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)

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)

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)