As practice has shown, you cannot simultaneously hold the joystick and close your eyes with your palms, frightened by another monster that jumped out of the darkness. At this, the remnants of my nerves got up and left the room, slamming the door loudly. But the inspiration remains. With all the abundance of monsters, the nightmare-ridden city of Yharnam is beautiful. Gothic buildings straight from Romania and Victorian England, ornate lanterns and the moon admiring its reflection in pools of blood. Yes, this is the very dissonance when something so creepy and frightening manages to attract even more. And most of the time, this is what books do. Horror books.
Progress does not stand still, and along with it, human fears change and evolve, taking on a completely unexpected look. Horror is no longer hiding under the bed, or in the closet, he chooses a more sophisticated way to intimidate the victim. He inspires awe with his unpredictability, and not with a sharp saw (although something remains unchanged), he has learned to influence a person from the inside, awakening his own demons from sleep.
The presented selection of books in the genre of horror and mysticism opens up new facets of fear to the reader, when the blood runs cold from the reality of what is happening, but it is already impossible to stop. When the victim can switch places with a bloodthirsty killer and not notice it. When it is enough to go to the mirror to see the most terrible monster.
Dan Simmons "The Terror"
On May 19, 1845, the two ships "Terror" and "Erebus" under the command of Rear Admiral John Franklin left the pier of England, setting off for the harsh Arctic ice in search of a passage connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. But they never returned. Until now, the fate of the missing expedition excites the minds of scientists and sailors. Shrouded in the mystery of disappearance, the Terror and Erebus have joined the list of ghost ships.
Dan Simmons presents to our attention a rather unusual type of literature, a fictional reconstruction of real events - cryptohistory. This is where the author's imagination is truly limitless. Adding mysticism to the already chilling events, the author has recreated such a vivid picture of what is happening on ships trapped in an uncharted land that the book breathes arctic cold, penetrating to the bones, and the pages turn over with the rattle of ice on the stern.
Scurvy, the taste of leather belts and strips of flesh torn off in the cold - all this is a diabolical naturalism of the narrative that makes you shiver from the darkness that surrounds you from all sides. The atmosphere of horror is reinforced by despair, hopelessness and hunger, when one glance at a comrade drools and the most terrible monster wakes up in the person himself. A monster, against the background of which death wandering in the ice simply fades.
This is a powerful, breathtaking novel in which we see everything that happens from the first persons of the team. Painstaking elaboration of details, weaving real names and events into the plot, create the effect of complete immersion, forcing fear, even when there is no visual danger. Thanks to the measured style of the author, a book of a thousand pages is read in one breath. Simmons approached the creation of an alternative history with such responsibility that just from the mention "Terror", covered with cold sweat.
“If a gentleman in a tuxedo, sitting in a well-heated library in his London mansion, is able to understand that life is given only once, and it is unhappy, miserable, disgusting, cruel and short, then how can a person who in a cold night pulling a sleigh laden with frozen meat and skins across a nameless island to a frozen sea, under a raging sky, a thousand miles or more from any civilized hearth?Walking towards his death, so terrible that you can’t even imagine.
Joe Hill "Heart Box"
Jude Coyne is a seasoned rock musician who delights his fans with dark, hardcore songs. He is well-to-do and can indulge in nothing, including buying a ghost over the Internet. When the package is delivered to the addressee and the bloodthirsty ghost breaks out ... Wow! What a cunning and dodgy rival Jude comes across. He swings his silver razor and it looks like he won't get away alive.
The novel is written as a finished script for a horror movie. Dynamic and cruel scenes of the protagonist's persecution do not let you take a breath. Chaos reigns on the pages of the book to the last, leaving the reader in confusion: "Who will prevail?"
Joe Hill created a whole and mysterious work. Beautifully written characters and a bit of humor in the dialogues - like a cherry on a cake, attract attention to the debut novel of the son of that same King.
True craftsmanship Hilla manifests itself in a love story appropriate for the sinister plot, giving the heroes hope for a happy ending.
“Most likely, ghosts have always lived not in castles and enchanted rooms, but in the minds of people. And if he wants to shoot a ghost, then he will have to aim the muzzle at his temple.
"He created melodies out of hate, perversion and pain, and they came to him, bouncing to the beat of the song, hoping that he would let them sing along."
Jean-Christophe Granget "The Passenger"
In psychiatry, there is such a disease as the “passenger without luggage” syndrome, in which a person who has experienced a psychological shock blocks this memory in his memory, and from the remaining fragments he forms a completely new personality that lives his life until the next traumatic situation. And then everything repeats again. The brain creates personalities according to the principle of a nesting doll, where the original personality that requires protection is the smallest doll.
