# The 14 Greatest Horror Writers of All Time

> Victorian ghost-story scholars share this list with the men who gave us Pennywise and Pinhead. Some of them never wrote a novel at all.

*By YPB Team · Published October 13, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-14-greatest-horror-writers-of-all-time*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Stephen King** — score 1000/1000
   Bestselling American novelist behind Carrie, The Shining and It.
2. **Edgar Allan Poe** — score 919/1000
   American master of the macabre tale, author of The Tell-Tale Heart and The Fall of the House of Usher.
3. **Clive Barker** — score 681/1000
   British writer of the Books of Blood and creator of Hellraiser.
4. **Sheridan Le Fanu** — score 600/1000
   Irish Victorian author of Carmilla and Uncle Silas.
5. **Mary Shelley** — score 529/1000
   English novelist who wrote Frankenstein in 1818, at twenty.
6. **Ramsey Campbell** — score 529/1000
   Liverpool author with decades of quietly unsettling horror fiction.
7. **Bram Stoker** — score 448/1000
   Irish author of Dracula, the 1897 novel that fixed the modern vampire.
8. **Richard Matheson** — score 353/1000
   American writer of I Am Legend and Hell House, and a Twilight Zone regular.
9. **Algernon Blackwood** — score 353/1000
   English writer of The Willows and The Wendigo, nature-haunted classics.
10. **Ira Levin** — score 353/1000
   American novelist of Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives.
11. **Joe Hill** — score 353/1000
   Author of NOS4A2 and Heart-Shaped Box, and co-creator of Locke & Key.
12. **H. P. Lovecraft** — score 241/1000
   Providence pulp writer whose cosmic horror created the Cthulhu Mythos.
13. **Shirley Jackson** — score 241/1000
   American author of The Haunting of Hill House and The Lottery.
14. **Peter Straub** — score 240/1000
   American novelist of Ghost Story and King's co-author on The Talisman.

Tags: books, horror, writers