The essential authors of science fiction, fantasy & horror — and where to start reading them.
Book Entry · Horror
A dying millionaire pays a physicist and two mediums to settle the question of survival after death by spending a week in the Belasco House in Maine — 'the Mount Everest of haunted houses', sealed since the 1940 expedition that left its investigators dead, mad or paralysed. Dr Barrett brings a machine to drain the house; the spiritualist Florence brings an open soul the house unlocks like a door; and Ben Fischer, sole survivor of 1940, brings the only working strategy: total shutdown. Matheson plays Hill House's ambiguity in reverse — everything is real, escalating and physical — and the solution, when Fischer finds it, is a profane joke worthy of Belasco himself.
The dark twin of Hill House and the template for the 'team investigates bad place' structure that powers half of modern horror cinema; filmed in 1973 as The Legend of Hell House from Matheson's own script.
The book that confirmed The Rats was no fluke and fixed Herbert's signature — civic catastrophe as a sequence of unforgettable atrocities — influencing the entire British disaster-horror line through to Garth Marenghi's affectionate parodies.
The book that, with King's early run, defined the late-70s horror boom's upper register — King has called it one of the finest horror novels of the century — and the modern model for the guilt-returns ghost narrative; filmed, reductively, in 1981.
Source of Hellraiser (1987), directed by Barker himself, and of Pinhead's permanent place in horror iconography; the most influential treatment of the 'be careful what you summon by wanting' theme in modern horror.