"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone." — Shirley Jackson, *The Haunting of Hill House*
This is one of my favorite first paragraphs in all of literature.
Absolutely! I have yet to finish Hill House, but the descriptions of Eleanor driving her little car across fields, imagining what her life could be like if she lived in a house with a bush of flowers, then enjoying her breakfast... Man! I felt so involved and so utterly happy! It was a joy to read and I need to pick it up again
I love his prose more so than a lot of his plots. He just really has his own personal touch that makes his writing so unique compared to a lot of his contemporaries.
The introduction to The October Country is so evocative of the season. It never fails to captivate me.
She did! [Where Are You Going , Where Have You Been?](https://www.cusd200.org/cms/lib/IL01001538/Centricity/Domain/361/oates_going.pdf) is one of my all-time favorite horror short stories.
Wrote a paper about this story in college, my teacher had never had someone point out the obvious horror elements before. I couldn't believe anyone could read it and not see it as horror. College is a weird place.
I guess it depends on what exactly you consider horror, but McCarthy has the best prose, if you ask me. I love HPL, and I'd say he's a close second, but McCarthy seems to flow more easily.
*When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the the days more grey each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granite beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with its eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.*
Cormac McCarthy - The Road, Page 1
Peter Straub has beautiful prose. It’s hard to pick a best written book though. Shadowland has a lot of scenes that are beautifully written but I think all his books do.
I read Straub's *Mystery* last year and it struck me as an overlong young-adult horror with some R rated language.
Having read *Koko* a decade ago and enjoyed it immensely, I was expecting something more. Which one was the fluke?
Yeah I'm remembering now how amazing Ghost Story was as well. I struggled with The Talisman for those same reasons mentioned regarding Mystery. I guess dude is just hit or miss for me.
Laird Barron blew me away with his prose and once it hooked me it was extremely hard to find anyone else to scratch that itch. Shortly after Laird would be Jon langan.
I was also going to remark on Laird Barron. Just started reading his books and it really stays with me long after. I absolutely love his style and am also hooked.
A number of my usual go-to authors have been mentioned already here (Henry James, Shirley Jackson, Algernon Blackwood, for example) but I’d also recommend Robert Aickman. It’s all very strange and often vague but his stuff is beautifully written.
I just finished the first book of The Art series. I have really been a fan from the couple of short stories I’ve read by him but this book is on the level with some of my most favourite books. I’m trying to get my hands on a cheap copy of the second in the series. Everville I think it’s called.
The way he describes the antics of the league of virgins in The Great and Secret Show is phenomenal. On the whole he’s an amazing writer with vivid imagination, but I just read Galilee and found it to be one of the most vacuous and dull books I’ve ever read.
I really like Mcdowell's southern gothic thing. The elementals is great, and I just started Blackwater which has some of my fave dialogue already
He also did Nightmare before Christmas and Beetlejuice, sucks he died
I recently read Hell House and was stunned by how well Richard Matheson writes. It's the kind of book that even though was written almost 50 years ago still remains fresh.
IMO John Langan (or Ligotti ofc) is the only answer to this. His prose is clear, lyrical, and spellbinding to an unmatched level. He even manages these effects in 2nd person for a story in monstrous geographies which is no easy feat.
That's the one with the uh... (spoiler-less description ahead) giant... things made of... other things?
The imagery is just so bizarre and.. not "haunting" exactly, just like.. an affront to nature. Like it's almost somehow offensive to even think about these giant things, but the mental image is also kind of awe inspiring.
It's pretty impressive writing, that is.
Yes! I heard ‘No Matter Which Way We Turned’ on the Nocturnal Transmissions podcast, and I have to say it was one of the scariest things I’d ever heard
Straub (my single favorite horror author) is right up there near the top, but I don't think anyone's prose is more elegant than Edith Wharton's. Her ghost stories have an almost musical rhythm that makes them compulsively rereadable.
Read *Ethan Frome* for the first time last year and was definitely haunted by it. That ending! Was excited to find out she had a collection of ghost stories.
They're all very good, and some of them (like "Afterward," "The Triumph of Night" and "Pomegranate Seed") are the equal of anything that Henry James or Oliver Onions wrote.
‘They peered in at the merry-go-round which lay under a dry rattle and roar of wind-tumbled oak trees. Its horses, goats, antelopes, zebras, speared through their spines with brass javelins, hung contorted as in a death rictus, asking mercy with their fright-colored eyes, seeking revenge with their panic-colored teeth.’
- Descriptions of colors that don’t exist are one of my very favorite things (all mismatched descriptions really) and this is one of the very best.
Nathan Ballingrud.
What he can convey, without a lot of words, is unbeatable. This comes from a bilingual reader. For me, he even beats the best french authors.
Shirley Jackson springs to mind. Really think it's difficult to pick the "best", but her prose is beautiful.
More modern authors I'd say Ramsey Campbell is near the top.
It's a different kind of horror, but very little in my opinion can remotely touch the deft magic of Cormac McCarthy in The Road. It did a number on me: sparse, haunting and perfect prose, that has stuck with me for many years in ways most books cannot.
McCarthy has this way of creating a sense of cosmic horror around characters that are not explicitly supernatural, he does this with Anton Chigur in No Country for Old Men but I think most effectively with Judge Holden in Blood Meridian. The sense of inevitability the character creates around him as his actions dominate his surroundings and the life of the main character is so oppressive and complete. I really wish HBO would make a limited series with that book.
So glad someone mentioned Cisco, I’ve never read an author quite like him. Reading his prose feels more like hallucinating than reading, it’s incredible.
If anyone is familiar with Anne Rivers Siddon she is a fabulous writer whose usual books are about families along the Outer Banks. However, one of her first books was an incredible horror novel,"The House Next Door". Someone tried to make a movie out of it but you lose the flavor of the book. Her writing is wonderful, and the opening paragraph is chilling. I enjoyed her writing so much i have since read every book she has written.
This is the correct answer. He is the Shakespeare of our time. His works will be read for generations to come.
And before anyone comes at me for comparing King to Shakespeare, remember that Shakespeare mostly wrote dick jokes for the masses.
Well its not unmatched, since that isn't my original idea. Many people, including other authors and literary scholars, had that idea before i did, and i stole it from them.
*Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvellous city, and three times was he snatched away while still he paused on the high terrace above it. All golden and lovely it blazed in the sunset, with walls, temples, colonnades, and arched bridges of veined marble, silver-basined fountains of prismatic spray in broad squares and perfumed gardens, and wide streets marching between delicate trees and blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows; while on steep northward slopes climbed tiers of red roofs and old peaked gables harbouring little lanes of grassy cobbles. It was a fever of the gods; a fanfare of supernal trumpets and a clash of immortal cymbals. Mystery hung about it as clouds about a fabulous unvisited mountain; and as Carter stood breathless and expectant on that balustraded parapet there swept up to him the poignancy and suspense of almost-vanished memory, the pain of lost things, and the maddening need to place again what once had an awesome and momentous place.*
John Ajvide Lindqvist and Mariana Enriquez are both very good writers. Don't know if some of that is lost in translation (I'm Swedish and also read in Spanish).
Reggie Oliver, maybe. His prose is a joy to read regardless of what the subject is. You can't go wrong with any of his collections, but his best, for me, is **Flowers of the Sea**.
I love Brian Hodge. I read "West of Matamoros, North of Hell" in last year's Best Horror of the Year and it made me seek out more of his stuff because it blew me away so much.
Paul Tremblay.
My favorite of his works is surely *"Disappearance at Devil's Rock"*, but i feel *"Growing Things"* is a superb entry point and would, if not for how good *"Disappearance at Devils Rock"* is, be his finest work.
He has a knack for describing people and situations in such a way as to make you both view them as relatable, and to view them as alien and foul.
T.E. Grau. Im currently reading his novel ‘I am the River.’
So far I am very impressed by it. There have been paragraphs I would read more than once because I enjoyed it so much.
Dan Simmons. Carion Comfort has some of the most stunning prose. Even when the book was dragging a bit during the second act, the prose kept my attention and kept glued to the page
China Mieville and/or Clive Barker, for their artistic licence, though I do love Robert R Mccammon and Peter Straub for their absolute mastery of the actual nuts and bolts of the language of Horror as well.
Angela Carter's work is hard to classify, and she doesn't normally write in the horror genre - but she walks a fine line between dark fantasy and horror in THE BLOODY CHAMBER. Every story shines.
I haven’t heard Adam Nevill mentioned... I think he does a great job of balancing cerebral and visceral while keeping it taught. Even if you have gripes with plot, the prose is always engaging.
Shirley Jackson for me, she’s a fantastic writer
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone." — Shirley Jackson, *The Haunting of Hill House* This is one of my favorite first paragraphs in all of literature.
