The 25 Best Horror Novels Of The New Millennium

Since the year 2000, live-action horror has gone through several popular, and inevitably overdone, phases, some better than others but all contributing the genre’s highest level of mainstream acceptance in decades, if not ever. First came the wave of Japan-inspired ghost stories and remakes of foreign movies, triggered by 2002’s box office hit The Ring; then, two years later, the controversial “torture porn” stretch of hard-R-rated flicks piggybacked on the successes of Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005). Once the Saw franchise hit its sadly redundant sixth film, audiences demanded a change, which came in the form of 2009’s made-for-nothing, found-footage phenomenon, Paranormal Activity, the impetus, along with the sci-fi/horror pic Cloverfield (2008), for the visual style’s current dominance (even in television shows like The River). And, in the last few years, vampires (Twilight, True Blood) and zombies (The Walking Dead) have once again become in vogue.

On the written page, horror has been even more substantial, touching upon all of those trends—save for found-footage, of course—and adding subtext that could only be achieved through prose and, subsequently, the mind’s eye. This week, however, scary literature is taking a look back at the classic monsters of yesteryear, with the release of first-time author Brian McGreevy’s buzz-worthy novel Hemlock Grove (available today). Set in a Pennsylvania steel town, Hemlock Grove reconfigures the werewolf and Frankenstein’s monster mythos into a whodunit murder mystery involving high school kids and an upper class family.

It’s an notable debut for McGreevy, but, ultimately, Hemlock Grove falls short of ranking amongst the fiction genre’s strongest books over the last 12 years. To see what does place within that honored distinction, check out The 25 Best Horror Novels Of The New Millennium. Your precious Kindle is about to get a workout.

Written by Matt Barone (@MBarone)

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Recently, and admirably, adapted by legendary horror filmmaker Don Coscarelli (Phantasm, Bubba Ho-Tep), John Dies At The End is one of those books that, no disrespect to Mr. Coscarelli, should remain on the page. David Wong’s freakishly inventive monsters, alternate universes, and perverted humor can’t truly be served by special effects.

At first, Wong (the pen name for online humorist Jason Pargin) published various short stories about the absurd exploits of main characters David and John, two college dropouts turned overmatched paranormal hunters. Riding mentally high on a brain-scrambling drug called “Soy Sauce,” the guys do battle with giant meat monsters (yes, uncooked hamburgers and other frozen beef), penis doorknobs, talking dogs, and demonic wiggers.

Though it may not be the scariest book on this list, John Dies At The End is certainly the funniest, not to mention one of the most creative.

Comparisons to Stephen King’s sprawling vampire yarn Salem’s Lot are never bad, so when Sarah Langan’s 2007 novel, The Missing, made its way into book shops and garnered such lofty parallels, horror fans took notice.

Those who gave The Missing a chance were greeted by a distressing examination of one town’s (Corpus Christi, Maine) upheaval thanks to an unseen force awakened by a precocious kid. This turns the townsfolk, many of whom Langan develops quite well, into flesh-eaters more enigmatic than your everyday zombies. Don’t let primitive gender stereotypes fool you, either—The Missing brings the gore in abundance.

Just when you think you’ve read and seen every kind of zombie story, there’s a fresh spin on the living dead like Bentley Little’s The Walking that reignites your teetering passion for stumbling corpses. Instead of launching off with hordes of zombies, Little enters the Z-world through a single flesh-eating walker, lead character Miles Huerdeen's undead father. Using his background as a private investigator, Miles begins looking into the existence of more zombies in other families, tracing the origins of pulse-less troublemakers back to the Old West.

Dan Simmons writes horror fiction for the biggest of history buffs. In what’s become a routine practice for the Hugo Award-winning author, The Terror finds Simmons combining actual researched facts with his own sick, monster-loving imagination. Here, the narrative is centered upon the lost expedition of British Navy officer Captain Sir John Franklin, a nearly 130-man mission that perished in frosty conditions.

As Simmons imagines it, though, Franklin and his crew, along with cannibalism, get preyed upon by a bloodthirsty demon lifted from Eskimo mythology, known as the Tuunbaq. To The Terror’s benefit, the scariest parts don’t even come from the inhuman antagonist—it’s the brutally shocking ways in which Franklin’s men turn on one another that gives this 784-page epic its unnerving potency.

