Miss Halloween? Scare the Crypt Out of Yourself With One of These

The best horror books creep up on you. They're uncanny rather than startling, gut-wrenching rather than gross. It's not so much "What's behind the door?" as "After I open the door, will I ever be able to forget it?" Here, as a little Halloween chaser, are 13 books that do a nice, creepy job of freaking you out with finesse.

1. "The Maimed," by Hermann Ungar. Upon its publication in 1923, Thomas Mann approvingly called it "a sexual hell, full of filth, crime and the deepest melancholy" (Disney film to come). It's about a bank clerk forced into a sexual relationship with his landlady. But that's like saying "The Shining" is about a family vacation.

2. "The Other," by Thomas Tryon. A truly unsettling book. Twin brothers cavort through a bucolic New England town, gathering memories and a pretty good body count. The book starts with misdirection and turns into a nail-biter.

3. "Glamorama," by Bret Easton Ellis. Ellis neatly sets up the first third of the novel as a parody of celebrity culture, then smashes you in the face with torture and mayhem. In his other books, the violence has an element of humor; the deaths in "Glamorama" are so graphic and insistent that when you do put it down, the images will stay with you long after.