Many thanks indeed to Andy Henson of
AS May Poetry for his glowing review of
Original Dark Poetry – The Paperback
which is available on Amazon.
The pieces featured in this collection are the culmination of several years work through many disturbed states of mind.
Purchase your copy of Original Dark Poetry – The Paperback.
21 Horror Novels You Need To Read.
Lovecraft Country – Matt Ruff
Lovecraft Country is a 2016 dark fantasy horror novel by Matt Ruff, exploring the conjunction between the horror fiction of H. P. Lovecraft and racism in the United States during the era of Jim Crow laws, as experienced by black science-fiction fan Atticus Turner and his family. It was published by Harper Collins.
The book consists of eight interconnected stories:
The first story has been adapted for the screen in HBO’s Lovecraft Country.
Lovecraft Country
Dreams of the Witch House
Abdullah’s Book
Hippolyta Disturbs the Universe
Jekyll In Hyde Park
The Narrow House
Horace and the Devil Doll
The Mark Of Cain
Bird Box -Josh Malerman
Josh Malerman’s novel “Bird Box” begins with Malorie inspecting her stomach. She and her sister Shannon find out that Malorie is pregnant.
Alongside this discovery, a growing number of news headlines report a wave of strange and disturbing occurrences of murder-suicides. As these incidents spread, the two sisters cloister themselves in their apartment in the hope of surviving the end of the world.
People soon identify that the way that creatures affect humans is through sight. With this discovery, people lock themselves in their houses and blindfold their eyes when they absolutely must go outside.
Burnt Offerings – Robert Marasco
The Rolfe family (Marian, Ben, and their son David) rent an isolated Summer home in the
remote North of Suffolk County, to escape
New York City and get away from their Queens apartment for the Summer.
Ben’s elderly aunt Elizabeth also moves into the home. As stipulated in their rental agreement, the Allardyces (the elderly siblings who own the home) insist that their elderly mother remain in her
apartment in the top floor of the home and be fed three times a day,
to which the Rolfes agree.
However upon moving in, each member of the Rolfe family is plagued by bizarre experiences, personality swings, delusions and
inner turmoil that seems to be stemming from the house itself. The novel was adapted for screen and was released in 1976 starring Oliver Reed, Karen Black, Burgess Meredith and Eileen Heckart. It also features Bette Davis as Aunt Elizabeth.
Carrie -Stephen King
The story of misfit high-school girl, Carrie White, who gradually discovers that she has telekinetic powers.
Repressed and abused by a domineering, ultra-religious mother and tormented by her peers at school, Carrie’s many efforts to fit in and find a meaningful role in her young life lead to a dramatic and deadly confrontation during the senior prom.
Dracula – Bram Stoker
Dracula begins with Jonathan Harker, a young English lawyer, as he travels to Transylvania to meet with Count Dracula, a client of his firm,
in order to finalise a property transaction.
When he arrives in Transylvania, the locals react with terror when he tells them of his destination: Castle Dracula. Though this unsettles him, he continues onward to his meeting with The Count.
When the young lawyer meets Dracula, he notices how pale, gaunt and strange The Count appears. Harker becomes increasingly concerned when, after cutting himself shaving, Dracula lunges at Harker’s throat. Soon after, Harker is seduced by three female vampires, from whom he barely escapes.
He then learns Dracula’s secret — that he is a vampire and survives by drinking human blood.
Head Full of Ghosts – Paul Tremblay
The lives of the Barretts, a normal suburban New England family, are torn apart when fourteen-year-old Marjorie begins to display signs of acute schizophrenia.
To her parents’ despair, the doctors are unable to stop Marjorie’s descent into madness. As their stable home devolves into a house of horrors, they reluctantly turn to a local Catholic priest for help. Father Wanderly suggests an exorcism; he believes the vulnerable teenager is the victim of demonic possession. He also contacts a production company that is eager to document the Barretts’ plight.
With John, Marjorie’s father, out of work for more than a year and the medical bills looming, the family agrees to be filmed, and soon find themselves the unwitting stars of a hit reality television show,
The Possession.
When events in the Barrett household explode in tragedy, the show and the shocking incidents it captures soon become the stuff of urban legend.
House Of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski
House of Leaves begins with a first-person
narrative by Johnny Truant, a Los Angeles tattoo parlour employee and professed unreliable narrator.
