Michael Wertenberg writes: "I don't scare easy. But I do love it when I come across a book that challenges me, that provokes my imagination into a spiral of ghastly possibilities.
"However, in order for that to happen, I need the book to be well-written; I need fluid and compelling prose to suck me in and have me suspend disbelief. And I need some level of invention. The familiar tired tropes are never going to work on me, as far as scares go, no matter how good the execution.
"So in this list of 10 books I am going to share with you, the commonality according to me, is that they are all well-written and inventive or original to some extent. And I think there is a decent variety, in terms of themes and threats and how the books managed to scare me. There is one book from the '80s, one from the '90s, and the rest are more recent: the last 15 years or so."
