Best Supernatural books, no romance, no series
Top 10 Best Supernatural books, no romance, no series
: The Woman in Black, Ghost Story, Her Fearful Symmetry, Come Closer, Ghost and Horror Stories of Ambrose Bierce, The White Hands and Other Weird Tales, Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Summer of Night, The Emperor of Dreams
| Author | Susan Hill |
| ISBN | 1567921892 |
What real reader does not yearn, somewhere in the recesses of his or her heart, for a really literate, first-class thriller--one that chills the body, but warms the soul with plot, perception, and language at once astute and vivid? In other words, a ghost story written by Jane Austen?
Alas,...
| Author | Peter Straub |
| ISBN | 0671685635 |
I don't think one can truly rate Ghost Story as a novel without acknowledging the fact that it's a literary homage to the classics of the genre. Indeed, two characters bear the surnames of Hawthorne and James.
This is my introduction to the work of Peter Straub. Having read The Talisman and Black...
| Author | Audrey Niffenegger |
| ISBN | 0224085611 |
Six years after the phenomenal success of The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger has returned with a spectacularly compelling and haunting second novel set in and around Highgate Cemetery in London.
When Elspeth Noblin dies of cancer, she leaves her London apartment to her twin nieces,...
| Author | Sara Gran |
| ISBN | 0425210316 |
this is short and anything but sweet, somehow managing to pack a whole lot of creepiness into just under 200 pages.
it’s a story of a woman’s disintegration as she is invaded by a demonic presence that insinuates itself into her body and mind, slowly and irrevocably supplanting her free...
| Author | Ambrose Bierce |
| ISBN | 0486207676 |
all hail Ambrose Bierce! an American original. aka "Bitter Bierce" - a soldier, government agent, journalist, short story writer, satirist, social critic. his life bookended by two wars: at age 19 in the American Civil War (most notably, fighting in the Battle of Shiloh) and at age 71 as a witness to...
| Author | Mark Samuels |
| ISBN | 1872621899 |
This is the first collection of strange stories by contemporary writer Mark Samuels. The themes that thread through these nine accomplished stories are drawn from the great tradition of the twentieth-century weird tale, and they are suffused with a distinctly cosmopolitan, European feel. Mark...
Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things
| Author | Lafcadio Hearn |
| ISBN | 0804836620 |
A blind musician with amazing talent is called upon to perform for the dead. Faceless creatures haunt an unwary traveler. A beautiful woman — the personification of winter at its cruelest — ruthlessly kills unsuspecting mortals. These and 17 other chilling supernatural tales — based on legends,...
Something Wicked This Way Comes
| Author | Ray Bradbury |
| ISBN | 0380729407 |
A carnival rolls in sometime after the midnight hour on a chill Midwestern October eve, ushering in Halloween a week before its time. A calliope's shrill siren song beckons to all with a seductive promise of dreams and youth regained. In this season of dying, Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show...
| Author | Dan Simmons |
| ISBN | 0446362662 |
It's the summer of 1960 in Elm Haven, Illinois, and five 12-year old boys are forming the bonds that a lifetime of changes will never erase. But then a dark cloud threatens the bright promise of summer vacation: on the last day of school, their classmate Tubby Cooke vanishes. Soon, the group discovers...
From the vampire-haunted alleyways of mediaeval Averoigne to the shining spires of dying Zothique, Clark Ashton Smith weaves his literary sorcery, transporting us to forgotten realms of necromancies and nightmares, lost worlds and other dimensions. In the enchanted regions of Hyperborea, Atlantis...
| Author | Neil Gaiman |
| ISBN | 0060530928 |
Bod is an unusual boy who inhabits an unusual place-he's the only living resident of a graveyard. Raised from infancy by the ghosts, werewolves, and other cemetery denizens, Bod has learned the antiquated customs of his guardians' time as well as their timely ghostly teachings-like the ability to...
| Author | Robert Marasco |
| ISBN | 0440009286 |
Ben and Marian Rolfe are desperate to escape a stifling summer in their tiny Brooklyn apartment, so when they get the chance to rent a mansion in upstate New York for the entire season for only $900, it's an offer that's too good to refuse. There's only one catch: behind a strange and intricately carved...
| Author | Jennifer McMahon |
| ISBN | 0385538499 |
West Hall, Vermont, has always been a town of strange disappearances and old legends. The most mysterious is that of Sara Harrison Shea, who, in 1908, was found dead in the field behind her house just months after the tragic death of her daughter.
Now, in present day, nineteen-year-old Ruthie...
| Author | Donna Tartt |
| ISBN | 1400031699 |
Bestselling author Donna Tartt returns with a grandly ambitious and utterly riveting novel of childhood, innocence and evil.
The setting is Alexandria, Mississippi, where one Mother’s Day a little boy named Robin Cleve Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree in his parents’ yard. Twelve...
| Author | Fritz Leiber |
| ISBN | 0441644171 |
Middle-aged San Francisco horror writer Franz Westen is rediscovering ordinary life following a long alcoholic binge. Then one day, peering at his apartment window from atop a nearby hill, he sees a pale brown thing lean out his window…and wave.
This encounter sends Westen on a quest through...
| Author | Emma Bull |
| ISBN | 0765349159 |
Acclaimed by critics and readers on its first publication in 1987, winner of the Locus Award for Best First Novel, Emma Bull's War for the Oaks is one of the novels that has defined modern urban fantasy.
