What is the Best Horror Novel/Novella (Write In Nominations Needed)

Image description:
spooky light behind a cemetery with some bats flying around.

What is the best horror Novel/Novella?

It's been three years since we ran our first Best Horror Novel poll, and there are lots more people following Writing About Writing these days, so I thought we might revisit the old topic for our October poll this year.

Please remember to keep voting for our current poll–Best Modern Science Fiction–while we gather nominations for October's poll. It's already the fifth, so expect the turn over to be quick.

But while you're wrapping that poll up with your votes, we also need write in nominations for our October poll: BEST HORROR NOVEL!

The Rules:

You may nominate TWO (2) books. Obviously the fifteen books you love can't all be the scariest you've ever read. Any nominations you give me beyond your first two will be ignored because I'm awful. (Though I will count them as "seconds" if someone else nominates the same book.)

As usual, I leave up to you what "best" means. Scariest? Best written. One that still makes you shudder? Canonical? I know some of you shudder to think of Tommyknockers going up against Dracula, but the more I try to control what "flavor" of best I ask for, the less participation seems to occur. (Perhaps some day when W.A.W. has far more readers, we can do some polls with more focused parameters.)

I'm also going to leave it up to you what "horror" means. You may have to make a case for your suggestion (especially if you want a Harry Potter book to count or something) in order to get anyone to go along with giving you a second, but genre policing is a big waste of energy.

You may, and SHOULD, "second" as many of the existing nominations as you wish. Nothing will go on to our poll if it doesn't have a second, and sometimes, in the interest of keeping a poll to one month (like a HALLOWEEN POLL...nudge nudge), instead of running semifinals, I may limit the final poll to every title that got three or more "seconds." SO PLEASE SECOND STUFF YOU WANT TO SEE ON THE POLL!

While I technically take nominations from anywhere, you should make a comment to this post. Comments left on social media where I cross post (like my Facebook page) don't tend to get seconded there because they are so quickly buried beneath ever spewing content.

Note: Only the best three (3) books from a single author will go onto the poll.  (I don't want this to be a "Which Stephen King Book is the Best*" poll.)  Most people don't read a lot of horror, and I find their experience to be limited to just a couple of authors. If we get more than 3 titles from a single author  I will pick the three with the most number of "seconds."

*Totally hypothetical example, obvi.