Horror for the Cosmopolitan Adult
Halloween Reading Rec 2026
This post was inspired by an intriguing request from my friend Joe Maddrey. Joe is a television writer and horror author with an incredible knowledge of the genre. His most recent book, The Soul of Wes Craven, is a case in point. Joe normally celebrates October by watching a different horror movie every day of the month, but this year he wanted to do something different. He asked a bunch of active horror authors to recommend short stories/anthologies that could get someone into the Halloween spirit, along with their reasons why and what they’re reading this year. The result is a magnificent catalog that’s almost a mini-history of the genre. Seriously, you’re going to want to bookmark it. You can find the four-part series on his blog under the title HALLOWEEN READS. Because he’s such a gentleman, he included a recommendation from me. What appears below is the full submission I sent to him, an excerpt of which appears in Part 2 of HALLOWEEN READS.
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God help me, I think Halloween should be slightly terrifying. We don’t get to have our sweets without worrying that one might contain a razor blade. That balance is what makes the season special: It’s when we look death and evil right in their faces, pop on a mask, and flip them the bird.
So being, it’s probably not surprising that my get-ready-for-Halloween reading suggestion is one of the most horrific entries ever added to the urban legend genre, “The Forbidden.” The story first appeared in the 1985 anthology (collection of four novellas, really), The Books of Blood Volume V, which was later republished as In the Flesh. “The Forbidden” has so many elements that fit the season. It’s set in October. There’s a back-to-school theme in its doctoral-student protagonist. It builds on the kind of urban folklore that’s driven so much of horror over the past few decades, including the movies playing this Halloween time. It even includes a monstrous bonfire, which, for those of us who grew up in middle America, will always be tied to Fall. But “The Forbidden” also tells a horror story that is absolutely not for children, best evidenced in kills that go THERE, to the places that horror for the masses won’t, not unless it wants to turn off some of the public. That’s horror for adults. It even describes its atrocities with the complexity and artistry of Gothic architecture. If none of that convinces you to give it a try, I suppose I should share that “The Forbidden” was written by Clive Barker and it is the source material for Candyman (1992)—though it is superior to the film in every way. As you consider whether to pick it up this season, let me offer you my favorite quote/musing from the story, which ties nicely into my beliefs about Halloween: What worth was a man who could not be haunted?
This Halloween, I’ll be rereading a different Barker story, the 1985 novel The Damnation Game. The edition I have includes an introduction by the author. Barker cites Game as his first horror novel, the original shot he took at a grotesque tale of that length. (He’d been acclaimed for his shorter stories prior, a body of work that led Stephen King to say, “He’s better than I am now.”) I reopened Game because I’d just finished writing my first horror novel and had started down the brutal road of querying agents and seeking a publisher. The process requires one to do lots of things that are crucial but agonizing, like writing synopses, hunting for the perfect comp titles, and reading broadly enough that you can claim at least some expertise about the genre at the moment. After all of it, I was exhausted. I needed a reminder of why I was doing the whole thing. But I’d recently made a poor book recommendation based on memory (it turns out Jurassic Park might not be the literary masterwork I believed it to be when I was twelve), so I was nervous to pick up Game. Two-hundred pages in, I can say my anxiety was unfounded. Barker’s twist of the Faustian tale reads as freshly as ever, its depravities told with the same prodigious lyricism I chase in my own work. I can still imagine Barker walking into a late-80s Manhattan cocktail party and being given the same respect and envy offered to Jim Morrison in his prime. His novel remains the pinnacle of horror fiction for the cosmopolitan adult.
I can’t remember if I experienced “Forbidden” or Game first, but I know both happened in my mid-teens and that their impacts were immediate and the same. I wanted to be a horror author like Clive Barker. From that moment on, I knew my flavor of terror wasn’t Edgar Allan Poe’s or Shirley Jackson’s or Stephen King’s; it was Barker’s. That meant that if I ever did anything in the genre, it probably wouldn’t be super mainstream. That was alright. My reader would be the one who wanted to go THERE, to the extremes of human (even inhuman) vileness and desire, so as to gain a deeper understanding of the mortal condition. Pretentious? Bizarre? Foolish? Sure. But in keeping with the themes of “Forbidden” and Game, where knowledge and power are pursued at the gravest of costs, the highest stakes are the most seductive. I don’t have the same designs now, but I certainly wouldn’t mind leaving you shaken and thinking, and loving both just a little. If you’re looking to go down into that valley right now, Barker’s work from the mid-80s is a hell of a guide.
Happy Halloween (reading), 2026-style.