Authors Like Stephen King

Shirley Jackson

American · “The Lottery” (1948), The Haunting of Hill House (1959), We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)

Jackson (1916–1965) lived in North Bennington, Vermont, and wrote most of her fiction while raising four children. “The Lottery”, published in The New Yorker in 1948, follows a village gathering for an annual ritual, and the magazine said it had never received so much mail about a piece of fiction. The Haunting of Hill House sends four people to stay in a reputedly haunted mansion and never quite settles whether the house or Eleanor, the lonely woman at its centre, is the source of the haunting.

Richard Matheson

American · I Am Legend (1954), The Shrinking Man (1956), Hell House (1971)

Matheson (1926–2013) was born in Allendale, New Jersey, and wrote novels, short stories and screenplays. I Am Legend follows Robert Neville, apparently the last man alive in a Los Angeles suburb overrun by vampires, as he repairs his house by day and waits out the nights. His story “Duel” became Steven Spielberg’s 1971 television film, and King dedicated his novel Cell (2006) to Matheson and the film-maker George A. Romero.

Ray Bradbury

American · Fahrenheit 451 (1953), The October Country (1955), Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962)

Bradbury (1920–2012) grew up in Waukegan, Illinois, which became Green Town in his fiction. In Something Wicked This Way Comes a travelling carnival arrives one October, and two boys, Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, discover that its owner, Mr Dark, grants people’s secret wishes in order to own them. King wrote about the novel at length in his study of horror, Danse Macabre (1981).

Every book by Ray Bradbury →

Peter Straub

American · Ghost Story (1979), The Talisman (1984, with Stephen King), Koko (1988)

Straub (1943–2022) was born in Milwaukee. Ghost Story, the novel that made his name, centres on four elderly men in a small New York town who meet to tell each other ghost stories and share a secret from their youth. He co-wrote The Talisman and Black House (2001) with King, and Koko, about Vietnam veterans, won the World Fantasy Award.

Ira Levin

American · A Kiss Before Dying (1953), Rosemary’s Baby (1967), The Stepford Wives (1972)

Levin (1929–2007) was a New Yorker who wrote seven novels and several plays, including Deathtrap; his first novel won the Edgar Award for best first novel. In Rosemary’s Baby a young wife moves into an old Manhattan apartment building and becomes pregnant while her husband grows close to the elderly neighbours. King has called Levin the Swiss watchmaker of the suspense novel.

Clive Barker

British · Books of Blood (1984–85), The Hellbound Heart (1986), Weaveworld (1987)

Barker was born in Liverpool in 1952 and worked in theatre before publishing the six volumes of Books of Blood, short stories whose US paperbacks carried King’s line that he had seen the future of horror and its name was Clive Barker. The Hellbound Heart became his own film Hellraiser (1987); Weaveworld hides a whole magical world inside a carpet.

Mariana Enríquez

Argentine · Things We Lost in the Fire (2016; English 2017), Our Share of Night (2019; English 2023)

Enríquez was born in Buenos Aires in 1973 and works as a journalist. The stories in Things We Lost in the Fire are set mostly in and around Buenos Aires, among poverty, addiction and disappearances. Our Share of Night, translated by Megan McDowell, follows a medium and his young son pursued by a wealthy occult society across Argentina from the 1960s to the 1990s, through the years of military dictatorship, and won the Premio Herralde in 2019.

John Ajvide Lindqvist

Swedish · Let the Right One In (2004), Handling the Undead (2005), Harbour (2008)

Lindqvist was born in 1968 in Blackeberg, a suburb of Stockholm, and worked as a magician and for twelve years as a stand-up comedian before publishing fiction. Let the Right One In is set in Blackeberg in 1981 and follows Oskar, a bullied twelve-year-old, and the strange child who moves in next door and only comes out at night. Tomas Alfredson’s 2008 film made it known around the world.

Stephen Graham Jones

Blackfeet American · The Only Good Indians (2020), My Heart Is a Chainsaw (2021), The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (2025)

Jones was born in Midland, Texas, in 1972 and is an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe of Montana. The Only Good Indians follows four Blackfeet men haunted, a decade later, by an elk hunt that broke the rules, and won the Bram Stoker Award. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter won the Bram Stoker Award for best novel and the Nebula Award in 2025.

Tananarive Due

American · My Soul to Keep (1997), The Good House (2003), The Reformatory (2023)

Due was born in Tallahassee, Florida, in 1966. The Reformatory is set in 1950 at a reform school in Jim Crow Florida, where twelve-year-old Robert Stephens Jr. can see the ghosts of boys who died there. It is dedicated to Due’s great-uncle Robert Stephens, who died at the real Dozier School for Boys in 1937, and won the Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards.