Part 3: 200 Authors Every Horror Reader Should Know (F-H)
Here’s a massive list of authors for fans of horror fiction, urban fantasy, vampires, zombies, ghost stories, magic, science fiction, dark fantasy, and other monster fiction. You’ll see familiar names, some unfamiliar ones, as well as pillars of the genre. This installment includes bios and more info about the likes of Kim Harrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Dana Fredsti, Neil Gaiman, Jessica Faleiro, Laurell K. Hamilton, Owl Goingback, Jack Finney, Gillian Flynn, Christopher Golden, Charlaine Harris, Faith Hunter, and a lot more.
Other parts of this series will include Ray Bradbury, Tananarive Due, Mary Shelley, Linda D. Addison, Patricia Briggs, Tomi Adeyemi, Clive Barker, Zoraida Córdova, Jim Butcher, Octavia E. Butler, Ilona Andrews, Stephen King, Jonathan Maberry, and a whole bunch more. NOTE: This page is a major project that I’ll be revising over time.
200 Authors Every Horror Reader Should Know
Part 4 (I-K) IN THE WORKS
Part 5 (L-M) IN THE WORKS
Part 6 (N-R) IN THE WORKS
Part 7 (S-Z) IN THE WORKS
Essential Horror Authors—Part 3 F-H
F Horror Authors
Jessica Faleiro’s 2012 novel Afterlife: Ghost stories from Goa is about a Goan family and their ghostly encounters. Her fiction, poetry, essays and travel pieces have been published in Asia Literary Review, Forbes, Indian Quarterly, IndiaCurrents, Coldnoon, Joao Roque Literary Journal, Mascara Literary Review, Muse India, and the Times of India, as well as in various anthologies. Her The Delicate Balance of Little Lives is a collection of interlinked stories about five middle-class Goan women trying to cope with loss. She won the Joao Roque Literary Award ‘Best in Fiction 2017 for her short story “Unmatched.” Visit her author website.
“Afterlife is a novel of interlinked stories set in contemporary Goa, a coastal state in the western part of India,” the author told New Asian Writing. “The Fonseca family gathers at their patriarch Savio’s house on the eve of his seventy-fifth birthday. It starts raining heavily, the electricity fails, and in the darkness, family members start narrating their encounters with the supernatural. Each story connects the family members in some way. As the night advances, the family begin to learn more about their history and eventually, discover the secret lurking behind their family name.”
Christopher Farnsworth, a bestselling novelist, screenwriter, and journalist, has been a finalist for the Goodreads Choice Awards. His technothriller Flashmob, about a psychic troubleshooter, was named one of the best books of 2017 by Publishers Weekly. Christopher is also the author of the Nathaniel Cade series, about a vampire who works for the President of the United States. He also wrote the novel The Eternal World about the Fountain of Youth; a comic book prequel to the 24 television series, 24: Legacy—Rules of Engagement; and co-authored with James Patterson Dead Man Running. Visit his author website.
Speaking of Nathaniel Cade, the author explained to Pajiba why his vampires do not sparkle. “I guess I can understand the place for the sparkly vampires. And I can understand teenage girls are looking for drama anyway and that’s a perfectly fine way to deliver it. When I grew up, vampires just weren’t sexy, they weren’t attractive, they just scared the hell out of me. And that’s kind of what I was looking for when I wanted to write my own book.”
Minister Faust is an award-winning novelist, award-winning print journalist, radio host-producer, television host and associate producer, sketch comedy writer, video game writer, playwright, and poet. He has spoken and taught workshops widely. The critically-acclaimed author of The Alchemists of Kush and the Kindred Award-winning and Philip K. Dick runner-up Shrinking the Heroes, Minister Faust first won accolades for his debut The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad, shortlisted for the Locus Best First Novel and Philip K. Dick awards. Minister Faust’s short stories have appeared in Cyber World, Edmonton on Location, Fiery Spirits, Griots: A Sword and Soul Anthology, Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond, and elsewhere. Visit his author website here.
