books include The Cellar (Beast House Book 1), After Midnight, Island, Endless Night, Darkness, Tell Us, Blood Games, The Woods are Dark, Body Rides, In the Dark, Beware, and Bite.
Richard was president of the Horror Writers Association (2000-2001).
The tribute anthology In Laymon’s Terms (2011) featured short stories and non-fiction tribute essays by authors Bentley Little, Jack Ketchum, Gary Brandner, Edward Lee, and more.
More about Richard Laymon online
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Junji Ito
Junji Ito is a Japanese horror manga artist. His work includes Tomie, about a femme fatale who can drive any man to murder, even if the victim is often Tomie herself; the story collections Tombs and Shiver; the two-volume story Gyo, about fish controlled by a strain of sentient bacteria called “the death stench”; and Uzumaki, about a town obsessed with spirals.
Ito’s comics have been adapted to other media, including movies and TV shows.
More about Junji Ito online
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Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman is an award-winning author of books, graphic novels, short stories, and films for all ages. His titles include American Gods, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (with Terry Pratchett), Neverwhere, Norse Mythology, The Graveyard Book, Coraline, and the Sandman series of graphic novels, among other works. His fiction has received Newbery, Carnegie, Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Eisner awards.
Born in Hampshire, UK, Gaiman now lives in the United States near Minneapolis. As a child he discovered his love of books, reading, and stories, devouring the works of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, James Branch Cabell, Edgar Allan Poe, Michael Moorcock, Ursula K. LeGuin, Gene Wolfe, and G.K. Chesterton.
A self-described “feral child who was raised in libraries,” Gaiman credits librarians with fostering a life-long love of reading: “I wouldn’t be who I am without libraries. I was the sort of kid who devoured books, and my happiest times as a boy were when I persuaded my parents to drop me off in the local library on their way to work, and I spent the day there. I discovered that librarians actually want to help you: they taught me about interlibrary loans.”
More about Neil Gaiman online
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Nadia Bulkin
Nadia Bulkin is an Indonesian-American political scientist and author of short stories, largely in horror fiction. In 2018, she was nominated in the Shirley Jackson Awards for both short fiction (“Live Through This”) and Single-Author Collection (She Said Destroy).
Bulkin has also contributed to the collections The Best Horror of the Year; Cassilda’s Song: Tales Inspired by Robert W. Chambers King in Yellow Mythos; Nightmare Magazine, Issue 49 (October 2016, People of Colo(u)r Destroy Horror! Special Issue); Black Apples: 18 new fairytales; Ride the Star Wind: Cthulhu, Space Opera, and the Cosmic Weird; Aickman’s Heirs; Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters; Tales from a Talking Board; Autumn Cthulhu; Nightmare Magazine, Issue 54; Phantasm Japan: Fantasies Light and Dark, From and About Japan; and Chthonic: Weird Tales of Inner Earth.
Bulkin has a B.A. in Political Science from Barnard College (Columbia University) and an M.A. in International Affairs from American University’s School of International Service. Her non-fiction essays on sport and nationalism have appeared in Tor, The Classical, The Diplomat, and The Battle Royale Slam Book (Haikasoru).
She grew up in Jakarta, Indonesia, with her Javanese father and American mother, before relocating to Lincoln, Nebraska. She currently lives in Washington, D.C., where she does not work for the government. She has a black cat named Piper (after her favorite Charmed witch), who is the light of her life.
More about Nadia Bulkin online
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Robert Bloch (1917-1994)
Over a writing career of 60 years, Robert Bloch wrote hundreds of short stories and more than 30 novels—in the genres of horror, crime fiction, fantasy, and science fiction. His fiction has been dramatized for movies, TV, radio, and comic books.
He started out as a protege of H.P. Lovecraft, but eventually moved in the direction of writing crime and psychological horror fiction. His most famous book, Psycho (1959), inspired the movie by director Alfred Hitchcock. Bloch’s other books include Psycho II, Psycho House, American Gothic, Firebug, The Kidnapper, The Star Stalker, Night-World, and Strange Eons.