Eddi McCandry sings rock and roll. But she's breaking up with her boyfriend, her band just...
| Author | Algernon Blackwood |
| ISBN | 1587156520 |
Two friends are midway on a canoe trip down the Danube River. Throughout the story Blackwood personifies the surrounding environment—river, sun, wind—and imbues them with a powerful and ultimately threatening character. Most ominous are the masses of dense, desultory, menacing willows,...
| Author | John Collier |
| ISBN | 1590170512 |
John Collier's edgy, sardonic tales are works of rare wit, curious insight, and scary implication. They stand out as one of the pinnacles in the critically neglected but perennially popular tradition of weird writing that includes E.T.A. Hoffmann and Charles Dickens as well as more recent masters...
The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth
| Author | Sarah Monette |
| ISBN | 0809557770 |
Admirers of M.R. James will discover much to dote on in this collection of linked short stories revolving around a museum archivist specializing in rare manuscripts, who has the unenviable misfortune of routinely confronting the bizarre and the not-so-natural. Sarah Monette has crafted and polished...
| Author | Stephen M. Irwin |
| ISBN | 0385533438 |
Do you remember the last time a book gave you the chills? The Dead Path is the ghost story we’ve been waiting for.
A haunting vision in the woods sets off a series of tragic events, leaving Nicholas Close lost amid visions of ghosts trapped in their harrowing, final moments. These uniquely terrifying...
| Author | Adam Nevill |
| ISBN | 0330514962 |
Some doors are better left closed—a spine-chilling horror novel from a new talent
In Barrington House, an upmarket block in London, there is an empty apartment. No one goes in and no one comes out, and it's been that way for 50 years, until the night a watchman hears a disturbance after...
| Author | Peter Straub |
| ISBN | 0425189643 |
I keep on being drawn back to Peter Straub for my Horror fix. With this author it isn’t just about the nasty stuff: it’s about the presentation. Floating Dragon is a case in point: not only does Straub expose our fears; he toys with them.
The plot in a nutshell
What you’ve got here is essentially...
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Librarian note: Alternate cover edition of 9780765356154.
Sophisticated, witty, and ingeniously convincing, Susanna Clarke's magisterial novel weaves magic into a flawlessly detailed vision of historical England. She has created a world so thoroughly enchanting that eight hundred...
| Author | Paul Tremblay |
| ISBN | 0062363239 |
The lives of the Barretts, a normal suburban New England family, are torn apart when fourteen-year-old Marjorie begins to display signs of acute schizophrenia.
To her parents' despair, the doctors are unable to stop Marjorie's descent into madness. As their stable home devolves into a house...
| Author | Michael McDowell |
| ISBN | 0380783606 |
On a split of land cut off by the Gulf, three Victorian summer houses stand against the encroaching sand. Two of the houses at Beldame are still used. The third house, filling with sand, is empty...except for the vicious horror which is shaping nightmares from the nothingness that hangs in the dank, fetid...
| Author | Susan Hill |
| ISBN | 1846685745 |
The remoter parts of the English Fens are forlorn, lost and damp even in the height of summer. At Iyot Lock, a large decaying house, two young cousins, Leonora and Edward are parked for the summer with their ageing spinster aunt and her cruel housekeeper. At first the unpleasantness and petty meannesses...
| Author | Arthur Machen |
| ISBN | 0523421117 |
Includes: The Terror. The Great God Pan. The White People. Fourteen Stories! Over 500 pages. From the beginning of his literary career, Machen espoused a mystical belief that the humdrum ordinary world hid a more mysterious and strange world beyond. His gothic and decadent works of the 1890s concluded...
| Author | T. Kingfisher |
| ISBN | 1534429573 |
When a young woman clears out her deceased grandmother’s home in rural North Carolina, she finds long-hidden secrets about a strange colony of beings in the woods.
When Mouse’s dad asks her to clean out her dead grandmother's house, she says yes. After all, how bad could it be?
Answer:...
| Author | G. Willow Wilson |
| ISBN | 0802120202 |
In an unnamed Middle Eastern security state, a young Arab-Indian hacker shields his clients—dissidents, outlaws, Islamists, and other watched groups—from surveillance and tries to stay out of trouble. He goes by Alif—the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, and a convenient handle to hide...
| Author | Algernon Blackwood |
| ISBN | 0486229777 |
A woman of snow ... a midnight caller keeping his promise ... forests where Nature is deliberate and malefic ... enchanted houses ... these are the beings and ideas that flood through this collection of ghost stories by Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951). Altogether 13 stories, gathered from the entire...
| Author | Ann Hite |
| ISBN | 1451606427 |
ONCE A PERSON LEAVES THE MOUNTAIN, THEY NEVER COME BACK, NOT REALLY. THEY’RE LOST FOREVER. Nellie Clay married Hobbs Pritchard without even noticing he was a spell conjured into a man, a walking, talking ghost story. But her mama knew. She saw it in her tea leaves: death. Folks told Nellie to get off...
| Author | Vernon Lee |
| ISBN | 1551115786 |
Violet Paget (given-name of writer Vernon Lee) was a lesbian, a female dandy, a disciple of Walter Pater, and an acquaintance of Oscar Wilde, so it should not be a surprise that these four tales of the supernatural are filled with gorgeous descriptive passages (particularly of Italy ad it's art)...
