Pat McCabe: master of the malign

Anyone who has seen the Friends episode in which Joey tries to convince Rachel that Stephen King's The Shining is the scariest book ever will remember him advising her to keep it in the fridge. Joey had a point. The Shining is a psychological chiller par excellence. Danny Torrance is a boy with psychic powers whose father is being pushed over the edge of sanity by visions in an old hotel with a violent history. Forget Jack Nicholson with his axe, The Shining's stand-out moments are the ones based on what the characters imagine rather than what they see. After reading this, you'll be looking at topiary in a whole new light.

If you're looking for something of the "I can't believe he just wrote that" variety, then try James Herbert's The Fog, which tells the tale of a mysterious fog that turns people into crazed psychotic maniacs. Herbert is a real meat-and-two-veg writer, his strength lying in his sensationalist, almost unapologetically vulgar, setpieces. The Fog includes a gloriously obscene wish-fulfilment fantasy in which the pupils of a private school turn on their teachers. If you want in-your-face splatter-filled thrills at a breakneck speed, then Herbert delivers.

Clive Barker's Books of Blood: Volumes One and Two manage something a little more poetic, without compromising on scares. These are collections of stories told in a baroque and ornate style, crammed with arresting images and moments of sublime dread. The standout is In the Hills the Cities, a story with an audaciously worked central conceit, about a bizarre annual wrestling bout between two villages.

The zombie genre has been given a new lease of life in recent years. (Sorry.) If you want a book that delivers that one-man-against-a-voracious-horde kind of thrill, then pick up Richard Matheson's classic I Am Legend. It's an intelligent and seminal book, and it might just help you forget the anodyne Will Smith movie version.

Closer to home, Pat McCabe is the master of malign, creeping, gothic thrills. Winterwood is arguably his most disturbing book, unravelling the relationship between journalist Redmond Hatch and mountain man and musician Pappie Strange in a quiet, threatening manner.

Like McCabe, John Connolly understands the importance of literary influences. His collection of short stories, Nocturnes, soaks up the best from Stephen King and MR James to deliver a typically rounded and entertaining read that will give you an appetite for reading past masters like Le Fanu and Poe.