The nature of this syndrome is trying to disassemble the brilliant psychiatrist Matthias Frere, when his patient, a witness to a brutal murder, turns to him for help. And what was the confusion of Matthias, who discovered that he not only suffered from this disease himself, but was also involved in a series of bloody murders that hit the city.
In this excellent, mystical thriller, grunge plays with the reader, dynamically changing scenery and costumes. Only one thing remains unchanged - the hero's escape from the death chasing him. The atmosphere of all kinds of reincarnations of the personality is accompanied by murders based on ancient Greek myths. The plot every now and then abruptly turns 180 degrees, not making it clear to the end, who is Matthias in essence? A cold-blooded maniac or an amnesiac victim?
grunge brings a new chapter to the world of horror, in which the fear of mortal torture gives way to a more perverse device - the loss of oneself. From the reality of what is happening, trembling penetrates to the bones, and one mystery follows another, spinning the tangle of inexplicable events ever tighter. And only an unexpected ending will put everything in its rightful place.
“The human soul is not the skin of an animal, which becomes better from tanning. The human soul is a hypersensitive, fluttering, fragile membrane. From the blows, she dies and becomes covered with scars. And he begins to fear the world.
“The most formidable weapon in the world remains the human brain. If Hitler had taken a strong sedative, world history would have taken a very different path.”
1699 The height of the witch hunt and its evil appears in Faunt Royal, as if by notes playing a play of nightmares of local residents: crops rot, fires, pestilence, poisonous fumes rise from the swamps. It seems that the end is near and the blame for it will be unlike the others - a proud and lonely woman. Witch. The sentence is about to be carried out, but the dark forces still do not leave the city. To investigate what is happening in Faunt Royal, Magistrate Woodworth arrives with a young clerk, Matthew Corbett. Now the sophisticated tortures of darkness take on a completely different turn and everyone can be at the stake.
Completely unpredictable plot. The darkness and secrets that accompany the characters do not let you relax, and even the author throws firewood of mysticism into the fire. The characters are charismatic and charming so much that parting with them is almost physically painful.
"Voice of the night bird" is pure delight. McCammon devilishly gorgeous and presents the reader with a perfect setting for witchcraft and superstition. The continuation of the series is "Queen of Bedlam", where the action takes place already in New York.
“According to all the rules and predictions of the calendar, the pleasant and cheerful month of May should already have come as sovereign master, but this year he entered stealthily, like a ragamuffin stealing candles in a church.”
“Everyone lives ... Yes. Live. They live with a crippled spirit and broken ideals. Years pass, and it is forgotten that they were mutilated and broken. They accept it as a gift when they get older, as if maiming and breaking is a royal favor. And the same spirit of hope and ideals of a young soul are considered stupid, petty ... and subject to mutilation and demolition, because everyone lives as they should live.
Clive Barker "Books of Blood"
Storybooks Clive Barker united by the themes of death, the nature of fear and doom. In the name of saving the mind, it should be deprived, because the writer prepares such monstrous trials for his heroes.
Every story is a living nightmare. Everything is in abundance here: maniacs, monsters, blood and corpses of varying degrees of decomposition. All the best for a true horror gourmet. Anxious, grotesque atmosphere exacerbates all the senses at once. with the dead Barker it's dangerous to joke - awkward movement, and you've got a ticket for the midnight meat train. One way.
"Books of Blood" fully justify their name. They are stunning, carnivorous and filled to the brim with the author's infernal fantasy. But how alive and naturalistic it is, this fantasy, which becomes uncomfortable from the very first lines.
We live in Yandex.Zene, try. There is a channel in Telegram. Subscribe, we will be pleased, and it will be convenient for you 👍 Meow!“The dead have their own highways. Laid in those inhospitable wastelands that begin outside of our lives, they are filled with streams of departing souls. Their disturbing rumble can be heard in the deep flaws of the universe - it comes from potholes and cracks left by cruelty, violence and vice. Their feverish turmoil can be glimpsed when the heart is ready to burst into pieces - it is then that the gaze opens up to what is supposed to be secret.
Everyone determines the list of the best for himself, but let's try to focus on the most popular and look at the alternative with one eye.
had a huge impact on the genre. Edgar Allan Poe. This is especially true of his work in psycho-horror, when the work does not strike with cruelty and dismemberment in the forehead, but slowly squeezes the head with suspense and loss of reason. " The tell-tale heart", "Black cat", "Metzengerstein", of course, "Well and pendulum"- the richest choice. Old Edgar did not deprive his attention of lovers of mystical metaphors (" Mask of the Red Death", "William Wilson") and fans of body horror (" The truth about what happened to Monsieur Valdemar"), there is enough material.