Bloch was a contributor to pulp magazines such as Weird Tales in his early career, and was also a prolific screenwriter and a major contributor to science fiction fanzines and fandom in general.
He won the Hugo Award (for his story “That Hell-Bound Train”), the Bram Stoker Award, and the World Fantasy Award. He served a term as president of the Mystery Writers of America (1970).
More about Robert Bloch online
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Kiran Manral
Kiran Manral is an Indian author, TEDx Speaker, columnist, mentor and feminist. She has written books across genres in both fiction and nonfiction.
Her books include the horror novels More Things in Heaven and Earth and The Face at the Window, the mysteries The Kitty Party Murder and Reluctant Detective, and the time travel novel of guilt and repurcussions All Those Who Wander.
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Joe Hill
Joe Hill is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the novels Heart-Shaped Box, NOS4A2, The Fireman, and Horns. The book Strange Weather is a collection of novellas. Hill’s other works include the short fiction collections Full Throttle and 20th Century Ghosts, plus several graphic novels, including Basketful of Heads, Plunge, Dying is Easy, and The Wraith: Welcome to Christmasland (which continues the story of NOS4A2’s Charlie Manx).
He is also the Eisner Award-winning writer of the long-running comic book Locke & Key, with artistic maestro Gabriel Rodriguez. In 2011 Hill won the Eisner Award (Best Writer) for his work on the series. The six books in the Locke & Key saga formed the basis for a hit TV series on Netflix. A seventh volume, published in 2022, married the world of Locke & Key to the epic Sandman universe.
Much of Hill’s work has been adapted for film and TV, including Horns (Lionsgate), NOS4A2 (AMC), In the Tall Grass (Netflix), and The Black Phone (Blumhouse).
More about Joe Hill online
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V. Castro
V. Castro is a Bram Stoker Award-nominated horror writer born in San Antonio, Texas, to Mexican American parents. She’s been writing horror stories since she was a child, always fascinated by Mexican folklore and the urban legends of Texas.
Her fiction includes the novels The Haunting of Alejandra, Goddess of Filth, The Queen of the Cicadas, Out of Aztlan, the official tie-in Aliens: Vasquez, novelletes Las Posadas and Hairspray and Switchblades, the short story collection Mestiza Blood, and stories in the anthologies Worst Laid Plans: an Anthology of Vacation Horror and Lockdown: Stories of Crime, Terror, and Hope During a Pandemic.
Castro now lives in the United Kingdom with her family, writing and traveling with her children.
More about V Castro online
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James Herbert (1943-2013)
Born in East End, London, England, horror author James Herbert wrote more than 20 novels that sold more than 50 million copies worldwide. Working for an advertising company, Herbert was 28 when he wrote his first novel. That book, The Rats, is now considered a horror classic.
His books also include The Fog, Shrine, the Rats Trilogy (The Rats, Lair, Domain), the David Ash series (Haunted, The Ghosts of Sleath, Ash), The Secret of Crickley Hall, Others, ’48, The Magic Cottage, and The Survivor. Not only did he write the novels, he designed some of their covers, too. His book Shrine was made into the movie The Unholy.
In 2010, he was made a Grand Master of Horror by the World Horror Convention. In 2010, Herbert was also awarded an OBE by the Queen for services to literature. He died in 2013 in Woodmancote, Henfield, West Sussex, England, UK.
More about James Herbert online
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Mónica Ojeda
Mónica Ojeda is an Ecuadorian writer of several novels and poetry collections. Her novel Jawbone was a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award in Translated Literature. “Was desire something like being possessed by a nightmare?” Interweaving pop culture references and horror concepts drawn from from Herman Melville, H. P. Lovecraft, and anonymous “creepypastas,” Jawbone is an ominous, multivocal novel that explores the terror inherent in the pure potentiality of adolescence and the fine line between desire and fear.
