Your favorite mainstream horror books?

[miguel1984]

I don't think she is mainstream. She did win two World Fantasy Awards recently, though. Hope she kept the Lovecraft bust.

[Michael]

Quote Originally Posted by shivering

Is Caitlin R. Kiernan mainstream? I truly adore all her novels, but The Drowning Girl may be her best.

I don't consider Kiernan mainstream although she should be more widely read. But I think out of all her impressive work The Drowning Girl (with good reason) is her best known work so can see a reason to call it "mainstream."

[orwell84]

Clive Barker's Books of Blood. Stories such as 'The Midnight Meat Train', 'In the Hills, the Cities', 'Dread', 'Jacqueline Ess', 'The Skins of the Fathers', 'Son of Celluloid', 'Rawhead Rex' are all very engrossing. Yes, he is mainstream, but still to this day a lot of the stories in there are very unique and original, as well as (of course) horrifying, raw, brutal and chilling. Truly astonishing.

[teguififthzeal]

Anyone remember TickTock by Dean Koontz? i read it in middle school, but I recall it being very evil, particularly the way the supernatural entity treats the homeless people.

[ChildofOldLeech]

- I read that one, along with a dozen others, when I went through a brief Koontz phase around 6th grade; at the time I preferred him over King because his plots were always more reliably gonzo and overtly pulpy. Unfortunately, I can't really recall the details of any of them save Intensity, which I still feel could be turned into a decent film despite the treatment it received at the hands of pretentious frenchmen.

[Murony_Pyre]

Houses Without Doors by Peter Straub--especially for "The Buffalo Hunter" and "A Short Guide to the City".

Clive Barker's Books of Blood. They'll go down as classics for sure.

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

I know it's bad etiquette to bump a thread with nothing new but I'm curious if any of our newer members have read much of the type of books I listed in the first post.

[Gnosticangel]

I've long enjoyed the Charlie Parker series of Irish "supernatural noir" writer John Connolly.

Apparently Connolly was drawn to the tradition of American crime fiction because "it seemed the best medium through which he could explore the issues of compassion, morality, reparation and salvation." His writing style has been described as a "rich and introspective style of prose."

My favorite in the series is "The Black Angel: A Thriller."

Haunted detective Charlie Parker returns with a complex new case. A young woman goes missing from the streets of New York. Those who have taken her believe that nobody cares about her, and that no one will come looking for her. They are wrong. Parker comes to realize that the disappearance is part of an older mystery, one that is linked to an ornate church of bones in Eastern Europe, to the slaughter at a French monastery in 1944, and to the quest for a mythical prize that has been sought for centuries by evil men: the Black Angel. Yet the Black Angel is more than a myth. It is conscious. It dreams. It is alive. And men are not the only creatures that seek it

The Black Angel: A Thriller: John Connolly: 9780743487863: Amazon.com: Books

 

The Black Angel: A Thriller: John Connolly: 9780743487863: Amazon.com: Books

I am also fond of "Bad Men: A Thriller." Though the character Charlie Parker is not a major protagonist in this work, it lies within the same mythos.

The long-dead, gray-skinned wraiths Connolly conjures up in this thriller with a supernatural twist are lighthearted sprites compared to the grotesque humans who maim, rape and kill their way through the gore-clotted story of horror and revenge. Off the coast of Maine, Dutch Island, known to the old-timers as Sanctuary, is cursed by the spirits of those who died in a savage slaughter there in the year 1693. In the present day, imprisoned murderer Edward Moloch dreams of an ancient land where he is a hunter bent on the massacre of his wife and the inhabitants of a small village. Moloch, the worst of the bad men of the title, escapes from prison and leaves a trail of mutilated victims behind as he searches for the wife who several years earlier betrayed him to police to escape his brutality. Horrified readers will turn the last blood-soaked page wondering if they would have begun the first had they known what was coming. Think Thomas Harris by way of Stephen King: haunting, compelling, but not for the faint of heart.

Bad Men: A Thriller (Connolly, John): John Connolly: 9780743487849: Amazon.com: Books

 

Bad Men: A Thriller (Connolly, John): John Connolly: 9780743487849: Amazon.com: Books

Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber.