Frankenstein by Mary Shelly “#12 ‘Frankenstein’. A tale of a modern Prometheus. If the countless film adaptations of this have kept you from reading the novel, that’s your mistake.” -Karl Edward Wagner, “The Thirteen Best…
#5 Falling Angel. This Chandleresque private eye novel may well be the finest American horror novel of this century.
– Karl Edward Wagner, 13 Best Supernatural Horror Novels (Twilight Zone magazine 1983)
#11 Freak Museum. RRR had a genius for putting her characters in horrid situations. This time her heroine is an unwed mother who falls into the clutches of a gang of mad scientists who create monstrous freaks from newborn infants-or are the freaks real? A battery of stock detectives die horribly trying to find out.
– Karl Edward Wagner, 13 Best Science Fiction Horror Novels (Twilight Zone Magazine 1983)
“#2 Final Blackout. Another future history detailing the destruction of civilization through global war, also written on the eve of World War II, also bleakly antiwar”
– Karl Edward Wagner, 13 Best Science Fiction Horror Novels (Twilight Zone Magazine 1983)
“#13: The Subjugated Beast. Ryan could be extremely sadistic when the mood was on her, and the mood was usually on her, and it certainly was here. Ryan could combine psychological cruelty with Grand Guignol horror better than any writer going, except perhaps Charles Birkin, and she had a knack for putting her characters into situations that would have given Hitchcock qualms. This would have made a great Hitchcock film, although the British probably had laws against such things.”
-Karl Edward Wagner, “13 Best Non-Supernatural Horror Novels” (Twilight Zone Magazine, June 1983)
QUATERMASS AND THE PIT by Nigel Kneale (1960,Penguin Books) “#5: Quatermass and The Pit. The third Quatermass teleplay, in which an ancient Martian spaceship is unearthed during expansion of a London tube station….
THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT By Nigel Kneale (1959, Penguin Books) “#4: The Quatermass Experiment. A BBC teleplay concerning the terrifying results of the first manned space flight. The first of four Quatermass television serials. The film…
HELL! SAID THE DUCHESS by Michael Arlen (1934, Doubleday) “#1: Hell! Said the Duchess. An unexpectedly chilling tale of demonic possession by this most charming author.” -Karl Edward Wagner, “13 Best Supernatural Horror Novels”(Twilight Zone Magazine,…
“#13 Medusa. If David Lindsay had written Treasure Island in the throes of a peyote-induced religious experience…Well, if Coleridge had given Melville a hand on Moby Dick after a few pipes of opium….”
-Karl Edward Wagner, “13 Best Supernatural Horror Novels” (Twilight Zone Magazine, 1983)
“#5 The Fire-Spirits. A strange tale of a young man’s involvement with a bewitching peasant child, mountain legends, and the quest for German unification. The English translation is said to be heavily expurgated, but I haven’t read the German to compare.”
-“13 Best Non-Supernatural Horror Novels”, by Karl Edward Wagner (Twilight Zone Magazine, 1983)
