Your favorite mainstream horror books?

[Druidic]

Ghost Story, The Wolfen and Red Dragon.

[T.E. Grau]

I loved Night Music: Nocturnes Volume 2. It was the first Connolly I'd read, and earned him instant respect from me.

Quote Originally Posted by Stu

John Connolly still tends to view himself mainly as a mystery writer; although he admits his definition of mystery is broader than most of his colleagues, allowing as it does for supernatural and metaphysical aspects. His latest short story collection Night Music is mainly horror (along with a few fantasy stories) and features a witty essay on the horror fiction he read in his formative years. Kind of a mini-version of King's Danse Macabre but about fifty times funnier. Among the classics -- Dracula, Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde, etc -- he mentions some more mainstream stuff such as Stephen King, The Pan Books of Horror, and Hammer Horror novelizations. Quite a few mentions of British TV horror as well: A Ghost Story for Christmas, Children of the Stones, Dr Who, Sapphire & Steel etc.

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

Swords Sorcery: a blog: Shiny Horror Covers From My Youth

Some of these covers are pretty cool. Especially Straub's Shadowland.

[Spiral]

I enjoyed the "The Strain" trilogy by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, quite a lot. Really good version of vampires

[miguel1984]

Quote Originally Posted by Spiral

I enjoyed the "The Strain" trilogy by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, quite a lot. Really good version of vampires

Yeah, it was pretty good. The TV series looks awful, though.

[paul b.]

Quote Originally Posted by Pharpetron

Quote Originally Posted by Mr. Veech I know it's not technically "horror," but I think Stephen King's The Gunslinger is a fantastic piece of literature. King can write with the best of them when he wants to. I was actually kind of blown away by The Gunslinger. In it, King shows a loving attention to rhythm and to the texture of the prose that is completely uncharacteristic of him. You can tell that he worked really, really hard on The Gunslinger.

It's still my absolute favorite novel of his. Atmospheric, melancholy Dying Earth science fantasy/western infused with occult imagery.
He never wrote another novel like that, even the direct sequels lost almost all of what made original so enjoyable for me.

It's weird, really. When you read it, you can almost imagine how King could've turned into one very, very different writer from one we know now if things turned out differently for him.

[Justin Isis]

Quote Originally Posted by paul b.

It's weird, really. When you read it, you can almost imagine how King could've turned into one very, very different writer from one we know now if things turned out differently for him.

It's pretty easy to tell the difference between the books where he was trying hard vs the ones where he was phoning it in and/or just typing really fast while on drugs (not that some of the coke-fueled 80s books didn't reach their own weird greatness at times). Seems like at least the last decade or two has been phoning it in, though. It's definitely interesting to speculate what kind of writer he would have become if he hadn't gotten so huge. There are also a lot of writers I can think of who probably would have tried out different things if they'd been slightly MORE successful/validated by the public - toiling away in obscurity for years has an undeniable effect on writing and it's not always for the best.

Salem's Lot is the best vampire book I have read. Sorry Stoker and Le Fanu.

He has written a lot of weak material, but he has enough great stories to justify his place in horror history. People are super selective regarding which Machen or Blackwood stories they pay attention to, and the same will be true for King. A lot of the criticism of him in Lovecraft fandom is unjustified, and once again I think S. T. Joshi is completely off base in his assessment.

[Michael]

May have said this already so all apologies if this is a repeat. Justin Cronin's trilogy I just freakin loved. Totally mainstream.

[ramonoski]

I've enjoyed some of Neil Gaiman's darker stories, like "we can get them for you wholesale", "october in the chair", and "click clack the rattlebag". Though I think the creepiest thing he's written was "wordsworth", a short comic he did with Dave McKean for an old Hellraiser-themed anthology.