“I can’t stress enough how important it is for writers to read their own work aloud to themselves,” the author told the SFWA (Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America). “One of the most helpful lessons I’ve learned from doing so much performance (which also includes giving scores of speeches and having taught public school for ten years) is how to be clear and concise. When we write, it’s easy to get carried away, to fall in love with our own endless descriptions of whatever we personally think is amazing: sunsets, flowers, action, aliens, guns, food, sex, shoes…. But when you read your work aloud and discover you’ve spent five minutes on something, no matter how pretty the words are you have to realize you’ve gone long.”
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Gemma Files was previously best-known as a Canadian film critic, teacher, and screenwriter. Gemma broke onto the horror scene when her short story “The Emperor’s Old Bones” won the 1999 International Horror Guild award for Best Short Fiction. Her Hexslinger Series trilogy is now complete: A Book of Tongues, A Rope of Thorns, and A Tree of Bones. She is the author of two collections of short work—Kissing Carrion: Stories and The Worm in Every Heart: Stories—and two chapbooks of poetry—Bent Under Night and Dust Radio. She has also appeared in other collections, the latest of which is In That Endlessness, Our End. Five of her short stories were adapted for the television series The Hunger. Visit her at Goodreads.
“A lot of my stories start with things that happen to me in real life, to which I add a sizable helping of creep,” the author told More 2 Read: Must Read Books. “For the last few years, I’ve taught a course in which I tell students that the easiest way to root a story in reality is to use whatever weird stuff comes your way, no matter how small it might seem. From my POV, almost all horror begins with the realization that something is wrong.”
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Jack Finney (1911-1995) is best-known for authoring science fiction and thrillers, including Invasion of The Body Snatchers (a politically charged alien invasion thriller that has been made into several films) and Time and Again. In 1987, Finney was given the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement at the World Fantasy Convention. Several of his writings have been adapted into other media.
In 2001, reviewer Ric Burns in the New York Times remarked why Finney’s Time and Again has held such popularity over generations. “An elaborately (some might say overly) contrived hybrid of a book—part science fiction, part detective story, part love story, part historical romance—the novel tells the tale of an advertising artist named Simon Morley, who is transported back to the year 1882 as part of a top-secret government-sponsored time travel project.
“After staying in print for more than three decades now, the book shows no real signs of losing steam. Mr. Finney himself published a sequel to it the year before he died, called From Time to Time, and scarcely a year goes by without fresh rumors of a film adaptation. A musical version, of all things, [opened] for a limited run in a Manhattan Theater Club production at City Center.”
Gillian Flynn, formerly the chief TV critic for Entertainment Weekly, has published three novels—Gone Girl, Dark Places, and Sharp Objects—which have all been adapted for film or TV. Her first novel, Sharp Objects, was the winner of two CWA Daggers from the Crime Writers’ Association and was shortlisted for the Gold Dagger. The film adaptation of Gone Girl won the Hollywood Film Award 2014. Flynn was co-screenwriter of the 2018 heist thriller film Widows, and show-runner of the 2020 science fiction drama series Utopia. Visit her website.
“I wrote about movies and then I was a TV critic,” the author told Rolling Stone, “and I think that that really helped me when it came to analyzing why something doesn’t work. I think it’s very easy to figure out why things are really good or why things are really bad. It was fascinating to me; it’s like this piece of a puzzle, like: ‘Why isn’t this quite clicking? It has all the ingredients of greatness, but it’s not great.’”
Rhiannon Frater is the award-winning author of the As the World Dies zombie series as well as The Last Bastion zombie series and Pretty When She Dies vampire series. She also co-hosted the ZCast: a Z Nation Fan Podcast, interviewing the cast and crew of the SyFy show. Visit her website.
“One thing readers have told me over and over again is that my characters feel like real people,” the author told Escapist Magazine. “So no matter what monster I’m writing about, I always concentrate on making the characters vibrant, living creations. If you care about the characters, then it heightens the suspense of the story. You worry about if they live or die. It’s a deeper emotional investment if you care about all the characters.”
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Dana Fredsti is author of the Ashley Parker novels Plague Town, Plague Nation, and Plague World (think Buffy meets The Walking Dead). Her Lilith series is an urban fantasy series based on the Lilith mythos, including Spawn of Lilith, Blood Ink, and the upcoming Hollywood Monsters. She co-wrote a science fiction series, Time Shards, with her husband David Fitzgerald, which included Time Shards, Shatter War, and Tempus Fury.