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Alma Katsu
Born in Alaska, Alma Katsu writes paranormal romance, historical fiction, Gothic fiction, and dark fantasy. Her books have been translated into over a dozen languages, and have been published in the United Kingdom, Brazil, Spain and Italy. She spent much of her youth living near Concord, Massachusetts, which she credits with developing her interest in the early American history featured in her novels.
Her fiction includes the Bram Stoker Award-nominated The Fervor (a novel about the horrors of the Japanese American internment camps in World War II, inspired by the Japanese yokai and the jorogumo spider demon), The Hunger (a historical tale of the Donner party which Stephen King called “deeply, deeply disturbing, hard to put down, not recommended reading after dark”), “The Wehrwolf” (a short story set in the 1940s about Nazis and a werewolf), and The Deep (featuring an eerie, psychological twist on the Titanic and the ill-fated sail of its sister ship, the Britannic).
Her Taker Trilogy, described as a literary take on the Faustian bargain, includes The Taker, The Reckoning, The Descent, and the related story “The Witch Sisters.”
Her spy fiction—which includes Red Widow, Red London, and the short story “Black Vault”—blends her storytelling skills with her 30+ year career as an intelligence officer.
Katsu also took part in the anthology Hex Life: Wicked New Tales of Witchery, featuring brand-new stories of witches and witchcraft written by popular female fantasy authors writing in their own bestselling universes. Also in the book are Tananarive Due, Ania Ahlborn, Kelley Armstrong, Rachel Caine, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Rachel Deering, Amber Benson, Chesya Burke, Rachel Caine, Kristin Dearborn, Theodora Goss, Kat Howard, Sarah Langan, Helen Marshall, Jennifer McMahon, Hillary Monahan, Mary SanGiovanni, and Angela Slatter.
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Ryū Murakami
The New York Times says that Ryū Murakami’s novels are “filled with entertaining psychopaths.” A Japanese novelist, short story writer, essayist and filmmaker, Murakami’s novels explore human nature through themes of disillusion, drug use, surrealism, murder and war, set against the dark backdrop of Japan. Awarded the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1976 for his novel Almost Transparent Blue, following a group of young people drowned in sex and drugs, Murakami has gone on to explore with cinematic intensity the themes of violence and technology in contemporary Japanese society. His fiction also includes the novels In the Miso Soup, Piercing, Audition, From the Fatherland with Love, Popular Hits of the Showa Era, and Coin Locker Babies. He also wrote the short stories found in the collection Tokyo Decadence: 15 Stories.
More about Ryū Murakami online
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Lauren Beukes
An award-winning author, Lauren Beukes’ fiction has been hailed by the likes of Stephen King, Gillian Flynn, George R.R. Martin. Her books include The Shining Girls (which has been adapted by AppleTV+), Bridge, Zoo City, Moxyland, Broken Monsters, and Afterland. Her books also include Ungirls, a collection of short stories, and Slipping, which includes short stories, essays, and other writing.
Her comics work includes the original horror series Survivors’ Club (with Dale Halvorsen and Ryan Kelly), Fairest: The Hidden Kingdom (a Japanese horror remix of Rapunzel with artist Inaki), and Sensation Comics “The Problem With Cats” (a Wonder Woman story with Mike Maihack).
Beukes has won several awards, including The Arthur C. Clarke Award, The University of Johannesburg Prize, the Strand Critics Choice Award, The Kitschies Red Tentacle, The August Derleth Prize, RT Thriller of the Year, Exclusive Books Booksellers Choice Award, and the prestigious Mbokodo Award for women in the creative arts from South Africa’s Department of Arts and Culture.
Beukes is also a screenwriter, journalist, and award-winning documentary maker.
More about Lauren Beukes online
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Helen Oyeyemi
Named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists, Helen Oyeyemi is a British novelist who lives in Prague with an ever-increasing perfume wardrobe. (Let’s just say the bottle count exceeds 150, but so far is less than 300.)