You can’t blame Joseph Hillstrom King for using the shortened pen name Joe Hill—the son of Stephen King, he’s determined to earn respect and acclaim without any accusations of nepotism. With his 2007 debut novel Heart-Shaped Box, Uncle Stevie’s little boy proved that he’s not only inherited storytelling genes from his pops, but he’s also a much different kind of writer.

There’s a certain elegance to Hill’s writing, a sparseness that makes lean sentences read poetically. It’s a unique gift that lends Heart-Shaped Box’s supernatural plot tons of emotional resonance. We follow, and easily care for, washed-up rocker Jude Coyne as he orders a dead guy’s suit online, believing the ad’s promise that the owner’s ghost still resides in it, and fights for his life once the malevolent spirit shows the seller’s honesty and starts causing death.

One of the new millennium’s strongest horror fiction debuts, Heart-Shaped Box signaled in ’07 that a magnificent new voice had emerged, a truth that only heightened with the 2010 release of Hill’s follow-up, Horns. But more on that one later.

Imagination and daring are vast in Tom Piccirilli’s A Choir Of Ill Children, a unique Southern Gothic tale told through the eyes of alternately lovable and reprehensible oddities. The main character, Thomas, is a descendant of supernatural forces that have long governed the swamplands of Kingdom Come county, and when’s not taking care of his conjoined triplet siblings (who share one brain and speak in sing-song), Thomas is avoiding fatal reprimanding from a crew of elderly witches who call Kingdom Come’s shots. With Piccirilli’s penchant for insightful analysis and rich character development, A Choir Of Ill Children is a freak show with tremendous heart.

Previously an entertainment critic for Entertainment Weekly, first-time novelist Gillian Flynn blindsided horror readers in 2006 with the uncompromising serial killer book Sharp Objects. Hopefully it’s not based on too much personal experience, because if it is we feel for homegirl.

Flynn’s protagonist is Camille Parker, a newspaper reporter who once lived in an asylum, due to her obsession with self-cutting. She gets assigned a story that’s happening back in her hometown, where a young girl has gone missing and a killer is on the loose. And, as the bait-and-switch ending of Sharp Objects makes abundantly clear, Camille’s reality goes from unstable to painfully undesirable.

Give director Carter Smith some kudos: When he adapted Scott Smith’s (no relation) novel The Ruins in 2008, the guy did a commendable and impressive job—working with a Scott-written script, no less. Yet we’re sure even Carter himself would acknowledge that the 2006 paperback version is the superior of the two editions.

Right down to its downright grim ending (which was foolishly altered for the movie), The Ruins does a masterful job of blending the uncertainties of being vacationers in a foreign, hostile land with the ecological terror brought about by unstoppable and lethal plant life.

Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist is one fortunate guy: Unlike most writers, whose novels have been sullied by inept filmmakers, Lindqvist’s excellent vampire story Let The Right One In is the direct inspiration for two outstanding movies, Sweden’s same-named 2008 version and America’s Let Me In (2010).

Give most of the credit to Lindqvist himself, whose original novel is so tightly rendered and emotionally potent that you’d have to be lobotomized to screw a book-to-film incarnation up. For those who’ve never seen either flick, Let The Right One is about a bullied grade school kid, Oskar, who finds a friend in the new girl (or, in Lindqvist’s book, a little he-she), Eli, who also happens to be an undying blood-drinker. The bond they form gives birth to a beautiful love story, while Eli’s nasty extracurricular activities provide the unflinching horror.

Every Halloween, bookstores should prominently feature Norman Partridge’s Dark Harvest at the front of their locations, to bring attention to one of the best novels centered around the spooky holiday. Thankfully, neither Disney or ABC Family has picked up on the plot’s kid-centric angle, because the magic of Dark Harvest is how Partridge throws all kinds of grown-up, scar-you-for-life dangers at his youthful characters.

