Most people like a good scare. Stories that get the adrenaline flowing have captivated us throughout much of recorded history, as dark and sinister legends are perhaps older than the written word. While many horror films rely on the element of surprise, with monsters jumping out from the shadows, books often offer a slower burn, one that’s oftentimes more terrifying. So if you like the thrill of wondering what’s lurking behind the shadows or making sounds in the night, we’ve got you covered with five of the best horror books of all time.

Now, we’ve already covered the Best Stephen King books so that eliminates those from contention here. Certainly, The Shining and Misery (among others) would have been considered, as King is the modern master of the genre. And Dracula is so notable that it was featured in our Best Classic Literature list. But that still leaves us with five of the most truly terrifying and mesmerizing horrors books ever put to print.

What horror books should you read if you haven’t done so already?

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

One of the more frightening aspects of Mary Shelley’s classic mad science tale, Frankenstein, is that she got the idea from a dream and penned it at the tender age of 19. Cinematic adaptations have morphed the Frankenstein monster into the green, bolt-necked icon that’s deeply ingrained within our cultural consciousness today, so it’s easy to forget that Shelley’s classic focuses more on Dr. Frankenstein himself and his mad wonder at having created life only to be horrified with the monster he has unleashed upon the people close to him and the world at large.

The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty

One of the most frightening horror films of all time was based on one of the most terrifying and suspenseful novels. Just as a Jesuit priest is having a crisis of faith, he’s called upon to tend to a girl who has been afflicted by some powerful diabolical force. The priest initially only wants to treat her as psychiatrist, but soon the disturbing physical transformation leads him to believe she is in fact possessed by a demon. When a more qualified exorcist dies of a heart ailment while attempting to perform the rites, the protagonist priest is left to do battle with a demonic force that beyond his comprehension.

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories by H.P. Lovecraft

It’s difficult to even imagine where the horror landscape would be today without 20th century scary story pioneer H. P. Lovecraft. This anthology of some of his best and most unnerving short stories continues to influence the genre to this day. The titular story introduces the reader to the frighteningly enormous tentacle-faced beast of Cthulhu who slumbers at the bottom of the ocean for all time, destined only to emerge once the Earth reaches an apocalyptic age. However, a cult works feverishly to hasten his inevitable awakening. And that’s only one of the many spine-tinglers in this marvelous collection.

Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist

This Swedish vampire novel is both full of a mix of suspense and chills, and it also tugs at the heartstrings more than most horror stories are inclined to do. When the often bullied 12-year old Oskar befriends a strange neighbor girl, he doesn’t know how dangerous she is. Turns out the girl is a vampire, one who is eternally preserved in childlike form and whose adult guardian undertakes the grisly business of killing community members in order to harvest their blood so she can eat. Oskar’s bond with Eli grows, as does their co-dependence, which is both sweet and intensely ominous in its implications.

House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski

Much like the domicile in its title, House of Leaves is both agoraphobic and claustrophobic due to its bizarre and unsettling structure. Formatted with footnotes, shreds of documents, and strangely-shaped paragraphs and sentences that sometimes include only a few words on a page, this book details the supernatural dimensions of a room in a house that seem to go on infinitely into darkness. As the house’s occupants eventually explore the vast labyrinth of paranormal space, the sanity of all involved begins to unravel in this chilling and mesmerizing work of fiction.

Science fiction is a broad genre. It can encompass stories about creatures and place and events that are, as far as we currently know, physically impossible. Or it can speculate on the not-too-distant future or alternate histories. Modern sci-fi tends to focus on the final frontier of outer space or paranormal occurrences or alternate dimensions. However, some of the best sci-fi of all time have been those books that offer commentary on our tangible physical world through flights of fancy and speculation about where we could be headed as a species, or what we’re otherwise capable of doing to fellow humans and our Mother Earth. Those more speculative fictions are the types of books we’re focusing on here.