She has written numerous published articles, essays, and shorts, including stories in Cat Fantastic IV, an anthology edited by Andre Norton (Daw, 1997), Danger City (Contemporary Press, 2005), Mondo Zombie (Cemetery Dance, 2006), and Hungry for Your Love (St. Martin’s Press, 2010). Her essays can be seen in Morbid Curiosity, Issues 2-7, as well as the anthology Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues (Scribner, 2009). She also has written spicy genre romances under her nom de plume Inara LaVey.
Fredsti is also an actress with a background in theatrical sword-fighting, whose credits include the cult classic Army of Darkness. Her favorite projects, however, included acting alongside Ken Foree (Dawn of the Dead) and Josef Pilato (Day of the Dead). She has been a producer, director, and screenplay writer for stage and film, and was the co-writer/associate producer on Urban Rescuers, a documentary on feral cats which won Best Documentary at the 2003 Valley Film Festival in Los Angeles.
Along with her best friend Maureen, Dana was co-producer/writer/director for a mystery-oriented theatrical troupe based in San Diego. These experiences were the basis for her mystery novel Murder for Hire: The Peruvian Pigeon (Rock Publications, 2007/Fox Spirit Books 2016). Visit her website.
“When I was a kid, I loved all things horror,” the author told Monster Complex, “but there were not a lot of zombie movies or books out there, at least not of the flesh- eating variety. It was pretty much all zombies created by voodoo (White Zombie, I Walked with a Zombie, like that). Lots of vampires, werewolves, witches, and satanic cults (oh, Hammer Films, how I loved you).
“At any rate, When Night of the Living Dead came out in 1968, I was way too young to be aware of it or go see it in the theater, so I didn’t see it until I was in high school. It scared the bejeesus out of me, and also made me want to see more movies with zombies who snacked on the living.
“Luckily, I didn’t have too long to wait as George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead was released in the States a year later and I was asked to go see it on what was my very first date. I’m not sure if it’s the association with being bought popcorn and candy that made me love them so, but that was pretty much the start of a long and happy relationship with flesh-eating zombies.”
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Jeaniene Frost is the New York Times, USA Today, and international bestselling author of the paranormal vampire romance Night Huntress series, the shirtless paranormal vampire romance Night Rebel series, the shirtless paranormal angel romance Broken Destiny series, and the shirtless paranormal ghost romance Night Prince series. Aside from writing, Jeaniene enjoys reading, poetry, watching movies, exploring old cemeteries, spelunking, and traveling - by car. Airplanes, children, and cook books frighten her. Visit her website.
Fresh Fiction asked the author whether it was more challenging to write from a man’s perspective as opposed to that of a woman: “Normally, I do find it more challenging. It definitely comes more naturally to me to write from a woman’s perspective, but as I mentioned above, I really plugged into Bones’ character for this book. So, I didn’t have most of the performance anxiety that I’ve previously felt when writing through a male point of view.”
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G Horror Authors
Neil Gaiman is a prolific writer of fantasy, horror, science fiction, dark fantasy, comedy, which have taken the forms of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, nonfiction, films, and television. His work includes the award wining Sandman comic book series, plus the novels Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (co-written with Terry Pratchett), Neverwhere, Coraline, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, American Gods, and The Graveyard Book. He is the winner of multiple awards, including the Bram Stoker Award, Hugo Award, Locus Award, Nebula Award, British National Book Award, and the Carnegie and Newbery medals. Visit his website.
The author talked to the Guardian about how much he enjoyed working on Sundays: “I love to write. On Sundays it’s a joy. It’s a gift that nobody else is working. It’s the day I have to really write—the best bit of the job—when most of my time is spent doing admin and emails. We’ve got three TV shows on the go, there’s a lot to do, but right now on Sundays I’m left to make things up, uninterrupted.”
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Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) was an English novelist, short story author, and biographer. Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of Victorian society, including the very poor. She became popular for her writing, especially her ghost stories, aided by Charles Dickens, who published her work in his magazine Household Words.
Her stories in Gothic Tales set a precedent for ghost and horror stories of the era. In “The Poor Clare,” a young innocent girl named Lucy is haunted by an unrelenting ghost invoked by her aging grandmother. In the novella “Lois the Witch,” a young woman sails to America to join her distant family—and is greeted by a New England engulfed in the fever of the Salem witch trials. “The Grey Woman” is a terrifying psychological thriller.
