Ok, I like this idea! I'm going to briefly go through some of my recommended reading list & some of the different authors' works that I mostly rely on when writing jokes (My recs will mostly skew older & to short stories, cuz that's what I mostly read) https://twitter.com/hellolibrarian/status/1334653673629229059

It's hard to limit myself when recommending Stephen King's work - The Shining and It are essentials, though a lot of my jokes are based on Eyes of the Dragon. Probably my fave is the short story 'Gramma,' about a kid forced to spend a weekend alone with his grandmother's corpse

Most of my Dean Koontz jokes are based on Watchers, but my favorite Koontz work is the short story Down in the Darkness, about a man who realizes his house has a mysterious door that shouldn't be there.

Clive Barker is in top sexy, gory, nasty form in The Books of Blood, but if I had to pick a single story from the collection it would most definitely be The Midnight Meat Train.

I really don't like H.P. Lovecraft's overly florid style tbh, but I think The Rats in the Walls is good for its creeping sense of paranoia (also it's the story with the oft-referenced infamously named racist cat)

Every modern horror writer is influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, but The Black Cat, with its unreliable narrator, building insanity, and premature burial themes, is Poe at his Poest.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is of course what we mostly know her for, but her short story Transformation, about a libertine offered a devil's deal to switch bodies with a grotesque creature from the sea to exact revenge, is the one I'll recommend here.

Everyone loves Dracula, but check out Bram Stoker's short story The Judge's House, about a student overnighting in a rat-infested house formerly belonging to a notorious hanging judge, for a real experience in creepy ambience.

Shirley Jackson's The Summer People is a simple story about an annoying New York retiree couple deciding to stay an extra month in their summer home. Literally nothing strange or supernatural happens but you can't shake the feeling of doom & dread, a sense of covenants violated

Edward Lee's The Infernal City is a fun, campy cook's tour through Hell, imagining the realm of the damned as a modern, thriving megapolis complete with its own twisted versions of beat cops, movie theaters, taxi cabs, and bodegas

Thomas Ligotti's The Last Feast of Harlequin follows an academic as he investigates a strange festival of clowns in a forgotten podunk town only to find a more sinister rite than he expected. Ligotti's lugubrious style makes even the most ordinary things feel weird & alien

Bentley Little's The Woods Be Dark, a young Appalachian girl must venture into the woods to complete an unspeakable rite to protect her family from forces beyond. Nasty & disturbing, with dark forces that share a hunger for human drives but remain ultimately unfathomable to us.

Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, a collection of re-imagined feminist fairy tales with hearts of the dark forest. The Erl-King is my personal favorite, a meditation on the trade-off between freedom & safety and the dark controlling impulses of male ego

My Brian Keene jokes draw mostly on Clickers and Earthworm Gods, but The Complex - about ragtag apartment complex residents weathering a "zombie" apocalypse - is my rec, not least b/c of the chapter written from a cat's pov

John Bellairs' gothic YA books are all a delight, super atmospheric with just the right amount of blood for baby's first horror book, but The Curse of the Blue Figurine is the one where Bellair's extremely esoteric, Catholic sensibilities are most on display

My take on Carlton Mellick III is probably most influenced by Neverday, but The Handsome Squirm, a Kafkaesque nightmare about a swinger forced to marry & eventually be eaten by an alien broodmare, is the one that most got under my skin