HDC Top 100 Horror Books
 

I suggested this soon after getting named HDC president, and although March is looking hectic, my schedule's gonna get worse before it gets better, so I might as well get on this quickly. HDC is not just a site for horror movies. This is not horror movies. com. This is horror.com, and the word means a lot of things. It's a concept that predates cinema. And horror predating cinema means drama, visual arts, poetry and fiction. It's been awhile since HDC has had one of these lists to get excited about and been awhile since HDC has truly been excited about horror fiction. So we're going to change that with a list of the Top 100 Works of Horror in Literature.
To start with, I'd like folks to post 10 books, plays, poems or books of poetry containing horror elements or influencing the genre. Plath's Ariel (the book, not the poem), Shakespeare's Macbeth, Joyce's Ulysses have as much horror to be found in them as Salem's Lot or American Psycho and should not be ignored just because they do not meet some arbitrary standard for the genre. Unlike real politicians, this HDC President is going to hear out your arguments in favor of works that you think might be controversial. Arguments against things are for later in the process. No eyerolls, no "Kafka isn't horror", "The Invisible Man isn't horror", "Haunting of Hill House isn't horror", "The Joy of Sex isn't horror" yet. I will assemble a panel for the purpose of cutting the list down to 100 when we have a substantial amount of entries. I'll start with ten:

1.) The Inferno- Dante Alighieri
2.) Macbeth- William Shakespeare
3.)Salem's Lot-Stephen King
4.) Ariel-Sylvia Plath
5.) Haunting of Hill House- Shirley Jackson
6.) Naked Lunch-William Burroughs
7.) Howl-Allen Ginsberg
8.) Ulysses-James Joyce
9.) Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque- Edgar Allan Poe
10.)Dracula- Bram Stoker

Great idea Doc

Here's my list

It - Stephen King
Duncan's Diary: Birth of a Serial Killer - Christopher C. Payne
The Scary Stories Trilogy - Alvin Schwartz
The Raven - Edgar Allen Poe
Wait Until Dark(play) - Frederick Knott
Frankenstein - Mary Shelly
Re-Animator - H.P. Lovecraft
The Exorcist - William Peter Blatty
Relic - Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
The Silence of the Lambs - Thomas Harris

I'm on it.:)

Give me a few days.

now you're talking Mr. President.......great idea. :D

will throw some suggestions out soon

Geez - Admittedly I haven't read a whole lot of horror (sadly) - Will ruminate for a while and see what I come up with...

1.Imajica-Clive Barker
2.At The Mountains Of Madness (and other stories)-HP Lovecraft
3.The Pit And The Pendulum (or Tales Of Mystery And Imagination)-Edgar Allan Poe
4.Shadowlands-Peter Straub
5.The Vampire Lestadt-Anne Rice
6.The Turn Of The Screw-Henry James
7.War And Peace-Leo Tolstoy
8.Crime And Punishment-Fyodor Dostoevsky
9.The Bell Jar-Sylvia Plath
10.Weaveworld-Clive Barker

Here's a few:

The Collector - John Fowles
The Monster at the End of This Book - Jon Stone
The Gashlycrumb Tinies - Edward Gorey
What Was I Scared Of? - Theodore Seuss Geisel
For the Love of Evil - Piers Anthony
Der Struwwelpeter - Heinrich Hoffmann

I'll need a bit of time to think!

Extremely difficult to pick just ten, but here you go:

The Tell-Tale Heart - Edgar Allan Poe
The Call Of Cthulhu - HP Lovecraft
The Haunting Of Hill House - Shirley Jackson
The Lottery - Shirley Jackson
The Turn Of The Screw - Henry James
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Picture Of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
Oh Whistle And I'll Come To You My Lad - MR James
I Am Legend - Richard Matheson
Salem's Lot - Stephen King

*Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
*The Vampyre by John Polidori
*The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
*The Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker
*The Firestarter by Stephen King
*The Stand by Stephen King
*Varney the Vampire by James Malcolm Rymer (Sometimes attributed to Thomas Preskett Prest)
*Interview with a Vampire by Anne Rice
*The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
*Cell Stephen King

Ten's tough. Some great picks already and a couple more I've been meaning to get to. Not much eye-rolling yet although I assume Doc included Ulysses because it gave him nightmares in school. It sure gave me some sleepless nights. And I still wake up screaming thinking I'm back at chapter one again. Anyway, here's my ten of the moment.

The Island of Dr Moreau - Wells
Dracula - Stoker
Frankenstein - Shelly
Salem's Lot - King
The Mask of the Red Death - Poe
A Christmas Carol - Dickens
Rebecca - Du Maurier
Moonchild - Crowley
House of Seven Gables - Hawthorne
The Metamorphosis - Kafka

Outside of Lovecraft/Mr James ect I'm not a big Horror reader and most of these are short stories but I'll try do a top 10.

Read the brothel sequence again. And I call a man in a long black coat presaging weird shit about to go down a horror element.

Ok in no particular order (and some are Collections/short stories/Novellas) and I bet I missed alot - I also limited one per Author:

1) A Clockwork Orange - Anthoney Burgess
2) Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - MR JAMES
3) The Shadow over Innsmouth - HP Lovecraft
4) Adrift on The Haunted Seas - William Hope Hodgson
5) The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
6) The Anno Dracula Series - Kim Newman
7) Draqcula - Bram Stoker
8) Masque of the Red Death - E.A Poe
9) Books of Blood series - Clive Barker
10) I Am Legend - Richard Matheson
11) Blood Meridian

Thanks to everyone thus far. I'm seeing some great stuff.