Even though her writing conformed to Victorian conventions, the author usually framed her stories as critiques of the attitudes of her day. She usually emphasized the role of women, with complex narratives and realistic female characters.
“Gothic Tales has a useful, if lengthy, introduction,” notes Musings of the Monster Librarian, “with notes and suggested reading, and additional notes in the back for reference in the individual stories, which is helpful when Gaskell makes contemporary references. I can’t say if it is the best or most complete collection of her Gothic and supernatural fiction, but it does contain some of her most well-known stories. While there are other collections available now, I think this one was a good place to start.”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), was a feminist, lecturer, writer, publisher, and leading theorist of the women’s movement in the United States. Inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, Perkins wrote poems and stories for various periodicals. Among her stories, “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” published in 1892, was a starkly realistic first-person portrayal of the mental breakdown of a physically pampered but emotionally starved young wife. There is a collection of her works in Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Novels, Stories & Poems.
Seressia Glass’ fiction spans urban fantasy, paranormal romance, and contemporary romance. “No matter the genre,” she says on her author website homepage, “my books feature tales of overcoming the odds to achieve love and acceptance–universal desires for everyone no matter who or what they are.”
Her Shadowchasers series is set in a supernatural Atlanta where Kira Solomon is an antiquities expert by day—and by night a Shadowchaser, a bounty hunter charged by the Light to hunt the Fallen.
The author told Hasty Book List the moment she knew she wanted to become an author: “It had always percolated in me during childhood as I read everything I could get my hands on. I even wrote a Halloween play that was performed during the PTA meeting, but at 17, when I wrote an essay for the inaugural MLK Jr holiday and won first place and got to meet Coretta Scott King, I knew I could touch people with my words. I was determined to write after that. It took me another 13 years to learn my craft, meet other writers, and choose the genre I wanted to write in, but I sold my first book just after I turned 30 and haven’t looked back since!”
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Owl Goingback is a Bram Stoker Award-winning novelist who has written numerous novels, children’s books, short stories, and magazine articles. His novel Crota won the 1996 Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel, and was one of four finalists in the Best Novel category. In addition to his writing, he has lectured throughout the country on the customs and folklore of the American Indians. Visit his website.
“I’ve always been in love with all thing scary,” he told the Horror Writers Association, sharing how he watched horror movies as a small child. “And horror literature was just as exciting to me, creating the same tingles of terror as the movies.”
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Christopher Golden is the New York Times bestselling, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of such novels as Road of Bones, Ararat, Snowblind, and Red Hands. With Mike Mignola, he is the co-creator of the Outerverse comic book universe, including such series as Baltimore, Joe Golem: Occult Detective, and Lady Baltimore. As an editor, he has worked on the short story anthologies Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror, Dark Cities, and The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology, among others, and he has also written and co-written comic books, video games, screenplays, and a network television pilot.
In 2015 he founded the popular Merrimack Valley Halloween Book Festival. His work has been nominated for the British Fantasy Award, the Eisner Award, and multiple Shirley Jackson Awards. For the Bram Stoker Awards, Golden has been nominated ten times in eight different categories, and won twice. Visit his website.
He explained to Civilian Reader how he was introduced to genre fiction: “I don’t remember how it began for me. It was just there. Twilight Zone and Kolchak the Night Stalker and movies on Creature Double Feature were all on my TV. My favorite comics included Tomb of Dracula and Werewolf by Night. When I started reading, I gravitated immediately toward Stephen King and creepy stories. I remember picking up The Stand in an an airport bookstore… same with various novels by Graham Masterton. From that point, I accumulated horror novels at absurd speed.”
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Jewelle Gomez is an American author, poet, critic and playwright. Her books include the double Lambda Literary Award-winning vampire novel, The Gilda Stories—the first Black lesbian vampire novel—which is now celebrating 30 years in print. Her most recent play, Waiting for Giovanni, explores an imagined moment in the life of author/activist James Baldwin. Her fiction, essays, criticism and poetry have appeared in numerous periodicals.
