Now, for the list w/commentary and fun facts:
1.) Stephen King-- Undeniably the modern master of horror, King has written many scary books that have been adapted for film, including: Carrie, It, The Shining, and Misery. Personally, I think Carrie and The Shining are King's best works.
2.) Edgar Allen Poe-- This guy is the all-time king of horror. Poe's extremely dark stories and poems have been favorites of many, including Abraham Lincoln. Poe's "The Raven," "The Death of Annabelle Lee," The Tell-Tale Heart, The Fall of the House of Usher, and A Cask of Amantillado are Halloween classics. In addition, Poe's life imitated his art, for he lived a dark and miserable existence, and he despised Romanticism. Maybe that's why he had such a hard life.
3). Mary Shelley-- Author of Frankenstein. In this terrifying tale, a troubled young doctor literally creates a monster, and chaos ensues. Of course, I read this book for school over the summer, so you can thumb through my post archives for further explanations of my views on it.
4.) Ray Bradbury-- Illinois-born dystopian novelist. Bradbury is most famous for Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes, two very Halloween-y books.
5.) Nathaniel Hawthorne-- It doesn't get much scarier than The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, novels set in Puritan-governed New England that tell of the havoc wreacked by uber-religious hysteria. (Nothing is scarier than the Religious Right.)
6.) Ambrose Bierce-- A Civil War veteran and a very strange man, to say the least. Most of Bierce's writings chronicle the horrors of war that he experienced first-hand. For example, "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" depicts the hanging of a Confederate sympathizer in haunting detail, complete with surrealistic flashbacks.
7.) Charles Brockden Brown-- Brown wrote a 1799 murder mystery called Edgar Huntly, Or, Memories of a Sleepwalker that some consider one of the first truly American novels. I read this book in my Early American Lit. class during a fall semester, and it really sets the mood (if you know what I mean).
8.) Bram Stoker-- No Halloween reading list would be complete without incorporating a little dash of Transylvania. Dracula, with all its dark themes and images of Eastern Europe (my ancestral homeland, incidentally), is perfect Hallow-reading.
9.) Washington Irving-- Let's talk about an all-American frightfest! I love The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. This tale of geeky schoolmaster Ichabod Crane, his fellow residents of Dutch extraction in a New York village, and the Headless Horseman-- the ghost of a Hessian (German) Revolutionary War soldier whose head was blown off by a cannonball-- is one my of seasonal faves. This story was supposedly inspired by real events and people. It is even believed that eighth U.S. president Martin Van Buren was a pupil of a teacher whom Ichabod was modeled after.
10.) Arthur Miller-- This playwright (and Marilyn Monroe's third husband) wrote The Crucible, a play set during the 1692 Salem Witch Trials that is a metaphor for his own experience of being blacklisted during the 1950s heyday of McCarthyism. In light of recent history, this should be required reading in all American high schools and colleges.
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