Vote for your 5 favorite horror tales in NPR's summer horror poll

[cannibal cop]

NPR is doing a summer reader poll of everyone's favorite horror books or stories. Cast your votes (or runes) here:

It's Aliiiiiive! And This Year, Our Summer Reader Poll Is All About Horror : NPR

Instead of voting for popular favorites, I tried to keep my choices pretty idiosyncratic, keeping my votes to stories like Gahan Wilson's "The Sea Was Wet As Wet Could Be" and Charles L. Grant's "The Orchard" that mean a lot to me and that no one else is likely to vote for. But I suppose there are other ways to do it.

Vote early and vote often, as they say.

[Whispers of Sorrow]

it would be nice if this gave visibility to some non-mainstream authors but, alas, results will consist of Jackson/King/Poe and so on... don't get your hopes up

[cannibal cop]

You never know. If enough people get involved they might be able to rock the boat a little. In any case, I expect Ligotti to make a major showing, with his recent mainstream successes.

[New Devilry]

Just between us, my current favorites are House of Leaves, Song of Kali, and The Red Tree.

[Jeff Matthews]

I could have done any number of things, but I quickly knocked off:


Red Tree - Kiernan

Teatro Grotesco - Ligotti

Man Who Collected Machen - Samuels

House of Leaves - Danielewski

Grin of the Dark - Campbell



Almost put Langan's The Fisherman on there... probably should have in place of Leaves

[Gnosticangel]

Hard to choose five, but when I went to the site these emerged:

The House on the Borderland
Songs of a Dead Dreamer
The Three Imposters
Xiccarph
Something Wicked This Way Comes

... would have added The Haunting of Hill House if I could have.

[cannibal cop]

I suppose I made a mistake in nominating a couple of anthologies (Dark Forces and 1989's Book of the Dead) since they seem to want single-author titles only. Oh well, they'd be among my choices, regardless.

[luciferfell]

I think I voted:

Grimscribe - Thomas Ligotti
The Ammonite Violin - Caitlin Kiernan
Demons by Daylight - Ramsey Campbell
Worse than Myself - Adam Golaski
Throat Sprockets - Tim Lucas

[JadedFool]

Teatro Grottesco (collection) - Thomas Ligotti
Occultation (collection) - Laird Barron
Dark Gods - T.E.D. Klein
Where Furnaces Burn - Joel Lane
The Pattern - Ramsey Campbell

Excited to see what they spit back at us.

[Ucasuni]

Quote Originally Posted by Trau

Just between us, my current favorites are House of Leaves, Song of Kali, and The Red Tree.

Song of Kali is one of the rare stories that literally haunted my dreams. It conveyed a sense of cultural and regional immersion that I had never experienced before in the genre. I would strongly recommend Brian A. Hopkins's Dia de los Muertos as another such story, delivered with the kind of leanness and meanness that his work so frequently achieves.