The author is the recipient of a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts; two California Arts Council fellowships and an Individual Artist Commission from the San Francisco Arts Commission. She was on the founding board of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). She was an original member of the boards of the Astraea Foundation and the Open Meadows Foundation.
Formerly the executive director of the Poetry Center and the American Poetry Archives at San Francisco State University, she has also worked in philanthropy for many years. She is the former director of the Literature program at the New York State Council on the Arts and the director of Cultural Equity Grants for the San Francisco Arts Commission. She is also the former Director of Grants and Community Initiatives for Horizons Foundation as well as the former President of the San Francisco Public Library Commission. She is currently Playwright in Residence at New Conservatory Theatre Center. Visit her website.
“When I sit down to write," the author told the gay magazine Curve, “Gilda is there, waiting like a friend. She’s both my past and my future—she carries all of the hopes and fears that I do. Writing genre fiction makes it easier to convey the principles I’m concerned about.”
Simon R. Green is the New York Times best-selling author of more than sixty science fiction, fantasy, and mystery novels. Simon sold his first book in 1988 and the very next year was commissioned to write the best-selling novelization of the Kevin Costner film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. From there he went on to write many more books, including Jekyll & Hyde Inc., plus the Nightside series, the Gideon Sable series, the Ishmael Jones mysteries, the Forest Kingdom series, the Deathstalker series, and the Secret History series, among others.
“I like to think my work appeals to male and female readers because I give equal time and attention to my male and female characters,” the author told SF Site. “And there’s always been strong romantic, if not Romantic, elements to everything I write. Action scenes and general weird shit are always fun, but it’s the character interactions that bring my work alive.”
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Lev Grossman is best-known for the #1 New York Times bestselling Magicians trilogy—The Magicians, The Magician King, and The Magician’s Land—which has been published in thirty countries and adapted as a TV show that ran for five seasons on Syfy. His books also include Codex and The Map of Tiny Perfect Things. His children’s novel The Silver Arrow appeared on best-of-the-year lists from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, People magazine, Apple, and Amazon. There’s also a sequel, The Golden Swift.
In 2021, Lev wrote the movie adaptation of The Map of Tiny Perfect Things for Amazon Prime. He’s also developing a TV series titled The Heavens with the Russo Brothers at Amazon.
Lev has also done a lot of journalism. He was the book critic at Time magazine for 15 years, and also wrote a lot of technology coverage there. He’s also written for Vanity Fair, the Believer, the Village Voice, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Salon, Slate, Wired, Entertainment Weekly, the Week, Buzzfeed, NPR, Lingua Franca, and many other places. Visit his website.
“Let me try to explain what interests me about fantasies and, really, stories in general,” he told BookBrowse. “When we read books and watch television or movies, we’re seeing representations of people’s lives. And I always wondered, even as a little kid, why does my life, which superficially resembles a life in a story, feel so different from a life in a story? Lives in stories are exciting and vivid and meaningful. Real lives are chaotic and disorganized and frequently boring, and that feeling of meaningfulness comes and goes, out of your control. It’s hard to hang on to. Why doesn’t life feel more like a story? Like a fantasy? I don’t know. But now, at a time in history when we spend so much of our waking life being entertained by stories, I wonder that even more.”
H Horror Authors
Mary Downing Hahn’s many acclaimed novels include such beloved ghost stories as Wait Till Helen Comes: A Ghost Story, Guest: A Changeling Tale, Took: A Ghost Story, and Deep and Dark and Dangerous: A Ghost Story. A former librarian, she has received more than fifty child-voted state awards for her work.
“When I wrote my first ghost story, I had no idea children loved scary reads,” she told the American Library Association. “I certainly didn’t—when I was a child I was terrified of ghosts and graveyards and awful things lurking in the dark. I would not have read Wait till Helen Comes! Either children are braver now or they are so afraid of the real world that they escape into ghost stories. Maybe they enjoy the thrill of being scared because they are safe in their own homes and know the story’s protagonist will triumph over the ghost.”
Virginia Hamilton (1934-2002) was born, as she said, “on the outer edge of the Great Depression,” on March 12, 1934. In her lifetime, Virginia wrote and published 41 books in multiple genres that spanned picture books and folktales, mysteries and science fiction, realistic novels and biography. Woven into her books is a deep concern with memory, tradition, and generational legacy, especially as they helped define the lives of African Americans. Virginia described her work as “Liberation Literature.”
