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As a living legend, when Stephen King recommends a book, his opinion holds weight, and that goes double when it's a recommendation for a horror book. King has never been an author stingy with his criticism, but also his praise, of the things he reads and watches. While these days, most of his opinions are reserved for TV and movies, that doesn't mean he's not an enthusiastic supporter of his fellow writers.
However, King recommending books from other authors isn't a new phenomenon; he's been doing it since early in his career. Sometimes it's for a book blurb, but other times it's simply unsolicited praise for a story he finds compelling, whether something he explores in the foreword of one of his own books or a quick post on social media.
To get you in the mood for the spookiest season, why not work your way through a curated list of horror books recommended by King?
The Haunting of Hill House
Shirley Jackson
It may seem like a cop-out to include Shirley Jackson's classic horror novel on a list of recommended works, but anyone collecting Stephen King horror recommendations would be remiss not to include it, seeing as how influential it's been on him. It's been so influential, in fact, that he included it in 1981's Danse Macabre, a non-fiction book where King dives into the horror genre, exploring how the genre has unfolded to reflect our current fears and anxieties across literature, movies, music, and television.
He spends a fair bit of time analyzing and reviewing Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, calling it one of the finest horror novels of the 20th century. He's credited Jackson's Gothic horror novel for being a significant influence on The Shining, referencing Jackson and Hill House in multiple books. His Rose Red miniseries was even Stephen King's stab at adapting Jackson in his own way.
Greatness recognizes greatness, and if someone as great as King has that much admiration and gratitude for Shirley Jackson's ghost story, it's an immediate, mandatory read.
The Church of Dead Girls
Stephen Dobyns
Stephen Dobyns is an interesting fixture in the literary world, as comfortable writing poetry as he is writing creepy mysteries and thrillers. His 1997 novel The Church of Dead Girls brings together his two loves, with the prose being as lyrical as anything you'll read in a horror thriller.
The story takes place in a small, sleepy town in upstate New York. It's rocked by a grisly murder, then a young girl goes missing. Then another. And another after that. As the town becomes steeped in fear and paranoia, neighbor turns on neighbor as suspicion and violence grow, leading to a horrifying ending that lingers.
It certainly lingered for King, who said of Dobyns' novel, "If ever there was a tale for a moonless night, a high wind and a creaking floor, this is it ... I don't expect to read a more frightening novel this year."
Red Moon
Benjamin Percy
Not all great horror books are full of ghosts or serial killers. Some of them are more dystopian in the vein of King's The Stand, and a dystopia that includes monsters. Such is the case with Benjamin Percy's 2013 novel Red Moon, which is, as King rightly describes it, “a werewolf epic."
Set in an alternate, present-day USA, about 5% of the American population is infected with something known as Lobos, a prion disease that, when triggered, forces them to become werewolves. The population is divided between those who think they should be treated like anyone else, and others who view them with fear and revulsion. As tensions rise, the threat of a red moon hangs over everything, promising to trigger a bloodbath that will sweep over the country.
Stephen King had simple praise for it: "Can’t stop thinking about it," he said. Sometimes, the simplest, most direct compliments are the most compelling.
Rovers
Richard Lange
Where werewolves exist, vampires aren't far behind, and that includes this Stephen King recommendation list. Enter Richard Lange's 2021 novel, Rovers. A sprawling vampire road-trip horror-thriller, Rovers tells the story of vampire brothers Jesse and Edgar, who bounce around from place to place and feeding off humans at the fringes of society.
They and a human woman they've just met accidentally end up on the radar of the Fiends, a murderous vampire motorcycle gang with bloody and malevolent intentions. As the brothers and their human companion go on the run, other storylines are woven together in a story that is a gory offering of traditional and new vampire lore.
King had high praise for it – very high: "Want a book that will scare the daylights out of you this weekend? ROVERS, by Richard Lange," he recommends. "The best vampire novel I've read since LET THE RIGHT ONE IN."
The Ignored
Bentley Little
Bentley Little is a divisive figure in the horror world, a reclusive writer who steadily releases a book a year to mixed reviews. While his writing style is not for everyone, horror names like Stephen King and Dean Koontz have praised him, with King referring to him Bentley both "the horror poet laureate" and "a master of the macabre" for his book The Ignored.
The Ignored, published in 1997, is, in ways, a prescient horror novel. It follows a man named Bob Jones, who is an utterly forgettable person, not memorable in any way, and going unnoticed by everyone around him, including coworkers and family. He is of a group of people called The Ignored, but when he meets a fellow Ignored named Philipe, things spiral out of control.