Can anything this man says be believed?
Truant is searching for a new apartment when his friend Lude tells him about the apartment of the recently deceased Zampanò, a blind, elderly man who lived in Lude’s apartment building.
In Zampanò’s apartment, Truant discovers a manuscript written by Zampanò that turns out to be an academic study of a documentary film called The Navidson Record, though Truant says he can find no evidence that the film or its subjects ever existed.
I Am Legend – Richard Matheson
Robert Neville appears to be the sole survivor of a pandemic that has killed most of the human population and turned the remainder into “vampires”
The novel details Neville’s life in the months and eventually years after the outbreak as he attempts to comprehend, research, and possibly cure the disease.
Swarms of vampires surround his house nightly and try to find ways to get inside. Neville survives by barricading himself inside his house every night; he is further protected by the traditional vampire
repellents of garlic, mirrors, and crucifixes.
Weekly dust storms ravage the city and during the day, when the vampires are inactive, Neville drives around to search them out in order to kill them with wooden stakes and to scavenge for supplies.
Interview With The Vampire is a story of immortality, loyalty, and detachment. The main plot surrounds three individuals brought and held together by the bond of immortality.
The story begins with the vampire, Louis, who meets with a boy conducting an interview of his life. The journey begins with tragedy in a young mortal’s life that brings him to an encounter with a
vampire that changes him forever.
Eternally in search of answers as to their true nature and origins, Louis faces the death of his humanity, the betrayal of other vampires, and the death of a companion dear to him. In the end, Louis
understands that the road of immortality is best travelled alone.
Set in Sweden in the early 80s, John Ajvide Lindqvist’s book tells the story of Oskar, a 12-year-old boy who is lonely and bullied and prone to wetting himself.
When Eli, a girl he assumes is around his age, moves in next door, he finally finds a friend. They tap messages to each other through the wall in Morse code, they play together, and through his friendship with Eli, Oskar starts to stand up for himself.
Of course, all is not what it seems, as Eli is a 200 year old vampire, forever condemned to live in the body of a child, but not as a child.
She has a helper named Hakan who kills people and drains their blood for her, but it is not long before their presence in the town starts to raise suspicions.
Other characters are drawn into Oskar and Eli’s world – the bullies, the police, a group of friends missing one of their number, and a newborn vampire coming to terms with what they are.
Midnight – Dean Koontz
The book opens with four separate stories that quickly weave themselves together and become different viewpoints of one overarching plot.
First: Janice Capshaw, a nighttime jogger, is pursued and then killed by a pack of mysterious and nightmarish beasts while she is jogging along the beaches of a coastal town named Moonlight Cove.
Second: Twenty-two days later, Sam Booker, an undercover FBI agent, arrives in Moonlight Cove to investigate the suspicious deaths of Janice Capshaw and eleven other people.
Third: Chrissie Foster, an eleven-year-old girl, witnesses her parents in a physically altered state- part human and part beast- and then must flee for her life, narrowly escaping death at the hands of her ‘beast parents’.
And fourth: Tessa Jane Lockland, sister of Janice Capshaw, arrives in Moonlight Cove to uncover the secret of her sister’s unexplained death.
Red Dragon – Thomas H
Red Dragon by Thomas Harris is the prequel to the novel that spawned the Academy Award winning movie Silence Of The Lambs, and is the first
appearance of the infamous, “Hannibal Lecter.”
The plot revolves around the man who captured Hannibal Lecter three years before in his pursuit for another insane serial killer.
Red Dragon is a crime novel full of suspense and forensic
technology that still stands with the best of its genre many years after it was written.
Rosemary’s Baby – Ira Levin
Rosemary Woodhouse, a young woman who has just moved into the Bramford, an old Gothic Revival style New York City apartment building with her husband, Guy, a struggling actor. The pair are warned that the Bramford has a disturbing history involving witchcraft and murder, but they choose to overlook this.
Rosemary has wanted children for some time, but Guy wants to wait until his career is more established.
Rosemary and Guy are quickly welcomed to the Bramford by neighbours Minnie and Roman Castevet, an eccentric elderly couple. Rosemary finds them meddlesome and absurd, where as Guy begins paying them frequent visits.
After a theatrical rival suddenly goes blind, Guy is given an important part in a stage play. Immediately afterwards, Guy unexpectedly agrees with Rosemary that it is time to conceive their first child.