Since we are talking about psycho-horror, the real king of the genre is Howard Phillips Lovecraft(as they say, our everything). With the help of remarkable style and famous painful images, Lovecraft masterfully transports the reader to the locations of his works and conveys such threshold states as psychopathy or catatonia with frightening accuracy. The signature feature of the author is the transfer of the consciousness of a person who slowly (and sometimes vice versa - instantly) goes crazy. The suspense in his rather short works is such that Bava himself would envy, and the games with the reader's imagination impress with their perversity. Howard gives the most detailed, but extremely pointy descriptions, allowing the imagination to connect everything together: it turns out to be powerful, and creepy, and exhausting (the incessant forcing of fantasy makes the brain work like a gasoline generator). You can grab from Lovecraft almost everything indiscriminately: " Dog", "Nightmare in Red Hook", "Picture in an old book", "Buried with pharaohs", "Winged death", a series of stories about Randolph Carter, sweeping " Shadow over Innsmouth" And " Ridges of Madness"; even a poem" star horror"(certainly in the original) causes respectful awe.
Perhaps the most popular horror author is Stephen King. If only because none of his colleagues inherited him in pop culture. It is distinguished by stories stretched over time, full of small, but at the same time interesting details. Stephen works in a variety of subgenres, so the reader's task is to find his own (although many, many people swallow everything related to King without any consequences for the body). In his stories one can find wild fantasy, grotesque and surreal (especially good in this aspect " Raft" And " Finger"), there is a brutal dystopia (" running Man"), breathtaking suspense (" Misery", "Shine"), pure mystical horror (" Carrie", "losing weight"), as well as fantasy, childhood memories, sci-fi and manuals on how to write books (by the way, a great thing for those who want to, but do not come out). King is not always well translated, and he himself is sometimes recorded and stretched no one needs for long pages, but, probably, everyone, regardless of beliefs and age, can find kingism to their liking.
Another venerable author - Robert Bloch. Bloch writes very interesting plots ("Train to Hell", for example), does not shy away from visualized violence and is very well-read, which is reflected in the changing style (you will have both Lovecraft and Poe). The choice is rich, but special attention should be paid to short stories, as well as novels " Psycho", "Couch" And " american gothic"plus story" The dead don't die".
And finally, a living horror classic Clive Barker. Barker is far from suitable for everyone because of his language (too ... sensual, or something), but his images and plots can be admired endlessly. The first three are required reading. Blood Books", then - to whom what: someone " Imagika", someone - " Canyon of cold hearts", while others continue to study the remaining " Blood Books". And, of course, " Hellraiser"- at least in order to compare with the film and be surprised how much everything is hidden in a seemingly familiar story.
This is one of the most popular horror writers of today. But also don't forget about Dina Kuntsa, Ambrose Bierce, Shirley Jackson, Bram Stoker, Richard Matheson and (why not?) Hans Evers.
As for the alternative to the mainstream, it lives in the underground. Consider a few authors as a guide.
David Wong "John dies at the end". Excellently written eclectic novel: there is horror, and sci-fi, and grotesque, and twists ... Everything is so good that Don Coscarelli undertook to make a screencap. And he did. The title, oddly enough, does not contain spoilers, so grab it and read boldly, the book is first class!
Matthew Stockow and his" cows". This book makes sense to poke extreme and fans of ultra-gore. Stokow, although in order to create a metaphor, regularly goes into a deliberate, but no less nauseating provocation, so sex with animals through holes pre-drilled with a drill, murder, dismemberment , as well as eating excrement is a common thing for him.But if you are drawn to the visual side of violence and the stale atmosphere of despair, hopelessness and the meaninglessness of human existence, then "Cows" will occupy an important place in your home library.
"Exquisite Corpse" Poppy Bright- more arthouse than horror, but fans of the dark side of literature will surely enjoy it. Huge work with characters (based on the most famous serial killers), a branching plot, excellent language and an icy narrative instantly made Poppy (at that time - a girl) a sensation in the literary underground.
"Satanburger" Carlton Mellick- a masterpiece of an eclectic American pseudo-pulp, stuffed not only with an interesting message about our reality (and its alternatives), but also with references to all kinds of horror stamps. A massive alien invasion, a homosexual Satan reviving people and...uh...parts of their bodies, punks-andeds and the unrestrained atmosphere of a small-town crust concert that coincided with the end of human civilization! In every respect worthwhile thing!
