any good sci/fi or horror books ?

[Rachelnm55]

im wanting to read a couple new books this week any recomendations in sci/fi horror or thriller

 

[Sven]

The Dark Tower Series by Stephen King bit of a mix of Sci-Fi and maybe some horror.
Amity ville Horror by someone i cant remember, Good Horror story
The Shining by Stephen King, kinda scary...also made a good movie

 

[Eldridge]

Into the darkness
by: Harry Turtledove

 

[dementomstie]

Thriller: I'd suggest James Rollins. He's a very fun author. The books may not be the deepest things in the world, but they are brilliant and fantastic. He has written several stand alone books and a series about a team of operatives that work for the US Government codenamed Sigma. The Sigma series starts with "Sandstorm" and it's great, but if you can only find "Map Of Bones" there isn't a whole lot that is crucial that would stop you from starting the series with Map of Bones. After that though, you really need to read them in order.

Sci-Fi: Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams. This is by far my favorite book. It's a fantastic comedy and is just, weird and goofy and really fun. I have read this far too many times and I still love it.
Old Man's War by John Scalzi. This is a fantastic novel by a much newer author than Adams. Also, this is serious where as Hitchhiker's Guide is not at all. This is a story about the future where when you turn 60 you have a choice to join the Army and leave the planet to defend our off world colonies. You then have 10 years to decide if you really want to go, and the story follows a man as he makes the choice. It's very good and I don't usually read books about war, but this is a great story about war while still being about people and the way they make their lives work. Very much recommended.

I don't really read a lot of horror, so I can't suggest anything.

Anti-genre: So, an author who I can recommend is Jasper Fforde, but I don't know what genre he writes. Sure, it's kind of fantasy, but it's also kind of sci-fi. And it's also kind of a thriller. But mostly, it's just hilarious. Jasper Fforde has written probably my favorite books of the last decade. Everything he writes is brilliant and everything I read of his I love. His first novel is called "The Eyre Affair" and is about Thursday Next, a detective who works for the British Government who stops crimes that have to do with books, like forging Shakespeare and fights breaking out at Hamlet Impersonation Competitions. She learns that a mad scientist is going to try stealing fictional characters out of books and so she tries to stop him. It is weird. It's also best to have an appreciation of "Classic Novels" like "Jane Eyre" and "Sense and Sensibility", but I haven't read those and I still really love these books. Also in the second book of the Thursday Next series "Lost In A Good Book" Thursday explains away all the things that happen in the first book in the second chapter. It's rather hilarious if you've read the first book how he just basically ignores his previous book and if you haven't read it it's a really good jumping on point because he explains all that happened in the previous book by like page 10.
The other series that Jasper has written are "The Nursery Crimes" novels and the new series that I'm not sure the title of series wise, but it starts with "Shades of Grey". The Nursery Crimes novels are mysteries with nursery rhyme characters as the central figures in the stories. These are not books for kids however. The first book "The Big Over Easy" is about the death of Humpty Dumpty. It's best summerized as "Humpty Dumpty: Accident? Suicide? Murder?" It is a very good parody of sorts of hard boiled detectives as there are things like interviews with suspects that delve into the intimate lives of Humpty and his lovers, but it's nursery rhyme and fairy tale characters, like Rapunzel and Solomon Grundy. It's bizarre but has one of the most exciting finales I've read in a book ever.
Shades of Grey is a very strange book. Consider the source here. I just recommended a book about Jack the Giant Killer solving the mysterious death of Humpty Dumpty and I then describe "Shades of Grey" as "strange". But it is. It takes place in the far future. It's a distopian future, like one out of 1984, but it's based entirely off of what colors you can and cannot see. People who see Purple are the upper class and people who see only Grey are the working class. It's all very British too, so you may want to read some other British authors before this, like Douglas Adams and P.G. Wodehouse. Shades of Grey really has to be read to be understood, any description of it would only hurt it and possibly spoil bits. At any rate I thought it was standard Fforde, which is to say it was brilliant and fantastically written and one of the most original things I've read in years.