Gus Moreno is the author of
This Thing Between Us. His stories have appeared in
Aurealis,
PseudoPod,
Bluestem Magazine,
LitroNy, the
Burnt Tongues anthology, and a bunch of other places that are totally not defunct.
At
Publishers Weekly he tagged ten books that "push the boundaries of the genre in terms of what terrifies us, what disturbs us, and what we expect from a horror novel." One title on the list:
The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum
Two young girls move in with their aunt and her sons in an assuming suburb and develop friendships with other neighborhood children. Is there a slasher? No. Is the house haunted? No. They’re cannibals then? No. 
Ghosts? Zombies? Serial Killers? Nope. Is it the most disturbing novel I’ve ever read? Yes. As the novel progresses, the walls begin to close in around what this story actually is about, and no work combines the domestic and the extreme more than The Girl Next Door. Many novels explore what’s beneath the thin veneer of suburban life, but not many reach the depths Ketchum’s book does, and you’re too ensnared in the story to stop by the time truly horrific things begin to happen. If the frog-in-a-pot-of-slowly-boiling-water fable was a novel, it would be this.
Read about
the other entries on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
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