And since the conversation turned to litandeground, it is impossible not to mention James Havok and his" Butcher shop in paradise". You can writhe endlessly in an attempt to convey all the convulsiveness and oozing lymph polychaetes of Havok's epithets, his mutilated and, frankly, disturbingly dreary love for Gilles de Rais, his sick fantasy through and through ... But it will not only be long, but also useless It's easier to quote:
Today, our invasion will set fire to an impoverished village, already cursed with minced black meat. My pack of hounds of pigs is tearing the rebels out of the fields where victory trumpets used to sound, the soldiers are nailing the men upside down to the crosses, setting fire to their faces. Having made secrets with the horse, I find a whole camp of pregnant wives embracing in a manger. One dies in front of my eyes, a tar doll, chewing, crawls out of smoking loins; the other, fulfilling the nightmares poured into flasks with her breasts, lives again the story of how the Devil attacked her on the eve of many centuries. Solemnly declared to be his septic bitch, he enters the bedchamber, strips the skin and meat from her husband's sleeping bones to feed his dogs, after which he impales her on a member, as if on a stake - cold, scaly and hefty, like a blacksmith's hand. She pinches and tugs at her cheeks, remembering the two bulging blows at the root of his serpentine organ, dripping with narcotic sludge as one of them thrashes her violent clit and the other screws into her rectum. Here is a two-horned tongue scraping the lining inside her womb to wash all the slop, retreating just at the moment when the goat-femurs are psychopathically twitching, and the chilling mucus floods the inner chambers. After this terrifying intercourse, her dreams were full of pyromania and cannibals in the caves, she is forever pregnant, but she continues to have terrible shriveled menstruation, for the devil's seed is made up of the smallest cannibal sephiroth colonizing the vagina, where they construct inextinguishable coal fires over which they barbecue from the delicious sperm of her mortal admirers.
Horror literature is now represented by a fairly wide range of names. These authors are scattered all over the world. Someone is known in a narrow circle of fans, and someone has incredible fees, fame and success. But, regardless of the fame of the authors, some books continue to scare readers even after years and decades. There are enough of them that neither words nor time will be enough to list this entire list, and everyone has their own understanding of the “terrible” book. Therefore, we will tell you about the ten most terrible books in the world. So let's go!
10. Opening our list is one of the most famous writers working in the horror genre - Stephen King.
It's hard to argue with the extent of his contribution to the genre, but some of his books can scare the hell out of you. A prime example of this is "Pet cemetery".
The 1983 book follows a doctor's family who move to Chicago. The neighbor of the head of the family tells many legends about those places, and among them is the legend of the pet cemetery. The doctor learns that this place is cursed due to the tricks of some evil spirit. But, being a realist, the main character decides to check it out on his own. If you want to get a lot of adrenaline - then this book is perfect for you. Horror will accompany you on every page.
Anyone who has read at least one of his books is familiar with his unorthodox storytelling style. A vivid example of how an original style can also be chilling is the book "Labyrinth".
If you follow books in the horror genre, you probably know the name Nail Izmailov. It was under this pseudonym that the writer released two horror novels - Ubyr and Ubyr. Nobody dies." We liked both "Ubyrs" so much that we asked Shamil to make a list of books for you, from which it becomes creepy in a good way.
So, we give the floor to Shamil: “I have always liked not the canon, but attempts to hack it or use it for unusual purposes. Therefore, the list turned out to be somewhat specific. I can only assure you that each of the items on this list not only made me tremble in the course of the piece, but also sent me to the easy groggy at the end. This, in my opinion, is one of the main criteria for class reading. I tried to do without well-known positions. Authors are ranked alphabetically.
- Maria Galina, Malaya Wilderness
- Leonid Kaganov, stories "Khomka" and "Until Dawn" (obscene version)
- Stephen King, "It"
- Stephen King, Misery
- Andrey Lazarchuk, stories "Mummy" and "Out of the Darkness"
Bixby is the quintessential burly literary tinkerer who's written tons of fantasy series and magazine stories with flashy covers. One went down in history - this one. A tiny story in a brilliant translation by Arkady Strugatsky (under a pseudonym - S. Berezhkov). "We live well!" Today it looks more like a social pamphlet, and in our conditions it is also a political pamphlet, but it frightens not like a child. Rather, childish, which is even scarier.
Smart Soviet publishers and literary critics adored Bradbury, so they actively positioned him as a singer of humanism and a master of philosophical fiction. The trick was a success: the fans managed not to ignite the dark side of Bradbury's work, who is actually the genius of a cruel parable, despite the fact that pieces from this side came across, for example, in the classic "Martian Chronicles" ("There will be gentle rain"), and according to the terrible "Veld" even the Soviet cinema was filmed. Now, of course, Bradbury has been published more or less completely - but, for example, his exemplary horror novel “Something terrible is coming” plowed me much less than the story “Ferris Wheel” read in childhood in the magazine “Around the World”, from which the novel, in fact, grew.