Her books include the Edgar Award winner The House of Dies Drear and its sequel, The Mystery of Drear House.
She won every major award in youth literature, including the U.S. National Book Award, the Newbery Medal, the Hans Christian Andersen Award for Writing, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, the University of Southern Mississippi de Grummond Medal, the Catholic Library Association’s Regina Medal, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Edgar Allan Poe Award, the Coretta Scott King Award, and the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award.
Charlaine Harris has celebrated 40 years as a published writer. Her series include the the Sookie Stackhouse urban fantasy vampire stories (which inspired the HBO series True Blood), the Midnight, Texas paranormal mystery series, the Harper Connelly urban fantasies, the Cemetery Girl graphic novels (with Christopher Golden), the Aurora Teagarden mysteries, the Lily Bard mysteries, and the Gunnie Rose books, set in an alternate history America.
Charlaine has also written many short stories, and with Toni L.P. Kelner she edited seven themed anthologies. Hallmark Movies and Mysteries is still showing a series of movies created about the Aurora Teagarden character, and for two seasons Midnight, Texas was on the air. Two of her other series are in production. And there are plans to bring True Blood back to TV. Visit her website.
“I learned a lot in the TV world,” she told the World Fantasy Convention. “I learned the writers for the shows are just as proud of being writers as I am, and they have their own ideas about where the characters should go and what their development should be. I have to respect that, and enjoy the product of their work just as they (presumably) enjoyed the product of mine. I’ve learned to live with the books and the shows as separate entertainment vehicles. To me, the bottom line . . . if my credit flashes on the screen, that increases the sale of the books. And the books are my thing.”
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Kim Harrison is best known as the author of the New York Times #1 best selling Hollows series, but she’s written more than urban fantasy, including young adult, accelerated-science thrillers, several anthologies, and has scripted two original graphic novels set in the Hollows universe. She has published traditional fantasy under the name Dawn Cook. Kim is currently working on a new Hollows book between other urban fantasy projects. Visit her website.
“Did I plan on restarting the Hollows after The Witch with No Name? Absolutely not,” the author told Grimdark Magazine. “I crafted that epilogue at the end of WWNN so carefully, so lovingly, just trying to get it the perfect balance of happy ending and satisfaction. Rachel deserved a well-earned peace after what I put her through. But the main reason I wanted to step away from the Hollows was to stretch my writing muscles in ways that the Hollows universe couldn’t give me.
“Several years spent on published and non published manuscripts with different characters in different worlds outside of that first-person narrative, however, and I began to feel a definite pull back to Rachel and the gang. I’ll be honest. Stretching my writing muscles was great and I learned a lot, but wow, stepping back into Rachel’s voice was truly like coming home. I hope that the readers feel the step from The Witch With No Name to American Demon is seamless. That happy ending epilogue is not out of reach, just put off for a few more years.”
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Kevin Hearne is the author of the New York Times bestselling series the Iron Druid Chronicles, the Iron Druid spin-off Ink & Sigil series, the Seven Kennings series, and the Star Wars novel Heir to the Jedi, as well as co-author of the Tales of Pell series with Delilah S. Dawson.
“Fight scenes are rough for me,” the author told John Dwaine McKenna, “since I’m not any sort of martial artist and would always rather buy someone a drink than throw a punch. Comic books, however, taught me about the structure of them, and if I play some heavy metal I can usually get them done—it’s just slower than any other kind of scene.”
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Grady Hendrix is an American author, journalist, public speaker, and screenwriter whose novels include The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, described as Steel Magnolias meets Dracula; The Final Girl Support Group, which asks what happens to horror movie’s final girls after they’re left standing when the credits roll; Horrorstör, about a haunted Scandinavian furniture store; My Best Friend’s Exorcism, described as Beaches meets The Exorcist (the eBook has a crazy amount of bonus material); and We Sold Our Souls, a heavy metal horror epic. He also wrote Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of '70s and '80s Horror Fiction, an award-winning history of the horror paperback boom of the Seventies and Eighties. My Best Friend’s Exorcism and Horrorstör have been optioned for movie adaptations, while The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires and The Final Girl Support Group are being developed for TV. Visit his website.