I thought we where supposed to mention things that where not already mentioned, if we can mention the same as others then off course both Dracula by Bram Stoker and Frankenstein by Mary Shelly have to be on my list, you can not have a list over the most influential horror books and not mention these two.

The more stuff the better. It's best to get a large sampling then reduce it to 100.

Trying to spotlight a few things not mentioned by others, as well as mention collections for short story writers.

Something Wicked This Way Comes - Ray Bradbury
Tales of Terror & Darkness - Algernon Blackwood
Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
H. P. Lovecraft: Tales (Library of America)
The Wolfen - Whitley Strieber
The Turn of the Screw - Henry James
The Other - Tom Tryon
Sheridan Le Fanu - Carmilla
The Hounds of Tindalos - Frank Belknap Long
I Am Legend - Richard Matheson

I'll be the first to break the rule and list an 11th:

Moby Dick - Herman Melville

Ok 11th-The Wasp Factory-Iain Banks

Adding some comic love.

The Preacher series - Garth Ennis
Batman: the Long Halloween - Jeph Loeb

"It" - Stephen King

"Summer of night" - Dan Simmons

"The witch herself" - Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

At the Mountains of Madness and other Macabre Tales - Dagon and other Macabre Tales - Dunwich Horror and others - The Horror in the Museum and other Revisions - Must be the Arkham House corrected versions.

Bleak House - Charles Dickens

The Castle of Otranto - Horace Walpole

Jaws - Peter Benchley

The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

The Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham

The Collected Stories of Gogol - any publisher's collection (mine is Folio Society)

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow - Washington Irving

The Devils of Loudon - Aldous Huxley

In Cold Blood - Truman Capote

I know I've just picked all the heavy weight, genre defining works but they are my favourites, probably because they're the best. Anyway, it's a Top 100 list we're compiling, not a 'lets impress everyone with my knowledge of lesser known works' list.

Almost forgot... The Keep by F. Paul Wilson

If we don't expand the list beyond the top 10 most popular books of horror, how are we ever to compile a top 100? As the Prez said in the first post, this is not the time to criticize people's choices, now is the time to brainstorm.

My edition doesn't have The LOved Dead in it which is one of the weirdest Lovecraft Stories (collaborations) :(

I've read very few horror books so far:o...but still I'll post a list here later though most of them already got mentioned.

Neverending - do you have any info on whether Lovecraft really worked on 'The Loved Dead' or it was all just C. M. Eddy?

Both of the Lovecraft biographies I have are in storage, and that story doesn't ring a bell...

You've misunderstood. I'm not criticisizing others selections (which have been wonderful thus far), I'm just stating the criteria I've set for myself. There's no point in offering Wayne Simmons' Flu, cause nobody will have read it and I know it's probably not one of the best 100 horror works of all time.

Anyway, I'll vote for...

Flu by Wayne Simmons (a local author; think Dickens writing Romero)

The Island of Dr Moreau, you know who it's by!

The Frankenstein Diaries, edited by Rev Hubert Venables

I actually own a copy of Flu, and have read it... it has some great atmosphere and local color.

I'm wondering if it might not be a more useful list if we try and come up with the top 100 horror writers, as opposed to single books. That way we could nominate people like Poe, Lovecraft & King for their bodies of work, and other writers for significant works...

What do you think, Prez!

Here's the one you need to get http://64.227.162.73/miva/merchant.m...egory_Code=001

The other HP Lovecrafts that I mention are on this site; it's the official Arkham House site. Many believe these are the definitive editions as the publisher was established by several of Lovecraft's inner circle concerned with keeping his work in circulation. They had first hand access to his manuscripts. He wasn't well known when he popped his clogs and they didn't want his work lost.

Excellent! I picked up a signed copy at his book launch in Belfast. I chatted to him for a while and he talked about his love of classic horror and how he hated the dumbing down and 'gorification' of the genre recently. Anyway, glad you liked it.

I really like this idea. As everyone's picking collections of stories from writers like Poe and Lovecraft anyway (which I personally think is cheating:p) we probably should do this. Maybe write down favorites from each author as well, then you'd have a top 5 to work with in each author's profile.

Opinions are divided. Some believe Derleth put a bit too much of himself in Arkham Houses editions, and that the volumes that Joshi edited and annotated are closer to the original Lovecraft.

This dichotomy is born out in the two different portrayals of Lovecraft presented in the respective biographies they each wrote.

You're not the first person I've heard saying that. I know that Derleth can be a little self-promoting and some people say he completely ripped off HPL's style. I tried to track down a good used copy of Joshi's biography a while back but it was a fortune. Would you recommend it?

I second that! If we just go by book, there will be numerous entries for several writers ie. King, Poe, Lovecraft, Herbert etc. But then, it'll be hard to narrow down 100 authors, especially as some only ever write one or two works that can be defined as 'horror'.

Lovecraft wrote mostly novellas and short pieces for popular 'weird fiction' publications during his time. It's not practical to enter numerous short stories in a top 100 but then the top 100 wouldn't be complete without the Call of Cthulu. Perhaps we could cap it at five books/entries per author. Or one entry entitled 'The complete works of...'.

Joshi's biography is essential for a Lovecraft fan. The work is exhaustive. In the end, he offers a portrait of a man significantly different than the somewhat pathetic creature Derleth presents in his bio. Though there's no denying Lovecraft felt out of place in the time he lived, socially, he was well liked, had a wide circle of friends who respected and adored him, and he was well traveled.