Maria Galina is a typical “friend among strangers”: she is rightfully one of the top authors of the so-called Bollitra (great literature), while weaving plots from masslit material - and it turns out about life, not the best, but ours. The action of the first part of "Little Wilderness" takes place in the most prosperous sleepy Odessa in 1979: a sharashka office called SES-2, whose duties include protecting this section of the Soviet border from the penetration of non-material threats, clicked on the invasion of some kind of horror - and the station employees are responsible for this will have to do not only before the party committee, the court and Moscow. You will have to answer with your life and soul. A very small second part takes place in 1987 in a gloomy countryside, through which two stubborn citizens make their way to the main village - obviously bruised by something and obviously hoping for something. After the first story, sweeping and desperate, the second, restrained and coldish, looks pale - like the quest plot against the backdrop of the multilinear action of SES-2. Galina pulls and pulls this pallor with ruthless precision, and then tears her to the jesters, to the Lesser Wilderness - to a flash in the whole sky and lethargy in her chest.
Kaganov aka lleo is a professional laugher, a Runet guru and a highly technical text writer who can write anything about anything. That's why I don't really like to read it. But I read this couple of stories - and imbued. Very different, hopeless in different ways, equally scary.
The most universal and serious horror from the man who made the low genre highly paid and respectable. There is almost too much of everything in this novel - fear, bright dreams, blood, pages, murdered children, first feelings, violence, love, drunkenness, perversions, flashbacks - in general, everything that normal fans love King for.
I'm crazy, and my favorite is still the novel "Dead Zone", mastered a quarter of a century ago in the journal "Foreign Literature" and has nothing to do with horror. "It" is in second place. The book, which forever inscribed the image of a terrible clown in the gallery of universal evil, was published in 1986. But Soviet children got acquainted with this image two years earlier: in 1984, Vladislav Krapivin’s brilliant story “A Summer Holiday in Starogorsk” was published, in which a clown sent by aliens frightened teenagers a little less.
Among other things, King is interesting for his mercilessly pragmatic attitude towards his own person. He made himself an episodic (and not the most attractive) hero of the epic The Dark Tower - and the dramatic appearances of the writer King a couple of times saved the hellishly long cycle from falling into burdensome meaninglessness. King resorted to less overt exploitation of his own person all the time. It is clear that everyone does this, but not everyone makes the writer the main character over and over again. King did - and won, along the way covering related topics of creative crises, graphomania, neurostimulation and whatnot (The Shining, The Ballad of a Flexible Bullet, The Dark Half, Secret Window, Secret Garden, then almost everywhere). In "Misery" the author closed the topic of responsibility to fans - so much so that most sane fiction writers have since shied away from communicating with single romantic fans with a background in medical institutions and an ax in a closet.
Lazarchuk is actually a science fiction writer who knows how and loves to scare in a variety of ways, both with episodes (in the spectrum from the psychedelic collapse of reality in Soldiers of Babylon to merciless necromagic and the chthonic holocaust of Caesar's Joy) river” (about voracious Morlocks from the outskirts of the industrial site).
But personally, two early stories frightened me much more - about the trip of children to the eternally living Lenin and about the fact that even adults do not need to be afraid of the dark - they need to be afraid of their victory over fear.
A mortally tired vampire girl and her sick quasi-dad make a stir in the November Stockholm of 1981, in which alcoholics read Dostoevsky with hatred, the stricken hero hides enuresis with the help of a foam rubber ball in his pants, and the Soviet a submarine that ran aground in Swedish waters. A chilly but brilliant book.
The author of iconic sci-fi sagas and low-profile horror films has risen to the cultural elite by offering the reader a new version of conspiracy theories: Simmons has begun to crush ancient mysteries with wild but carefully substantiated solutions. The most successful was the first experiment, in which the author deceives the cunning reader twice. First, instead of the expected thriller, he slipped a verbose, boring and purely realistic reconstruction of the report on the Arctic campaign of the Erebus and Terror ships, which disappeared in the middle of the 19th century, setting off in search of the Northwest Passage to Canada. According to Simmons, the dogmatism of planning, the swagger of command and theft of suppliers, which traditionally ruined expeditions, was supplemented by the main factor incompatible with life: a monster living in ice that emerges from any clot of the polar night, casually bites a person along with a rhea and loves to lay out puzzles from fragments of human bodies . The first 500 pages of the 900-page volume are devoted to a detailed escalation of the nightmare: the crew sits on frozen ships, weekly carries the next corpses into the holds infested with rats and looks longingly into the future. And the reader is even sadder. And then Simmons deceives the reader once again by putting him, along with the characters, into an ending that was impossible to imagine, and which captures, like in childhood. And scary accordingly.