That night, she dreams of a rough sexual encounter with a huge, inhuman creature with yellow eyes.
Rosemary finds claw marks on her breasts and crotch the following morning, which Guy dismisses as the results of a hangnail.
She subsequently finds out that she is pregnant.
William Halloway and James Nightshade are
thirteen-year-old boys living in Green Town, Illinois. They will turn fourteen within a week.
A lightning-rod salesman comes into town and warns the boys that a storm is coming. He gives Jim a lightning rod to put up on his roof.
The boys visit Charles Halloway, Will’s father, at the library and take out some books. Charles Halloway feels old, although he is only fifty-four, and he is tormented by an urge to be young and run like the boys. Both Charles Halloway and the boys learn about the
carnival that is to start the next day.
The Elementals – Michael McDowell
The story begins with the funeral of Marian Savage, the matriarch of an old and opulent family from Alabama with an intriguingly peculiar and disturbing burial rite.
The Savage family are linked by marriage, friendship and history to the McCrays and both families spend the summer at Beldame.
An island compound on which sits three identical Victorian
mansions, one owned by the Savages, one by the McCrays and one that sits empty, for reasons unknown.
At night the island is cut off from the mainland by the tide, there is literally no escape from what haunts the night.
The Exorcist – William Peter Blatty
Inspired by the supposed true story of a child’s
demonic possession in the 1940s, William Peter Blatty created an iconic novel that focuses on Regan, the eleven-year-old daughter of a movie actress residing in Washington, D.C.
A small group of overwhelmed yet determined individuals must
rescue Regan from an unspeakable fate, and the drama that ensues is both gripping and unfailingly terrifying.
Four brothers, Ikenna, Boja, Obembe, and Benjamin, begin to fish at the Omi-Ala river near their home in a quiet neighbourhood of the city of
Akure, Nigeria, despite being forbidden from doing so by their parents, as the river is heavily polluted.
On one of their fishing trips, they encounter a local madman, Abulu, who follows them shouting the name of Ikenna, the oldest brother. The other children flee, but the four brothers stop to listen, as Abulu shouts a series of prophecies: that Ikenna will become blind, mute and crippled. He finishes by prophesying that Ikenna will be killed by a fisherman.
Ikenna thinks this means that one of his brothers will kill him, and he gradually turns against them. The prophecy undoes the family and the expectations the brother’s parents have for them.
The book is the story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House.
Dr Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of a “haunting”; Theodora, his light hearted assistant; Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the
future heir of Hill House.
Dr Montague hopes to find scientific evidence of the existence of the supernatural. He rents Hill House for a summer and invites as his guests, several people whom he has chosen because of their past experience with paranormal events. Of these, only Eleanor and Theodora accept. Eleanor travels to the house, where she and Theodora will live in isolation with Montague and Luke.
Jack Torrance, his wife Wendy, and their young son Danny move into the Overlook Hotel, where Jack has been hired as the winter caretaker.
Cut off from civilisation for months, Jack hopes the isolation will enable him to write a new play as he battles his alcoholism and barely concealed rage and anger.
Tensions between the three build as evil forces residing in the hotel, which has a long and violent history, covet young Danny for his
precognitive powers and exploit Jack’s weaknesses to try to claim the boy.
The Whisper Man – Alex North
Still devastated after the loss of his wife, Tom Kennedy and his young son Jake move to the sleepy village of Featherbank, looking for a much-needed fresh start, but the village has a dark past.
Fifteen years ago, a twisted serial killer known as ‘The Whisper Man’ abducted and murdered five young boys.
Of course, these historic crimes shouldn’t trouble Tom and Jake as they try to settle into their new home. Except that now another boy has gone missing. And then Jake begins acting strangely.
The Woman In Black – Susan Hill
Solicitor Arthur Kipps arrives at the mysterious and foreboding Eel Marsh House to attend to the estate of the recently deceased Mrs Alice Drablow.
Eel Marsh House is not just mysterious and foreboding, but come the high tide access from the property to the mainland is cut off by the foreboding sea.
During the funeral service of Mrs Drablow, Arthur happens to spy a woman dressed all in black. Disturbing enough, but the woman in black looks almost like she has just risen from the grave. To make the situation even worse, nobody but Kipps actually sees her.
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