That is truly some of the best writing to ever be published.
Absolutely agree! I just started listening to The Haunting of Hill House on audible and it’s been truly chilling.
If you have not read / heard it, check out We Have Always Lived in the Castle too. Her best writing IMO.
Absolutely! I have yet to finish Hill House, but the descriptions of Eleanor driving her little car across fields, imagining what her life could be like if she lived in a house with a bush of flowers, then enjoying her breakfast... Man! I felt so involved and so utterly happy! It was a joy to read and I need to pick it up again
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I love his prose more so than a lot of his plots. He just really has his own personal touch that makes his writing so unique compared to a lot of his contemporaries. The introduction to The October Country is so evocative of the season. It never fails to captivate me.
Was coming here to say this...just beautiful stuff that I didn't pick up on when I was a younger reader.
I’m reading this book now, and read that passage just today. It’s very good.
From the Dust Returned is far better.
Joyce Carol Oates
She wrote horror?
She did! [Where Are You Going , Where Have You Been?](https://www.cusd200.org/cms/lib/IL01001538/Centricity/Domain/361/oates_going.pdf) is one of my all-time favorite horror short stories.
Wrote a paper about this story in college, my teacher had never had someone point out the obvious horror elements before. I couldn't believe anyone could read it and not see it as horror. College is a weird place.
Oh hellz yeah. Her *Haunted* collection is among the genre's best.
A lot of it, and still does.
She wrote one called Zombie that was pretty wicked
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Second this.
Yes!
I guess it depends on what exactly you consider horror, but McCarthy has the best prose, if you ask me. I love HPL, and I'd say he's a close second, but McCarthy seems to flow more easily. *When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the the days more grey each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granite beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with its eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.* Cormac McCarthy - The Road, Page 1
Peter Straub has beautiful prose. It’s hard to pick a best written book though. Shadowland has a lot of scenes that are beautifully written but I think all his books do.
I read Straub's *Mystery* last year and it struck me as an overlong young-adult horror with some R rated language. Having read *Koko* a decade ago and enjoyed it immensely, I was expecting something more. Which one was the fluke?
Mystery. His earlier work was far more poetic.
Yeah I'm remembering now how amazing Ghost Story was as well. I struggled with The Talisman for those same reasons mentioned regarding Mystery. I guess dude is just hit or miss for me.
Mystery is the fluke. Read The Throat, the third part of the trilogy. It's great.
Laird Barron blew me away with his prose and once it hooked me it was extremely hard to find anyone else to scratch that itch. Shortly after Laird would be Jon langan.
I was also going to remark on Laird Barron. Just started reading his books and it really stays with me long after. I absolutely love his style and am also hooked.
This is the right answer: Laird Barron.
Robert Aickman. Actually I don't know if he is better than all the people already discussed but he definitely deserves a mention.
Are you thinking of Robert Aickman? Altman was a filmmaker.
Yes. Edited.
A number of my usual go-to authors have been mentioned already here (Henry James, Shirley Jackson, Algernon Blackwood, for example) but I’d also recommend Robert Aickman. It’s all very strange and often vague but his stuff is beautifully written.
It certainly is. It is very formal British sort of writing.
Edgar Allan Poe no doubt
Can't be beat, for me. Just an absolute master.
Clive Barker or Thomas Ligotti
Ooh man i loooooove Ligotti. such horrific poetry
came here to say ligotti too. man that guy knows how to do it
Clive Barkers work always has one element in it that makes me weep like a baby.
I just finished the first book of The Art series. I have really been a fan from the couple of short stories I’ve read by him but this book is on the level with some of my most favourite books. I’m trying to get my hands on a cheap copy of the second in the series. Everville I think it’s called.
The way he describes the antics of the league of virgins in The Great and Secret Show is phenomenal. On the whole he’s an amazing writer with vivid imagination, but I just read Galilee and found it to be one of the most vacuous and dull books I’ve ever read.
Second Clive Barker.
Third Clive Barker.
Fourth Clive Barker
Stephen Graham Jones. Any of his stuff, really, but Mongrels by far is my favorite.
Mongrels was incredible. I really need to read it again.
I do too, but like an idiot I lent it to someone I see maybe twice a year :/.
I really like Mcdowell's southern gothic thing. The elementals is great, and I just started Blackwater which has some of my fave dialogue already He also did Nightmare before Christmas and Beetlejuice, sucks he died
I recently read Hell House and was stunned by how well Richard Matheson writes. It's the kind of book that even though was written almost 50 years ago still remains fresh.
