Clive Barker
The most original British horror voice of his generation: Barker rewired the genre's relationship with the body and desire, founded the dark-fantasy register a generation now writes in, and gave horror cinema one of its…
Horror
Fiction designed to unsettle, from the gothic shudders of the eighteenth century through ghost stories, cosmic dread and vampires to the mass-market terrors of the modern bestseller list. The oldest emotion, as Lovecraft noted, given literary form.
Sub-genres
- Steampunk
- Science Fantasy
- Dark Fantasy
- Weird Fiction
- New Weird
- Cosmic Horror
- Gothic Horror
- Ghost Story
- Psychological Horror
- Supernatural Horror
- Vampire Fiction
- Body Horror & Splatterpunk
- Folk Horror
The authors (23)
Algernon Blackwood
The supreme master of nature-horror and a direct ancestor of cosmic horror: Blackwood demonstrated that the most profound terror comes from indifference and immensity, not fangs.
Robert Bloch
The hinge between Lovecraft's cosmic age and the psychological thriller: Psycho founded the serial-killer genre, and Bloch's insight — that the scariest monster is the neighbour — became modern horror's operating premise.
Ray Bradbury
The writer who proved science fiction could be literature without apologising.
Ramsey Campbell
The bridge between Lovecraft's tradition and modern British unease, and the field's standard for sustained literary quality: multiple Grand Master and lifetime honours from every body that issues them, and an influence on…
Neil Gaiman
The defining mythic fantasist of his generation: Sandman legitimised comics as literature, American Gods codified the gods-among-us novel, and his fairy-tale register shaped two decades of fantasy, YA and screen storytelling.
James Herbert
The man who built the British mass market for horror: Herbert's paperbacks made the genre a working-class national pastime in the 1970s, and the visceral, urban, set-piece-driven school he founded runs through British horror…
Robert E. Howard
Sword and sorcery begins with Howard, full stop.
Shirley Jackson
The author of the finest haunted-house novel in the language and the great demonstration that horror's true engine is psychology: Hill House and 'The Lottery' are permanent fixtures of the canon and the curriculum alike.
M. R. James
James perfected the English ghost story and defined its rules so thoroughly that the form is simply called 'Jamesian'.
Stephen King
Simply the most important horror writer who has ever lived, by reach: King made the genre a mass medium, trained generations of readers and writers, and his best books — The Shining, The Stand, It — are American literature…
Tanith Lee
The great sensualist of fantasy and a key architect of its dark, eroticised register — the bridge between Moorcock's generation and modern dark fantasy and paranormal fiction.
Fritz Leiber
The bridge between Howard and modern fantasy, the founder of urban supernatural horror, and sword and sorcery's official christener.
H. P. Lovecraft
The defining figure of twentieth-century horror.
Arthur Machen
A foundational figure of weird fiction whom Lovecraft ranked among the modern masters of horror.
George R. R. Martin
The defining fantasist of the twenty-first century so far: ASOIAF normalised moral consequence and political realism in epic fantasy, created the grimdark mainstream, and via HBO made the genre a global mass medium.
Richard Matheson
The great normaliser of horror: by relocating the uncanny to postwar ordinary life, Matheson built the road King drove down, and I Am Legend's last-man-amid-infection template underwrites half of modern apocalyptic fiction and…
China Miéville
The central figure of the New Weird and the most formally restless major fantasist of his generation: Miéville re-opened the weird tradition for the twenty-first century and made genre hybridity itself a respectable literary…
Edgar Allan Poe
The wellspring of psychological horror and the modern short story of dread.
Anne Rice
The author who made the vampire a point-of-view character and built the template — sympathetic immortals, gothic sensuality, found families of the undead — on which paranormal romance, urban fantasy and a thousand brooding…
Mary Shelley
Frankenstein is, by most serious accounts (Brian Aldiss's included), the first true science fiction novel: the fantastic event generated by science rather than the supernatural, with the moral bill presented in full.
Bram Stoker
Dracula codified the vampire for all time and established the template of ancient evil versus modern method that underpins a vast swathe of horror since.
Peter Straub
The writer who held horror to literary standard during its boom decades: Ghost Story is the modern summit of the form it names, and his King collaborations bridged the genre's commercial and literary wings in one bloodline.