There’s a famous quote about Jack Ketchum that goes like this: “Who’s the scariest guy in America? Probably Jack Ketchum.” The author of that quote? Just some guy named Stephen King. Ketchum—who, in person, is amiable and personable enough to have once been a successful literary agent (he managed the career of literary icon Henry Miller, among others)—has always walked a unique line between mass market author and cult object. His first novel, Off Season, was released by Ballantine Books in 1980; in his introduction to a later reprint, Douglas Winter called the tale of a group of cave-dwelling and cannibalistic savages who prey on vacationing New Yorkers “raw and risky.”

Author Grady Hendrix and author-slash-witch historian Katherine Howe join Theresa DeLucci, television and horror fiction reviewer, to discuss the role of witches in the horror genre.

Readers of horror fiction are frequently unfamiliar with the world of horror role-playing games, and yet that world is consistently producing high-quality fiction and beautifully designed books. Among the most popular writers in the horror RPG field is C.A. Suleiman, who has spent nearly two decades working on such immensely successful games as Scarred Lands, Vampire: The Requiem (for which he and Ari Marmell created the acclaimed “city book” City of the Damned: New Orleans), and, most recently, Mummy: The Curse.

My opinions of The Exorcist changed as I got older. It was one of those movies where I was told you’re not allowed to see it as a kid because it will horrify you so much that you’ll never sleep again, and so I waited like a good little teenager until I was seventeen to see it, and I watched the director’s cut that came out in like 2003 or so. I was just like, “Oh, this isn’t that bad. This is totally fine. I don’t get what the big deal is.” And now, I am no longer seventeen and invincible, and it’s much more upsetting.

David J. Schow hasn’t just consistently produced great horror fiction and nonfiction for decades, he’s also managed to stay exciting, fresh, and relevant. Although he’s known primarily as a screenwriter (The Crow, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning) and award-winning short horror fiction author, he’s also written several acclaimed novels (The Shaft, The Kill Riff), edited the influential 1988 anthology Silver Scream, and is probably the world’s leading expert on The Outer Limits. His latest collection, DJSturbia, was released in March by Subterranean Press.

One of the biggest surprise hits of 2014 was the cinematic adaptation of John Green’s young adult novel The Fault in Our Stars. With a budget of just twelve million dollars, the film went on to earn over three-hundred million worldwide, and gave its director Josh Boone carte blanche in Hollywood. But what Hollywood didn’t know was that Boone was a lifelong horror fan who was more interested in adapting Stephen King than additional teen romances.

David Mitchell is the best-selling author of the 2004 novel Cloud Atlas, which was adapted by the Wachowskis into a feature film starring Tom Hanks and Halle Berry. All of Mitchell’s novels are set in the same universe with characters from one book appearing in or being referenced in the others. Those books include Ghost Written, Number Nine Dream, Black Swan Green, and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Mitchell’s most recent books are The Bone Clocks, about a secret war between two factions of immortal occultists, and Slade House, a decade-spanning haunted house novel.

Garry Whitta wrote the screenplay for the post-apocalyptic thriller THE BOOK OF ELI, starring Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman, and also worked on the script for AFTER EARTH, an SF adventure starring Will Smith and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Gary has also written for video games and comics and he also worked on the upcoming feature film STAR WAR: ROGUE ONE, which (unfortunately) he is strictly forbidden from discussing. He recently used the Ink Shares crowdfunding platform to publish his first novel, ABOMINATION.

[The book required] years and years of research, much of which I never had the opportunity to use, but it was vital to the process. I delved into alchemy, sacred geography, the Quivira and their language—I even got a chance to read a transcript of Coronado’s journal from the expedition. The truth is more fantastic than anything I could ever come up with.