Sequel: Ten short horror novels that left me stirred.

For the book length thing, I've heard that publishers aren't that willing to publish overly long books from new authors. Each genre and age group has an average book length that new authors need to stick to. They don't want to risk the cost of publishing a long book from a new author and then not have it sell well. The more you publish the more likely they are to say yes to a long book. People are more willing to read a 500+ page book from an established author that they like vs from someone that they don't know who it is is the thinking.

Carrie by Stephen King Off Season by Jack Ketchum The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks The Hellbound Heart by Clive Baker Deadhead by Shaun Hutson The Collector by John Fowles The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin Dead Laura by Gemma Amor You've Lost A Lot Of Blood by Eric Larocca

Sir, your dedication and involvement in horror genre is exemplary. Your knowledge is astounding, certainly a Genius. I only recommend one short story " The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins. It is one of most brilliant and profound stories I have ever read.

Off season is such a great book. It's was a pretty hardcore experience reading it on middle school.

I also read The Collector years ago, and it is simply one of the scariest, most uncompromising books I've ever read.

A horror story that truly creeped me out was HEX by Thomas Olde Heuveldt. He translated the original into English and moved the location to a small town in upstate New York. A 300 year old witch, eyes and mouth sewn shut and arms chained to her body, appears in various places in the town and even in homes. All townspeople have government provided phones with an app to report sightings and there are cameras everywhere that are monitored by a secret govt group. Oh yeah, and no one who lives in the town can leave for more than a few days without becoming suicidal. I read it 3 years ago and it still creeps me out.

Uzumaki by Junji ito had that affect on me. It is truly a master piece.

Loved this list of new reading material you've given me - some I've read, others not yet. Like your videos - learning new things all the time.

I would strongly suggest reading "The Fisherman" by John Langan. fantastically creepy and haunting.

I could listen to you speaking about books for hours! Glad I found your channel

I absolutely love these lists!!! Thank you so much!! 😃

I have only read the collector from this list and it still creeps me out when I think about it or if my eyes happen across it on my bookshelf. thanks for the list!

I just stumbled across your channel and your handle kills me 😂 Looking forward to watching more of your content!

had to pause to say the collector is such a phenomenal story & something that has stuck with me as well! such a great list

Great video! I’m diving into horror after circling the genre for the last twenty years. Was more of a sci fi guy but have been intrigued by surreal horror / dread in the recent years. Thanks for the commentary!

Cabal by Clive Barker is a great short book. Was filmed as Nightbreed. Thanks for the list, wii definitely look for them.

A terrific list and definitely some titles I must seek out and read. Many thanks.

Fantastic video thank you! One of my favorite authors is Patrick McGrath. I’ve had a hard time finding anything I love as much as his stuff. Psychological Horror without the gore.

Great list. I've read a few of these and particularly liked You've Lost a Lot of Blood and Dear Laura.

You are excellent at concise analyses. The Lonely sounds interesting.

I agree about advising the new aspiring King fan to start with "Carrie". When you want to get to know an author reading their books in the order they were written is often a good way to go about it.

Fantastic and inspiring presentation. Yes, the shorter the book the greater the impact. The great classics like Frankenstein , Dracula and the Dystopian and disturbing. Lord of the Flies come to mind. There are many others too.Any great Horror anthologies ( short stories ) you can recommend? I think of the Pan Horror anthologies which were my basic diet growing up in the 1960s

Love your channel. You have gave me so many booktips. I thought I have read all horror worth reading. Boy, was i wrong.

This video was much appreciated! Can’t wait to start The Loney.

if you liked Dear Laura, i think you might also enjoy Penpal by Dathan Auerbach. very similar vibes. while i read Dear Laura first and really liked it, i liked Penpal a little better and found it more scary (perhaps because it was also slightly longer, around 300-ish pages). thanks for the list though, it looks fantastic!

Off Season was a crazy and grotesque ride but I loved it! If you like exploring the demented minds of disturbed killers I'd highly recommend Exquisite Corpse. I plan in reading the entire list!

The best short horror book Ive read this year is "Come Closer" by Sara Gran

I love the watch recharging in the background. There’s something strangely satisfying watch it rotate. :)

I've read The Hellbound Heart, Carrie, and Off Season and I enjoyed them all. I will have to read the other books on this list eventually. So many books so little time

A successful author's later books tend to be longer because editors become more afraid to edit them.

Thanks, Olly. just brought Off Season. can't wait to read it.

OMG Dear Laura sounds horrific! I definitely want to read that one! I've officially bought You've Lost a Lot of Blood and will be reading it in June!

I’ve read some of these and would totally agree on their lasting impressions. Need to check out the ones I haven’t read yet!

