Your favorite mainstream horror books?

[Acutely decayed]

again and again...I think it's the babe boss in bandages



the fluorescent lights embedded in gothic stone...wasp women...

[Ucasuni]

Stephen Laws is wonderful. I first encountered him through his book Darkfall, mentioned in Stanley Wiater's list of notable works of horror fiction (from Dark Thoughts: On Writing).

I find the "I write to entertain, and I write for the man on the street" defense offered by many mainstream authors to reek of populist deflection. A cheap excuse for weak writing that has found an audience in spite of its shortcomings.

But Laws is pure entertainment. His work has no identifiable worldview, and his style is not notably distinctive. But he DOES have a style... one that is propulsive without becoming sloppy and compelling without being exploitative. I wish he wrote more.

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

Bumping again.

I'm seeing more and more names on the Bram Stoker Award winners, splatterpunks and Bizarro that I don't recognize; due to the increased separation of weird fiction from the rest of horror.

And names like Nick Cutter, Josh Malerman and Gabino Iglesias getting more hype.

Where do Adam Nevill and Paul Tremblay fall in terms of weird and regular horror?

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

I don't think Brian Hodge or Thomas Tessier has been mentioned.

[Zaharoff]

Quote Originally Posted by Robert Adam Gilmour

... names like Nick Cutter, Josh Malerman and Gabino Iglesias getting more hype. Where do Adam Nevill and Paul Tremblay fall in terms of weird and regular horror?

I have one Josh Malerman which I did not care for. It was a Borderlands "little book" and one might think stories had been cherry picked to entice readers to explore his catalogue. Instead, that one left a bad impression and I won't buy any more of his books.

Personally, I would place Mr. Nevill into the weird camp. I have two collections of his stories and those are closer to Aickman than, say, James Herbert.

[Michael]

They seriously need to reprint Malerman's "Goblin." It's WAY stronger than Bird Box. And for my mainstream guilty pleasure, I gotta go with James Herbert too. It's my fiction equivalent of donuts. SOOO good.

[Zaharoff]

Malerman interviewed this morning on NPR.
Malerman
I wish they had edited out all the "you know"s.

[miguel1984]

I do not know if it is considered a horror book, but the first Stephen King novel I read was Roadwork, published under his Richard Bachman pseudonym, and I thougth it was terrific.

[Grimalkin]

Mainstream in Australia, I guess, award winning Alan Baxter released The Roo followed soon by The Gulp. Both were wonderfully entertaining books. The Gulp promises to be a new location for future stories centered in a strange village named Gulpepper. I am totally hooked on its weirdness.

[enthusiast]

One horror writer from the 1980's who eventually faded away from the genre is Ken Eulo. His best work is the trilogy that began with "The Brownstone" and continued with "The Bloodstone" and "The Deathstone". I recently found a copy of his novel "Nocturnal" in a used bookstore and quite enjoyed it. A psychologist experiments with subjects experiencing telepathic dreams and one of her subjects ends up having nightmares that come true of a serial killer murdering two of her friends and who ultimately tries to kill her at the novel's climax. Eulo's style seems somewhat derivative of Stephen King but he manages to capture King' best qualities as a writer, including complex, sympathetic characters and a level of suspense that kept me turning the pages until the end.