best horror novels

Terror as a literary space is marked with that infumable sub-genre band, halfway between the fantastic, the science fiction and crime novels.

And it will not be that the matter is irrelevant. Because in many aspects the History of the human being is the history of their fears. From the appearance of the fire with which to light the darkest nights of the caves to the mists lurking in a great city, passing through the power of the great dictators who handled that fear as motor sustenance to control us ...

How many essential aspects of our being will already be studied in psychology and psychiatry regarding fear ... And yet in literature it is considered that terror is a mere morbid entertainment, a disturbing look at that accident that happened in the middle of the street, while we walk with relief for not have shaken us up close.

In any case, no matter how minor it is labeled, terror is there treated in fiction as the main actor in many authors, and with less prominence in all the rest. Because fear is inherent in our condition, it is what predisposes us to alarm. And not wanting to know it is to assume the blockade as the only potential response.

So, without further ado, let's go there with those authors who to a greater extent cultivate the horror genre for their unconditional readers. Very good works will come out of all of them to have a terrifying time.

Little by little I will add new authors to the selection. Because the list of best current horror books does not stop increasing ...

Stephen King, master of masters

It is not that the vast literary production of Stephen King is confined to terror. In fact, since that initial labeling it has been lavished on many more fantastic works, science fiction or more popular genres, but always with an empathic capacity towards its characters incomparable with any other living author.

The terror of Stephen King it assaults us from any flank.

It can be a clown converted by him into a paradigm of childhood fears, essential, prolonged from the ancestral to our last being.

But it can also befall us with the electric intensity of a psychological rampage of some character completely surrendered to his madness as the ultimate cause, threatening the rest of the characters and gripping us with that realistic and sinister outlining of what the human mind can make up.

Of course, from the fantastic, King also weaves his spider webs that inevitably trap us, undermining our will to escape, showing us what can come from other worlds and dimensions lurking in the shadow of dreams.

The best of all, in this horror made his own genre by King, is that ability to transform everything. Because the beginnings of an electrifying novel of sheer fear can point to something quite different.

An innocent girl in high school, singled out by her classmates, abused, a victim of harassment... Some old childhood friends who meet among jokes and jokes many years later... An idyllic family in search of the warmth of a home among bucolic pictures .

Nothing is ever what it seems in a horror novel by Stephen King. But it is precisely that what we are looking for. Also adding one of the latest and most surprising virtues of King. There is no other author who balances the filthiest horrors with a sensation of humanity opportunely brushed in different scenes, thus achieving that absolute mimicry, the most maddening empathy.

Some horror novels by Stephen King:

Egar Allan Poe, tormented soul

Symbol par excellence of terror. Emblem of that fear that starts from within, from an inner disturbance that stirred its dark waters to end up emerging all kinds of everyday monsters in his prose, and of fanciful and rugged elements in his verses.

Poe was gloomy like sharp, out-of-tune violins that begin to sound continuously, like an obsession, in the middle of the night. And the echoes reach today still firm, with that gliding of taut strings that bristle the skin.

In certain writers you never know where reality ends and legend begins. Edgar Allan Poe is the quintessential cursed writer. Cursed not in the current snobbish sense of the term but rather in a deep meaning of his soul ruled by hells through alcohol and insanity. But... What would literature be without its influence? The underworld is a fascinating creative space to which Poe and many other writers frequently descended in search of inspiration, leaving shreds of skin and pieces of their soul with each new incursion.

And the results are there ... poems, stories, stories. Chilling sensations between delusions and feelings of a violent, aggressive world, lurking for every sensitive heart. The darkness with the adornment of the dreamlike and the insane, the lyricism of out-of-tune violins and voices from beyond the grave that awaken obsessive echoes. Death disguised as verse or prose, dancing its carnival in the imagination of the intrepid reader.

Some horror books by Edgar Allan Poe

Clive Barker and the monstrous terror

Heir to that Poe with nerves gripped by disturbing and creepy visions of impossible beings, Clive Barker awakens his particular spectral beings so that we never forget that those great monsters that inhabit the shadows, such as the bogeyman or the one who plays in each place of the world, it also has a face, almost always marked by the most horrifying vicissitudes.

Someone had to be in charge of keeping the Edgar Allan Poe inheritance. Some writer (beyond Barker also dedicating himself to cinema, video games or comics) had to continue to think first of a story as a simple story or novel with which to terrorize readers. And that, without a doubt, is a Clive Barker that goes further adding sexual components and a touch of gore more in line with our times.

From his well-known Hellraiser, Barker also assaults the fantastic, losing that horizon of the closest terror (on the other side of our walls perhaps). But his always laudable desire to make the horror genre a vast, prolific universe, ready to embark anyone on a journey through the most unsuspected horrors, deserves to be cited for the glory of the genre.

Some horror books by Clive Barker

Mariana Enriquez and the wild side

The best example that horror is more than just a subgenre. Because based on terrors, horrors or simple fears that end up breaking into life, sustaining all existence, Mariana composes the most intense existential mosaic. An author who walks through that wild side of our most hidden fears, perhaps those that the subconscious tries to lightly whiten in dreams.

Mariana's literature has a sustained intensity since at her tender 19 years old she already composed her first novel "Bajar es lo worst", a story that marked a whole generation in Argentina.

Since then, Mariana has been carried away by terrifying scenarios, by creepy fantasies, like a Edgar Allan Poe transmuted to these uncertain days, at times more sinister than his own.

And from those scenarios, Mariana knows how to combine that surprising, fatalistic and rebellious existentialism, determined to destroy any glimmer of hope. Only in this way can his characters shine at times, in flashes of humanity of bitter blinding lucidity.

Terror of our days that seems to have overcome any phase of old symbols, recurring characters and scares to point to something deeper and labyrinthine, a fear that contracts the stomach as if an internal fist were clenching it.

Richard Matheson, display of horrors

One of the worst horrors that man can suffer is the feeling of a silent world where no one is left. The apocalypse itself with which the Bible closes points to that darkening of our world full of symbols where man moves like ecce homo before nothingness.

The film "2001, a space odyssey" also addresses in its final scenes that terrifying sense of loneliness in tune with old age. No one is left between those four nuclear white walls suspended in the universe or in nothingness, which amounts to the same in a growing notion of madness.

But going back to Matheson, he undoubtedly wrote one of the best post-apocalyptic stories in which fear ruled everything. Nothing to do with worlds recomposed from scratch to target fantastic themes.

In "I am a legend" the human being is alone in a city like New York (I myself have a photo on the portal where Will Smith was locked away), everything that happens has that feeling of absolute end. If the last humans disappear from Earth, there is nothing left.

Carlos Sisí, inhabitants of the shadows

In its Spanish version, terror finds one of its strongest allies in Sisi. This writer from Madrid collects sagas and series of zombies and vampires as if to fill a whole hell.

Intense and magnetic novels, loaded with that horror between life and death, on graves and between menacing beings yearning for blood or brains, whatever it takes ...