Things kick off with October Boy, an inanimate, human-sized prop with a pumpkin head that the kids in Anytown, U.S.A. must retrieve in order to be granted passage out of their homeland. Rightfully so, the mission isn’t as easy as grab-and-run. Partridge conveys his tale of a boy’s maturation into adulthood through a gothic filter—it’s Stand By Me by way of Neil Gaiman.

Even when the one-of-a-kind Chuck Palahniuk isn’t working in the horror fiction genre, his novels are always seeped in darkness, and also the sickest humor imaginable. So when he decided to jump headfirst into the world of literary scares with Lullaby, the results were practically guaranteed to disturb beyond belief.

And the man didn’t disappoint. Lullaby, a twisty, wildly structured tale of magic and murder, follows a newspaper reporter, a real estate agent, and a Wiccan as they travel across country tracking down copies of a children’s poem that kills anyone who hears it. Naturally, none of the characters are one-dimensional. Streator, the journalist, first uses the “culling song” to flat-line several innocent victims; meanwhile, Helen Boyle, the house-seller, specializes in showing demonically inhabited houses.

By the time you reach Lullaby's rug-pulling, totally bonkers ending (the norm for a Palahniuk novel), the author’s knack for alternating between hilarity and creepiness enhances what’s already been a fascinating, richly layered narrative. One that could only from a man as warped and gifted as Palahniuk.

It’s enough to make us want to stay out of the historically witchy, and similarly storied, Salem, Massachusetts, forever. In Jonathan Maberry’s action-packed, supernatural freakout Ghost Road Blues, the setting of Pine Deep has become a tourist trap thanks to an old serial killer, called the Reaper, whose legacy attracts thrill-seekers like pigs to feces. And, in a rather clever plot turn, Maberry lets swarms of visitors enter Pine Deep before he unleashes a gang of malicious spirits to finish the Reaper’s handiwork. Let’s just say, they’re not exactly operating cameras while out-of-towners pose for flicks.

The man behind such sordid and intimate novels as Less Than Zero and American Psycho, author Bret Easton Ellis is no stranger to first-person narratives. But with 2005’s format-skewering Lunar Park, he outdid himself in ways very few writers could ably execute.

As Lunar Park opens, it’s a candid memoir about Ellis’ real battles with mainstream popularity and damaging narcotics; slowly, though, the book’s tell-all nature morphs into an exercise in meta fiction once he (fictionally) marries an actress-ex, starts a family, and encounters evil spirits while working on his latest future best-seller, the nicely titled Teenage Pussy. Lampooning one’s self has never been so disquieting.

The iconic Stephen King pumps out so many novels and short stories that it’s nearly impossible to read everything he’s ever written. So, if you ask us, the best way to sample the fiction legend’s greatest works is to rely upon critics’ and like-minded fans’ recommendations—such as this urging to pick up King’s Lisey’s Story, which showcases the author’s gift for balancing tenderness and grotesqueries.

Shamelessly a love saga, Lisey’s Story takes its title character’s grief over her husband’s death and uses the internal pain to fuel an investigation into murder and her late spouse’s never-exposed childhood demons. And, in typical King fashion, it’s a harrowing journey.

As much as we love George A. Romero’s original Dead trilogy, as well as AMC’s The Walking Dead and Robert Kirkman’s comic book source material, zombie fiction tends to bore. Blame it on the surplus of cookie-cutter short stories and novels, written by lazy authors who’ve watched the same Romero flicks, in addition to 28 Days Later, and simply regurgitate scenes and story beats.

One rare exception is Brian Keene’s fast-paced novel The Rising, a fresh take on the flesh-eating and mobile cadaver subgenre that allows the ghouls to operate machinery and strategize amongst each other. Even worse for the still-breathing humans in Keene’s universe are the reanimated birds and animals also hungry for human flesh. That’s something you won’t see Rick Grimes contending with, at least.

There’s a reason why Stephen King refers to Jack Ketchum as “the scariest guy in America.” Through his naturalistic, supernatural-and-fantasy-free novels, Ketchum earns his frights without any gimmicks, bells, or whistles. He simply peels back mankind’s psyche and yanks out the most animalistic impulses.

