Get Your Blood Stirring With Some Horror Picks

Posted by Staff

Fed up with the weather?  Need something to stir the senses? How about a good, scary read!  Choose one of these superb, horror novels,considered the best of 2013 by Booklist , and you are sure to be entertained.

Apocalypse-Cow by Michael-Logan.  This startlingly funny novel imagines a contemporary Scotland in which animals are infested with an experimental virus that turns them into crazed killing machines—yes, zombie animals.

Ash by James Herbert. This is a big, thrilling, pull-out-all-the-stops novel featuring David Ash, the skeptical psychic investigator who was introduced in Haunted (1988) and made his second appearance in The Ghosts of Sleath (1994).

Babayaga by Toby Barlow. Barlow’s second book, after the novel-in-verse Sharp Teeth (2008), delivers a helluva good time, a delicious mash-up of Cold War spy thriller, horror novel, and love story.

Hitchers by Will McIntosh. In a charming novel about a terrorist bioweapon attack that wipes out a substantial portion of the population of Atlanta, the characters are well drawn and the plot is smartly constructed.
 
Little Star by John Ajvide Lindqvist, translated by Marlaine Delargy. This is a confounding novel: irredeemable villains become admirable heroes; major characters are sacrificed in abrupt, shocking ways; and important players pop up late in the game. But it’s audacious!

NOS4A2 by Joe Hill. Hill is omnivorous in his appetite for story and character, and here he has created his best in both.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman. In Gaiman’s first novel for adults since Anansi Boys(2005), he mines mythological typology—the threefold goddess, the water of life (the pond, actually an ocean)—and his own childhood milieu to build a graceful story.

Red Moon by Benjamin Percy. Doing for werewolves what Justin Cronin’s The Passage (2010) did for vampires, this literary horror novel, set in an alternate version of the present day, humanizes the werewolf.

Zoo by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge. In the newest thrill fest from the prolific fiction factory that is James Patterson et al., something unnatural is causing normally placid animals to savagely attack humans.