50. You could argue that body horror is the purest horror. It taps into our basest fears: the vulnerability of our own bodies to infection, mutation, and destruction. In The Loop, a Pacific Northwest town falls prey to a parasite that transforms its youth into ravening fiends. After a short build-up, young adult sensibility blossoms darkly into scenes of extreme violence and bodily damage. The Loop is fiction’s closest equivalent to the films of David Cronenberg, with a jaw-dropping central set-piece that rivals the most fevered excesses of horror cinema.

49. After quitting his career as a Hollywood star, Thomas Tryon turned to writing and gave us a pair of bestselling horror novels. The Other may be better known, but Harvest Home is the true chiller. In classic New England Gothic style, a nice family relocates to a Quaint Little Town™ only to discover hideous secrets about the corn crop. What follows is an ultra slow-burn of tightening anxiety, with a folk-horror finale that rivals 1973’s other pagan classic, The Wicker Man, or even Ben Wheatley’s 2011 shocker, Kill List. The final passages are as bleak as horror got in the ‘70s.

48. At first glance, the terrors of The Other Black Girl appear slight. Harris’ workplace thriller spends ample time cataloguing the microaggressions endured by Nella, the only woman of color at a major New York publishing house. However, when Hazel, the titular other Black girl, joins the firm, the novel moves into more uncanny territory. The result is a scalpel-sharp instrument of social horror—a book that exposes monstrousness in the minutiae of office politics and the complacent evil of white privilege. It’s particularly telling that Harris wrote the book after working in New York publishing…

47. The Auctioneer may be the bestselling horror novel that most people have never heard of. It sold a million copies on release, garnered praise from genre heavyweights, and was further distinguished by the author’s death soon after publication. Yet Samson’s novel remained in obscurity for decades until Grady Hendrix and Valancourt Press reissued it as part of the Paperbacks from Hell series. In the figure of the titular auctioneer, Perly Dinsmore, and the havoc wreaked by his manipulation of a rural New Hampshire community, Samson’s novel refers back to Shirley Jackson’s ”The Lottery,” and must surely be the inspiration behind Leland Gaunt, the malignant shopkeeper in Stephen King’s Needful Things.

46. The Hunger takes one of the darkest incidents in American history and makes it more horrible still. Katsu’s retelling of the Donner Party’s catastrophic attempt to cross the Sierra Nevadas in winter begins with the death of a child and heads onward, like the wagon train, into deeper horror. It’s slow progress, too. The Hunger takes its time to get to the awful fate we know is waiting. Some people may buck at the pace and the way Katsu dangles the grisliest elements of the story just out of reach. But for those who appreciate authenticity and great character work, it’s a piece of historical horror that takes exactly the route it should.

45. It’s hard to overstate Bradbury’s contribution to speculative fiction. His unique blend of horror and fantasy is a clear influence on later giants like Stephen King and Neil Gaiman. But his macabre whimsy was never more powerful than in Something Wicked This Way Comes, a tale of romanticized boyhood in the golden decades of post-war America. Best friends Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade (neatly born on either side of the same Halloween midnight) confront the loss of innocence in the form of Mr. Dark’s traveling carnival. The scene in which the aging Miss Foley is granted her wish to become young again stands out as the most horrifically poignant moment in a novel obsessed with the boundary between youth and adulthood.

44. At only 120 pages, Eric LaRocca’s novella is the shortest book on this list, but it may also be the most distressing. It is an epistolary period-piece—taking place in the internet chat-rooms of the early 2000s—in which two broken souls come together in a pact of extreme body horror and emotional degeneration. If that sounds fun, well, it isn’t. Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke pulls not a single punch, offering perhaps the single most upsetting scene to be found on this list (The Little Christ—if you know, you know!) and a question for the ages: “What have you done today to deserve your eyes?”

43. Joe Donnelly’s books arrived at the tail-end of horror’s paperback boom, all gaudy covers and pulpy premises. Yet his final horror novel is an almost unknown classic: an adolescent trial set on the West coast of Scotland, where five young friends on a camping trip encounter a child killer. The Scottish setting gives a different tone and a grittier vernacular to the oft-romanticized coming-of-age tradition. Think Stand by Me refracted through Trainspotting. It’s a violent story, with the rare threat that simply being a child is not enough to save Donnelly’s characters from a brutal end.

41. Horror’s roots extend far back into the 18th century Gothic tradition, beginning with The Castle of Otranto in 1764 and evolving in Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho in 1794. It is Lewis’ novel, however, that first showcases the genre’s power to shock. Written when Lewis was still a teenager, The Monk relates the demonic corruption of the devout Ambrosio. Upon its release, the novel was considered a danger to society; even now, its details of rape, incest, murder, and black sorcery remain eyebrow-raising. If the scares are dulled by archaic language, some moments still hit hard, such as when the prioress’ body is mutilated by a mob “till it became no more than a mass of flesh, unsightly, shapeless, and disgusting.” Remember, this was written in 1796!

40. Files worked as a film critic for years, and in Experimental Film, all that insider knowledge is put to uncanny use. She blends a verité blogging style with the story of cursed film footage from the early 20th century and a frightening Slavic demon named Lady Midday. As so often happens in Files’ fiction, things get very weird, but the industry detail coupled with biographical allusions grounds the high strangeness into something truly unnerving. This is a too-often overlooked postmodern gem, one of the best in a string of books about the spectral effects of film.

39. American Psycho may be the most controversial novel of the late 20th century, but Lunar Park is the more affecting horror story. Ellis’ faux-memoir slides from authentic early experiences into a fictional middle-age as reluctant husband and father. Out in the suburbs, reality and fiction collapse, ushering horrors into Ellis’ home. These include a version of Ellis’ infamous killer, Patrick Bateman, and—in the centrepiece scene—a doll that undergoes a truly terrifying metamorphosis. Readers are never sure where truth or sincerity lie. The novel could be a big joke, or it could, as is suggested in the scenes between Ellis and his make-believe son, be a yearning for a life not lived. If American Psycho is the book that made Ellis the enfant terrible of contemporary fiction, Lunar Park is the book that exposes his heart.