The Women in Black by Susan Hill
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The 50 Best Horror Novels of All Time
By Steve Foxe and Paste Staff | August 30, 2018 | 10:11am
BOOKS LISTS HORROR
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The 50 Best Horror Novels of All Time
Horror is a peculiar genre. If it’s meant purely to scare, then some of the heftier books on this list would have wracked up a body count, terrifying readers to death over 700 pages or more. And what is scary? What might shock one reader is laughable to another. Ghosts, serial killers, great heaving monsters, the loss of self-control, plagues, impossible physics and a creepy clown all figure into our countdown, with entries spanning from the 1800s to the last few years. One (obvious) author makes five(!) appearances, and easily could have qualified for a few more; another has written just one novel during his decades-long career. We narrowed our focus to prose novels, so please don’t ask after The Books of Blood or Uzumaki. And while we kept an eye on the diversity of our featured authors, the inclusion of women, authors of color and queer creators came naturally as we gathered the best of the best. We’re prepared for you to question our choices, we ask only that you leave the chainsaw at home before doing so. Without further ado, we present our choices for the best horror novels of all time.
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50. The Summer Is Ended and We Are Not Yet Saved by Joey Comeau (2014)
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Joey Comeau’s first horror outing, One Bloody Thing After Another, is perhaps creepier and more unsettling than this summer-camp slasher. But The Summer Is Ended and We Are Not Yet Saved gets the nod for importing the genre from film into prose while layering in subtle, smart commentary on our thirst for teen blood. Eleven-year-old Martin is used to entrails—his mother does special-effect makeup for horror movies—but would like to keep his inside of his body. A maniac employed at his bible camp has other intentions. The title of Comeau’s previous novel would have worked here just as well: the gory killings are one bloody thing after the other, stacking up as a reminder that we’ve created a prolific genre around watching kids get murdered in inventive ways.
—Steve Foxe
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49. The Woman in Black by Susan Hill (1983)
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One of the biggest tonal outliers on this list, Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black is crafted like a traditional gothic novel, and could likely fool readers into thinking that Hill is a few hundred years older than she truly is. Published in 1983, The Woman in Black is best known today for inspiring one of the longest-running plays in London’s West End (and a Daniel Radcliffe movie). Structured in the classic British form of a story told around a fireplace, Hill’s short ‘80s anachronism chills thanks to its ominous titular figure, who stalks a house on the foggy moors and foretells the death of children. The Woman in Black may not feel like a quintessentially ‘80s horror novel, but it’s an excellent reminder that, even at the peak of its copycat boom period, the genre refused to be pigeonholed.
—Steve Foxe
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