Horror Books
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50 free Horror Books trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Horror fiction has been keeping readers awake for more than two centuries. The genre runs from Gothic tales of crumbling mansions and family curses, through the Victorian age of Dracula and Dr Jekyll, to the paperback boom that made Stephen King a household name. Along the way it gave us many of the most familiar monsters in popular culture. This quiz covers the whole shelf: the classics everyone half-remembers from school, the pulp writers who invented cosmic dread, the bestsellers behind famous films, and newer hits from Japan, Britain and America. Expect questions on authors, characters, settings, pen names and the strange real events that inspired some of the scariest stories ever written. The questions run from easy openers for casual readers to deep cuts for people who collect first editions. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will leave with a few new stories to tell, and perhaps a longer reading list.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which volcano's eruption caused the dismal 1816 summer when Frankenstein began as a ghost-story contest?
Mount Tambora
Mount Tambora erupted in Indonesia in 1815 and cooled the whole planet the following year. Kept indoors by the endless rain near Geneva, Lord Byron and his guests passed the time inventing scary tales.
Q 02Which Stephen King debut novel did his wife, Tabitha, rescue from the trash after he gave up?
Carrie
Carrie survived because Tabitha King fished its first three pages out of the bin and talked him into finishing. The couple were living in a trailer in Maine with two children at the time.
Q 03In which city was Dracula author Bram Stoker born and later educated at Trinity College?
Dublin
Dublin kept him busy long before the Count did: Stoker spent ten years as a civil servant there while reviewing plays for an evening newspaper on the side.
Q 04In which Thomas Harris novel did the cannibal psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter make his first appearance?
Red Dragon
Red Dragon gave him only a small role in 1981, advising an FBI profiler from his cell. Its first film version, Manhunter, cast Brian Cox and spelled the name Lecktor.
Q 05Which Stephen King novel about a doctor's family in rural Maine has the author said scared him the most?
Pet Sematary
Pet Sematary grew out of a real loss: a truck killed his daughter's cat on the busy road beside their rented Maine house. Days after burying it, King wondered what would happen if it came back.
Q 06Which Scottish author said the plot of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde came to him in a dream?
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson was woken mid-nightmare by his wife and complained that she had interrupted a fine bogey tale. He is said to have burned the first draft and started again.
Q 07Which lanky schoolmaster is chased by the Headless Horseman in Washington Irving's tale of Sleepy Hollow?
Ichabod Crane
Ichabod Crane vanishes after the chase, leaving behind only his hat and a smashed pumpkin. The pumpkin hints that the ghostly rider was a rival for his sweetheart playing a trick.
Q 08Which Shakespeare play supplied the title of Ray Bradbury's carnival novel Something Wicked This Way Comes?
Macbeth
Macbeth supplied it: the phrase is spoken by one of the witches as the murderous king draws near. Bradbury's story brings a sinister travelling show to a small Illinois town in October.
Q 09Which Robert Bloch novel about a motel keeper and his domineering mother became an Alfred Hitchcock film?
Psycho
Psycho was almost finished when killer Ed Gein was arrested just 35 miles from Bloch's home, so Bloch slipped in a line alluding to him. The film followed the book within a year.
Q 10Which author, married to a Romantic poet, first published Frankenstein anonymously with a preface he had written?
Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley began the story at 18 and was only 20 when it reached the shops. Her own name did not appear on the book until later editions.
Q 11Which fictional Colorado hotel does Jack Torrance look after for the winter in Stephen King's The Shining?
The Overlook
The Overlook was born when King and his wife checked into the real Stanley Hotel in Estes Park in October 1974. On film, its exterior was a lodge on Oregon's Mount Hood.
Q 12Which name does the shape-shifting monster use when appearing as a clown in Stephen King's novel It?
Pennywise
Pennywise the Dancing Clown is only a lure for children. The creature wakes roughly every 27 years to feed on the town of Derry, and its final form is closer to a giant spider.
Q 13Which former nurse holds injured novelist Paul Sheldon captive in her farmhouse in Stephen King's Misery?
Annie Wilkes
Q 21Which fictional book of forbidden lore did H. P. Lovecraft credit to the so-called Mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred?
Necronomicon
Necronomicon sounded so convincing that Lovecraft had to state plainly that he had invented both the book and its author. The supposed writer's name is not even grammatical Arabic.
