You know this story even if you haven't read it: A seemingly-idyllic New England village gathers for an annual lottery, at which it is gradually revealed that one resident will be stoned to death to ensure a good harvest. Outraged New Yorker readers canceled their subscriptions when "The Lottery" first appeared in 1948, appalled at Shirley Jackson's insinuation that their comfortable lives might be hiding horrors. But some letter writers wondered whether such rituals were real, and if so, where could they be seen?

The horrors in John Fowles' first novel are purely human — it is Fredrick's monstrous desire for and feelings of entitlement toward beautiful art student Miranda Grey that drives the story. Where before he had been happy collecting and immobilizing butterflies, now it's Miranda he must pin down and keep. And how dare she be so ungrateful, so unwilling?

Give this to the Shackleton fan in your life, but then run away quickly. No heartwarming tale of ice-bound persistence here; The Terror takes on Sir John Franklin's ill-fated 1845 expedition in search of the Northwest Passage in which he and both his ships were lost. Franklin's real fate — frozen and starving, locked in the Arctic ice — is awful enough, but Dan Simmons ratchets up the horror with a mystery and a monster that looks like a giant polar bear.

Our readers loved Dean Koontz, and our judges agreed that Intensity, his tale of a woman frantically fleeing a murderer, was their choice for the list and a natural fit in this category. There are no evil spirits here, no Elder Gods under the waves — just a tense duet between "homicidal adventurer" Edgler Vess, addicted to the intensity of experiences, and intended victim Chyna Shepherd, who turns the tables on Vess, risking her life to stop him.

"The Girl Next Door takes us down step after step, until — too late — we realize we're in a small damp cellar, and then it grabs our head, makes us see what is going on over in the corner," says judge Stephen Graham Jones. "Worse, it leaves us there, doesn't allow us any of the usual outs, it makes us accept that this horror is a potential built into ... people? Society? All of us? Hopefully not, but if we don't guard against it, maybe so, too. The Girl Next Door is that guard."

The big star of the Dell Abyss imprint, Poppy Z. Brite (now Billy Martin) spoke in the language of the marginalized, the forgotten and the lost. Brite's first two novels, Lost Souls and Drawing Blood, were inspirational texts for goth kids, gay kids, lost kids, unwanted kids — basically everyone the Happy Shiny '90s didn't have room for — telling them that no matter what anyone said, they belonged. Exquisite Corpse, on the other hand, was a romance novel about two serial killers so bleak and unforgiving, it almost ended Brite's career.

"Night They Missed the Horror Show" is "a story that doesn't flinch even once," says judge Stephen Graham Jones. "It's a story that looks straight on at terrible things, yeah — but the real power of this story is that it has a clear moral center. It pulls off that impossible trick of getting us to side with people we have no business siding with, and then it punishes us for our complicity, it punishes us for leering, it leaves us feeling dirty and compromised. When horror is really working, it works like this." (And a language warning — there's some ugly stuff here.)

What hath the Internet wrought? To find the most original ghost stories these days, you have to dive into the online world of creepypasta: urban legends unleashed by anonymous authors online. Like a nest of squirming eels, these stories mutate, procreate and cross-pollinate with alarming speed and slipperiness, occasionally getting mistaken for reality. Penpal — and its close relative John Dies at the End — capture the spirit of online horror and trap it between two covers. Dathan Auerbach originally posted Penpal in serial form on Reddit's r/nosleep board, and while it loses something in book form, it's still a disconcerting tale about a kid who learns that his childhood may not have happened quite the way he remembers it.

Not strictly a vampire story, despite the license-plate pun of the title — but Joe Hill's tale of a child predator who whisks his quarry away to a place called Christmasland where their souls are imprisoned to the tune of sugary Christmas music is still plenty blood-chilling. With its biker heroine with supernatural gifts pursuing her classic-car-driving nemesis through roads real and strange, NOS4A2 is a wild ride.

The aliens in Octavia Butler's short story are awful-looking insectoids who implant their eggs in human hosts, but that is actually not what is horrible in "Bloodchild." While there is a touch of body horror in Butler's depiction of male pregnancy, what is scary here is the queasily familial relationship between the alien Tlic and their human hosts. The Tlic see humans affectionately, as big warm convenient animals. And the humans, though troubled, mostly return that affection.

Keep your vampires, werewolves and haunts — few things are as scary as "the darkness of man's heart." William Golding's tale of tale of castaway boys gone murderously feral has become shorthand for any situation in which people start turning on each other. "What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?" asks the ill-fated Piggy, and it's pretty clear what Golding thinks. Bonus: Stephen King got the name Castle Rock from one of the locations in Lord of the Flies.

Blessed be the fruit ... of Margaret Atwood's horrifically sharp mind. This classic feminist dystopia is prominent in the public mind right now, and not just because it has been made into a TV series. Atwood's book mines true horror from what people do to one another (poor Offred, suffering through the Ceremony every month) — and to themselves. (Who really thinks Serena Joy was happy with her accomplishments?)