If You Like Dean Koontz ...
Updated 5/09
Darwin’s Radio by Greg Bear
Molecular biologist Kaye Lang has a theory on human retroviruses and it has just been verified with the discovery of SHEVA, a virus that has slept in our DNA for millions of years and is now waking up. Kaye and her colleagues must race against a genetic time bomb in this international adventure taking place in a cave high in the Alps and in Southern Russia. Also try Darwin’s Children and Vitals.
Running With the Demon by Terry Brooks
In Hopewell, Illinois, 14-year-old Nest Freemark defends the town's parkland against encroaching "feeders" with the magic she inherited from her mysteriously dead mother and her Gran, with whom she lives. Nest's helpers are Pick, a tiny 150-year-old sylvan, Daniel the owl, and the eerie, wolf-like Wraith. As July 4th approaches, a demon arrives in town, as does John Ross, Knight of the Word. Nest is the key to the looming good vs. evil showdown, but wonders why nobody will tell her the truth about her missing parents, or what's really going on in the park. This trilogy continues with Knight of the Word and Angel Fire East. Brooks also bridges this series and his Shannara series with Armageddon’s Children.
Afterlife by Douglas Clegg
This supernatural Horror story features a school for special children, an unsolved murder, a terrified widow, a dream of murder and lost souls, and a stranger with an unspeakable secret coalesce into a nightmare of unspeakable secrets that one stranger will do anything – even breach the boundaries of life and death – to keep hidden forever. Also try Naomi.
Heart Shaped Box by Joe Hill
The set-up for this novel is appealingly simple. Jude Coyne, an aging rock star, buys himself a dead man's suit. He acquires it online, lured by the promise that the dead man's ghost will be included in his purchase. Jude thinks this is a joke, of course. He also assumes the seller is a stranger. We soon discover that he's wrong on both counts, however, and from this point on the story moves with an exhilarating urgency. Jude wants the ghost gone; the ghost wants Jude dead: watch, chapter-by-chapter, as they battle for survival.
Hawke’s Harbor by S. E. Hinton
Conceived in adultery and born in sin, Jamie Sommers was destined to repeat the sins of his parents -or so the nuns told him. And he proved them right. Taking to sea, Jamie sought out danger and adventure in exotic ports all over the world as a smuggler, gunrunner-and murderer. Tough enough to handle anything, he's survived foreign prisons, pirates, and a shark attack. But in a quiet seaside town in Delaware, Jamie discovered something that was enough to drive him insane-and change his life forever. For it was in Hawke’s Harbor that Jamie came face to face with the ultimate evil....
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
Hill House is a foreboding structure of towers, buttresses, Gothic spires, gargoyles, strange angles, and rooms within rooms – a place "without kindness, never meant to be lived in...." Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House has unnerved readers since its original publication in 1959. A tale of subtle, psychological terror, it has earned its place as one of the significant haunted house stories of the ages.
Desperation by Stephen King
In Desperation, Nevada, an alien force has slaughtered everyone in town and is now in the body of a patrol cop who picks up two motorists. One is a burned-out novelist and the other an 11-year-old boy who hears the voice of God. Also try The Regulators written under King’s pen name: Richard Bachman.
Darkness, Tell Us by Richard Laymon
Although a bit more hardcore and gruesome than Koontz usually is, Laymon's strength is writing about adolescents; the six highlighted here are college students, three male and three female, who, during a party at the house of one of their professors, are prompted by a Ouija board to look for a "4-T-U-N-E" at a remote California locale, Calamity Peak. Road-tripping there right away, the six students -two of whom mate in the book's affecting romantic subplot- eventually encounter a machete-wielding madman who terrorizes them. Meanwhile, the professor and her new lover, concerned about the students' impetuousness, follow the six, only to fall prey to the madman themselves. Also try No Sanctuary.
The Walking by Bentley Little
The dead are getting restless… Across the country, they have risen. And they seem to have a mission… The walking has begun... No one knows why they are walking. No one knows where they are going. And no one can stop them… They are here. Miles Huerdeen's father dies of a stroke and becomes one of the Walkers, dead humans compelled by some inexplicable homing instinct to travel to a rendezvous in the canyon country of the Southwest. Little evokes an uncanny sense of horror in his macabre tale of ancient evils loose in the modern world. Also try The Store.
Boy’s Life by Robert McCammon
Zephyr, Alabama, is an idyllic hometown for eleven-year-old Cory Mackenson — a place where monsters swim the river deep and friends are forever. Then, one cold spring morning, Cory and his father witness a car plunge into a lake — and a desperate rescue attempt brings his father face-to-face with a terrible vision of death that will haunt him forever. As Cory struggles to understand his father's pain, his eyes are slowly opened to the forces of good and evil that are manifested in Zephyr. McCammon is a multiple Bram Stoker Award winner. Also try Swan Song and Speaks the Nightbird.
Creepers by Davis Morrell
On a cold October night, five people gather in a rundown motel on the Jersey shore to make preparations to break into a nearby abandoned hotel – built by a reclusive millionaire during Asbury Park's golden days – but the group of urban explorers, joined for the evening by a reporter, are unprepared for the danger, terror, and death awaiting.
Relic by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
A monster on the loose in New York City's American Museum of Natural History provides the hook for this high-concept, high-energy thriller. A statue of the mad god Mbwun, a monstrous mix of man and reptile, was discovered by a Museum expedition to South America in 1987. Now, it is about to become part of the new Superstition Exhibition at the museum (here renamed the "New York Museum of Natural History"). But as the exhibition's opening night approaches, the museum may have to be shut down due to a series of savage murders that seem to be the work of a maniac-or a living version of Mbwun. Also try Reliquary and the rest of the Pendergast series.
Manhattan Hunt Club by John Saul
When Jeff Converse is convicted and sentenced to prison for an assault he didn't commit, he believes matters couldn't get any worse. Of course, he's wrong. While being transported to prison, he's kidnapped and thrown into the tunnels below the New York subway system, where he's the latest participant in a game in which humans are hunted for sport by a group of the city's business and civic leaders. The only way Jeff can win is to make it to the surface alive, which, not surprisingly, proves more difficult than it sounds. Also try Nightshade.
A Winter Haunting by Dan Simmons
Returning to the small Illinois town of his childhood to pick up the pieces of his shattered life, and regain his confidence as a writer, Professor Dale Stewart leases an empty farmhouse of a long-dead friend, who had been murdered in the summer of 1960, but instead of finding peace and quiet, he finds that the house is haunted. Simmons is also known for being able to write across genres, often combining elements of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Mystery. Also try Summer of Night or The Terror.
Lost Boy, Lost Girl by Peter Straub
A woman commits suicide for no apparent reason. A week later, her son – beautiful, troubled 15-year-old Mark Underhill – vanishes from the face of the earth. To his uncle, horror novelist Timothy Underhill, Mark's inexplicable absence feels like a second death. After his sister-in-law's funeral, Tim searches his hometown of Millhaven for clues that might help unravel this mystery of death and disappearance. He soon learns that a pedophilic murderer is on the loose in the vicinity, and that shortly before his mother's suicide Mark had become obsessed with an abandoned house where he imagined the killer might have taken refuge. Also try the sequel In the Night Room.
- Updated 05/09