Reading list
The best classic horror books
Gothic novels set the scene; horror is what happens when the lights go out. This list is for the books and stories that still frighten, not only the ones that matter to literary history: ghosts that are never explained, things in the dark that predate humanity, and the monkey's paw that grants three wishes.
19 books, all free to read
Many of the best are short stories, so several entries are collections. The note says which story to start with.
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1. Dracula
by Bram Stoker
The opening chapters in Castle Dracula are still the most frightening thing in the genre.
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2. Short Fiction start with The Tell-Tale Heart
by Edgar Allan Poe
Poe's tales of terror: a heartbeat under the floor, a wall being bricked up, a masked plague at a party.
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3. Short Fiction start with Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad
by M. R. James
The master of the English ghost story, written to be read aloud at Christmas. Quiet, scholarly and terrifying.
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4. The Turn of the Screw
by Henry James
Two children, two ghosts and a governess who may be the danger. The most argued-about ghost story ever.
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5. Short Fiction with The Great God Pan
by Arthur Machen
Machen's weird tales, which Stephen King called maybe the best horror story in English.
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6. Short Fiction with The Call of Cthulhu
by H. P. Lovecraft
Lovecraft's cosmic horror: the universe is old and does not care about us. The source of a whole genre.
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7. Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley
Horror as tragedy: the creature is the most frightening and the most sympathetic thing in the book.
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8. The King in Yellow
by Robert W. Chambers
A play that drives its readers mad. The first four stories are the horror; the rest drift into romance.
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9. The Lady of the Barge with The Monkey's Paw
by W. W. Jacobs
Three wishes, and the knock at the door in the night. The most famous horror story in English is here.
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10. Short Fiction with Carmilla and Green Tea
by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Le Fanu's vampire and his haunted clergyman, two of the finest Victorian chillers.
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11. At the Mountains of Madness
by H. P. Lovecraft
An expedition to Antarctica finds a vast dead city. Lovecraft's longest and most ambitious story.
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12. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson
A respectable doctor and the thing he lets out at night. The horror of the double, still unmatched.
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13. The House on the Borderland
by William Hope Hodgson
A recluse's house is besieged by swine-things from the pit, then by time itself. Lovecraft loved it.
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14. Can Such Things Be?
by Ambrose Bierce
Bierce's ghost stories, including The Damned Thing, an invisible predator in a California field.
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15. The Monk
by M. G. Lewis
Demons, bleeding nuns and a monk's fall. Shocking in 1796 and still lurid.
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16. The Beetle
by Richard Marsh
A shape-changing horror from Egypt in late-Victorian London. It outsold Dracula in its first year.
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17. John Silence Stories
by Algernon Blackwood
Algernon Blackwood's psychic doctor investigates the supernatural. Blackwood wrote The Willows, and it shows.
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18. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
by H. P. Lovecraft
A young man raises an ancestor from the dead and becomes someone else. Lovecraft's best short novel.
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19. The Mummy!
by Jane C. Loudon
A revived Egyptian mummy in the year 2126, written in 1827. The first mummy story, odd and fascinating.
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Read them free
Every book on this list is free in Doomreader: open one and it reads as short posts you scroll, with your place kept and its best pages a tap away. You can listen to any of them free too, read aloud by your device.