Book Meme III - Horror

This was difficult.  Extremely difficult.  I'm just not a voracious horror reader, despite reading a bit of everything.  And when I do read horror, I'm very critical.  It's the lowest rated category in my book list, primarily because I'm supposed to find it frightening, and usually I find it boring.  I remember liking it much more as a teenager when Christine, The Stand, It, and Pet Semetary were new and I was still coming off a childhood of Hammer films and Soylent Green.  The only thing to make me nervous as an adult was a movie, not a book.  I went to Dawn of the Dead alone close to midnight in 2004 when it came out, and when I walked out the back of the theater into an empty lot I was a bit twitchy.


The last horror book I read was:
Law 101: Everything You Needed to Know About American Law by Jay M. Feinman.  Actually, Horns by Joe Hill.  Enjoyable, but not great.  I do like him better than Stephen King.

The horror book I am reading right now is:
I am not.

The next horror book I will read is:
Probably the new Joe Hill book, Nos4A2

The last horror book I didn’t finish was:
I almost didn't finish The Cipher by Kathe Koja.

I didn’t finish it because:
It gets a little weird for a little too long and the language requires some work in my opinion.

The last horror I recommended to a friend was:
I never recommend horror books to friends.  Although I have told my wife a few times whether something was ok to read, like a Stephen King book (I think I told her Under the Dome and Cell were ok reads).

The last horror book someone recommended to me was: (Did you enjoy it?)
I truly think the last horror book someone recommended to me was Pet Semetary in high school.  And I did enjoy it at the time.  Someone recommended The Last Gunslinger series to me, but I consider that fantasy and I didn't really enjoy it.

My favorite horror novel is:
This is truly the lowest rated category in 17 years of tracking what I read.  The Living Dead edited by John Joseph Adams was good, lots of short stories about zombies, but only about 1/4 of it.  1/4 of that book was truly excellent reading.  The other 3/4 not so much.  I suppose it can't be my favorite then, because even if I gave it a 10, the other 3/4 drags it down to a 2.5?  I think John Dies in the End is my favorite I can remember recently, although I disliked the sequel.  I do like the classics: Frankenstein, Sleepy Hollow, Dracula, and The Mountains of Madness.  One of the scariest endings I remember to a book was A Handful of Dust.  It gave me the sort of feeling I imagine I'm supposed to get from slasher movies.

An underrated horror author is:
I think most horror is overrated: King, Koontz, Lumley, Brooks (Max that is, as in World War Z).  So I'm going to go with zombie SHORT stories are underrated.  There are some gems if you read enough of them, but you have to put in some time and get past a sizable selection of turds.

My favorite sub-genre of horror is:
Using this list from Wikipedia, comedy horror and science fiction horror.