Thursday, October 29, 2020

Ten top horror novels

Gabriel Bergmoser is an award-winning Melbourne-based author and playwright. He won the prestigious Sir Peter Ustinov Television Scriptwriting Award in 2015, was nominated for the 2017 Kenneth Branagh Award for New Drama Writing and went on to win several awards at the 2017 VDL One Act Play Festival circuit. In 2016 his first young adult novel, Boone Shepard, was shortlisted for the Readings Young Adult Prize. A film adaptation of his novel The Hunted is currently being developed in a joint production between Stampede Ventures and Vertigo entertainment in Los Angeles.

At the Guardian, Bergmoser tagged ten "horror stories that in different ways revolutionised the genre by being far more than just bumps in the night," including:
The Passage by Justin Cronin

Justin Cronin’s epic vampire saga is a sprawling tale of love, loss and societies destroyed, rebuilt and destroyed again, centred not only on characters we could care deeply for, but a slowly growing sense of insidious evil whispering from the shadows, a terror so unknowable that it was always going to lose a little menace once it was explained. But like the best horror writers, Cronin uses that inevitability to make his point – that all too often evil grows from a place that is a little more understandable than we might care to confront. The whole trilogy is fantastic, but for its singular atmosphere of growing dread the first will always be the best.
Read about the other entries on the list.

The Passage is among C.J. Tudor's eight thrillers featuring a child with a mysterious supernatural power, Anthony Horowitz's top ten apocalypse books and Annalee Newitz's ten works of science fiction that are really fantasy.

--Marshal Zeringue