PSYCHO by Robert Block
“#2 Psycho. Can you ever feel safe in a shower again? I think there may have been a film adaptation by Alfred Hitchcock.”
-Karl Edward Wagner, “13 Best Non Supernatural Horror Novels” (Twilight Zone Magazine, 1983)
THE SCREAMING MIMI by Frederic Brown
“#4 The Screaming Mimi. Brown at his terrifying best, and again with a psychotic killer.This was filmed twice; once as The Screaming Mimi and more recently as The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (a/k/a The Phantom of Terror)”
– Karl Edward Wagner, “13 Best Non-Supernatural Horror Novels” (Twilight Zone Magazine, 1983)
THE DEADLY PERCHERON by John Bardin
“#1 The Deadly Percheron. The opening chapter defies description. Imagine one of those 1930s screwball comedies with the crazy situations, but substitute malevolence for humor.”
-Karl Edward Wagner, 13 Best Non-Supernatural Horror Novels” (Twilight Zone Magazine, 1983)
HERE COMES A CANDLE by Fredric Brown
“#3 Here Comes a Candle. Brown, Like Bloch, could be extremely funny when he chose, or extremely frightening. This time he wasn’t kidding.”
-Karl Edward Wagner, “13 Best Non-Supernatural Horror Novels” (Twilight Zone Magazine, 1983)
MASTER OF THE DAY OF JUDGEMENT by Leo Perutz
“#12 Master of the Day of Judgement. Is it real or is it hashish? But what is reality? It’s all relative, isn’t it? This one is strange even for Perutz.”
-Karl Edward Wagner, “13 Best Non-Supernatural Horror Novels” (Twilight Zone Magazine, 1983)
FULLY DRESSED AND IN HIS RIGHT MIND by Michael Fessier
“#9 Fully Dressed and in His Right Mind. Like John Franklin Bardin [The Deadly Percheron], Fressier takes a screwball situation and adroitly twists it into something evil.”
-Karl Edward Wagner, “13 Best Non-Supernatural Horror Novels” (Twilight Zone Magazine, 1983)
TORTURE GARDEN by Octave Mirabeau
“#11 Torture Garden. Fin-de-siecle decadence at its best. At one time one of those ‘suppressed’ books and now chiefly remembered as one of Frank Frazetta’s better paperback covers”
-Karl Edward Wagner, “The Thirteen Best Non-Supernatural Horror Novels” (Twilight Zone Magazine 1983)
THE CROOKED HINGE by John Dickson Carr
“#6 The Crooked Hinge. Sometimes Carr actually did use the supernatural in his detective novels, sometimes he only seemed to do so. The Crooked Hinge does not turn out to be a ghost story, but that won’t spare your nerves.”
-Karl Edward Wagner, “The Thirteen Best Non-Supernatural Horror Novels” (Twilight Zone Magazine, 1983)
SHADOW OPTS: CONTROL POINT by Myke Cole
At some point in the near future, magic has begun to manifest itself in the world. People with natural magical abilities, known as “Latents” can summon fire, control water, reanimate the dead, or heal.
DARK SANCTUARY by HB Gregory
“#4 Dark Sanctuary. This begins routinely enough- an occult investigator is called in to slay an ancestral curse in a gloomy castle- then takes off to become a 1930s version of Blish’s Black Easter. Perhaps the best of the British thrillers.”
-Karl Edward Wagner, “The Thirteen Best Supernatural Horror Novels” (Twilight Zone Magazine, 1983)