Toni Morrison's towering and beautifully crafted story concentrates the horrors of slavery into one singular horror — the apparition of Beloved, whose mother Sethe has killed her to spare her from being taken by slave catchers. While slavery has been over for a decade when the book opens, it's as much a specter in Sethe's new home as Beloved is and is destined to haunt and scar lives long after her unquiet spirit disappears. Beloved isn't a horror novel in the strictest sense of the word, but our judges felt it more than deserved a place here.

Octavia Butler's story of a young woman yanked backwards in time from the 1970s California to the slave quarters of a Maryland plantation is horrifying enough on the printed page, but John Jennings and Damian Duffy's graphic adaptation means you really can't look away. "The graphic novel makes the horror of imagining being whisked back to the slavery era even more visceral," says judge Tananarive Due.

"Horror often tries to explain the inexplicable," says judge Tananarive Due, and Kai Ashante Wilson's novelette about the things lost to slavery and hellish destruction of a black town in the years just after Emancipation "is as good an explanation as any for why incidents of mass violence against blacks have peppered our history."

Lots of movies, books and stories have been built on the premise of an out-of-control artificial intelligence. But except for maybe HAL 9000, none of them are as scary as AM, the supercomputer created by warring nations in Harlan Ellison's horrifying short story. AM abruptly gets tired of the war, ends it by triggering a mass genocide and spends the next century or so working out its hatred of humanity by torturing the last five remaining humans — but not letting them die.

In 1984, Clive Barker burst onto the scene with one of the most remarkable debuts in horror: three volumes of short stories known as the Books of Blood. It was as if a band you had never heard of released a box set instead of a first album. Never treated with much respect in the United States (his American publisher only printed them in paperback), the stories raised the bar for horror, making it sexier, queerer and more poetic. Ranging from slapstick comedy to gross-out horror to breathtaking surrealism just in the first volume alone, each story is technically perfect and philosophically unnerving.

Evil babies, mysterious jars, bodies in a lake, strange inheritances, monstrous families — whatever your favorite flavor of horror is, you're likely to find something to your taste in this collection. Ray Bradbury wrote these 19 stories early in his career, but they read like the work of a mature master, gripping and stylish. If you can, find one of the editions that includes the striking, stark-edged illustrations by Joseph Mugnaini; they'll add an extra frisson for your reading pleasure.

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's massive anthology includes everyone from Franz Kafka to George R.R. Martin — and some of the weirdest stories ever assembled between two covers. It won a World Fantasy Award in 2012, and it's guaranteed to keep you occupied (and thoroughly creeped out) for a good long while. Alternatively, you can use it to squash any pesky monsters under your bed.

Tough guys are generally no match for the eldritch horrors of Laird Barron's Imago Sequence — which, if you had to sum it up, you could describe in an extremely reductive manner as H.P. Lovecraft meets Raymond Chandler. Imago Sequence is a great read if mere noir isn't dark enough for you, and it has a peculiar humor all its own — Lovecraft's Great Old Ones become, in Barron's world, crotchety but plenty scary old people.

Modern horror's ultimate stylist, Ramsey Campbell started his career as a Lovecraft imitator before going off in his own direction. Specializing in the horror of cities, dirt, squalor and the general mind-shattering everyday degradations of urban life, Campbell creates a world in which there is no difference between our brutalist, lunatic buildings and their brutal and insane inhabitants. Strongest in his short stories, a massive selection of which are collected here, he writes from the point of view that our cities are haunted garbage heaps, and we're all just the ghostly, numb cadavers infesting their derelict ruins.

Contemporary Argentinian politics provide plenty of horror in Mariana Enriquez' story collection — crime, abandonment, corruption, drugs; Enriquez grew up in Argentina during the country's brutal Dirty War period and draws on it in her writing. But then the horrors begin to creep in from outside the boundaries of our own world — haunted houses, evil rituals, disappearances that seem political but prove ... otherwise. "I guess I've always been a dark child," she told NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro. "There's comfort in darkness for me."

Teenagers Tom and Del are miserable at their extremely grim boarding school — tormented by staff and upperclassmen alike — until a tragic fire halfway through Peter Straub's book leads them to retreat to Del's uncle's spooky house in the Vermont woods (called, of course, Shadowland). Uncle Coleman is a master stage magician and, to put it mildly, not a very nice fellow. And it turns out that the magic he is teaching Tom and Del has much more to it than just stagecraft. Also, at one point the Brothers Grimm appear, making for a truly warped fairy tale of a novel.

Old-fashioned and very modern horrors collide, explosively, in Paul Tremblay's novel. As a teenager, Merry Barrett's older sister Marjorie, begins to display signs of mental illness, leading her parents to consult a priest, who recommends exorcism and who brings in a TV production company to make a reality show about the troubled family, with tragic consequences. Years later, Merry begins to dig up the past, leading to what our reviewer Jason Heller calls a "bloodcurdling revelation ... as sickeningly satisfying as it is masterful."