On the surface, The Lost, easily the author’s grandest achievement, is a coming-of-age story about New Jersey youth gone wild. But that’s not taking into account the book’s central figure, teenage Ray Pye, who’s a burgeoning Hannibal Lecter without the taste for human flesh. The Lost watches the evil Ray slowly decimate the lives of everyone around him, culminating in a finale that’s intensely appalling, gruesome, and, best of all, totally off the rails.

When it comes to vampire fiction, all of the talk as of late, of course, has involved Stephanie Meyer’s hack-tastic Twlight series and Charlaine Harris’ trashy, fun, but oftentimes silly Sookie Stackhouse novels (the source material for HBO’s True Blood). And by that, we mean that’s what teenyboppers and cool-chasing readers are discussing.

Smart and self-challenging bibliophiles, however, should pledge their vamp allegiance to Justin Cronin’s massive, 800-page roller coaster novel The Passage. The book’s villains are technically infected with a virus, but Cronin doesn’t hesitate to identify his hairless, bug-like creatures that glow in the dark as, yes, vampires. Showing their destruction over a 90-year span, The Passage explores the monsters' singular force in extremely thorough detail.

Cronin, an extraordinary storyteller, knows that a great horror novel requires more than just cool villains, though, setting the book’s heart on the shoulders of a father and his young daughter, the latter being humanity’s only hope for survival. Needless to say, expectations are Eiffel-Tower-high for Cronin’s sequel, The Twelve, due to heat up bookstores in October.

The ambition in Max Brooks’ seminal World War Z is something to behold. Presented as a series of Q&A’s and as-told-to passages, the author’s defining work tells the gory and gut-wrenching ins and outs of a zombie takeover through the words of survivors, everyone from military men to politicians to average Joes.

Not all of the fictional accounts are slam-dunks, though; some of the many soldier-based anecdotes, for instance, become repetitive. But Brooks, who wisely writes the entire book in an unwaveringly serious tone, is too intelligent to let World War Z ever lose its allegorical force.

Admit it, at one point or another in your lifetime, you’ve been scared of clowns. Or at least left in a state of unease by the sight of a creepy man wearing makeup and constantly smiling. That’s the universal fear that Liverpool, England, native Ramsey Campbell exploits beautifully in The Grin Of The Dark, a purposefully disconcerting descent into madness that’s written with Campbell’s signature brand of dense, attention-requiring prose.

The Grin Of The Dark puts you into the increasingly fractured mind of shamed movie critic Simon Lester, who hopes to fix his dishonored name by writing a definitive biography on mysterious silent film star Tubby Thackeray. Acted out in a clown get-up, Thackeray’s performances, the recordings of which have disappeared over time, reportedly drove audiences crazy, literally.

And, predictably, but not lamely, Lester goes loopy himself while trying to unravel the tubby one’s secrets. Campbell is at his scary best whenever Thackeray’s performances are described, and he’s funny as hell when depicting the psychologically warped manners in which Lester’s paranoia gets assaulted.

We’ve all been there: After a night filled with more alcoholic beverages than one’s brain can handle, you wake up with a beastly hangover and no recollection of what happened before bedtime. But how would you react if that killer headache was compounded by a pair of pointy horns sticking out of your temples? You’d probably never sip on Hennessy ever again.

For Ig Parrish, the protagonist in Joe Hill’s heartfelt and devilish character study Horns, his new built-in head accessories turn him into the world’s greatest listener: Everyone, in the presence of Ig’s horns, tells him their most fiendish desires, such as who they want to kill, and, in some cases, who they’ve already murdered. Which leads Ig on a chase to once and for all identify the person who left his girlfriend’s corpse lying in the woods.

Ig, as wonderfully written by Hill, is a flawed yet effectively sympathetic character, going to hell and back—almost literally—but never once leaving readers cheering for an unhappy ending.

Just as experienced as good buddy Stephen King but nowhere near as universally recognized, Peter Straub has been penning some of the best novels and short stories in the horror since the early 1970s; for his all-around greatest work, check out his 1979 monster of a novel, Ghost Story, an undisputed classic in the literary genre.

Straub is still churning out great work today, and his top page-turner in recent years is 2010’s A Dark Matter. And it’s a devastating knockout. Structured much like Akira Kurosawa’s terrifically complicated film Rashomon, A Dark Matter provides the individual, conflicting accounts of four longtime friends’ run-in with an occultist wanderer back during their high school days.