Her novels include White is for Witching (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), Mr. Fox (winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction), The Icarus Girl (a striking variation on the classic literary theme of doubles—both real and spiritual), Boy, Snow, Bird (recasting the Snow White fairy tale as a story of family secrets, race, beauty, and vanity), Peaces, Gingerbread, and The Opposite House.
She also wrote Juniper’s Whitening AND Victimese (featuring two plays that explore the pain of living and the difficulty of dying) and the collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours.
More about Helen Oyeyemi online
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Ania Ahlborn
Born in Poland, Ania Ahlborn is a horror thriller author who started out as self-published. She became Amazon’s top selling horror novelist with her self-published novel Seed, which was developed into film by Amazon Studios.
Now published through Simon and Schuster, Ahlborn’s fiction now includes the books Brother, The Shuddering, The Bird Eater, The Devil Crept In, Dark Across the Bay, Within These Walls, The Neighbors, and If You See Her, plus the novellas The Pretty Ones and I Call Upon Thee.
In 2015 and 2017 she was nominated for the This is Horror award as well as making the Bram Stoker Award Recommendations list from the Horror Writers Association.
She lives in South Carolina with her husband and their dog.
Ahlborn also took part in the anthology Hex Life: Wicked New Tales of Witchery, featuring brand-new stories of witches and witchcraft written by popular female fantasy authors writing in their own bestselling universes. Also in the book are Tananarive Due, Alma Katsu, Kelley Armstrong, Rachel Caine, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Rachel Deering, Amber Benson, Chesya Burke, Rachel Caine, Kristin Dearborn, Theodora Goss, Kat Howard, Sarah Langan, Helen Marshall, Jennifer McMahon, Hillary Monahan, Mary SanGiovanni, and Angela Slatter.
More about Ania Ahlborn online
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Yangsze Choo
Yangsze Choo is a NYTimes bestselling novelist and a fourth generation Malaysian of Chinese descent. Due to a childhood spent in various countries, she can eavesdrop (badly) in several languages. After graduating from Harvard, she worked in various corporate jobs and had a briefcase, while writing fiction on a coffee table at home in her spare time.
Her debut novel, The Ghost Bride, was a New York Times bestseller and now a Netflix Original series. Her second novel, The Night Tiger, was a Reese Witherspoon Bookclub pick and a Big Jubilee Read selection for Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee.
Choo lives in California with her family and loves to eat and read (often at the same time). Her upcoming third novel, The Fox Wife, and all previous books would not have been possible without large quantities of dark chocolate.
Yangsze is happy to visit book clubs via Zoom! You can find her on her website, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
More about Yangsze Choo online
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Grady Hendrix
Grady Hendrix writes horror comedy fiction (among other things). In addition to Horrorstör, his works include the “wildly entertaining” real estate horror comedy How to Sell a Haunted House; the book The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires about, well, a Southern vampire getting clubbed to death with books; the novel We Sold Our Souls, a heavy metal take on the Faust legend; The Final Girl Support Group, with its clever spin on slasher movie ideas; and My Best Friend’s Exorcism, about demonic possession, friendship, exorcism, and the Eighties (it’s basically Beaches meets The Exorcist).
Hendrix also wrote the Bram Stoker Award-winning book Paperbacks from Hell, a history of the horror paperback boom in the 1970s and 1980s.
More about Grady Hendrix online
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Alisha “Priti” Kirpalani
Alisha ‘Priti’ Kirpalani is based in Mumbai, India. Her journey with words started after she won a creative writing contest in college, an undisclosed number of decades ago. This was followed by a degree in English Literature, a short stint as a reporter and later as a copywriter.
From full- length novels to blogging to micro-fiction, she is known for the impeccable language and insightful nature of her writing. Her fiction includes the novels Out With Lanterns: A Discovery of Life, Love and Everything in Between and A Smattering of Darkness: Short and Shorter Twisted Tales. She also wrote the nonfiction book Ghosts in Our Backyard—The Ramsay’s real-life encounters with the supernatural.
She was declared a top writer in Feminism for her blog on Medium. She won the micro-fiction contest hosted by the online publication The Coffeelicious. A short story written by her has been selected for the ICSE curriculum VIth standard textbook.