“When I was a kid, we lived in England for a year, and in the library of the house we rented I found Folklore Myths and Legends of Britain put out by Reader’s Digest,” the author told Southern Review of Books. “It was full of pictures of men dying in gibbets, women being hung as witches, horrifying ghosts, gruesome torture, awful monsters—you know, for kids! After that, whenever we’d go to the library, I’d try to find more of the same. Alfred Hitchcock anthologies like Monster Museum became my drug of choice until I was old enough to start renting horror movies with my friends. After that, it was all downhill. In terms of writing horror, I always just kind of wrote what I wrote, and when I realized that my horror stories were what people liked best, I doubled down.”
Sarah Henning is an ex-journalist whose fiction includes Sea Witch and the Kingdoms of Sand and Sky series. “I’m a former sports journalist who can’t quite seem to stop writing about royalty, swordfighting, and true love," she told Stuck in Fiction. “My latest young adult fantasy, The Queen Will Betray You, is the sequel to The Princess Will Save You, which was a gender-swapped take on the damsel-in-distress trope inspired by The Princess Bride.” Visit her author website.
James Herbert (1943-2013) was one of the world’s top writers of horror fiction and was one of the most influential and widely imitated authors of our time. Born in London, James Herbert originally worked as an art director and group head for an advertising company before writing his first novel. One of Britain’s best-selling writers, he wrote more than 20 novels—including the horror classics The Rats and The Fog. (Not only did he write the novels, he designed some of their covers as well.)
In 2010, he was made a Grand Master of Horror by the World Horror Convention. In 2010, Herbert was also awarded an OBE by the Queen for services to literature. Visit this unofficial fan site of James Herbert.
Joe Hill is an American author and comic book writer whose work includes the novels Heart-Shaped Box (2007), Gunpowder (2008), Horns (2010), NOS4A2 (2013), and The Fireman (2016); the short story collections 20th Century Ghosts (2005), Tales From The Darkside (2016) and Strange Weather (2017); and the comic book series The Cape and Locke & Key. Locke & Key won British Fantasy Awards in 2009 and 2012, and an Eisner Award in 2012.
The son of authors Stephen and Tabitha King (his real name is Joseph Hillstrom King), at age 9, Hill appeared in the 1982 film Creepshow, directed by George A. Romero, which co-starred and was written by his father. Visit this resource website for more info about his work.
Susan Hill, a professional writer more than 50 years, has won such awards and prizes as the Whitbread, the John Llewellyn Rhys and a Somerset Maugham, and her fiction has been shortlisted for the Booker. The British author’s novels include Strange Meeting, I’m the King of the Castle, In the Springtime of the Year, and The Mist in the Mirror. She has also published collections of short stories plus the Simon Serrailler series of crime novels. The play of her ghost story “The Woman in Black” is one of the longest running in the history of London’s West End. In 2020 she was awarded a damehood (DBE) for services to literature.
“I have always loved reading ghost stories but had realized that in recent years not a lot had been written,” she told At The Theatre. “People were writing horror, but horror is different to me. You can have a horror story that doesn’t have a ghost, whereas a ghost story could be horror but also could be unnerving in a different way or even heartbreaking.”
Jim C. Hines is the author of the Magic ex Libris series, the Princess series of fairy tale retellings, the humorous Goblin Quest trilogy, and the Fable Legends tie-in Blood of Heroes. He also won the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer. His latest novel is Terminal Uprising, book two in the humorous science fiction Janitors of the Post-Apocalypse trilogy. Visit his author website.
“I think practice and skill are far more important and useful than talent,” he told Michael A. Ventrella. “Looking back, I don’t know how much of where I started was actual talent vs. skills I’d picked up over my life, from reading and telling jokes and getting a pretty good education and so on. But wherever you start, pretty much all of us have to work to improve before we become Good Writers™.”
William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918) was an English author whose work included essays, short fiction, and novels. He used his experiences at sea to accentuate his short horror stories, many of which are set on the ocean, including his series of linked tales forming the “Sargasso Sea Stories.” Several of his novels also focud on horrors associated with the sea. He died in World War I at age 40. Find out more about him here.
