Favourite Horror writers

[Markus R]

My personal collection by my favourite horror writer

[BadPony]

1 H. P. Lovecraft
2 Edgar Allan Poe
3 Clive Barker
4 Jack Ketchum
5 Stephen King

[jomama]

Stephen King
Anna Rice
Dean Koontz
Clive Barker

[trailmaster]

My favorite horror writers in no order are:

Graham Masterton- some of his novels were tremendously scary
Howard Phillips Lovecraft
Arthur Machen
Stephen King
Dean Koontz- his novel Phantoms was one of the scariest novels I read in my life.
Clive Barker

[deepsepia]

Three Americans, a Brits and a Frenchman.

Most of my faves have been mentioned many times, so I'll restrict my self to names not mentioned, or only once, like T.E.D Klein -- mentioned only by Markus R.

Klein writes very little, but what he writes is spectacular. Lovecraftian, but with a sense of character that Lovecraft doesn't have, and without the racism. "Elder Gods" is a great read for any Lovecraft fan, along with "Black Man with a Horn"

And one writer who's not exactly horror, Lucius Shepard, but overlaps sometimes. A talent that came on the SF/Fantasy scene like a comet-- blazed in the sky for a few years and then burnt out. If you haven't read Shepard, you're in for a treat, for example his "Kirikh'quru Krokundor" is a take on Poe's "The Domain of Arnheim".

You can compare him a bit to Harlan Ellison . . . who deserves a mention too, thought of as an SF author, "On the Slab" certain rates as a horror story as does "Eidolons"

A British gothic author who's just now getting his due (long after his death), Robert Aickman. He's in the M.R James school of educated and subtle -- no severed heads or zombies-- but he's got a way with the "unsettling" story, rather dreamlike but where something bad is intruding. In a very English way, he is probably better known for founding the Inland Waterways Association than his fiction . . . but if you haven't read him and you're in the mood for something very English, he is very much the right cup of tea.

Aickman is held in high esteem by the literary crowd, the New Yorker rarely covers horror writers, but "Burial Plots: Robert Aickman’s Eerily Ordinary Stories" is their recent piece about his work
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page...dinary-stories

And pour nos amis français, Guy de Maupassant. Classic stories-- probably the best known among the anglophone world is "the Horla", I'll leave to H.P. Lovecraft to tell you why you should read it:

Originally Posted by Lovecraft on Maupassant

Relating the advent in France of an invisible being who lives on water and milk, sways the minds of others, and seems to be the vanguard of a horde of extra-terrestrial organisms arrived on earth to subjugate and overwhelm mankind, this tense narrative is perhaps without peer in its particular department.

[Mal Hombre]

Lovecraft and Maupassant had much in common,Lovecraft sneered at New England "Rural Degenerates" While Maupassant derided Norman Peasants,Neither man sounded like They would good company on an evening out..

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by Mal Hombre

Lovecraft and Maupassant had much in common,Lovecraft sneered at New England "Rural Degenerates" While Maupassant derided Norman Peasants,Neither man sounded like They would good company on an evening out..

Maupassant's life was similarly short to Lovecraft's - he died at 42 after a suicide attempt-- but unlike Lovecraft, he had a lot of success in his life. A protegé of Flaubert's, he sold well and had good jobs at newspapers during his brief life. Oddly, in the literary world he's also known for having saved the poet Swinburne from drowning, and it makes a great story

Originally Posted by A bizarre Anglo-French encounter

When Guy de Maupassant helped save Algernon Swinburne from drowning off the north coast of France, he was invited to lunch - an unforgettable experience involving lots of alcohol, monkey meat and pornography.

full story at:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...-de-maupassant

. . . you can see the imprint of this odd encounter in his writing.

The French have sometimes had a much greater appreciation for English language horror than we do-- Rimbaud's translation of Poe was far more successful than Poe himself was, and recently Michel Houellebecq has sung the praises of H.P Lovecraft as literature, something that you don't hear much in American circles

[Jolitorax]

Stephen king for sure. I've read almost all of his books. I say almost cause he write faster than I read

I also like Graham Masterton , Clive Barker and Dean Koontz.

And I realy love Bram Stoker's Dracula.

[Morethan]

Have read the usual gamut of horror writers mentioned by other posters, but Patrick McGrath is a little bit different. Writes books other than horror, but I particularly liked The Grotesque. Think Remains of the Day by way of Psycho

Here's an interview in 2005 for your perusal

https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...ction.features

[mizlaplan]

Stephen King fanatic?
Of course.
I think that King's strength isn't the actual horror in his stories. It's the normal everyday life at the start of his stories which struggles against the horror and eventually succumbs to it.
Moving on to someone who hasn't been mentioned.
William Hope Hodgson.
https://www.bing.com/search?q=willia...ANNTA1&PC=U531
His novels "The Night Land" and "The House on the Borderland" are brilliant.
Most novels are just words which create images in your mind for a milli-second and then you move on.
"The Night Land" did far more for me than that. A helluva powerful book, full of humanity struggling against a doomed world.