I’ll bat for Jackson, Barker and Jones! “The Lottery”, Haunting of Hill House, Books of Blood and My Heart is a Chainsaw are mandatory reading, great horrors all. Here’s a few more names to consider...
Jack Ketchum. Haven’t read The Girl Next Door – it’s a kind of book you have to “prepare yourself”, as if that’ll mean anything, though I have read Mendal W. Johnson’s Let’s Go Play At the Adams’, which I will recommend – but I have read his first two novels. Off Season is as essential a textbook of horror as it is brain-fryingly horrific (those in the know, no that was not a pun), but those who are not yet prepared to take the deep dive in primeval terror can do well with Hide and Seek, which is just as touching and heartbreaking as Dathan Auerbach’s Penpal (another recommendation).
Koushun Takami. He wrote one book, but hot damn what a book. Before its title got commodified into a popular video game subgenre Battle Royale actually meant something, though those who’ve read the book and/or seen Kinji Fukasaku’s film still know it means a lot. Especially those who read the book. If you thought Hunger Games was a tad tame and The Long Walk wasn’t devastating enough (if Lord of the Flies was lacking automatics), let this 600-paged tome ruin you. There’s a lot of kids in there, and you’ll know every one; by hook or by crook (by lead-splattered grey matter), you will.
Alison Rumfitt. Tell Me I’m Worthless must’ve been what it felt like back when Dell Abyss published Poppy Z. Brite’s Lost Souls back in 1993, but those van-hoppin’ vampires back in New Orleans seem a lot cozier than whatever subterranean red rooms Rumfitt unveils in the casual complicit heart of London (as if that could ever happen here in the US...). It’s a dark, heavy, and dare I say an evil novel, but “evil” in the sense that I consider The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to be evil: both of them stare deep into the abyss, they report back without a flinch, NOT ONE WORD OMITTED… But in the case of TWIW, it might just stare back at you. She has also written some great short fiction: “The Nonce” and “Leechdog” (of the Eerie anthology podcast) are also worthy of your attention.
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS: Songs of a Dead Dreamer by Thomas Ligotti (20th century existentialism), The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enríquez (that too, but also terrible pasts revisited with a vengeance, Argentina style), Gathering the Bones edited by Ramsey Campbell, Jack Dann and Dennis Etchison (mix of quiet and not-so-quiet horror; some great tales, but what I do remember all the years since I read it is a name: “Li’l Miss Ultrasound” by Robert Devereaux) and The Dark Descent edited by David G. Hartwell (big mother of a book, but a worthy excavation of horror fiction history).
HONORABLE MENTIONS: Testament and The Totem by David Morrell, The Drive-In by Joe R. Lansdale, By Reason of Insanity by Shane Stevens, and the works of Michael McDowell.
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