Nancy Holder is the New York Times bestselling coauthor (with Debbie Viguie) of the New York Times bestselling dark fantasy series Wicked. She also wrote the Crusade and Wolf Springs Chronicles series with Debbie, and they have a teen thriller titled The Rules. She also wrote fiction inspired by or adapting several titles, including Highlander, Firefly, Ghostbusters, and Crimson Peak. She also had a comic book series from Kymera Press titled Mary Shelley Presents.
“The first novel I ever sold was a young adult romance novel,” she told Nightmare. “I wrote a baker’s dozen of young adult novels and romance novels, and I had a great time doing it. But I was drawn to horror, always had been. I met Kathy Ptacek, (Charles L. Grant’s) wife, at a romance conference and she in turn introduced me to Charlie. I made my first horror short story sale to him (after selling five novels). When his father died, we got drunk on Black Russians and he told me that life was short and I should write what I love. He told me to look at my bookshelves and that would tell me what it was I loved. So I called my agent and told him I wanted to switch to writing horror. And I did.”
Nalo Hopkinson is an award-winning fiction author who also makes art. Her storytelling includes science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction, with her novels and stories full of the unreal, the futuristic, the unlikely, the impossible. A Jamaican-born Canadian speculative fiction writer and editor, her writing has received the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Locus Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, and the Andre Norton Award. Her books include the novels Brown Girl in the Ring, Midnight Robber, and The Salt Roads, and her collection Skin Folk: Stories. She was the curator of Six Impossible Things, an audio series of Canadian fantastical fiction on CBC Radio One. She entered Neil Gaiman’s Sandman universe with the comic book limited-series House of Whispers (DC Comic), a story that took readers from the bayou to the Dreaming.
“I’m drawing pretty heavily on the science fiction and fantasy I read growing up,” the author told Indie Bound. “I also come out of a very strong Caribbean literary tradition. In that sense I’m kind of marrying the two, but not in a way of ‘trying to go out there and do something new.’ I’ve found that science fiction reviewers tend to react most strongly to the Caribbean-flavored stuff, and some of them identify that as being new and over-focus on it. I’m starting to feel I might be getting typecast.”
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Tanya Huff acquired a degree in radio and television arts from Ryerson Polytechnic University—an education she was happy to finally use while writing her Smoke series. Of her previous books, those featuring Henry Fitzroy, bastard son of Henry VIII, romance writer, and vampire—Blood Price, Blood Trail, Blood Lines, Blood Pact, Blood Debt—are among the most popular.
“I’ve been a voracious reader all my life and I was always a story-teller,” she told Strange Horizons. “I come from a working-class family, though, and I didn’t realise writing was even a career until about grade eight when it suddenly hit me: ‘People write books.’ Where I thought they came from before that, I have no idea. Springing fully formed from the head of Zeus perhaps? Who knows. Anyway, shortly after that came the equally important epiphany: ‘I am people! Therefore I can write books.’ So I started to.”
Faith Hunter is the award-winning New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of multiple series—including the Jane Yellowrock series, the Soulwood series, and the Rogue Mage series. Altogether, she has 40+ books and dozens of short stories in print and is juggling multiple projects.
“The interesting thing about writing the fantasy field,” Faith told Monster Complex, “is that not only do you have to use all of the devices and concepts that are used in ‘higher literature’—and I will put that in quotes—you also have to keep a world-building straight and use the world-building. You’re doing twice as much as a writer who just writes literary fiction, because you’re adding in a completely different paranormal world, and that paranormal world comes with its own problems and negatives and positives. And instead of this paranormal element being a magic wand or a light switch or—flip!—everything solved, everything has a price. So the use of magic is its own un-reward. There’s always a price.”
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Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was an American author, anthropologist, and filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-1900s American South and published research on hoodoo. The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. She also wrote more than 50 short stories, plays, and essays.
200 Authors Every Horror Reader Should Know
Part 4 (I-K) IN THE WORKS
Part 5 (L-M) IN THE WORKS
Part 6 (N-R) IN THE WORKS
Part 7 (S-Z) IN THE WORKS
More Authors and Books on Monster Complex
Horror and comedy both make us jump—which is why these elements work together so well together. Looking at books from authors like Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Tanya Huff, Kelley Armstrong, John Scalzi, Diana Rowland, and Kevin J. Anderson, plus many authors you should meet.