The best
British & Irish Horror books:
Reddit reviews
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
The best of British & Irish Horror books by number of unique Reddit comments:
Top Reddit reviews mentioning British & Irish Horror books:
Johannes Cabal: The Necromancer
Steampunk(?) Lovecraftian witty and sometimes very funny. I normally go for high fantasy but loved this series.
Yahtzee Croshaw, the guy who makes Zero Punctuation videos, wrote a book where jam, like toast jam, gains sentience and takes over the world. It's somewhere similar to what you described.
HIGHLY recommend checking out Clive Barker's Books of Blood. Six volumes of beautifully terrifying and unsettling shorts from what may be one of the best horror authors in history.
>Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red.
Both under $20 right now and well worth it.
Great book! Frankenstein is good too, but parts of it are a bit of a slog. I really enjoyed this edition on a re-read a few years back, and found the comparison to the pre-Percy-fied version very interesting.
The Laundry Files by Charles Stross is about a top-secret British intelligence agency charged with managing all things supernatural.
The sci-fi twist is that magic is basically applied math, and as computing becomes more ubiquitous, more and more stuff starts leaking over.
Think a joke-cracking IT professional evolving into James Bond as he fights the supernatural, and you've got The Laundry Files.
If you have a kindle, you need this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Masters-Horror-Weird-Supernatural-Stories-ebook/dp/B07BKMW5YW
Includes lots of works by authors you list, and hundreds of others.
Otherwise, I would direct you towards...
Arthur Machen Clark Ashton Smith E F Benson Edgar Allen Poe
All of these are in the ebook I linked.
Bob Howard from Capital Laundry Services shows up, the books are confiscated and everyone forgets it happened. This probably kicks off an interesting adventure involving time travel, where we learn that the Deep Ones actually opened the first book store some time during the mid-paleolithic.
Charlie Stross's Laundry series. Sci-Fi -> Lovecraftian Fantasy in an action/spy thriller framework.
Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan saga.
> killed at least three people by that age.
Is that you, Frank? Hows ya brother holding up? Burned any dogs lately?
Johannes Cabal the Necromancer (as well as the other three books of the series), by Jonathan L. Howard.
Hell even the AUTHOR'S name has a vaguely H. P. Lovecraft feel.
Read this series. You will love it, or I'll eat my hat.
You can buy it here in Kindle format which will allow you to download it legally. If you don't have a Kindle reader, you can also download the free Kindle reader program for the PC and you can read it that way.
Just noticed the cover: that's not the cover I see on blogs the most: US version cover
Also, Amazon's copy has 9 stories in it, and includes "The Birds" (not the movie version with love story), and another story Hitchcock made into a film; and one called "The Blue Lenses" where blind girl has surgery to see again but sees way more than she expected afterwards; plus some story called "The Alibi" where a guy suddenly has a vision he's the puppet-master of everyone in town. The reviews at link above to Amazon give away a little more.
Oh, and there's a serial killer in the Red Coat girl story. Something that's so subtle that many readers apparently missed it (or didn't want to spoil it?), which actually explains a lot of the end "horror", and which is clearer in the 1973 movie.
It's pretty clear that some of these stories (especially in the title story) are similar to things we've seen in PLL. I just don't know (like other readers) if these stories are related. There is an academic paper about the first 5-story version; this theme and curiosity is discussed. (The author died in 1989 I think.) Also warning to people who want to enjoy the stories: the intro gives a lot more away than I did (!!!) that makes the stories less enjoyable, according to Amazon reviews. But, the neat thing for PLL watcher MIGHT be that the intro is in part written by Shirley Jackson. (Finale spoilers to explain that reference below)
MOBILE READERS: Spoiler below is related to a finale spoiler
[Someone here guessed that "Charles" is from a Shirley Jackson short story about a fake kid, Charles, that another kid invents to tell his parents about a bad kid at school; that part stood out to me. Too many coincidences to NOT mean something.](/spoiler)
Above spoiler text is related to a finale spoiler
Reading House of Leaves right now; The Road is next. Just finished From the Dust Returned, and also planning to re-read The Halloween Tree and Dracula, doing entiries on all of those as part of my annual Halloween orgy on my blog. I re-read Frankenstein earlier this year so it's out for now, but I do want to read The Original Frankenstein if I can get my hands on a copy soon. I picked up a bunch of Stephen King books for a dime each at a library sale a couple of weeks ago, so I'll probably slip a couple of those in there, too.
<em>Don't Look Now: Selected Stories of Daphne du Maurier</em>. Found through the Guardian's book club. Good collection for Halloween.
Johannes Cabal the Necromancer
Fun little book - nothing particularly profound, but the beat was good and I could dance to it.