Hey Bud, great idea for a poll!
I wish I could add to my vote. I somehow missed voting for E. A. Poe!
Here's a fun EAP prank: A few years ago, I bought one of those sleep-noise machines -- you know, the kind that makes white noise or the sound of waves or whatever when you're trying to sleep? Anyway, one of the settings was "heartbeat." It so happened that at the same time, my older son, then about 12, was reading EAP stories. So my younger son and I set the little machine for heartbeat, hid it, and then when my son said "What's that sound?" pretended we didn't know what he was talking about.
I considered putting Toni Morrison on the list because of Beloved. I think Beloved is an absolutely fantastic book and it does involve a ghost. It's one of those books that's always stuck with me.
I didn't really know if it would qualify for this type of list, or if the use of the ghost theme in that book is too metaphoric... or, in other words... if the inclusion of the ghost in that book was for motivations so different from a lot of typical ghost stories, that it wouldn't really be appropriate for this list.
For anyone who's read Beloved, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
Well, I loved
Beloved. It didn't scare me, though -- except in, you know, the larger political/humanity sense.
I also voted for Stephen King. I used to love Stephen King in his earliest days -- like the first 10 books or so -- then I got kind of sick of him. This isn't very scary, but in recent years I've circled back around to like him again, partly because he seems like such a likeable person in real life, as far as I can tell. I read his memoir about writing, and it was pretty charming; he seems very down to earth, and not to have changed that much since the days when he was a regular unknown horror-magazine geek. And he certainly knows how to keep you turning the pages!
Also, as I've said many times, his book
The Stand is the closest parallel I know of for Brokieism. I guess that's not very scary, either, but still.
I read a lot of Anne Rice, but I just never thought her books were scary. Perhaps because she's telling the story from the 'creature's POV in her vampire novels?
I'm almost going through something similar with Anne Rice, except in an even weirder sense -- I've never read any of her books! When I lived in New Orleans, she just seemed kind of annoying (that's where she lives, in a big scary haunted-looking house). But now, in retrospect, I'm developing a certain affection for her, too. I think she deserves a lot of the credit for the trend these days to humanize/romanticize vampires. I'm not a big vampire buff (ooh -- no pun intended!), but her idea was pretty original, and the Twilight series and its ilk owe a lot to her.