Some Gripping Horror
Discover gripping horror books to keep you up at night—from Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and Dean Koontz's The Good Guy to vampire classics by Anne Rice and Ray Garton. Explore a curated list of terrifying fiction, haunted houses, and supernatural thrillers.
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The Darkest Evening of the Year
by Dean Ray Koontz
Koontz delivers suspense for all seasons with a transcendent thriller--a heart-gripping tour de force featuring a dedicated dog rescuer, a very special golden retriever she saves, and the murderous adversaries they must face together.
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The Haunting of Hill House
by Shirley Jackson
An anthropologist conducts an unusual research project in a reputedly haunted house.
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The Host
by Stephenie Meyer
A member of a species that takes over the minds of human bodies, Wanderer is unable to disregard his host's love for a man in hiding, a situation that forces both possessor and host to become unwilling allies.
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The Vampire Chronicles Collection
by Anne Rice
The hypnotic, deeply seductive novels of Anne Rice have captivated millions of fans around the world. It all began a quarter of a century ago with Interview with the Vampire. Now, in one chilling volume, here are the first three classic novels of The Vampire Chronicles. INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE Witness the confessions of a vampire. A novel of mesmerizing beauty and astonishing force, it is a story of danger and flight, love and loss, suspense and resolution, and the extraordinary power of the senses. “A magnificent, compulsively readable thriller . . . Anne Rice begins where Bram Stoker and the Hollywood versions leave off and penetrates directly to the true fascination of the myth–the education of the vampire.” –Chicago Tribune THE VAMPIRE LESTAT Once an aristocrat from pre-revolutionary France, now a rock star in the decadent 1980s, Lestat rushes through the centuries seeking to fathom the mystery of his existence. His is a mesmerizing story–passionate and thrilling. “Frightening, sensual . . . A psychological, mythological sojourn . . . Anne Rice will live on through the ages of literature. . . . To read her is to become giddy as if spinning through the mind of time.” –San Francisco Chronicle QUEEN OF THE DAMNED Akasha, the queen of the damned, has risen from a six-thousand-year sleep to let loose the powers of the night. She has a marvelously devious plan to “save” mankind–in this vivid novel of the erotic, electrifying world of the undead. “With The Queen of the Damned, Anne Rice has created universes within universes, traveling back in time as far as ancient, pre-pyramidic Egypt and journeying from the frozen mountain peaks of Nepal to the crowded, sweating streets of southern Florida.” –Los Angeles Times
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Live Girls
by Ray Garton
A classic novel of horror by the author of "The Loveliest Dead"--a nominee for the Bram Stoker Award--is back in print. A strip club in New York's Times Square is very different from the others--the girls there happen to be vampires.
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2012
by Whitley Strieber
On December 21, 2012, the date prophesied as the end of the world, a mysterious alien presence bursts from sacred sites across the globe, ripping human souls from their bodies and plunging the world into a time of chaos and darkness.
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The Loveliest Dead
by Ray Garton
A young family moves into their new home only to find they are not alone--they share the house with the dead.
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The Good Guy
by Dean Ray Koontz
Timothy Carrier has a dry sense of humor, but his deadpan wit lands him in a precarious situation when a stranger Tim converses with mistakes him for a hit man.
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Mistress of the Art of Death
by Ariana Franklin
Sent to medieval Cambridge in order to exonerate Jewish prisoners who have been accused of murdering four children, University of Salerno medical expert Adelia discovers that the killer may be a former crusader.
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The Judas Strain
by James Rollins
ju·das strain, n. A scientific term for an organism that drives an entire species to extinction A master at combining historical and scientific intrigue with cutting-edge adventure, New York Times bestselling author of Map of Bones and Black Order James Rollins returns with his most relentless, high-octane thriller to date—a terrifying story of an ancient menace reborn to plague the modern world . . . and of an impossible hope that lies hidden in the most shocking place imaginable: within the language of angels. From the depths of the Indian Ocean, a horrific plague has arisen to devastate humankind—a disease that's unknown, unstoppable . . . and deadly. But it is merely a harbinger of the doom that is to follow. Aboard a cruise liner transformed into a makeshift hospital, Dr. Lisa Cummings and Monk Kokkalis—operatives of the shadowy covert organization SIGMA Force—search for answers to the bizarre affliction that has inexplicably washed ashore. But there are others with far less altruistic intentions. In a savage and sudden coup, terrorists hijack the vessel, turning a mercy ship into a floating bio-weapons lab. At a Fourth of July celebration a world away, SIGMA's commander Gray Pierce thwarts the murderous schemes of a beautiful assassin—a would-be killer who holds the first clue to the discovery of a possible cure. With the fate of every man, woman, and child on Earth hanging in the balance, Pierce joins forces with the woman who wanted him dead, and together they embark upon an astonishing quest—one that winds through Venetian tombs, Byzantine cathedrals, and jungle-encrusted ruins—following the trail of the most fabled explorer in history: Marco Polo. But time is an enemy as a worldwide pandemic grows rapidly out of control. And as a relentless madman dogs their every step, Pierce and his unlikely ally are being pulled into an astonishing mystery buried deep in antiquity and in humanity's genetic code. And as the seconds tick closer to doomsday, Pierce will realize he can truly trust no one—not the bewitching enigma who runs at his side or even those who are closest to him—for any one of them could be . . . a Judas.
