Authors who wrote books that actually caused me to feel horror

I must not be afraid
by Alex Ness
April 28, 2022

A reader wrote to say, "Hey Nessman, I read your reviews of comics and books especially, not enough games or music to really mention, but overall I like what you say, and can use what you say to guide whether or not I will buy that item. But you often say that the book or comic, despite being in the genre of horror, didn't scare you. If the genre was horror, can that product be considered successful for what it was? Now I hear people say this writer scares them or that one... but like you I don't find 99% of the horror books I read to inspire horror. So which books, or authors if you prefer, cause you to experience the feeling of horror?"

Thanks for the email. Since I don't have an issue with anything in this question*, no secret agendas, no clue that I should now mention so and so I'll do my best but I am going to choose two books from each author who spooked me. Why? In case you like one you might like others by the same author.  Also, as some get tired of me mentioning, I find the only true horror to be books on The Holocaust, The Rwandan Genocide, the Armenian Genocide...  Because they are proof that humans can be purely evil, and become more so as they gather into groups of similar views on life.

*There have been PR people who write hoping I'll mention their client's work, or the person wants me to reconsider what I reported about a book. But I'm honestly too tired and have been in too much pain for a long time to rewrite something or reconsider something the author or publisher weren't happy with.

Without any order of preference here are 6 authors who wrote stuff that spooked me.

Predictable, yes, I love Joe Monks as a human, and love his wife Pamela. But the reason Monks writes works that work for me, is that he is honest, he writes without unnecessary added baloney, and he understands that the best approach to horror isn't absolute gore, it isn't writing about ugly or vile feelings or thoughts.  It is the experiencing of the horror. To see a zombie would scare me, but Monks gives you a gun and you can fight it. But the things that dwell in the heart of the evil in the books he writes, aren't targets you can kill with a gun. He understands being lost in the darkness with evil surrounding you, and having the advantage against you. He makes you feel the fear the characters he writes about feel.

I rarely talk about Stephen King, and it isn't about his personality. I find his work good in quality, but they rarely frighten me. However, Salem's Lot scared me poopless. The images in Cycle of the Werewolf were more than frightening. The prose wasn't that dark, or fear inducing, but perhaps he wrote knowing Berni Wrightson could express horror better than most other authors. I am not suggesting King is the best at evoking horror, or making you feel it, but in his best works, he lays open your vein of fear, and doesn't severe it, he licks it, he plays with it and then when you feel relief that you might survive, he severs your jugular. 

The title Black Easter and Day after Judgment refer directly to what the subject of this book series is about. The devil and his minions attack and kill God. Nietzsche's famous term God is dead was a phrase that had a philosophical meaning behind it. It meant, listen humans, quit living your lives for something you do not know exists, likely doesn't, and shouldn't rule over your existence.  Which arose the theory of their being a higher man and blah blah... But in this case, when James Blish says God is dead, that bastich means it.  It is by far the most dark work I've ever read, and I read it to learn what a concept about such a dethroning of the king of all creation could mean. I wish I hadn't read it, but as the books on this list go, it is certainly a work that scared the shit out of me

The world found out that the personal character of HP Lovecraft was filled with xenophobic, ugly racist views. He lived in his own private hell, with numerous health issues, having lost most of his family, and lived upon very little money with two aunts with equally poor health. He was isolated, kept out of school but self educated, to a very high degree. His fascination with astronomy and his life's lesson that there is very little in the world of a kind or benevolent nature. He imagined aliens who had powers, and to the primitive and bestial human mind, they'd surely appear to be gods. So when he wrote his horror, he did so in a way, that was devoid of fear as we might think. He imagined a mostly empty cold and vast universe, where the beings that now found earth could do almost anything with, and find rewards in followers and powers. His works aren't jump scares, or monsters who tear out your throats. They are so bright humans can't understand them, and see them as Gods or godlike beings. And no one exists that will come and save us.

The works of Alma Katsu are almost unfair. They take normal and introduce the abnormal, they use realism to create the backdrop for the surrealistic horror that follows. She uses the Japanese Internment camp in Idaho as the stage for a drama that brings demons to the foreground, but Oni, not Western Demons, and by adding that cultural flavor, it is deeply unsettling. The Hunger is a retelling of the famed cannibalistic event, the Donner Party. And frankly, if cannibalism from a HISTORICAL backdrop doesn't make you gag or run in fear, you are immune to it and a better person than me.

Mary Shelley is not a current name, but she was a genius for the era in which she wrote. Imagining the first world pandemic was brilliant if it didn't induce fear in me, I think it is nonetheless worth reading for what someone 200 years ago imagined would destroy the human population. For me Frankenstein held less horror as it did a lesson that was taught, again, far sooner than could be imagined had you only now first heard of it and was asked, when would you guess the first story of humans reanimating flesh through science would have appeared. The genius concept compares man to God and asks if humans are morally as wise as they've now appeared to be bright. And for me, not the monster or events, the true horror for me comes in the fact that people saw this monster and thought, it is just dead flesh, that lightning revived, but in the original unabridged novel, Frankenstein is bright, angry but not evil per se, and he has the sole punishment of a being born by science, and not a soul. He is isolated, screams for human friendship or company, and is condemned in the end to walk the arctic ice pack since he cannot die, and doesn't have a soul to worry about his actions affecting. The monster itself isn't scary, it is that humans created him, and think HE is the monster.  I really really adore Mary Shelley's mind and work.

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