Not so much frightening as disturbingly puzzling cycle of dry, harsh and very catchy stories, in each of which the hero, then a Komsomol member of twenty-five thousand, then a Red Army soldier with a flying detachment of the NKVD, then a special doctor, or even bombed with a truck, collides with devils and werewolves jumping out from cellars and forests of the Voronezh outback. Much, as Shchepetnev should, is explained by the intrigues of the Soviet government, demolishing churches and blowing up power units, but the author, as, again, he is supposed to, makes it clear to an impartial reader that the Bolsheviks only removed the lid from the infernal incubator that they did not equip. A couple of times Shchepetnev, who has been playing with an alternative course of history for a long time, could not resist rudely sticking a classic plot into real village life. To show, for example, how the story of Gogol's "Viya" would be seen by a left-wing traveler who, along the party line, spends the night in a church while Khoma is being sausageed to the cries of "And you, Brutus!" Or how events would have turned out at the Dead Climber's Hotel if natural scientists and special laboratory workers had gathered there, and zombies with werewolves were naughty instead of aliens. I have to report that nothing good came of it anyway. Some of the main characters remained alive - and that's bread. Black is like that.
What could be more interesting than the worlds that can be entered using the key that is the book! Those horrors that unfold before you are connected not only with the talent of the writer, but also with the imagination of the reader. You build the scenery yourself, choose the appearance of the characters, capturing the atmosphere pumped up by the author. There are no special effects in the book, mediocre acting and inappropriate actors or fake pavilions, it's all up to you. Although many popular works have been filmed more than once, primary source books are still successfully sold both in paper and in the now popular electronic form.
The book takes longer than the movie; it must open up, you need to feel contact with it, find common ground, and it will generously reward you for the time spent, opening up its secrets to you, page by page. You can “swallow” it in just one night or put it aside for a few days, thinking about what you read. A book is always a relationship, it is like a friendship - yours and yours the key to the fantasy universe. We hope that you will be happy to make friends with the works from our list, compiled in random order, and want to pick them up more than once, because books are like people - they get bored without the attention of their friends.
1) "Pet Cemetery"
Release year: 1983
Pet cemetery. Nice provincial fun, so strashno.com thought at first Louis Creed, who arrived in a new house with his family. Children from all over the area brought dead animals here. Dogs, cats, canaries, rats. They were buried in ancient Indian land. In one that is harder than the human heart. People are not buried in the Pet Cemetery. But Louis will have to do it one day - in deep grief, in a fit of despair. But everything you do, sooner or later comes back to you threefold.
2) "Call" ("Ring")
Release year: 1991
This novel, after its publication, gained such popularity that it has already been filmed twice - in its homeland in Japan and in the USA. The plot of the work was a Japanese urban legend of the late XX century. A video cassette falls into the hands of journalist Asakawa Kazuyuki, which has already brought death to four people. If exactly in a week he does not unravel the magic formula of salvation strashno.com, death awaits him and his loved ones.
3) "The Ghost of Hill House"
Release year: 1959
An old mansion on a hill brings only grief to its inhabitants. The owners refuse to live in it, an elderly couple looking after the house does not risk staying here for the night. The reputation of the abode of ghosts was firmly entrenched behind the house. And then one day the silence of the house is broken by a noisy company of visitors. Dr. Montagu, a paranormal researcher, rents a mansion for the summer to study the phenomena taking place there. None of the arrivals can even imagine what a nightmare this trip will end. The popularity of the book was consolidated by its two film adaptations - directed by Robert Wise (1963) and Jan De Bont with the participation of Steven Spielberg (1999).
4) Cycle "Myths of Cthulhu"
Years of release: 1917-1927
During the life of Lovecraft, his works were not very popular, but strashno.com, after his death, they had a noticeable impact on the formation of modern popular culture. His work is so unique that the works of Lovecraft stand out in a separate subgenre - the so-called Lovecraftian horror, which most often uses the psychological horror of the unknown. It can also be said that Lovecraft was the first to develop in detail the “cosmic horror” about the intervention of aliens in earthly life, which seriously affected post-war fiction: the author’s influence is noticeable in many works about aliens from outer space.
