Who is the greatest horror author of all time? Is it Stephen King? He’s probably the most successful and maybe the most well-known. How about authors who have written literary classics, authors like H.P. Lovecraft or Edgar Allan Poe? Or what about authors who have created legendary monsters and characters, authors such as Bram Stoker or Mary Shelley? And where do other horror authors like Dean Koontz, Clive Barker, or Robert McCammon place on this list? What about newer or independent authors? Well, let’s take a look at the list and find out.

Once again, like with my previous Halloween lists, I scoured the internet for lists of the greatest horror authors. There were a lot of suggestions and I narrowed those down to fifty-nine of them – authors who received two or more mentions on various lists. But there were eleven authors who kept popping up on most or all of the lists. So I decided to narrow the list down even further to only the top 30 authors. The top three writers were on every list I looked up. The authors from 4 to 10 appeared on most of the lists. Number 11 had one less mention than the seven above her. The authors listed from 12 to 18 had one less mention than number 11. And numbers 19 through 30 all had one less mention than the authors above them. In each section, I listed the authors randomly, so this isn’t a countdown from best on down; for instance, the top three authors all received the same amount of mentions so I listed them in no particular order.

As with my previous lists, this isn’t a list of my personal favorites, but a consensuses among many lists I researched on the internet.

Another note: There are some authors on this list that many may argue aren’t true horror authors; they may be more famous for writing in other categories such as science fiction, fantasy, and thrillers. But again, I tried to stay true to the authors mentioned over and over again in various lists that I researched.

What do you think of the list? I would love to hear your thoughts. Do you feel some in the top 30 shouldn’t be there? Was there a particular author you feel was left out of the entire list? Who are your favorite authors?

And now here’s the list:

1. Stephen King
2. Dean Koontz
3. Clive Barker
4. Ramsey Campbell
5. Anne Rice
6. Edgar Allan Poe
7. H.P. Lovecraft
8. Richard Matheson
9. Peter Straub
10. Bram Stoker
11. Mary Shelley
12. Ray Bradbury
13. Dan Simmons
14. Shirley Jackson
15. William Peter Blatty
16. Robert McCammon
17. Jack Ketchum
18. Neil Gaiman
19. Robert Bloch
20. Richard Laymon
21. Bentley Little
22. James Herbert
23. John Saul
24. Joe R. Lansdale
25. John Mayberry
26. Thomas Harris
27. Ambrose Bierce
28. Brian Lumley
29. Douglas Clegg
30. R.L. Stine

And I wanted to list the rest of the authors that appeared more than once on the various lists I looked up. There were many other authors mentioned only once (some great horror authors), but to keep it fair I only wanted to complete this list of runners up with authors who were mentioned more than once. So here are the rest that make the entire list of 59 authors. This list is in no particular order.

1. Henry James
2. Daphne du Maurier
3. Poppy Z. Brite
4. F. Paul Wilson
5. Chuck Palahniuk
6. Thomas Ligotti
7. Algernon Blackwood
8. Ania Ahlborn
9. Mylo Carbia
10. M.R. James
11. Robert Louis Stevenson
12. Arthur Machen
13. Robert E. Howard
14. Fritz Leiber
15. H.G. Wells
16. T.E.D. Klein
17. Harlan Ellison
18. Tim Lebbon
19. Edward Lee
20. Whitley Strieber
21. Joe Hill
22. Brian Keene
23. Mark Z. Danielewski
24. Ira Levin
25. John Ajvide Lindqvist
26. Paul Tremblay
27. Adam Nevill
28. Scott Smith
29. Susan Hill

So there’s the list. Once again, I would love to hear your thoughts on it, and please feel free to comment below.

On a personal note, I’m still working through my own challenge to read every book on my 100 greatest horror novels (this list can be found on this blog). This year I’ve read: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft, I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, Hell House by Richard Matheson, They Thirst by Robert McCammon, The Song of Kali by Dan Simmons, Lost Souls by Poppy Z. Brite, The Choir of Ill Children by Tom Picarelli, Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk, and The Ruins by Scott Smith.

I hope to read many more books from my list in the coming year.

And I just wanted to let everyone know that my book THE EXORCIST’S APPRENTICE is still on sale for .99 cents for a few more days.

You can find it here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00YYF1E5C

I hope everyone has a safe and happy Halloween.

Until next Halloween . . .

