26. Penpal began as a series of Reddit posts. It’s not the most auspicious start for a horror classic, but Auerbach’s writing has a disconcerting, disorienting power that elevates it beyond the usual creepypasta fare. In its published form, Penpal is a novel of fragments in which the unnamed narrator attempts to reconcile unusual memories from his childhood. These include odd sleepwalking episodes, the disappearance of a childhood friend, and the discovery of something in the crawlspace that prompts his mother to sell their home. The ambiguity is dizzying, until the strands suddenly coalesce into the most devastating reveal on this list. There is nothing else quite like Penpal. It leaves a stain.

25. Most people will come to Suzuki’s Ring fully aware of the videotape that leaves unwary viewers with only seven days to live. However, if you've only seen Hideo Nakata’s adaptation or Gore Verbinski’s American remake, there is so much that you have yet to learn. We follow journalist Kazayuki Asakawa as he investigates the untimely deaths of four healthy teens and pieces together the story of madness, disease, and sexual violence that birthed the lethal Sadako. Though the films have the advantage of showing you the cursed images, Suzuki’s novel slowly builds a weight of creeping mystery that no movie adaptation could hope to bear.

24. Those only familiar with Game of Thrones may be surprised to find that George R. R. Martin has turned his hand to full-blown horror a few times over the years. Fevre Dream is the high point, a Southern Gothic set aboard an 1800s Mississippi River steamboat with very unusual management. The unveiling of certain characters’ true natures is fairly easy to predict for anyone with genre savviness, and the mythology cleaves fairly close to tradition, but what sets the novel apart is the warmth and depth of the relationships onboard. Fevre Dream is proof that horror can have a heart, and that good character work outperforms gimmick every time.

23. There are plenty of unreliable narrators in horror, but Catriona Ward ups the ante by packing a whole roster of them into one claustrophobic novel. Meet Ted, the oddball who lives in the titular house, along with his pseudo-daughter, Lauren, and Olivia, a surprisingly articulate black cat. When Dee comes calling, suspecting Ted’s involvement in her sister’s disappearance years before, each of these perspectives becomes a fragment of a fractured window on the truth. The result is perhaps the slipperiest psychological study in the annals of horror—a book with secrets as sorrowful as they are appalling.

22. For many readers Pet Sematary is the quintessential King novel. It came out at the very height of his ‘80s dominion over the genre to horrify and inspire a generation of writers to come. However, the book is actually an outlier for King. It is bleaker and more consistently sadistic than anything else in his oeuvre. Ostensibly a simple story about a family who moves into a house near a burial ground with resurrective powers, it gradually tightens into inevitable, inescapable torment. The last third of the book is an extended howl of grief. No matter how many times you read Pet Sematary, you will always urge Louis Creed to run a little faster, reach a little further, in the vain hope that this time, things might work out differently.

21. Stevenson wrote his famous novella in three days, burned it in despair, then rewrote it just as quickly. Something of that frenzy can still be felt in the pages after all these years. Despite the starched Victorian language, Jekyll and Hyde is a tale of gleeful depravity, unfettered urges, and extreme violence, even against a child. The story of transformation and duality is so famous that the title has entered our vocabulary, but the book is about far more than a mad scientist’s hubris. Stevenson’s novella comments on class, theology, and substance abuse, as well as the Freudian concept of the divided mind. No work of fiction has been adapted more often, and few have burrowed so deeply into the public consciousness.

20. Anyone who has tinnitus or is vulnerable to intrusive thoughts may wish to turn the pages of Come Closer with some care. It’s a book that could damage the unwary psyche. When Amanda is plagued by odd noises, her dreams intensify and her behavior changes in ways that she can’t easily reconcile. Gradually, a question emerges: is something else inside Amanda’s mind? Come Closer eschews the shock and awe of the typical possession narrative for a more subliminal approach, refusing to extinguish the possibility that it’s all a manifestation of Amanda’s secret desires. Gran’s genius is in making the strange details so commonplace and incidental that ambiguity survives, and suddenly, the reader becomes aware that sometimes they hear strange noises too…

19. Stephen Graham Jones has been deconstructing horror for years. His novels and stories take the genre apart to see how it works, and if it can be reassembled in more interesting ways. The Only Good Indians proves that it can. A tale of a hunting trip gone wrong and the curse that hounds a group of Native American men, it’s at once a moral fable and a subversion of slasher tropes. In Jones’ own words, he “wanted to take Jason up to the Reservation,” but the Deer-Headed Woman who pursues the men is more menacing than any man in a mask. Indians is a deserved breakout novel—one that captures a genuine horror superstar in the moment of his becoming.

18. Matheson’s 1954 novel reconfigures the vampire to meet the anxiety of post-war science fiction. These bloodsuckers are not supernatural, but biological—the result of a global pandemic that has left every human being either dead or undead. Everyone except Robert Nevill, the last man on earth, living alone in his fortified home, while each night the undead crowds tempt him with an end to his solitude. At first we assume Neville to be the last bastion of civilisation, but with each chapter the truth becomes more supple and complex. Much of Neville’s behaviour is deeply problematic in the novel’s own era, as well as ours. Yet aren’t we conditioned to champion humanity over any alternative? I Am Legend is philosophical pulp fiction: a truly existential horror. It’s also, as one critic suggested, perhaps the greatest novel written on human loneliness.

17. Few contemporary novels have as notorious a reputation as Haunted. As lore would have us believe, each time the author reads the opening story, someone in the audience faints. That story, "Guts," is indeed a stomach-churning read (if you’ve read it, pun intended), but it’s only one of two-dozen dark gems that make up Palahniuk’s crowning work. Each story is told by members of a writing group sequestered in a decaying theatre by the derelict Mr. Whittier. The result falls somewhere between The Canterbury Tales and One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom. Offerings run the gamut from murder to body horror to Bigfoot. One especially nasty anecdote involves a mix-up between therapy dolls and sex dolls. The results are morally-sickening, wince-inducing, and deviously funny.

16. John Langan is the horror laureate of the Hudson Valley. He has written several collections of excellent short fiction, but it’s The Fisherman that best maps the shadowy recesses of the region. It begins as a piece of muscular American realism with a pair of widowers on a fishing trip before shifting into a cosmic gear through an encounter with ‘Der Fisher’ and his mad attempt to land a much bigger catch. Like all the best tall tales, it has the feel of a yarn heard at night in a bar in strange town, told by some old-timer with a squint. And though it’s not a big book, it seems to lie on the cusp of something much more vast and entirely other.

15. Geek Love is the very definition of a cult novel. Though not as widely known as it should be, it’s championed with a devout intensity by those who love it. Oh, and it’s also about a cult of sorts—one founded on acts of voluntary amputation. That’s only one of the many absurd and abhorrent plot strands in this story of a traveling carnival breeding their own ‘freakshow.’ Even that problematic description does no justice to the depravity of Dunn’s novel. There is body horror of the grimmest kind, incest, rape, infanticide, and a once-read, never-forgotten scene involving conjoined twins that will leave you unsure whether to laugh, sob, or vomit. In polite company, this would be damning. Here, amongst the initiated, it makes Geek Love a contemporary classic of the macabre.