5) "Omen" ("Omen")
Release year: 1976
Robert Thorne, an American diplomat, upon arrival at the hospital learns that his wife has given birth to a dead child. The wife does not yet know about this, and Thorne is offered to adopt a baby who was born on the same day - the 6th of the 6th month. The nurse convinced him that the newborn's mother had died in childbirth and she had no strashno.com relatives. Robert agrees without telling his wife. Soon, parents notice strange things about their son: Damien has never been sick, he is afraid of churches, and people are dying around him. In the Book of Revelations it was said that the Antichrist would come in human form, that this birth would take place on the sixth day of the sixth month at six o'clock.
6) "The Exorcist"
Release year: 1971
Ragan, a sweet, well-mannered girl of eleven, transforms before her eyes into a monster with an animal disguise and a rough, raspy voice. Her mother, a famous actress, is desperately looking for a way out of this situation, realizing that she is irretrievably losing her daughter every day. The tender soul of the child groans in pain and horror and tries to resist, but the forces are unequal, and the demon that has taken possession of it is already ready to celebrate the victory. Meanwhile, the priest Karras comes to the aid of the family.
7) "Salim's Destiny" ("The Lot of Jerusalem")
Release year: 1975
Ben Mears, a writer, arrives in the small town of Maine, Salim's Lot, and almost at the same time, a new owner moves into the newly bought old sinister Marsten house. Following this, a little boy tragically disappears, and then people began to disappear all over the town - one by one and whole families. Neither relatives nor even the police could find them. And when hope disappeared, it seemed forever, the lost returned, and the town shuddered with horror. Ben is one of the few who guessed what was the matter, he begins the fight against the ancient evil, whose name is vampires.
This novel has many variants of the title depending on the translation. Here we present two of the most popular.
8) "Dracula"
Release year: 1897
Bram Stoker's novel is a well-known classic of the vampire genre, and his count strashno.com Dracula is a truly immortal creature that has survived many adaptations and has become the embodiment of all the most insidious and mysterious that human fantasy is capable of. The reader is about to hear five voices telling of their nightmarish encounters with Dracula. Beauty Lucy, who received a fatal bite and gradually becomes a vampire; her lover, who cannot find a place for himself from despair; a courageous physician who recognizes ominous symptoms; lawyer Jonathan Harker, who went to distant Transylvania to conclude a fatal deal; his faithful fiancee Mina. Excerpts from their diaries and letters step by step bring the sinister mystery closer to the solution.
9) “Evenings on a farm near Dikanka”, “Mirgorod”
Years of release: 1831-1832, 1835
The book "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka", consisting of eight stories, is divided exactly into two parts. "Mirgorod", published in 1835, which includes the famous "Viy", is a collection of stories by Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, strashno.com, which is positioned as a continuation of "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka". The stories in this collection are based on Ukrainian folklore and have much in common with each other. In this collection, unlike "Dikanka", where Rudy Panko was, there is no single "publisher" who closes the cycle of stories. Despite the fact that the stories are grouped, they can be read separately without losing the meaning of each story. "Mirgorod" was published in two volumes, two stories each.
10) "Ghouls"
Release year: 2000
The novel "Guly" was published in two books, the first is called "Black Dawn", the second "Fight", and the author himself was announced by the publishers as the Russian Stephen King. Based on the mythological concept developed by the author, the ghouls are the children of Ahriman, the dark deity of Zoroastrianism, whom he created in opposition to the human race. Ghouls do not have a soul, they are insidious, unreasonably vicious, bloodthirsty and strashno.com are practically immortal, they can only be destroyed by fire or sea water. These monsters are born from buried human corpses. According to ancient prophecies, Vassakh Gul appears in the world every few centuries - a powerful leader of the dark army, who arranges a local apocalypse in one single town and, having destroyed its entire population, grows an army of ghouls from corpses for a global apocalypse. This is exactly the situation that arises in a small modern Italian city.
11) "Stories"
Release year: 1834-1847
Edgar Alan Poe is a legend in American literature. It seems that all its genres and directions have grown out of his work. It is his gloomy mysterious figure that runs through all the masterpieces born in the New World. His own works are full of darkness and mysticism. Mysterious dead, mysterious beasts, the Sphinx, King Plague and the Devil himself - these are his favorite characters.
12) "Risen strashno.com from hell"
Release year: 1986
The box, once created by the toy craftsman Lemarchand, opens the way to other dimensions. A mysterious order of senobites who have tasted the highest pleasure that is inaccessible to an ordinary person. And the gates of hell itself, flung open to our world. Hellraiser has become a world horror classic, and cult films based on this novel were shot, in the creation of which Clive Barker himself took part.
