Best Books: Horror Novels & Stories

After two days of high temperatures and intense boredom, he remembered the three books. Sam pulled out the one with the Mummy on the cover, because it looked the most innocuous. It was entitled the Ninth Pan Book of Horror Stories. He wasn’t the least bit prepared for what he found inside. The first three stories involved emasculation, murder and burning at the stake. In his fevered state Sam felt he was not only watching the characters’ suffering, he was experiencing it along with them. He flung the book at the wall and then hid it again, wishing he could burn it like Jinnot, the young girl in the third story who was burned alive.

Those books were older than any of the others in his office. The bottom shelf (the one he’d been searching when he’d first heard the cats playing in the hall) held his collection of horror anthologies. The famed Whispers series, edited by Stuart David Schiff, featuring the varied works of Ramsey Campbell, Stephen King, Charles Grant and so many others. The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror from England. The Shivers series, published by Cemetery Dance. Masques, Borderlands, Shadows, Stalkers, Dark Forces, October Dreams I & II, Corpse Blossoms, Horror Library Volumes 1-5, and Prime Evil. Classic horror anthologies jammed next to paperback collections of slightly lesser repute with titles to mat