For this list we’ve left out several notables simply because they’ve already appeared in one of our other best-of lists. These include Aldous Huxley’s classic Brave New World, George Orwell’s paranoid dystopian triumph 1984, and Kurt Vonnegut’s unstuck-in-time masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five, all of which appeared in our Best Novels list. And Orwell’s anthropomorphic social commentary Animal Farm already appeared on our Best Political Books list. But enough about past lists, it’s time for our choices for five of the best sci-fi books ever.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

We may be well into the 21st century, but book banning is still a reality, at least within school districts. Ray Bradbury’s dystopian classic serves as a cautionary tale about a future society that has outlawed books entirely. Government “firemen” routinely burn any caches of books that are found. The theme of this landmark in sci-fi focuses on the oppression inherent in stifling free speech and free thought and, to this day, the book often enters into discussions about the suppression of dissenting ideas. Yet, ironically the book itself has been subject to requests to be banned from school curricula in America as recently as 2006.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

It’s difficult to even imagine where sci-fi would be today without Philip K. Dick. The man wrote dozens of books and many more short stories, yet he wasn’t well known outside of select genre circles. That all changed when his phenomenal post-apocalyptic novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was released as the movie Blade Runner shortly following his untimely death. Focusing on a future world where nuclear war has nearly exterminated all animals, the book ponders the question of what the dividing line is between humanity and artificial intelligence in a world where technology has advanced to the point of both forms appearing almost identical.

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula Le Guin has written many books about fictional realms and alien civilizations, but her best book is one that’s squarely focused on our own. Of course, what we know as our own world quickly changes at the whim of the protagonist’s dreams. That’s because the man at the center of The Lathe of Heaven has what he perceives as the curse of changing the nature of reality simply by dreaming things into existence. When his psychologist discovers this and harnesses this power for his own professional and financial gain, things quickly swing off-kilter into mayhem.

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood’s award-winning dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale imagines a near-future where the United States government has been overthrown by a totalitarian Christian theocracy. Atwood’s book is so poignant because it deals with themes of the historical oppression of women in the light of a future sociopolitical scenario. What was so prescient about this book is that many cultures around the world do continue to subjugate women in the almost unfathomable ways written about in the book (women are even forbidden to read), making this tale of a future hijacked by fundamentalist religious extremism ahead of its time.

Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut

When it comes to his best work, Vonnegut’s Galápagos rivals Slaughterhouse-Five. Galápagos is narrated by a spirit of a deceased army vet who has been watching the last vestiges of humanity for over a million years. You see, when the world’s economy goes belly up in the modern era, a small group of misfits happen to get shipwrecked in the remote Galápagos islands. Good thing too, because a disease renders the rest of world infertile, leaving this small pocket of people to lead the way forward for the species into a future where humans eventually evolve into seal-like aquatic apes.

With 2013 marking the year of the unlikely sequel to Stephen King’s phenomenal horror classic The Shining, a book that also spawned one of director Stanley Kubrick’s finest films (though King was famously not happy with the adaptation), it’s an appropriate time look back at King’s best books. The jury will be out on where that surprise sequel, Doctor Sleep, fits until we’ve had time to digest it, and since we’re addressing it here, we’ll leave The Shining out of this particular list as well—although that classic story of caretaker Jack Torrance eventually succumbing to his own personal demons and the evil spirits lurking in the Overlook Hotel may be King’s best. So as you’re gearing up to read about the grown-up Danny in Doctor Sleep, here’s our list of the Top 5 non-Shining related books written by modern horror master Stephen King.

It

Of all the monsters King has conjured throughout his prolific career, few are more frightening than the shapeshifting entity simply referred to as “It.” In this 1986 classic, one that was adapted (as a number of King’s works were) to a TV miniseries, the monster exploits the fears and phobias of the people it stalks. Most often, “It” takes the form of Pennywise the clown in order to lure its favorite prey of children. Through a plethora of vividly horrifying images, King touches upon his favorite topics: the impact of childhood trauma, the power of memory and the dark and sinister underbelly that often lies hidden beneath the idyllic sheen of small-town values.

Misery

In 1987, the horror master who often focused on the paranormal went the psychological thriller route, and Misery may be one of his most terrifying books. When romance novelist Paul Sheldon suffers a car crash, he’s rescued by Annie Wilkes, a rabid fan of his steamy, Victorian-era  stories, and one who’s particularly fond of his character Misery Chastain. Rather than take him to a hospital, Annie attempts to nurse her writing idol back to health at her home, until she learns what he’s done to her beloved Misery in his newest book. Learning this, Annie moves to force Paul to write a new ending by any means necessary.

Pet Sematary

Pet Sematary almost didn’t see the light of day. King shelved the book, feeling that he’d gone too far in the subject matter, but he eventually unearthed it when he needed another book to fulfill his contract. In this grisly tale, a Chicago doctor moves his young family to Maine. There, he befriends a father-figure neighbor who, when the family cat is hit by a passing truck, instructs him to bury the dead animal in a nearby ancient Native burial ground. The cat resurrects, but is changed somehow. All hell breaks lose when the doctor’s toddler son is also killed, buried, and returned to life in altered form.