13) "Caught by Ghosts"
Release year: 1987
Where is the line between dream and reality? What happens in real life, and what is just a figment of the imagination? Is contact with the other world possible if there is nothing beyond death? Trying to answer all these questions cost David Ash too much. He never believed in ghosts, did not trust the supernatural, laughed at photos of ghosts, considering strashno.com to be their Photoshop. But it couldn't go on like this for long. Sooner or later, he had to fight with otherworldly forces. What awaits him at the end of this terrible, chilling story?
14) "They appear at midnight"
Release year: 1968
In all sinister literature about the other world, there is no other such creature that would cause more horror, disgust and unhealthy interest than a vampire. No other monster has attracted such close attention from the recognized masters of this genre, and no other creature from the power of darkness has managed to inspire writers and become the hero of such numerous and outstanding nightmare stories.
15) "We live in a castle"
Release year: 1962
This book is an American Gothic novel, a true psychological thriller. It was selected by the Times magazine as one of the 10 best novels of the year by strashno.com, withstood 13 editions. In one American family living in their own house near the village, a tragedy occurred: almost all of its members were poisoned with arsenic. Two sisters and an elderly uncle - that's all that's left of the once great clan. Life on the estate flowed quietly and measuredly, but one evening there was a knock on the door, announcing the arrival of a cousin who wanted to visit the sisters.
16) "Florence and Giles"
Release year: 2010
1891 New England. Twelve-year-old orphan Florence lives with her younger brother Giles in a secluded and almost abandoned mansion. Their uncle cares little about raising children, and for his niece, he completely forbade hiring a teacher. He is sure that the girl cannot read or write. But Florence, left to herself, secretly swallows book after book, disappearing for hours in strashno.com in the cold silence of a huge library alone with Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe. She invents her own language with which she tells her story. After the mysterious death of the first governess, the guardian did not burden himself with an overly picky choice of a new mentor. Soon Miss Taylor arrives at the estate. She smells of misfortune and the scent of lilies. Florence senses that an evil and vengeful spirit has entered the house and threatens Giles. Unable to turn to adults for help, she uses all her wits and ingenuity to resist him.
17) "Haunted Story"
Release year: 1979
The writer Don Wonderly comes to the small town of Milburn, where his uncle used to live, at the invitation of four old men who call themselves the Nonsense Club; they are busy telling scary stories to each other at club meetings. The fifth member of the club was strashno.com's uncle Dona, who died at a reception given in honor of the enigmatic actress Ann Veronica Moore. This trip is perfect for Don. After all, not everything is going smoothly in his life either: his brother recently died, and Don blames a strange woman for his death, who turned his whole life upside down. In addition, Don hopes to finally write a new novel. But things are not all right in Milbourne either. An out-of-town farmer discovers his cows have been killed and bled to death; a strange woman appears in town, and her appearance shocks the members of the Nonsense Club, one of whom commits suicide. But that's not all: people are starting to disappear in Milbourne.
18) "Madame Mandilip's Devil Dolls" ("Burn, witch, burn!")
Release year: 1932
An unusual patient, henchman of the famous gangster Ricori, is brought to Dr. Lowell's clinic. The patient dies, but the cause of death is unknown, strashno.com and the death itself was so strange and terrible that Ricori, in collaboration with Lowell, begin an investigation. It soon turns out that Lowell's patient was far from the first victim who died in this way, and the only thing that unites all the victims of the epidemic is dolls from Madame Mandilip's shop, a witch who creates reduced copies of living people and relocates the souls of the originals into them.
19) Hell House
Release year: 1971
For nearly twenty years, the house of Emeric Belasco, known throughout the city as an ominous abode of ghosts, has been empty. All attempts to cleanse the Hell House fail, and those who take part in them either die or lose their minds. Nevertheless, the inhabitants of the city do not lose hope. Physicist Barret and his wife Edith, medium Florence Tanver and psychic Benjamin Fisher are ready to make another attempt at cleansing. Will strashno.com manage to get rid of the power of dark forces this time?
20) “Vampires. The fantastic novel of Baron Olshevry from the family chronicle of Counts Dracula-Cardy" 
Release year: 1912
A young, rich and energetic American heir to an old family, Harry Cardy, arrives in an abandoned Carpathian castle of the ancient Dracula family, accompanied by inseparable friends: the brave Captain Wright, the inquisitive young man James, nicknamed by his friends Sherlock Holmes, and the calm, sensible Dr. Weiss. This novel, written as a parody in response to the emerging vampiric vogue, is now a classic of the genre.
And which mystical book from our list seemed the most terrible to you?