Alisha ‘Priti’ Kirpalani lives in Mumbai along with her husband, two daughters, one cat and over a hundred board games.
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M.R. James (1862-1936)
M.R. James was an English scholar and horror writer of ghost stories. An absolute master of the ghost story—and foundation stone of modern horror—his work influenced authors such as H.P. Lovecraft, Ramsey Campbell, and Stephen King. His story collections include Complete Ghost Stories, Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories: The Complete Ghost Stories of M. R. James, Volume 1, M.R. James: The Complete Supernatural Stories, and Collected Ghost Stories.
He redefined the ghost story for the new century by abandoning many of the formal Gothic clichés of his predecessors and using more realistic contemporary settings. Because his protagonists and plots tend to reflect his own antiquarian interests, he is known as the originator of the “antiquarian ghost story.”
More about M.R. James online
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N.K. Jemisin
N.K. Jemisin is a science fiction and fantasy writer whose fiction includes a wide range of themes, notably cultural conflict and oppression. She is the first author to win three consecutive Best Novel Hugos—she won them for each book in her Broken Earth trilogy, the first time to win three Hugos for all three novels in a trilogy.
Jemisin previously won the Locus Award for her first novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and her short fiction and novels have been nominated multiple times for Hugo, World Fantasy, and Nebula awards, and shortlisted for the Crawford and the James Tiptree, Jr. awards.
Her fiction also includes the Great Cities series, the Inheritance Trilogy series, and the Dreamblood series. She was one of the authors in the Forward SF series. She also wrote the cosmic murder mystery Green Lantern comic book Far Sector.
She is a MacArthur 2020 Genius Grant Fellow. She is a science fiction and fantasy reviewer for the New York Times. She lives and writes in New York City.
More about N.K. Jemisin online
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Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951)
Born in London, Algernon Blackwood was an English broadcasting narrator, journalist, novelist and short story writer, and among the most prolific ghost story writers in the history of the genre. Blackwood rebelled against his strong Catholic upbringing and began studying Oriental religions and the occult, later joining several occult societies.
Over his life, he wrote more than 150 stories, a dozen novels, two plays and quite a few children’s books. He revealed to his friends, most of his stories were based on actual events. By the time of his death in 1951, he had become one of the greatest writers of supernatural fiction in the 20th century. Blackwood is most remembered for his horror stories “The Wendigo” and “The Willows.”
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Mylo Carbia
Mylo Carbia is a #1 bestselling author and Hollywood screenwriter widely known for her work in the horror-thriller genre and trademark of surprise twist endings. Her novels, all featuring strong female protagonists, include The Hitherto Secret Experiments of Marie Curie, Violets Are Red: A Dark Thriller, and The Raping of Ava DeSantis: A Horror Novel.
Ranked “Greatest Horror Writers of All Time” by Ranker.com, “The Top 10 Horror Writers Alive Today” by Booklaunch, and “The Most Influential Authors” by Richtopia.com, her award-winning writing style has been described as “a perfect mix between Stephen King, M. Night Shyamalan and Quentin Tarantino, but infused with a signature female sharpness that is all her own.”
Born in Jackson, New Jersey, Carbia famously spent her childhood years writing to escape the terrors of growing up in a severely haunted house.
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Jeff VanderMeer
Considered one of the foremost “weird fiction writers” in the world, Jeff VanderMeer grew up in the Fiji Islands and spent six months traveling through Asia, Africa, and Europe before returning to the United States. These travels have deeply influenced his fiction.
VanderMeer is the author of The Southern Reach Trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance), the first book of which won the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award, and was adapted into a movie starring Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, Tuva Novotny, and Oscar Isaac.
He also wrote the Borne novels (Borne and Dead Astronauts, as well as the novella The Strange Bird), Hummingbird Salamander, and Veniss Underground. Plans are in the works to adapt his Borne novels for TV by AMC.
