Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

The end is nigh (or maybe not)!

An unlikely angel and an odd devil work together to stop Armageddon in this genius partnership between two of my favorite writers. I picked it up now because it's about to be released as a TV series with Gaiman at its helm.

A kid in England is actually the Antichrist, but nobody knows that. Every time he thinks about something hard enough (Atlantis, UFOs, or tunnels to China) it happens - and let's just say Adam is a real thinker.

It's very funny, and wicked smart, so I can't wait to see how they film it, since Neil's overseeing it so maybe they can't bleed the fun out of it.

Cat Out of Hell by Lynne Truss

In her first foray into fiction, punctuation expert Lynne Truss brings us an absurd, completely horrifying novel about the evil inner lives of cats. I'd forgotten how subversively funny Truss can be, but her nonfiction books were both informative and hysterical. This novel sneaks up on you with the laughs ... and the cold heebie jeebies.

A man on a grief sabbatical gets bored and begins reading a document emailed to him by a former colleague. What starts out fantastical and unbelievable begins slowly to make more and more sense until you're scared of your own housecat and can't put the damn book down.

It's a gothic horror premise: Let me tell you my tale of death and immortality. But it's told in a more contemporary manner, in a shifting variety of forms: sometimes it's straight narrative, other times it's transcripts of oral recordings, descriptions of images, email correspondence and more.

I love horror, and I have a cat. That said, I had to put this down for a bit in the middle because I made it half-way through after dark and I got the creeps. I finally got up the guts to finish, and I loved it - but I'm still giving my cat the side-eye treatment.

Horns by Joe Hill

Could you get past the "horror" genre to read a really good coming-of-age story? Because this book is SO WORTH IT ... even if you're not a fan of the supernatural.

Ig did something terrible last night, but he can't remember what. Now, in addition to a killer hangover, he seems to have sprouted devil's horns from his forehead. And they seem to make everyone he comes into contact with confess their darkest thoughts.

Much of the story is told in flashbacks to Ig's high school days: hangin' with his friends, meeting Merrin and falling in love, etc. And while Ig was a good kid with high morals and solid faith, since Merrin's murder a year ago, he's struggled to find footing.

I would love to read and discuss this story with a book club. There's lots of meat here to dig into concerning belief, humanity, evil, revenge, love ... but I'd have to convince them that a horror story is worth their time. Any ideas on how to do that?