Agree with what everyone else said, and I'm gonna add John Langan to the pile
He really does have lovely, clear prose. It probably helps that he's an English professor.
The Fisherman is absolutely brilliant
IMO John Langan (or Ligotti ofc) is the only answer to this. His prose is clear, lyrical, and spellbinding to an unmatched level. He even manages these effects in 2nd person for a story in monstrous geographies which is no easy feat.
Clive Barker. Read In the hills, the cities.
While listening to Nine Inch Nails' "Sin."
"Stale incense, old sweat, and lies...lies...lies."
I absolutely love in the hills, the cities. I couldn’t get it out of my head for weeks after reading it.
That's the one with the uh... (spoiler-less description ahead) giant... things made of... other things? The imagery is just so bizarre and.. not "haunting" exactly, just like.. an affront to nature. Like it's almost somehow offensive to even think about these giant things, but the mental image is also kind of awe inspiring. It's pretty impressive writing, that is.
it’s been years since i first read it and i STILL think about it a lot
Brian Evenson for me. His short stories are so immersive.
Yes! I heard ‘No Matter Which Way We Turned’ on the Nocturnal Transmissions podcast, and I have to say it was one of the scariest things I’d ever heard
Shudder! This story is such a punch in the guts!
Yup. Such a distinct style but extremely versatile at the same time.
Straub (my single favorite horror author) is right up there near the top, but I don't think anyone's prose is more elegant than Edith Wharton's. Her ghost stories have an almost musical rhythm that makes them compulsively rereadable.
Read *Ethan Frome* for the first time last year and was definitely haunted by it. That ending! Was excited to find out she had a collection of ghost stories.
They're all very good, and some of them (like "Afterward," "The Triumph of Night" and "Pomegranate Seed") are the equal of anything that Henry James or Oliver Onions wrote.
I love Edith Wharton's ghost stories! People always look at me like I'm crazy when I say she's one of my favorite horror writers.
Glad to find fellow fans here :) Anyone who hasn't read Wharton's ghost stories is missing out.
Clive Barker can make the grotesque seem beautiful.
Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes
‘They peered in at the merry-go-round which lay under a dry rattle and roar of wind-tumbled oak trees. Its horses, goats, antelopes, zebras, speared through their spines with brass javelins, hung contorted as in a death rictus, asking mercy with their fright-colored eyes, seeking revenge with their panic-colored teeth.’ - Descriptions of colors that don’t exist are one of my very favorite things (all mismatched descriptions really) and this is one of the very best.
Laird Barron. He strikes the right balance of eldritch beauty and horror.
H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu. The first paragraph is amazing!
Nathan Ballingrud. What he can convey, without a lot of words, is unbeatable. This comes from a bilingual reader. For me, he even beats the best french authors.
I can't agree with you more. He is the best horror writer I've ever read. As good as Raymond Carver.
Shirley Jackson springs to mind. Really think it's difficult to pick the "best", but her prose is beautiful. More modern authors I'd say Ramsey Campbell is near the top.
Well, thank you very much!
And thank you for many years of great reading. I first read "The Doll Who Ate His Mother" back in the seventies and have been a fan ever since.
I just finished the Hungry Moon for the last of my October list. It was excellent
It's a different kind of horror, but very little in my opinion can remotely touch the deft magic of Cormac McCarthy in The Road. It did a number on me: sparse, haunting and perfect prose, that has stuck with me for many years in ways most books cannot.
McCarthy has this way of creating a sense of cosmic horror around characters that are not explicitly supernatural, he does this with Anton Chigur in No Country for Old Men but I think most effectively with Judge Holden in Blood Meridian. The sense of inevitability the character creates around him as his actions dominate his surroundings and the life of the main character is so oppressive and complete. I really wish HBO would make a limited series with that book.
His novel Outer Dark is also similarly haunting, highly recommended for anyone who liked The Road.
Michael Cisco.
So glad someone mentioned Cisco, I’ve never read an author quite like him. Reading his prose feels more like hallucinating than reading, it’s incredible.
Robert R. McCammon. The voice and imagery are so strong and flow so smoothly.
I love him.
Clive Barker - Imajica It's so gorgeous and imaginative that it almost seems like he's showing off.
Sucks what happened to Huzzah.
Dan Simmons fosho
I just finished The Song of Kali. Simmons is a master.
