We asked you on our Facebook page for scary book suggestions with the one stipulation that they were not written by Stephen King as he’d dominated our previous scary book poll. You answered in your hundreds as you always do, but we didn’t get many actual book titles. We did however get plenty of suggestions for authors and I could have either ignored the myriad author suggestions and written up the results for a much smaller poll or add up all the votes for all the authors and change the poll to an author based one.
Which is what I did.
Top of the list is Dean Koontz, I have read most of his books and I would tend to agree with his lofty placing based on his earlier novels.
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…and second place goes to H.P. Lovecraft, popularly known as the father of modern horror he was the go to horror author for 56 of you.
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Another of my favourite authors next. The strange and wonderful Clive Barker, the author of The Hellbound Heart which was made into the hugely successful film Hellraiser received 53 votes.
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James Herbert is fourth, with 47 votes, this british master of Horror kept us awake with his Rats Trilogy and titles such as The Fog, The Spear, The Jonah and The Ghosts of Sleath. He sadly passed away in 2013 and his cause of death was never released.
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Edgar Allan Poe received 42 votes; his Tell Tale Heart was one of the first Horror stories I ever read and I was instantly hooked by the genre.
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.. I knew the Kings would squeeze in somewhere, they’re the literary equivalent of the Kardashians. Not Stephen this time but his son, Joe Hill; I absolutely love everything Joe has written so far with Heart Shaped Box being my favourite.
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Richard Laymon comes in at number 7 with 23 votes. Don’t read him if you’re uncomfortable with protagonists you’ll love to hate and sex, don’t read him if you dislike dirty old men.
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We have a tie for 8th place, Anne Rice and Mark Z. Danielewski both receiving 19 votes each.
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And in tenth place, Susan Hill; your 14 votes for her unique writing style places her in our final spot.
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Here are some of your other favourite Horror writers that didn’t quite make our top ten.
Peter Straub
Bram Stoker
Cormac McCarthy
Nick Cutter
Shirley Jackson
William Peter Blatty
Brian Lumley
David Wong
Guillermo Del Toro
Hopefully you will have been introduced to some new Horror authors by reading this poll, I know I have.
As always, thanks go to those who take the time to vote on our polls, we couldn’t do this without your input.
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