The most impressive thing about A Dark Matter is that Straub is basically telling the same story five times, yet he manages to make each version interesting, and unsettling in its own right. And, fortunately, he finds a way to bring them all together in one hell of a payoff.

The name Dan Simmons on a book’s spine guarantees three things: The paperback or hardcover in question is going to be thoroughly researched, exhaustively detailed, and uncompromisingly horrific. And in terms of his research skills, Simmons’ revisionist history chiller Drood is an English major’s wet dream.

Based around intensive studies into the lives of Charles Dickens and his fellow writer/pal Wilkie Collins, Drood imagines a scenario that led to the creation of Dickens’ final, unpublished book The Mystery Of Edwin Drood. Here, after surviving the infamous train wreck that almost killed him, Dickens meets an enigmatic, ghoulish figured, Edwin Drood, who becomes the Great Expectations scribe’s obsession.

Corpses start piling up as Dickens and Collins investigate the mysterious Drood, and, in a haze of opium and other hallucinogenic drugs, Collins begins to suspect that their person-of-interest is a figment of his buddy’s imagination, and that Dickens is the murderer, not Drood. Employing the tactic of an “unreliable narrator” (in this case, Collins) to brilliant degrees, Simmons remixes a fiction icon’s life into a nightmarish, trippy, and immersive psychological ride.

Just how much did Stephen King love the idea behind Under The Dome before finally completing it? Try this on for size: He first started writing the 1,088-page opus way back in 1976, then abandoned it for over 30 years before once again paying the story mind. Even after 2007’s The Simpsons Movie curiously jacked the yet-to-be-finished novel’s central concept. Unsurprisingly, King’s take on the material is far more impactful than Homer’s antics.

Set in the quiet, well-meaning town of Chester’s Mill, Maine, Under The Dome shows what happens when a massive, all-encompassing, and invisible barrier covers the town’s perimeters and blocks it from the rest of society. Similarly allegorical to King’s The Mist, the long-awaited and violent meditation on humanity’s fragile morals doesn’t take long before characters turn on one another, and, multiple times, gruesomely decrease Chester’s Mill’s population. Under The Dome is horrifying in the mankind-is-inherently-bad sense.

Who needs a small army of writers to assemble an anthology of short, dark fiction when you’ve got Chuck Palahniuk and his endless imagination? Especially when he’s clever enough to frame Haunted’s 23 mini-stories with a wraparound narrative that classifies this gorgeously demented triumph as a firmly rooted novel.

Inspired by Palahniuk’s own real-life writers’ group meetings, Haunted, at its nucleus, is the account of several aspiring storytellers’ trip to a weekend retreat, where they’re encouraged to avoid outside distractions and complete original prose. But then they decide to stop eating and cease using electronic devices. And then comes the escalating madness, which seeps into the short stories that get progressively weirder. And people start dying. The reader, however, will never stop grinning with perverse excitement.

Put it this way: You’ve never read anything remotely like Mark Z. Danielewksi’s House Of Leaves. Essentially two books in one, the eccentric and mad genius author’s 2000 debut takes the age-old haunted house setup, rips it apart, and then pieces it back together as a kind of Frankenstein’s monster of a novel. And the final product is both invigorating and mind-blowing enough to make reading another novel the same way again impossible once page 709 is done.

Splicing the two narratives within one another, Danielewski pulls off some amazing literary gymnastics. On one front, House Of Leaves is a lengthy description of a documentary called “The Navidson Report,” about a home whose interiors constantly change in dimensions, cry out in agony, and drive residents to homicide; on the book’s other side, Johnny Truant, a sex-crazed, good-for-nothing tattoo artist, reads said description and frequently goes off on morbid and drug-infused tangents.

Got all of that? Frankly, our heads hurt just trying to streamline House Of Leaves’s “plot.” We haven’t mentioned how Danielewski translates the house’s altering size by presenting the novel’s text upside-down, sideways, and, at times, in one-word-per-page increments. You’ll need a hard drink once the book is finished, but you’ll also have just experienced sheer brilliance.