Did Underwater Leave You Breathless? If So, Read These 4 Claustrophobic Thrillers

#1 New York Times bestselling author and master of horror Stephen King teams up with Bev Vincent of Cemetery Dance to present a terrifying collection of sixteen short stories (and one poem) that tap into one of King’s greatest fears—air travel—featuring brand-new stories by King and Joe Hill, “an expertly compiled collection of tales that entertain and scare” (Booklist).

Stephen King hates to fly, and he and co-editor Bev Vincent would like to share their fear of flying with you.

Welcome to Flight or Fright, an anthology about all the things that can go horribly wrong when you’re suspended six miles in the air, hurtling through space at more than 500 mph, and sealed up in a metal tube (like—gulp!—a coffin) with hundreds of strangers. Here are all the ways your trip into the friendly skies can turn into a nightmare, including some we’ll bet you’ve never thought of before... but now you will the next time you walk down the jetway and place your fate in the hands of a total stranger.

Featuring brand-new “standouts” (Publishers Weekly) by Joe Hill and Stephen King, as well as fourteen classic tales and one poem from the likes of Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, Roald Dahl, Dan Simmons, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and many others, Flight or Fright is, as King says, “ideal airplane reading, especially on stormy descents…Even if you are safe on the ground, you might want to buckle up nice and tight.”

Each story is introduced by Stephen King and all will have you thinking twice about how you want to reach your final destination.

The ocean is mostly unexplored, which is why Underwater is so effectively unnerving. But it’s not the only piece of media that finds horrors in the deep. Michael Crichton, best known for his seminal work Jurassic Park, takes to the deep blue sea in Sphere. A group of scientists head down to the bottom of the ocean to study an unknown spacecraft. It goes as well as you would expect, especially when one of the scientists manages to enter the sphere-like UFO as the rest of the crew are trapped when a cyclone ruins their escape. If you’re looking to get some more of the scary madness that upped the tension in Underwater, you’ll want to grab this tale of nautical nightmares.

NAMED AN NPR GREAT READ OF 2018

From the Shirley Jackson Award–winning author of The Hole, a Kafkaesque tale of crime and punishment hailed by Korea’s Wall Street Journal as “an airtight masterpiece.”

Distinguished for his talents as a rat killer, the nameless protagonist of Hye-young Pyun's City of Ash and Red is sent by the extermination company he works for on an extended assignment in C, a country descending into chaos and paranoia, swept by a contagious disease, and flooded with trash. No sooner does he disembark than he is whisked away by quarantine officials and detained overnight. Isolated and forgotten, he realizes that he is stranded with no means of contacting the outside world. Still worse, when he finally manages to reach an old friend, he is told that his ex-wife's body was found in his apartment and he is the prime suspect. Barely managing to escape arrest, he must struggle to survive in the streets of this foreign city gripped with fear of contamination and reestablish contact with his company and friends in order to clear his reputation.

But as the man's former life slips further and further from his grasp, and he looks back on his time with his wife, it becomes clear that he may not quite be who he seems. From the bestselling author of The Hole, City of Ash and Red is an apocalyptic account of the destructive impact of fear and paranoia on people's lives as well as a haunting novel about a man’s loss of himself and his humanity.