A bit OT but books which are criminally forgotten IMHO are John Pritchard's trilogy starting with "Night Sisters", "Angels of mourning" and "The Witching Hour"; A young nurse finds herself target of the Clinicians, medieval surgeons (much inspired by the band Fields oof the Nephilim) and a murderous sorceress. A mix of visceral horror, action, urban fantasy (before the term was coined), very British with a gothic vibe. I know them well, I translated those mothers ! The author seems to have disappeared after one last novel…

Excellent review. I've added a few of these to my list. I highly recommend The Other by Thomas Tryon. I read the first time as a teen and again as an adult and it really has stuck with me.

This was excellent! How did I miss this? Do you put out a video every day?! Who DOES that? Anyway, there are a bunch of books here I haven’t read yet and now I really want to.

Just found your channel looking for spooky read recommendations.. I love the way you talk about and explain books!!! Subscribed. 🥰

Another great and very informative list, Olly. When I watch one of your vids (I've been bingeing your channel lately) I always find out about at least one book I've never heard of but should really know (being a long-time horror fan), so thanks. Also - I've been boring people at parties for years telling anyone who will listen that the short novel is Stephen King's best 'canvas', so to speak. His short stories are often hit and miss, and his longest novels are always just a little too long (IT would be perfect with one or two characters less and a couple of sub-sub-plots trimmed a bit). But I can't think of a novella of King's I really dislike. And DIFFERENT SEASONS forever remains in my top ten King books of all time. What do you think? Am I crazy? 😁 Keep up the fine work.

The Running Man by Richard Bachman (SK) always disturbed me. More so as the dystopian future it portrayed is seemingly coming true!

So glad you referenced 'Fever Dream' by Samanta Schweblin. I loved it and was baffled by it. Also, if you haven't read it, there's "The Grip of It' by Jac Jemc (no idea how to pronounce the name) which is a terrific psychological haunted house/possession narrative.

There are four I haven’t read: Bleeding a Lot, Deadhead, Dear Laura, and The Loney. I might have to pick them up. The Collector is not traditionally classified as horror, but it is very chilling nonetheless.

Great list and observations. I have only read The Hellbound Heart and Carrie, but have The Wasp Factory sitting beside me for when i have finished Mirror by Graham Masterton. I would recommend Wet Work by Philip Nutman, a fairly short zombie apocalypse that has stayed in my head over the years. I would love to read Off Season but i highly doubt I'll find it in my 'back' neck of the woods.

I wonder if you could recommend psychological horror versus blood and gore horror. Think Ligotti, Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce and similar. I don't like a lot of blood and gore, but love the creepy, weird kind of horror.

I'm very glad to have found your channel. best wishes from south Florida🏖

Carrie stuck with me since childhood as well. King does a great job of bringing out the indifferent cruelty of adolescence. I just finished “the Deep” by Nick Cutter and was pleasantly chilled all the way to the end, when it kinda fell apart. Do you have any suggestions for cosmic or space horror that evokes thalassophobia (or it’s outer space equivalent)? Also, have you read any of Ligotti’s short story collections?

My pick for a short(er) Stephen King is Salem’s Lot. One of the best vampire books I’ve read.

I’ve been enjoying you videos and some of your recommendations. I watched John Dies in the End. I liked it. Question: Many of these books have been adapted to movies. What would you generally recommend first, the film or the book? Personally I feel that the reading experience is so much richer and able to be inside the characters than pictures shows can manage, plus I favor atmosphere over plot so I would say there is less disappointment in watching the movie first than the other way around. What do you think?

Some great stuff. Quite a few added to my list.

I’m surprised Ligotti’s My Work is Not Yet Done isn’t on here.

This is right on time. Recently I don’t have much time to read long novels, this is just what I need!

"The Collector" was made into a movie! Samantha Eggar played the lady who was captured and imprisoned. I saw it way back in the 1970's

This was another great analysis--though I have not read most of these I enjoy hearing the analysis. I do remember reading Carrie, Salem's Lot and The Stand when I was young and they were quite memorable. It's well known here that Maine is the "South of the North" meaning you run into the "hick culture" in New England as well as the South. There is a long standing tension between rural and urban here particularly the more rural south and the more urban north which has changed over the decades but was a holdover from the Civil War. I have been meaning to ask this question and it is just based on my casual observation...but why is it that Scottish writers produce (or seem to produce) such gruesome and/or violent type of works at what seems like a disproportionate rate...it just seems like something I have noticed and I might be totally off but I am wondering if there is some affinity there. Even the grotesque things like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde or the weird medical experimentation by doctors on cadavers etc...it just seems like there is some weird vibe that comes out of that area. (I am both southern and lots of Scots background so I am not casting aspersions if any take umbrage). 🤓

I don’t mean to push Stephen King, but another favourite for me is ‘The Mist’, more of a novella, I suppose. And then there’s ‘Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption’, which is more ‘horrible’ than ‘horror’ in its concept, but with a wonderfully satisfying ending. The film makers dropped ‘Rita Hayworth’ from the title because they thought people would think it was a biographical film about Rita Hayworth. 😂😂😂

I also love short books. Longer ones usually have so much unnecessary info that just bores me. Great video.