Q 22Which American author wrote The Haunting of Hill House, a finalist for the National Book Award?
Shirley Jackson
Shirley Jackson got the idea from reading about 19th-century psychic researchers who studied a home they thought was full of spirits. She said that she believed in ghosts herself.
Q 23Which Richard Matheson novel about a lone survivor of a vampire pandemic was filmed as The Omega Man?
Annie Wilkes came to King in a dream during a flight across the Atlantic. He planned to release the book under a pen name, but his secret identity was exposed before it came out.
Q 14Which William Peter Blatty novel about an actress's daughter in Georgetown was inspired by a real 1949 case?
The Exorcist
The Exorcist grew from a case Blatty heard about while he was a student at Georgetown University. He went on to write the film's screenplay himself and won an Oscar for it.
Q 15Which New Orleans-born author introduced the vampire Lestat in the 1976 novel Interview with the Vampire?
Anne Rice
Anne Rice wrote it soon after her young daughter Michele died of leukaemia. The child vampire Claudia, forever trapped at the age of a little girl, was inspired by her.
Q 16Which Oscar Wilde character stays young and handsome while his hidden portrait ages and records his sins?
Dorian Gray
Dorian Gray is the hero of the only novel Wilde ever wrote. He rashly begs for the painting to grow old in his place, and gets exactly what he asked for.
Q 17Which Goosebumps author has been called the Stephen King of children's literature?
R. L. Stine
R. L. Stine started out in comedy, writing joke books for children under the name Jovial Bob. His scary series went on to sell more than 400 million copies around the world.
Q 18Which 15th-century Wallachian prince is often named as a model for Bram Stoker's Count Dracula?
Vlad the Impaler
Vlad the Impaler may have lent the Count little more than a name. The idea that the two are one and the same was put forward only decades after the novel came out.
Q 19Which Max Brooks novel tells the story of a global zombie outbreak through interviews with survivors?
World War Z
World War Z borrowed its format from Studs Terkel's oral history of the Second World War. Its author is the son of comedy director Mel Brooks and actress Anne Bancroft.
Q 20Which Jay Anson bestseller tells of the Lutz family fleeing a Long Island home after 28 days?
The Amityville Horror
The Amityville Horror was sold as a true story, but its claims have led to controversy and lawsuits. About a year before the Lutzes arrived, Ronald DeFeo Jr. had shot six of his family there.
I Am Legend
I Am Legend also reached cinemas as The Last Man on Earth and, in 2007, under its own title. Its plague-born undead helped to shape the modern zombie story.
Q 24Which Henry James novella follows a governess who believes ghosts haunt two children at a country house, Bly?
The Turn of the Screw
The Turn of the Screw was written to order as a twelve-part ghost story for an illustrated magazine. Later critics argued that the spirits exist only in the governess's mind.
Q 25At which English seaside town does Count Dracula's ship run aground in Bram Stoker's novel?
Whitby
Whitby got the part because Stoker holidayed there in 1890 and did research in its library. In the book a large dog leaps ashore from the wreck, whose dead captain is tied to the helm.
Q 26Under which pen name did Stephen King publish Thinner before a bookstore clerk exposed the secret?
Richard Bachman
Richard Bachman existed because publishers thought readers would accept only one book a year from an author. Thinner sold ten times as many copies once the truth was out.
Q 27Which Neil Gaiman novella features an Other Mother who wants to sew buttons over a girl's eyes?
Coraline
Coraline won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novella. Its villain, also known as the Beldam, has already lured three earlier children into her copy of the real world.
Q 28Which cursed object kills whoever views it within a week in Koji Suzuki's Japanese novel Ring?
A videotape
A videotape of strange, dreamlike scenes ends with a warning that the viewer has one week to live. A journalist finds it at a resort where a group of dead teenagers had stayed.
Q 29What must survivors wear outdoors to stay alive in Josh Malerman's debut novel Bird Box?
Blindfolds
Blindfolds are the only defence against creatures that drive anyone who sees them to violent madness. The heroine even takes two children down a river without looking.
Q 30Which breed of dog is the rabid title animal of Stephen King's novel Cujo?
Saint Bernard
A Saint Bernard, Cujo catches rabies when a bat bites him on the nose. King has said he barely remembers writing the book, which dates from his heaviest drinking years.