101 Horror Books to Read Before You're Murdered

by Sadie Hartmann

But 101 Horror Books to Read Before You’re Murdered? Now that’s horror, baby! And that, my friend, is what we’re here for. (Please read the last two sentences as the character George Costanza from Seinfeld.)

Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone. —Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

In horror’s wake, hope was a bountiful garden.

Is one possible without the other? I think you have to know someone in order to truly love them, and you have to love someone in order to really hate them.

There it was, the house on Kill Creek, the Finch House, the old, grizzled monster that stalked the dreams of children, that danced on the tongues of morbid storytellers.

If there are ghosts, what do they want? Are they benign? Are they evil? Are they here to exact revenge (justified or not), to take care of unfinished business that was interrupted by a violent death, or because they’re prevented from resting by the living? And are there places haunted by the echoes of those who lived and died in them? —Ellen Datlow, introduction to Echoes

He understood that the ghost existed first and foremost within his own head. That maybe ghosts always haunted minds, not places.

Tending to lost souls is my vocation, Dona Beatriz.

To love someone is to hate them, a little bit. We hate everyone we really love.

As far as God goes, I am a nonbeliever. Still am. But when it comes to a devil — well, that’s something else. —William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist

WE COULD devote our lives to making sense of the odd, the inexplicable, the coincidental. But most of us don’t, and I didn’t either.

This is all it takes for people to plunge into insanity: one night alone with themselves and what they fear the most.

Cosmic Horror’s true terror is best understood as subjugation. A jail where all hope is a farce and every choice a sham. —C.S. Humble, author of the Black Wells series

“Fear is a symptom. It happens when our old perspective breaks down.“ Corene stared hard into Monique’s eyes. “Sometimes, we have to break down to see things in new ways.”

Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win. —Stephen King

In Greek, “nostalgia” literally means “the pain from an old wound.” It’s a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backward and forward, it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. —Don Draper, Mad Men

As children we have terrific and terrible times — events that, as we experience them, seem to be the most important things that have ever happened to us — but more often than not we forget them. Truth to tell, at any point in our lives we’ve forgotten more than we know about our own history.

Because we are a branch of the same tree that made those witches long ago.

And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity. —Stephen King, Pet Sematary

You’re in a cult. Call your dad. —Karen Kilgariff, My Favorite Murder Podcast

Jesus had not saved Cora before. He would not save her now. There were only her own two hands and the blade tucked into her palm. If there was a savior for her, it was made up of hard, glinting metal.

The walls speak to me. They tell me secrets. Don’t listen to them, press your hands against your ears, Noemí. There are ghosts. They’re real. You’ll see them eventually.

Chicago was plagued with hundreds and hundreds of unsolved murders and missing persons cases. Lauren knew this was her purgatory, her reason for living to find them and set this right.

After all, since the world began, we’ve been eating each other. If not symbolically, then we’ve been literally gorging on each other. The Transition has enabled us to be less hypocritical.

That’s how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.