WRITING THE FIRST DRAFT OF YOUR NOVEL

How do you write your first draft?

You power right through it.

In the previous posts we talked about coming up with ideas for your stories and novels, character bios, creating an outline, using drawings and maps, research, and now it’s time to finally begin writing the first draft.

First, you need to decide how you’re going to write your first draft: by hand on paper or on your computer (or there’s always speech to text). That’s totally up to you. I usually do a mixture of both writing by hand and typing on my computer. I almost always start a first draft by hand in a spiral notebook, but I usually end up typing about the halfway point, sometimes going back and forth between paper and the computer until it’s done.

You’re ready to begin your first draft; you either have your pen and notebook ready or your writing program in your computer – one way or another the blank page is staring at you. And maybe you freeze; you just don’t know where to begin. My advice is to just start writing. Even if you don’t love every word or sentence you’re putting down, just get something on paper or on the screen so you’ll have something to go back and fix later on. My advice would be to get as much of the first draft down without going back and doing much editing. Of course you might make major changes to the story as you go along and new ideas may pop up, but if you’ve written a pretty detailed outline there shouldn’t be too many major structural changes to your story.

One of the worst mistakes a writer can make is worrying about the first draft being perfect. It never is. You’ll always want to go back and make some changes after you’ve written the first draft, tweak something here and there, some fiddling there. You’ll want to improve a scene, punch up some dialogue, go into more detail here and less there. No one is going to write a perfect first draft every time, so just get it all down on paper so you can have something to revise and improve.

Another mistake is thinking that your fist draft is garbage and then you give up. Your first draft isn’t going to be perfect, and sometimes when you’re in the middle of it, struggling with sentences and descriptions, backing up and editing as you go, the whole thing can seem like a big mess. But push through to the end and then let it breathe for a few weeks before beginning the editing. You might surprise yourself and find that what you’ve written is better than you remember.

Your first draft is exactly that, a first draft. you can revise it as much as you want to. I do many revisions on my novels, and usually I’ll have read and re-read a project ten or twelve times before I finally publish (this doesn’t include editors/beta readers looking it over for me). Some books I’ve written need more rewriting and editing than others, some books have been easier for me to write than others – every book you work on is different.

We’ve established that you’re just going to power through this first draft and not try to do major revising and editing along the way. So, how long is this first draft going to take you? Well, that depends on how fast you write, how much time you have available to write, and how many roadblocks you come across in your story (if you don’t have a detailed outline). It could take a month to write your first draft or it could take years, no way is the right way. I would still suggest that you try to power through your first draft as quickly as you can. You could even give yourself a goal of getting the first draft done in a month, or three months, or six months, but make sure you try to get a little writing done each day. Maybe you could give yourself a word or page count for the day or the week to accomplish if that helps. There will be days where the writing is easy, where the muse is singing in your ear, and then there will be days where just getting a paragraph or two down on paper is torture. But you must power through those days even if you only get a few paragraphs done.

I’ll admit that I don’t always write every day. Sometimes I’ll take several days off. I tend to write in spurts, maybe nothing for a few days and then I’ll bang out thirty or forty pages in a few days. But I’ve been writing for so long now that I trust my process and I know that I’m not going to let a significant amount of time go by without writing something. Remember, writing is like a muscle that needs to be exercised.

On those days when you don’t feel much like writing, just try to get a few paragraphs done, or even a few sentences. Sometimes when you begin writing, something magical happens and ideas begin to pop up in your mind as you write. If you’re really stuck, another trick is to take a piece of notebook paper and just start writing down what you’re going to write about in the next chapter. For instance, you could write something like: John will meet Susan in this chapter. They’ll meet at a store, one going out and one going in. They haven’t seen each other for a week now since their awkward first date. And on and on. Before you know it you might be writing dialogue and whole paragraphs about what’s going to happen in this chapter. This works for me a lot of the time if I get stuck.

So, just power through that first draft as quickly as you can and then set it aside for a week or two so it can “cool down” before you go back to it. We’ll go more into the “cooling down” or letting a manuscript breathe stage in an upcoming post.

How do you write your first draft? I would love to hear your writing process in the comments. Also, if you have any tips about maintaining motivation, I would love to hear them.

Next month we’ll talk about placeholder words or phrases in your first draft.

Hope this helps someone out there.

Until next time . . .