What is it about horror stories that you like?

[Jason]

You should. They're good! Especially The Red Tree! It is a branching off from her usual style, but it is very very good!

[Danielle The Book Huntress]

I have a couple of hers at home that I need to get to.

[Sarah]

I like horror for many reasons...for one, it reminds me of the good old days when my younger brother and I used to read those Alvin Schwartz Scary Stories books in the dark. Those illustrations were so creepy! That was the start of it all...

Plus, I can really use my imagination to set up the scene. I am sick of horror movies being more gory and bloody versus scary, so of course I just resort to horror novels. I will say the last greatest scary movie I saw was The Orphan. Ooooh, creepy!

[Lori]

Does anyone know anything about Tami Hoag? I bought two books Saturday at a yard sale for.66 cents. One tag line is "the scream heard by no one is the deadliest" The books titles are Cry Wolf & A Thin Dark Line.

[Leland]

I can't speak for 'A Thin Dark Line' but I've read 'Cry Wolf' and I loved it. Its a serial killer thriller and I think it's written very well. Great plot, good characters, etc. Its also pretty....steamy...but not in a romance novel sort of way. I also really like the way Hoag describes the environment. The novel is set in the Bayou of Louisiana. I'm from GA myself, and she perfectly describes the hot wet feeling you get in the summer. Enjoy it!

[Kasia]

Coraline was fantastic, even her sweater was knitted on needles by a real person, I can't imagine anyone not liking it.

I like the dangerous edge in horror books, the walk close towards the dark mysterious side with hair rising side effects, observed from safety of a book, all playing in my head, what is there not to love? Horror can be intense and packed with voltage depending for our taste, kinda of like hot sauce.

[Helen]

There's something quite unsettling about American Psycho, lulling you into a false sense of security with all that banality, then a sentence like 'I like to cut up girls' just pops in there!

[Gef]

For me, I'm drawn to dark fiction because it tends to examine human nature in a very unapologetic fashion. While I'm not averse to literary/contemporary fiction, I've found that it ironically has a gloomier, more morose outlook, where horror literature can actually scare you and uplift you. Not all the time, but I find more satisfying reading experiences in the dark fiction realm than in other corners of the fiction world.

[Carly]

I am a huge fan of the horror genre, I love horror films, books and graphic novels that are in this genre.

For me personally, I really like it, when the characters are relate-able and you care about if they live or die. There is nothing worse than, a horror film with no character development to explain why they are going to be killed, or what motivates the killer.
Even if a film has a good plot and interesting characters, sometimes they still suck, such as the quiet ones it was poorly executed.There has to be an equal measure of gore, jumps scare and build up of tension and character development as there are scary scenes of development of plot otherwise what's the point. I like unique stories with interesting characters, foreign characters with interesting quirks for example and a supernatural or occult theme etc...
I am primarily thinking about films that I paid to see at the cinema that sucked, for example the pact it's not really a horror film, although there is a cool creepy, medium girl in the film, but that has nothing to do with what happens in the rest of the film. Another film the silent house, this is not a horror film, when they finally, explain that the girl's dad raped her and his friend raped her friend yet there house is supposedly haunted by her friend, it'a load of rubbish. There was also final destination 5 which sucked, I hated that film.

[Erin]

Sarah wrote: "I like horror for many reasons...for one, it reminds me of the good old days when my younger brother and I used to read those Alvin Schwartz Scary Stories books in the dark. Those illustrations wer..."

I LOVE those books and I think that is where it all started for me too.

[Marie]

I found another "dead thread"! lol

So my answer to the question: "What is it about horror novels that you like"?

I like being scared when it comes to horror novels. Horror novels just take us into an unknown world where anything and everything can happen! There are no limits or bounds in horror. Also there are no happy endings like in some other genres. In horror, the main character can die just as easily as a lesser character.

In some genres, books are expected sometimes to wrap up nice and neat at the end, but with horror there is almost always an unexpected end and there is always something different within horror books.

Horror authors have the ability to take us readers to the edge of the cliff and drop us down into the unknown waters below. The gasping horror as we fall into the unknown is what I love about horror as you never know what is going to happen next! :)