Another great list, buddy! ♥️

So glad for this list! I'm a PhD student so my 'for fun' reading time is pretty limited, but I want it to be impactful.

James Herbert's Haunted has some delightful spooky moments and comes in at about 230 pages. Naomi's Room by Jonathan Aycliffe is also a good short one as well, at about 200 pages. Valley of Lights by Stephen Gallagher, which predated the film Fallen, is a real gripper of a book, again only a couple hundred pages long.

I've only read The Collector and agree, it's very good. Dear Laura sounds interesting. Great list.

Of these I have only read ‘The Wasp Factory’ and ‘Carrie’ but when you spoke about ‘The Collector’ it seemed very familiar. So I went to IMDB and I know that I have watched the 1965 movie based on the book starring Terrance Stamp. The movie was creepy and I remember it though I must have watched it in the 1970s/1980s. I will have to see if I can find both the movie and book and compared them.

not too long ago i watched the film "cruising" with al pacino. i then read the book by gerald walker. the book has a different focus than the film. there are parallels between the 2 and they both enhanced the character of steve burns. when he said , "i want you to show me the world", horrified and kind of nauseated me. it was a creepy and unsettling experience. and if the script had been more developed it would have been a very good film.

The girl next door by Jack Ketchum is very unsettling and stuck with me for a long time.

A couple of short horror novels that I enjoyed are by Patrick McGrath. The Grotesque and Spider were great, short books. His short story collection Blood and Water is also great.

A good short horror book I really enjoy is "Nothing But Blackened Teeth". I really liked this video! I now have some new books on my tbr list!

Some of my favorites: "The Haunted and the Haunters, or, the House and the Brain," by Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton. It's the CLASSIC haunted house story. "The King in Yellow," by Robert Chambers. It's a book about a book called "The King King in Yellow," the reading of which makes one insane. "The Great God Pan," by Arthur Machen. After publishing it, the author was INVITED to join "The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn." Normally, one had to prove oneself worthy, to be admitted into that occult society. "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward," by H.P. Lovecraft. Need I say more? : "Mind Ye Boy, raise up not that which Ye cannot put down!" "Who Goes There?" by John Campbell. "The Thing" movies were based on this. I think the title of the novella is more creepy, especially when you know what it means.

I received "Carrie" as a birthday gift the year it came out. It was the first Stephen King book I read and I remember staying up all night reading it. I also saw the movie in theaters when it came out but I prefer the book because there's much more character development in the book.

I love The Collector, both the book and the movie. So glad you mentioned The Loney,don't enjoy many new authors but he is fantastic.

“Things have gotten worse since we last spoke” by Eric Larocca is also very weird, short, and effective horror. I thought about it for weeks after.

Thank you so much!! ❤

Good review on the book A Simple Plan by Scott Smith. I read it in 1995, and I was hooked from page 1 to the end because it was so suspenseful and I wanted to know what's going to happen. I could not put it down, and it's one of the best thrillers I ever read. There was a movie that was from the book, which is very faithful to the book and it was just as good. I tried to read more of Scott Smith books but he wrote one more . Do you if he's written anymore novels?

I have about a dozen anthologies of supernatural stories…so many good short stories and novellas….I can’t possibly remember all the great ones off the top of my head. Personally, I think some of the best were written in Victorian times/early 20th century. I prefer ghost stories over slasher/violent horror. EF Benson’s “Mrs Amsworth” is a good one, a vampire story (I have always wondered if this story inspired King’s “‘Salem’s Lot”) and the very short “Graveyard Shift” by Richard Matheson.

I read The Collector last year and it absolutely chilled me.

There is a Novella by King called “in the Tall Grass” that is twisted, warped and deeply unsettling. But at the same time, completely fascinating. Most would have seen the movie Netflix made from it, but the book definitely deserves a mention.

I really enjoyed Carrie and the Wasp Factory. I think your list has shorter fiction I may want to check out. The only disagreement personally is that I've never got on with Clive Barker. Thanks for this run through of some short horror highlights.

I love the content, but as an aside: love the Doxa as well.

The Loney! 👍🏻 Although I actually preferred Starve Acre 😉

Thanks some interesting picks I might like to read.