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The Outlaw Demon Wails
by Kim Harrison
To save the lives of her friends, Rachel did the unthinkable: she willingly trafficked in forbidden demon magic. And now her sins are coming home to haunt her. As Rachel searches for the truth behind a terrifying murder, an even greater menace threatens, for the demon Algaliarept will stop at nothing to claim her, and the discovery of a shocking family secret throws Rachel's entire life into question. If she is ever to live free, Rachel must first walk willingly into the demonic ever-after in search of long-lost ancient knowledge. But when you dance with demons, you lay your soul on the line . . . and there are some lines that should never be crossed.
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The Freakshow
by Bryan Smith
The Flaherty Brothers Traveling Carnivale and Freakshow has rolled into Pleasant Hills, Tennessee, and the quiet little town will never be the same. In fact, much of the town won't survive as unimaginable creatures lure locals to a fate worse than death. Original.
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The Book of Air and Shadows
by Michael Gruber
A distinguished Shakespearean scholar found tortured to death . . . A lost manuscript and its secrets buried for centuries . . . An encrypted map that leads to incalculable wealth . . . The Washington Post called Michael Gruber's previous work "a miracle of intelligent fiction and among the essential novels of recent years." Now comes his most intellectually provocative and compulsively readable novel yet. Tap-tapping the keys and out come the words on this little screen, and who will read them I hardly know. I could be dead by the time anyone actually gets to read them, as dead as, say, Tolstoy. Or Shakespeare. Does it matter, when you read, if the person who wrote still lives? These are the words of Jake Mishkin, whose seemingly innocent job as an intellectual property lawyer has put him at the center of a deadly conspiracy and a chase to find a priceless treasure involving William Shakespeare. As he awaits a killer—or killers—unknown, Jake writes an account of the events that led to this deadly endgame, a frantic chase that began when a fire in an antiquarian bookstore revealed the hiding place of letters containing a shocking secret, concealed for four hundred years. In a frantic race from New York to England and Switzerland, Jake finds himself matching wits with a shadowy figure who seems to anticipate his every move. What at first seems like a thrilling puzzle waiting to be deciphered soon turns into a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse, where no one—not family, not friends, not lovers—is to be trusted. Moving between twenty-first-century America and seventeenth-century England, The Book of Air and Shadows is a modern thriller that brilliantly re-creates William Shakespeare's life at the turn of the seventeenth century and combines an ingenious and intricately layered plot with a devastating portrait of a contemporary man on the brink of self-discovery . . . or self-destruction.
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Lunar Park
by Bret Easton Ellis
A somewhat autobiographical novel about the life of the author, with some things true, other things exagerrated and other things completely fictitious.
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Plague of the Dead
by Z. A. Recht
The end begins with a viral outbreak unlike anything mankind as ever encountered before. The infected are subject to delirium, fever, a dramatic increase in violent behavior, and a one-hundred percent mortality rate? Death. But it doesn't end there. The victims return from death to walk the earth. When a massive military operation fails to contain the plague of the living dead it escalates into a global pandemic. In one fell swoop, the necessities of life become much more basic. Gone are petty everyday concerns. Gone are the amenities of civilized life. Yet a single law of nature remains: Live, or die. Kill, or be killed. On one side of the world, a battle-hardened General surveys the remnants of his command: a young medic, a veteran photographer, a brash Private, and dozens of refugees, all are his responsibility--all thousands of miles from home. Back in the United States, an Army Colonel discovers the darker side of Morningstar virus and begins to collaborate with a well-known journalist to leak the information out to the public... The Morningstar Saga has begun.