VanderMeer started writing at age eight and published his first short story at age 14. In the years since, he has won the World Fantasy Award four times (and been nominated more than a dozen times). For eleven years, VanderMeer served as the co-director of Shared Worlds, a unique teen SF/fantasy writing camp he helped found, located at Wofford College in South Carolina.
More about Jeff VanderMeer online
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Christopher Buehlman
Christopher Buehlman is a novelist, comedian, playwright, and poet from St. Petersburg, Florida. His fiction includes Between Two Fires (called “genre-bending Southern horror” by California Literary Review), The Blacktongue Thief (set in a world of goblin wars, stag-sized battle ravens, and assassins who kill with deadly tattoos), Those Across the River (a man must confront a terrifying evil in this captivating horror novel that’s “as much F. Scott Fitzgerald as Dean Koontz”), The Lesser Dead (winner of the American Library Association’s Best Horror Novel of the Year), The Suicide Motor Club (vampire suspense novel), and The Necromancer’s House (called “a scary, funny, fast-paced urban fantasy novel” by Fantasy Literature).
He is the winner of the 2007 Bridport Prize in Poetry and a finalist for the 2008 Forward Prize for best poem (UK). He spent his twenties and thirties touring renaissance festivals with his very popular show Christophe the Insultor, Verbal Mercenary.
He holds a Bachelor’s degree in French Language from Florida State University, where he minored in History. He enjoys theater, independent films, chess, archery, running, cooking with lots of garlic, and thick, inky, bone-dry red wines with sediment at the bottom.
More about Christopher Buehlman online
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Adam Nevill
Horror author Adam Nevill grew up in England and New Zealand. His novels The Ritual, Last Days, No One Gets Out Alive and The Reddening were all winners of The August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel. He has also published three collections of short stories, with Some Will Not Sleep: Selected Horrors winning the British Fantasy Award for Best Collection, 2017.
Imaginarium adapted The Ritual and No One Gets Out Alive into feature films and more of his work is currently in development for the screen.
The author lives in Devon, England.
More about Adam Nevill online
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Joe R. Lansdale
An author and a martial arts instructor, Joe R. Lansdale writes in a variety of genres, including horror, science fiction, mystery, suspense and Western—including novels, comic books, and screenplays.
He has written 50 novels and published more than 30 short-story collections along with chapbooks and comic book. Several of his novels have been adapted for TV shows and movies.
Lansdale’s fiction includes Bubba and the Cosmic Blood-Suckers, The Nightrunners Reloaded, The Drive-In: A “B” Movie with Blood and Popcorn, Made in Texas, Savage Season (Hap and Leonard #1), and lots more.
Frequent features of Lansdale’s writing are usually deeply ironic, strange or absurd situations or characters, such as Elvis Presley and John F. Kennedy battling a soul-sucking Egyptian mummy in a nursing home (the plot of his Bram Stoker Award-nominated novella, Bubba Ho-Tep, which was made into the Bubba Ho-Tep movie by Don Coscarelli).
He has won the British Fantasy Award, the American Horror Award, the Edgar Award, a World Horror Convention Grand Master Award, a Sugarprize, a Grinzane Cavour Prize for Literature, a Spur Award, a Raymond Chandler Lifetime Achievement Award, and 11(!) Bram Stoker Awards. He has been inducted into The Texas Literary Hall of Fame.
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Robert R. McCammon
Robert McCammon is a novelist from Birmingham, Alabama with some New York Times bestsellers and like 5 million books in print. He also writes a historical mystery series set in colonial America.
His fiction includes Swan Song (a Bram Stoker Award-winner and a PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick), The Hunter from the Woods, the Matthew Corbett series, Usher’s Passing, The Wolf’s Hour, a 2-in-1 book with the vampiric gunslinger in I Travel by Night and Last Train from Perdition, Bethany’s Sin, Boy’s Life, The Border, Gone South, and more.
More about Robert R. McCammon online
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Dan Simmons
Dan Simmons is a science fiction and horror writer. He is the author of the Hyperion Cantos series and the Seasons of Horror series, among other works which span the science fiction, horror, and fantasy genres, sometimes within a single novel.