I’ve been enjoying you videos and some of your recommendations. I watched John Dies in the End. I liked it. Question: Many of these books have been adapted to movies. What would you generally recommend first, the film or the book? Personally I feel that the reading experience is so much richer and able to be inside the characters than pictures shows can manage, plus I favor atmosphere over plot so I would say there is less disappointment in watching the movie first than the other way around. What do you think? 10:06

I read Off Season and enjoyed it immensely. Then I read the sequel Offspring. And I was blown away by it. I found it to be more satisfying. Both books are among my very favorite horror stories. There is another book making it a trilogy, which I think is called The Woman. What I've read about it, because I can't find it anywhere, is deeply disturbing. And I think the theme of the civilized becoming primitive is fully realized here, and I think Ketchum shows the dark side of that shift.

I'm curious about that John Fowles book. Also, that Library of America book beneath the copy of Autumn Gothic in the back - would that be Ulysses S Grant's civil war memoirs? If so, recommend?

Thank you Olly for that list. I have read Carrie and The Collector which I also enjoyed. The others I shall be searching for.. Have you read Margaret Atwood s The Handmaid's Tale. It and Salem's Lot are two books that truly disturbed me. Take care 🧙

Thank you for the recommendations. Stephen King has always been my go-to author, and I kind of fell into that safe zone in which his books were all I would read. So it's nice to hear about authors and books I'd most likely leave this world never have discovered on my own. Have you ever read any books by Robert McCammon? Swan Song is his The Stand. Very similar in plot structure (the end of the world, good vs evil), but told in a way that doesn't make you think that McCammon is ripping King off in any way. He's a very visual author. I'd remember parts of his novels years later, and the memory of certain chapters were as vivid as stand-out scenes in actual movies. Boy's Life, Mystery Walk, Baal, and Mine are a few great McCammon novels, as well as his book of short stories, called Blue World.

I always thought it interesting that (and interviewers never asked why) in the movie, Clive Barker changed Kirsty from Larry's mistress to his daughter; I guess to keep the lines of innocent/whom-we're-rooting-for vs. guilty/rooted-against clearer? I kind of preferred the way the events in the book just kind of pushed Kirsty to the side, and she's left standing outside the house at the end, out of the loop and completely baffled by what has transpired, a stranger looking in through the (very proper English) windows....

In respect to page umbers. Many publishers simply won't publish books over a certain page count by new authors. Scott sigler didn't publish nocturnal very early on in his career because of this.

The Hellbound Heart just went on my TBR list lol

What a terrific video! I'm a writer who writes horror, sci fi and fantasy and I prefer writing short novels and novellas, short stories and the occasional novelette. All of these forms have their purpose. I would rather write ten 150-page novellas than a thousand-page behemoth. I realized a long time ago that I produce my best work in this form. I think the same goes for Stephen King, although he can still pop out a thousand-page whopper that justifies its wordcount. My favorite horror writer these days is Ramsey Campbell. He tends to write short to medium length novels and excellent short stories.

the collector was a recent read, loved it.

“Tales from Essex County” by Matt DeCristo is great - its a collection of horror short stories 👻😱

The rotating watch in the back tho

Interesting choices. I've read seven, including early Shaun Hudson. I'm definitely going to read, You've Lost a Lot of Blood.

I just read The Collector - so good! I remember in school it was referred to as on of the first psychological horror/thrillers.

Summer, Fireworks and My Corpse is a short story from the pov of the dead body, pretty cool perspective. If you buy the paperback it has two other short stories by the Japanese author Otsuichi.

I'd recommend Sawbones by Stuart McBride to add to another such list. All of McBride's work is darkly awful and funny, but Sawbones is a short. It's genuinely horrific and amusing in equal measure. His novel Half Head is dystopian horror and utterly unique. Highly recommend both.

People Live Still in Cashtown Corners, by Canadian author Tony Burgess (no, not Anthony Burgess who wrote A Clockwork Orange). He also wrote Pontypool. Brilliant stuff.

Yeah The Wasp Factory was slammed by snobby critics when it first came out, but that didn't stop me from reading & enjoying it - & J.G. Ballard praised it, which was good enough for me to pick it up, despite what almost everybody else said about it. Anyway the author had the last laugh, because his book is still in print, at a time when most other mainstream novels are long forgotten. If you like shorter type horror, may I recommend a novelette called "The White People" by Arthur Machen if you haven't already read it.

I've read both Dear Laura and The Collector. Both excellent books that resonated with me as well. Another book by Ketchum fitting for this list is The Girl Next Door.

I first heard about The Collector from watching loads of documentaries about serial killers. Turned out to be a great read.(Leonard Lake was the loony I got the "tip" from I think)

My name is Caroline. When my youngest niece started to talk she called me Carrie, and 4 years later that's what she still calls me lol

Great video!!!

Hellbound Heart…one of my favorites