Ten books guaranteed to scare you witless Christopher Lee as Dracula in the 1972 movie There is no going past Stephen King when it comes to the scariest books of all time. Four of King's books - It, The Shining, Salem's Lot and Pet Sematary - have this year been ranked in the top 10 Halloween horror reads in The Book Depository's online survey of 7000 customers. Even Australia's spook writers, whose job it is to scare the living daylights out of readers, acknowledge King's pre-eminence in the genre. The Pilo Family Circus Could anything be more horrific than losing a child? "Oh, yes," says Mark Smith-Briggs, president of the Australian Horror Writers' Association. To have that child come back again, but dfferent. That's the basic plot of Pet Sematary, a reworking of the classic horror short story The Monkey's Paw, written in 1902 by W. W. Jacobs, about the paw of a dead monkey that grants its possessor three wishes. Only Edgar Allan Poe, however, to my mind, truly terrorises. Poe came in at number four on The Book Depository's list, which included the votes of 1750 Australian customers - behind Bram Stoker's Dracula. King owes an enormous debt of gratitude to Poe, the originator of the tale of creeping terror and Gothic darkness, Smith-Briggs says. Master of horror ... Edgar Allan Poe No self-respecting reader of horror should be without a volume of Poe on their bookshelf. My favourite Poe short story is the The Fall of the House of Usher, especially the part when the moaning shrouded figure of the lady Madeline rises from her tomb with blood on her robes. Run for your lives. For others it's The Murders in the Rue Morgue, or The Pit and the Pendulum. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein came in at number six. Asked to nominate their favourite scares, Australia's professional scaremongers also offer up At the Mountains of Madness and Others by H.P. Lovecraft, the man credited with creating cosmic horror, a blend of science fiction and horror. "All of Lovecraft's tales revolve around the loose theme that unimaginable alien gods once ruled the cosmos, and are always looking to find their way back to our reality in order to consume the souls of those foolish enough to mess with black magic," says Briggs-Smith. Mountains is a cornerstone tale of what has become known collectively as the Cthulhu Mythos, and is regarded as one of Lovecraft's best. Victorian author M.R. James, a medieval scholar, is also one of King's inspirations. The master of the antiquarian ghost story, James built suspense by injecting terror into the mundane and the everyday. It's not what he puts in but what he leaves out that unnerves. His ghosts are almost always of odious intent and tend to loiter in musty libraries and drawing rooms. "Amiable and helpful apparitions are all very well in fairy tales or in local legends," he wrote before his death in 1936, "but I have no use for them in a fictitious ghost story." Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, which came in at number eight in the survey, turns the age-old haunted house setup on its head. There are no ghosts, no malign forces. Just a house that gets larger from within. For the classic haunted house novel, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House deserves a higher ranking than number 11. King considers it one of the finest horror novels of the late 20th century, a novel that can be either read as the descent into madness or a chilling encounter with the dead. Susan Hill's Woman in Black, about a vengeful ghost whose appearance heralds a child's death in an English village, is much darker than the movie starring Daniel Radcliffe. Possibly the creepiest sort-of zombie tale the AHWA nominates is Virus by Sarah Langan, combining supernatural evil with civilisation-toppling epidemics in small-town America. "Light on gore, big on chills, a must-read," says Briggs-Smith. A book with a strong local accent is The Dead Path by Stephen M Irwin. Reading like a cross between It and The Blair Witch Project, it's a tale of witchcraft and undying evil in the Australian outback. Martin Livings' debut Living With the Dead collection features some of the best dark, creepy and brilliantly literary Australian horror fiction of the past 20 years, says Briggs-Smith, and the author deserves a far greater readership. And if you are not scared of clowns, you soon will be, predicts Briggs-Smith in Will Elliot's The Pilo Family Circus, a story that revolves around a supernatural travelling circus, where the clowns' scary make-up never really comes off. And proving that horror must run in the genes, King's son Joe Hill has crafted a highly original and extremely frightening ghost story in The Heart-Shaped Box. See www.australianhorror.com The Book Depository's 10 scariest novels The Shining - Stephen King It - Stephen King Dracula - Bram Stoker Complete Tales and Poems - Edgar Allan Poe The Exorcist - William Peter Blatty Frankenstein - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Pet Sematary - Stephen King House of Leaves - Mar Z Danielewski Salem's Lot - Stephen King The Turn of the Screw - Henry James Poll: What is the scariest novel? Other - please add comment Total votes: 695.