Simmons’s genre-intermingling Song of Kali won the World Fantasy Award. His science fiction novel Hyperion won the Hugo Award. His other novels and short fiction have also been honored with nine Locus Awards, four Bram Stoker Awards, the French Prix Cosmos 2000, the British SF Association Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Award.
“Writing in different genres requires wildly different mindsets,” he told The Internet Writing Journal, “and also wildly different approaches in research, style, plotting, characterization, use of dialogue, and narrative. I promised myself more than 20 years ago that if I were ever lucky enough to write full time and continue to be published, that I would write what I wanted to write, enjoy creating different types of novels in different fields of literature just as I enjoy reading such a wide variety of quality fiction.”
More about Dan Simmons online
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Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
A professional writer more than 40 years, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro has sold more than 80 books, more than 70 works of short fiction, and dozens of essays, introductions, and reviews. She also composes serious music.
Known for her historical horror novels about the vampire Count Saint-Germain, Yarbro was also one of the authors who contributed to the collections The Vampire Megapack: 27 Modern and Classic Vampire Stories, Vampires: The Recent Undead (Otherworld Stories series), Rage Against the Night, and Dragonwriter: A Tribute to Anne McCaffrey and Pern.
In 1997, the Transylvanian Society of Dracula bestowed a literary knighthood on Yarbro, and in 2003 the World Horror Association presented her with a Grand Master award. In 2006, the International Horror Guild enrolled her among their Living Legends, the first woman to be so honored; the Horror Writers Association gave her a Life Achievement Award in 2009. In 2014 she won a Life Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention.
A skeptical occultist for forty years, she has studied everything from alchemy to zoomancy, and in the late 1970s worked occasionally as a professional tarot card reader and palmist at the Magic Cellar in San Francisco.
More about Chelsea Quinn Yarbro online
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Joseph Nassise
Joseph Nassise is the New York Times, USA Today, and Der Spiegel bestselling author of more than 60 books, including the internationally bestselling Templar Chronicles series, the Jeremiah Hunt trilogy, and the Great Undead War series.
He has collaborated with other authors for collections including American Horror (featuring vampires, zombies, monsters, serial killers, and other creepy creatures of the night), Urban Allies (which teams up characters from different urban fantasy series), Haunting Shadows: A Wraith 20th Anniversary Edition Fiction Anthology, shared-world anthology series Limbus, Inc. (about a shadowy employment agency), Aberrations: Horror Stories (with monster tales from masters of horror and supernatural suspense), and Urban Enemies (starring villains from several urban fantasy series).
His work has been nominated for both the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild Award and been translated into half a dozen languages to date. He has written for both the comic book and role-playing game industries and also served two terms as president of the Horror Writers Association, the world’s largest organization of professional horror and dark fantasy writers.
Nassise also writes epic fantasy under the pen name Matthew Caine, a new take on the Arthurian mythos under the pen name Rowan Casey, and paranormal romance under the name J.S. Hope. He has taught novel writing at Arizona State University’s Virginia G. Piper Writer's House and is the creator of the Story Engine course on story structure.
More about Joseph Nassise online
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Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize for Lifetime Achievement, and has been nominated several times for the Pulitzer Prize.
Having published more than 70 books, she has written novels, short stories, poetry, and essays. Her horror fiction includes Night, Neon: Tales of Mystery and Suspense (2022), Zombie (1995), The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares (2011), Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror (2015), The Doll-Master: And Other Tales of Terror (2016), Dis Mem Ber (2017), and Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense (2018).
More about Joyce Carol Oates online
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Jessica Faleiro
Jessica Faleiro’s debut novel Afterlife: Ghost stories from Goa (2012) is about a Goan family and their “ghostly” encounters. She also wrote The Delicate Balance of Little Lives (2018), a collection of interlinked stories about five middle-class Goan women trying to cope with loss. She won the Joao Roque Literary Award “Best in Fiction 2017” for her short story “Unmatched.”