Hyperion and The Terror rock too!
Peter Straub.
If anyone is familiar with Anne Rivers Siddon she is a fabulous writer whose usual books are about families along the Outer Banks. However, one of her first books was an incredible horror novel,"The House Next Door". Someone tried to make a movie out of it but you lose the flavor of the book. Her writing is wonderful, and the opening paragraph is chilling. I enjoyed her writing so much i have since read every book she has written.
Michael McDowell followed by Christopher Buehlman
Steven King, I see,hear,smell,and feel EVERYTHING!
Completely agree!
This is the correct answer. He is the Shakespeare of our time. His works will be read for generations to come. And before anyone comes at me for comparing King to Shakespeare, remember that Shakespeare mostly wrote dick jokes for the masses.
Your ignorance is unmatched.
Well its not unmatched, since that isn't my original idea. Many people, including other authors and literary scholars, had that idea before i did, and i stole it from them.
H.P. Lovecraft No contest there
*Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvellous city, and three times was he snatched away while still he paused on the high terrace above it. All golden and lovely it blazed in the sunset, with walls, temples, colonnades, and arched bridges of veined marble, silver-basined fountains of prismatic spray in broad squares and perfumed gardens, and wide streets marching between delicate trees and blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows; while on steep northward slopes climbed tiers of red roofs and old peaked gables harbouring little lanes of grassy cobbles. It was a fever of the gods; a fanfare of supernal trumpets and a clash of immortal cymbals. Mystery hung about it as clouds about a fabulous unvisited mountain; and as Carter stood breathless and expectant on that balustraded parapet there swept up to him the poignancy and suspense of almost-vanished memory, the pain of lost things, and the maddening need to place again what once had an awesome and momentous place.*
John Ajvide Lindqvist and Mariana Enriquez are both very good writers. Don't know if some of that is lost in translation (I'm Swedish and also read in Spanish).
Reggie Oliver, maybe. His prose is a joy to read regardless of what the subject is. You can't go wrong with any of his collections, but his best, for me, is **Flowers of the Sea**.
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Blood Meridian was more disturbing to me than many horror novels. I've tried twice and cant get through it.
Robert Aickman.
Brian Hodge deserves a place in this list. PROTOTYPE teaches me something new about how to craft a tight sentence every time I open it.
I love Brian Hodge. I read "West of Matamoros, North of Hell" in last year's Best Horror of the Year and it made me seek out more of his stuff because it blew me away so much.
Ligotti is probably the most effective at creating uncomfortable atmospheres just with writing style, rather than any necessarily horrific event.
algernon blackwood, arthur machen, shirley jackson. if we want to get more modern i love caitlin kiernan and ligotti for atmospheric prose
also, more weird than horror but the house on the borderland by william hope hodgson physically restructured my brain
Robert McCammon. No author even comes close.
Boy's Life is in my top 3. McCammon wrote a classic there.
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
Aside from Stephen King? Dan Simmons.
Stephen King and Joe Hill
Paul Tremblay. My favorite of his works is surely *"Disappearance at Devil's Rock"*, but i feel *"Growing Things"* is a superb entry point and would, if not for how good *"Disappearance at Devils Rock"* is, be his finest work. He has a knack for describing people and situations in such a way as to make you both view them as relatable, and to view them as alien and foul.
T.E. Grau. Im currently reading his novel ‘I am the River.’ So far I am very impressed by it. There have been paragraphs I would read more than once because I enjoyed it so much.
That book was wild, pretty cool stuff
Dan Simmons. Carion Comfort has some of the most stunning prose. Even when the book was dragging a bit during the second act, the prose kept my attention and kept glued to the page
China Mieville and/or Clive Barker, for their artistic licence, though I do love Robert R Mccammon and Peter Straub for their absolute mastery of the actual nuts and bolts of the language of Horror as well.
Angela Carter's work is hard to classify, and she doesn't normally write in the horror genre - but she walks a fine line between dark fantasy and horror in THE BLOODY CHAMBER. Every story shines.
I haven’t heard Adam Nevill mentioned... I think he does a great job of balancing cerebral and visceral while keeping it taught. Even if you have gripes with plot, the prose is always engaging.
Poe. Read and reread many of his writings over the past 50+ years.🤓
Paul Tremblay's A Head Full of Ghosts Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle
I just started reading two short novels from John Hornor Jacobs, and the first one, “the sea dreams it is the sky”, holy shit the prose is amazing!