Carrie

King’s first published novel is also one of his best. It features the eponymous high-schooler exacting revenge on bullies with her newly discovered telekinetic powers. King has described this work as particularly “raw,” and it’s one of the more frequently banned books in American schools. Unlike most his other books, King wrote Carrie in an epistolary story structure, using purported magazine articles, letters, book excerpts, and newspaper clippings to tell the story. The book has been adapted to film several times, with the most iconic being the 1976 Brian De Palma feature film of the same name that earned Sissy Spacek an Oscar nomination.

The Green Mile

Not all of King’s books are horror. King’s 1996 serial novel, The Green Mile showcases his ability to write magical realism. The story centers around a death row supervisor’s encounter with John Coffey, an inmate convicted of murdering two young girls who also possesses seemingly supernatural empathetic and healing abilities. The serial novel was originally released in six volumes, each of roughly 100 pages in length. Since then it’s been made available in a single volume, and it was adapted into a 1999 film of the same name that was directed by Frank Darabont and received four Oscar nominations.

Roald Dahl was responsible for some of the 20th century’s most vivid and imaginative tales, books that dazzled the young and old alike. It’s no wonder that his fiction is still routinely being adapted to film nearly 25 years after his death, many becoming classics in their own right.

Fewer people realize that in addition to his many wildly popular children’s books, he also was an accomplished short story writer and published two novels oriented toward an adult audience. However, it’s his children’s tales (often darker than many other children’s stories) that most stick in our memories, and those will be the focus of our list here.

Selecting the best Roald Dahl books is a little like picking a favorite Beatles album: it’s open to personal preference but, when it comes right down to it, you really can’t go wrong.

The Twits

The only Dahl book on this list that hasn’t been adapted to a feature film is in the midst of protracted development to become one. The Twits was inspired by Dahl’s famous hatred of beards and centers around Mr. and Mrs. Twit, two horrible people who own and mistreat a family of pet monkeys and derive their only joy from playing mean-spirited practical jokes on each other. Mrs. Twit drops her glass eye in her husband’s soup while Mr. Twit lengthens his wife’s cane in an effort to convince her that she’s shrinking. Ultimately, the monkeys get their revenge by giving the Twits a taste of their own medicine.

Matilda

Pranks pop up again in Matilda. The titular young girl is gifted with magical powers that go unnoticed by her wealthy, boorish parents who emotionally neglect her. But Matilda gets satisfaction for their misdeeds by putting her powers to work to perform these pranks. While in school, Matilda encounters a nurturing teacher, Miss Honey, whose attempts to recognize Matilda’s uncanny intelligence are thwarted by the cruel headmistress, Miss Trunchbull. As the plot thickens, Matilda ends up using her telekinetic powers to help Miss Honey get what’s rightfully hers from the wicked Miss Trunchbull.

James and the Giant Peach

When his parents are trampled to death by escaped rhinoceroses, young James Henry Trotter is forced to live with his two evil aunts. The aunts physically and verbally abuse him and, even when it comes about that James inadvertently causes a magical giant peach to grow on the tree outside their home, the aunts profit off this turn of luck and lock him away. James one day enters a tunnel in the peach to discover enchanted talking bugs living inside who help him dispose of his aunts and ride the peach throughout the world in a madcap adventure.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

The crafty Mr. Fox feeds his family by swiping livestock or crops from the farms of three nearby dimwitted farmers. As the farmers grow livid at constantly having their farms raided by the fox, they ultimately devise a plan to kill Mr. Fox but only manage to shoot off his tail. Their quest for revenge gets so intense that they even dig up the fox den with heavy machinery, but are largely ridiculed for doing so by the townspeople. Meanwhile, Mr. Fox burrows his family deeper underground until he discovers a subterranean path to the encroaching farmers’ barns, where he ends up inviting other animal friends to live while the three farmers waste their time waiting for him at his old fox hole.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Perhaps Dahl’s most famous book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory follows the poverty-stricken Charlie Bucket in his quest to find a golden ticket that will allow him unprecedented access to the reclusive Willy Wonka’s famed chocolate factory. As Charlie is fortunate enough to find one, he’s whisked away on a strange and surreal adventure within the factory’s walls, and the four other children who tour with him are picked off one by one due to their own moral failings. As the sole golden ticket winner to successfully complete the tour, Charlie becomes Willy Wonka’s heir and his entire destitute family is whisked to the lavish factory to live out the rest of their lives in saccharine splendor.