Her fiction, poetry, essays and travel pieces have been published in Asia Literary Review, Forbes, Indian Quarterly, IndiaCurrents, Coldnoon, Joao Roque Literary Journal, Mascara Literary Review, Muse India and the Times of India as well as in various anthologies.
Faleiro is currently the Commissioning Editor for the Joao Roque Literary Journal. She previously worked for Kingston University Press as a sub-editor and co-edited the March 2018 editor of the Joao Roque Literary Journal’s edition on Writing from the Goan Diaspora. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Kingston University, UK, talks about creativity, and runs creative writing workshops.
More about Jessica Faleiro online
Related links:
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Ray Bradbury (1920-2012)
Ray Bradbury was the author of more than three dozen books, including Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, and Something Wicked This Way Comes, as well as hundreds of short stories.
He wrote for the theater, cinema, and TV, including the screenplay for John Huston’s Moby Dick and the Emmy Award-winning teleplay The Halloween Tree, and adapted for television sixty-five of his stories for The Ray Bradbury Theater.
He was the recipient of the 2000 National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2007 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, and numerous other honors.
More about Ray Bradbury online
Further reading:
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Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (1842-1914) was a short story writer, journalist, poet, and American Civil War veteran.
His short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”—with that memorable twist ending—has been included in lots of anthologies. The story has been adapted to the screen multiple times, including episodes of the anthology series Alfred Hitchcock Presents and also The Twilight Zone, and even used as the background for the 1990 Jon Bon Jovi music video for the song “Dyin’ Ain’t Much Of A Livin’.”
For his horror writing, Bierce has been ranked alongside Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. His horror short stories are included in such books as The Ghost Stories of Ambrose Bierce and The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce.
But Bierce’s wide range in writing means he was also an influential journalist, and acclaimed for his satirical writing, his war stories, his literary critic writing, and his poetry.
In 1913, Bierce told reporters he was travelling to Mexico to see the Mexican Revolution for himself. He disappeared and was never seen again.
More about Ambrose Bierce online
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H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937)
Born in 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island, where he lived most of his life, H.P. Lovecraft wrote weird, science, fantasy, and horror fiction. He wrote many essays and poems early in his career, but gradually focused on the writing of horror stories, after the advent in 1923 of the pulp magazine Weird Tales, to which he contributed most of his fiction.
Best known for his creation of the Cthulhu Mythos, his relatively small corpus of fiction—three short novels and about 60 short stories—has nevertheless exercised a wide influence on subsequent work in the field, and he is regarded as the leading twentieth-century American author of supernatural fiction. H. P. Lovecraft died in Providence in 1937.
One of the most influential writers of the 20th century. He was also one of its most racist—Lovecraft apparently held a number of racist views for much of his adult life.
More about H.P. Lovecraft online
Video: Discussing H.P. Lovecraft and his racism
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The 50 Best Horror Books of All Time Will Scare You Sh*tless (Esquire)
The 56 Best Horror Books of All Time (Readers Digest)
10 of the Scariest Vampire Books to Read Until Your Blood Runs Cold (Book Riot)
50 Best Horror Books 2023 - The Scariest Books of All Time to Read for Halloween (Town & Country Magazine)
Boo Who: 9 Classic Horror Books, Old and New (Book Riot)
29 best horror books to read in 2022, from classics to thrillers (Business Insider)
15 Scary Ass Books By Black Authors That Are Perfect for Halloween (The Root)
15 of the best horror books of all time, from ‘The Shining’ to ‘The Little Stranger’ (Lifestyle Asia Hong Kong)
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10 Best Horror Novel Adaptations Not Based On Stephen King (Collider)
12 Best Horror Authors of All Time (2021 Edition) (Cultured Vultures)
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Horror and comedy both make us jump—which is why these elements work together so well together. Looking at books from authors like Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Tanya Huff, Kelley Armstrong, John Scalzi, Diana Rowland, and Kevin J. Anderson, plus many authors you should meet.