Book picks similar to
Familiar Spirit by Lisa Tuttle
horror
paperbacks-from-hell
fiction
monster-she-wrote
The Nightwalker
Thomas Tessier - 1979
He couldn't explain the morbid impulse that gripped him. Then it happened again when a playful race with a passing jogger spawned an animalistic urge. Now only the gruesome thrill of the hunt could satisfy his terrible hunger.
Night Train
Thomas F. Monteleone - 1984
Now the final nightmare must explode. Now the killing frenzy must begin...
...Walkers
Gary Brandner - 1980
But she was brought back to life!That's when people began trying to kill her...nice people...the last people in the world anyone would suspect of being capable of murder--people who were already dead......Walkers: The most terrifying novel you've ever read!
The Haunting of Hill House
Shirley Jackson - 1959
Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of a "haunting"; Theodora, the lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the future heir of Hill House. At first, their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable phenomena. But Hill House is gathering its powers—and soon it will choose one of them to make its own.
Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga
Michael McDowell - 1983
Michael McDowell was proclaimed “the finest writer of paperback originals in America” by Stephen King, and “one of the best writers of horror in this country” by Peter Straub.Now, McDowell’s masterpiece—the serial novel, Blackwater—returns to thrill and terrify a new generation of readers, with all six volumes available for the first time as a single e-book.Featuring an insightful new introduction by John Langan, Blackwater traces more than fifty years in the lives of the powerful Caskey family of Perdido, Alabama, under the influence of the mysterious and beautiful—but not quite human—Elinor Dammert.The Flood heralds the arrival of a visitor who will change the Caskey family—and the town—forever…When the town builds The Levee, it proves a vain attempt to control a horrific power that can never be contained…The House hides terrible secrets that whisper in closed rooms and scrabble at locked doors…The War reveals family secrets more deadly and devastating than anything Perdido has ever dreamed in its deepest nightmares…The Fortune brings happiness and power—but even greater terror…And finally, the mysterious saga of the Caskey family ends the only way it can—in terrible judgment and fury delivered under the cover of a relentless, earth-shattering Rain.Will Errickson (Too Much Horror Fiction) writes, “Michael McDowell has written a rich, layered historical novel with many Southern Gothic touches, filled out with memorable characters and satisfying moments of death and shock.”
Dead in the Water
Nancy Holder - 1994
Pandora and sail into a cruise of metaphysical terror, madness, and death.
Walkers
Graham Masterton - 1989
Sixty years ago the house was an asylum, home to crazed psychopaths. One night all of them disappeared, never to be seen again.Jack Reed, the owner of The Oaks, has no idea about the building's terrible history. It is only when Jack's son is dragged into the walls of the mansion that he realizes what happened sixty years ago – and just where the inmates have been living all this time...
The House Next Door
Anne Rivers Siddons - 1978
Life is made up of enjoyable work, long, lazy weekends, and the company of good neighbors. Then, to their shock, construction starts on the vacant lot next door, a wooded hillside they'd believed would always remain undeveloped. Soon, though, they come to realize that more is wrong than their diminished privacy. Surely the house can't be "haunted," yet something about it seems to destroy the goodness of every person who comes to live in it, until the entire heart of this friendly neighborhood threatens to be torn apart.
What's Wrong With Valerie?
D.A. Fowler - 1991
The house belongs to her. She should be happy. But Valerie isn’t quite normal… She’s taking in roommates to make ends meet, but, one by one, they keep ending up dead. Her young niece is crying out for a special kind of discipline that only she can provide. And there’s the voices she hears...voices that want her to do terrible things. Valerie is only trying to survive. If she stops doing what the voices tell her, something grotesquely evil will devour her soul... WHAT’S WRONG WITH VALERIE?
The Citadel of Fear
Francis Stevens - 1913
One is taken over by an evil god while the other falls in love with a woman from Tlapallan. Back in the states, the possessed man begins to use magic to mutate civilians. The other walks away, but the pair must duel in the end.
The Hellbound Heart
Clive Barker - 1986
Not your ordinary affair. For Frank it began with his own insatiable sexual appetite, a mysterious lacquered box- and then an unhinged voyage through a netherworld of imaginable pleasures and unimaginable horror… Now Frank - or what is left of Frank - waits in an empty room. All he wants is to live as he was before. All Julia can do is bring him her unfulfilled passions… and a little flesh and blood…
Julia
Peter Straub - 1975
Then a pretty blonde child runs into view, bringing with her an inexplicable suggestion of evil.Once Julia Lofting had a husband and a daughter. But everything has changed since she bolted from her marriage, in flight from the unbearable truth of her daughter's death. For Julia, there is no escape. Another child awaits, another mother suffers, and a circle of the damned gathers around her. The haunting has begun . . .
666
Jay Anson - 1980
666 takes the reader into the world of evil that lies unsuspected behind the door of an ordinary-looking house: a house that reappears from time to time near any city, waiting invitingly, innocently, for someone to rent it, a house in which a dreadful, bloody, orgiastic crime recurs again and again, bringing its victims screaming to the very brink of hell—and into the hands of the devil himself.
Candles Burning
Tabitha King - 2006
Known for his chilling "Blackwater" series, author Michael McDowell left behind the unfinished manuscript for "Candles Burning" upon his death in 1999. In the spirit of the ghost stories that Michael loved, Tabitha King has taken up where he left off, weaving a Southern gothic fabric of murder, guilt, innocence, corruption, and survival, in the voices of the living and the dead. Calliope "Calley" Dakin is just seven when her beloved father is tortured, murdered, and dismembered by two women with no discernible motivation. In the aftermath, Calley and her mother find themselves caught up in inexplicable events that exile them to Pensacola Beach, where-in a house that's a dead ringer for Calley's late great-grandmother's house-a woman awaits their presence. For Calley is no normal little girl.