Today’s Book Blogger Hop question is: Who is your favorite horror/suspense author and why?
I am not a reader or watcher of horror by and large–but sometimes I like a good suspense. I enjoy Alfred Hitchcock (when he’s doing suspense more than horror) and my favorite suspense writer is Lois Duncan. She writes young adult, sometimes with supernatural elements, but usually contemporary and mostly focused on the world as you and I know it. And that’s the suspense I like best–stories where, on the surface, everything seems normal…but something very wrong is lurking beneath.
Duncan’s most famous book, I think, is I Know What You Did Last Summer, but, just for the record, the book apparently bears little resemblance to the movie of the same name (I’ve read the book, I’ve not watched the movie). My favorite of her novels is Daughters of Eve, which very much is that surface-level calm with something else lurking…and it has the most chilling but very understated ending. It’s masterful.
Do you distinguish between suspense and horror? Who is your favorite author who writes either?
I don’t really do horror either, instead I lean more towards suspense, mystery and gothic literature, especially this time of year. One of my favourite suspense writers is Mary Stewart and I have just added 5 of her new-to-me novels to my Kindle 😀
I don’t read much suspense and no horror, but I do like “page turners” that could be called suspense in the genre of stories about women and families (is that a genre?). One I read lately that I really liked was “Watch Me Disappear” by Janelle Brown, about a woman who is presumed dead after hiking alone and disappearing in a wilderness area. Some of her personal effects are recovered, but no body. Her husband and teenage daughter begin to wonder if she did indeed die or instead simply disappeared, leaving their family life behind. It has plot twists all the way through.