Twenty-one books from a crash course on the literary horror world

Jeff Somers is the author of Lifers, the Avery Cates series from Orbit Books, Chum from Tyrus Books, and the Ustari Cycle from Pocket/Gallery, including We Are Not Good People. At the B&N Reads blog he tagged twenty-one books that will give you an idea of how the horror genre has evolved, including:

The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, by Laird Barron, 2013

Barron may represent the future of horror; he combines a literary flare with long, complex sentences, and lush descriptive passages with a fusion of genres; his most successful stories mashups of noir, crime, horror, and fantasy. Because why can’t everything be terrifying? Consider the first season of HBO’s True Detective: a crime thriller that was flat-out a horror story for a few episodes before resolving into a crime story again. Who’s to say what’s horror and what’s not?

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All is among Kelly Link's six notable books that warp reality and Jeff Somers's five great under-the-radar reads of 2014.

--Marshal Zeringue