RehnWriter

Wrath James White is the writer who makes the case that extreme horror can be about something, and he is also the writer most likely to make you put a book down. He was a world-class heavyweight kickboxer before he was a novelist, he trains fighters, and he has spent ...

William Peter Blatty wrote comedies for a living, then wrote The Exorcist, and spent the rest of his career being asked about the one book. That's the shape of it, and the comedy background is anything but a footnote. He wrote screenplays for Blake Edwards, including A Shot in the ...

Whitley Strieber wrote three genuinely good horror novels in six years and then published Communion, and the second fact has swallowed the first for forty years. The horror novels came first, and they're the reason the Whitley Strieber books are on this site. The Wolfen in 1978 and The Hunger ...

Wayne Barlowe is a painter who writes, and if you read the novels without knowing that you will come away with the wrong impression of both. He is the son of two natural history illustrators, he trained at Cooper Union, and he spent his twenties painting paperback covers before publishing ...

Victor LaValle wrote the best thing anyone has done with Lovecraft, and he did it by taking the racism seriously instead of apologizing for it. The Ballad of Black Tom retells The Horror at Red Hook, which is Lovecraft's most straightforwardly racist story, from the point of view of a ...

T. Kingfisher is Ursula Vernon writing for adults, and the horror novels are the best thing either name has produced. Vernon is a children's author and illustrator who won a Hugo for a graphic novel and writes the Hamster Princess and Dragonbreath books. Kingfisher is the pseudonym she adopted so ...

Thomas Tryon walked out of Hollywood at forty-three, sat down to write a horror novel because Rosemary's Baby had annoyed him into it, and produced two of the best American horror novels of the seventies. The acting career is why he could. He was a square-jawed leading man who never ...

Thomas Harris has published six novels in fifty years and invented the modern serial killer thriller with two of them. He is famously private, gives almost no interviews, and works slowly enough that a decade between books is normal. What he actually did, across Red Dragon and The Silence of ...

Tananarive Due has been writing Black horror for thirty years, spent most of that time being under-recognized for it, and is now the person the field points at when it wants to explain what it missed. She teaches Black Horror and Afrofuturism at UCLA. She was an executive producer on ...

Susan Hill wrote The Woman in Black in 1983 as a deliberate exercise in an obsolete form, and it became the second-longest-running non-musical play in West End history. That's the useful fact about her, because it explains what she's doing. She is a literary novelist with a long career, a ...