Unlike Bob, Philipe's rage at being a nobody has been building, and he has plans to gather together other Ignored for more malevolent ends. His plan is a bloody retribution on a world that has ignored them for too long. In 1997, two years before Columbine, the premise seemed farfetched. In 2025, with school shootings and incel culture more entrenched than ever, The Ignored seems like a premonition.
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Ray Bradbury
The late, great American author Ray Bradbury was a literary chameleon, writing across multiple genres. However, his most famous work is the classic dystopian 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, which just about any high school student in America can attest. Yet, the dark horse candidate for his greatest piece of writing is 1962's dark horror-fantasy Something Wicked This Way Comes.
It was Bradbury's novel that firmly established the concept of the traveling night carnival hiding supernatural and sinister secrets among its brightly colored tents and cotton candy. It's a premise that has been borrowed numerous times by other writers, including Stephen King; one could draw a throughline from Something Wicked This Way Comes to parts of King's novels Joyland and Revival.
It's fitting, then, that King has referred to Bradbury's book as "A darkly poetic tale...it is probably Bradbury's best work." As someone who has influenced King almost as much as Jackson has, Bradbury has been a constant in King's life. So much a constant, in fact, that King once said of Bradbury, "Without Ray Bradbury, there would be no Stephen King."
My Soul To Keep
Tananarive Due
It's fitting that there are two vampire novels on this list, considering that some of King's greatest works all tie back to the town of Jerusalem's Lot. Tananarive Due is a celebrated figure in the horror genre, and a historian of Black horror. My Soul to Keep, the first book in her African Immortals series, is not her first book, but arguably her breakout work and the one that carved out a place for her as a master of horror.
It's a breakout novel, indeed. When strange deaths start piling up around Jessica, a reporter, it soon becomes clear that her husband, David, is hiding something. He finally confesses to her that he's a vampire, and it plunges Jessica into a terrifying world from which there is no escape.
King called Due's standout novel "an eerie epic” that “bears favorable comparison to Interview with the Vampire," going on to confess,"I loved this novel.” He loved it so much, in fact, that Due herself later wrote (via EW) that her publisher had to cut down King's blurb because he had so much to say. He also told numerous people he knew about it, including a man who once asked for Due's autograph and told her he'd gotten into her writing because he was an extra in The Green Mile movie and King had recommended her.
Coming from the King of Horror, that's high and genuine praise.
Books of Blood
Clive Barker
Stephen King made his mark on the horror world in the '70s with the release of his first book, Carrie, in 1974. A decade later, however, another name that would become a game-changer in the horror genre hit the scene: Clive Barker. From the start, King recognized his brilliance and named him "the future of horror."
It was Clive Barker's short story series, Books of Blood, that established Barker as a new force to be reckoned with in horror, and King said as much when asked to provide a blurb for Barker's book. In 2013, Barker shared a photo of a 1985 letter King sent to Barker's publisher (via Clive Barker/Facebook), revealing King's enthusiastic praise:
"It's easier, I find, to blurb a book (or a series of them) when you're not quite as excited and bowled over. I think Clive Barker is so good that I am literally almost tongue-tied. Yes, I stick by it: I have seen the future of the horror genre, and his name is Clive Barker (the paraphrase actually comes from Jon Landau, who said in 1970 that he had seen the future of rock 'n roll and his name was Bruce Springsteen).
What Barker does in THE BOOKS OF BLOOD makes the rest of us look like we've been asleep for the last ten years. Some of the stories were so creepily awful that I literally could not read them alone; others go up and over the edge and into a gruesome territory that no one has really traversed since M.L. Lewis's The Monk.
Barker's scenes of glaring pulpy horror should cause instant dismissal, but forty or fifty pages is enough to convince any reader of sense and taste (funny word to use in connection with stories like 'The Midnight Meat-Train,' but it's the right word) that this is a tool, and not an end. The stories are compulsively readable and lit here and there with furnace-gleams of wit.
He's an original. I hope there are folks at Berkley who understand just how good he is, and how proud you should be of publishing him. What he's doing will shortly make him an enormously saleable writer, but what he's doing is also important and exciting.
And if you don't send me his novel, I'll have to send a few vampires after you.
Regards,
Stephen King"
Considering what a towering figure in horror Clive Barker became since that letter, it would appear that Stephen King had a touch of clairvoyance at the time – or he's just a darn good judge of what's brilliant and fresh in horror. With that in mind, you might consider adding any of the books on this list to your October TBR pile.
