You can never go wrong with Princess Bride by William Goldman, anything by Terry Pratchett, the Harry Potter series, oh and Pride and Prejudice.

1 Make the time to write and stick to it
2 Don’t be afraid to rewrite things that doesn’t work.
3 Read your dialog out loud and listen if it sounds natural
4 Don’t become discouraged if it is difficult, if it was easy everyone would have a bestseller.
5 Work on an outline first
6 Keep an eye on your pacing
7 Save the editing for later
8 Start short if you can and hone your craft
9 Get feedback
10 Read a lot

The Kite Runner and A thousand splendid sun's ..These books just never left me. I don't think they ever will.

You may think that monsters only reside in horror novels, but as an avid reader of science fiction, I would beg to differ. While I don't go out of my way to read books about monsters, I have read plenty of science fiction novels and I have come across a few of them that feature monsters that could rival anything horror authors could come up with. First up you have the giant sand worms from the planet Arrakis in the Dune series of books by Frank Herbert. These things are basically giant, wriggling mountains of teeth that can swallow man and machine whole. To make matters worse, they live under the desert sands that cover the entire planet and pop up when they sense vibrations, which is bad news for anyone trying to walk around.

Next, I can recommend the novel Alien by Alan Dean Foster. If you have watched the original Ridley Scott movie, then you'll already know what to expect from the book as it is basically a novelization. However, it is still well written and the alien is one of the most terrifying monsters ever in my opinion.

But what about those monsters that you cannot fight off with bullets and bombs? Disease is arguably one of the scariest real "monsters" we can ever face and this theme is explored in a book called The Girl With All The Gifts by M.R. Carey. It features a type of disease that is busy infecting the minds of everyone on the planet and the only way to make a vaccine is to harvest it from children who are immune to the disease. It is a great book (I haven't seen the movie adaptation yet) and one that will make you wonder if the scariest monsters on the planet are not humans after all.

My last choice is Event Horizon by Steven E. McDonald. This is another novelization of a movie, so if you have already seen the film, there's not much in the book that is really new. I do know that if you are squeamish about seeing blood and gore on film, then the book is probably a better bet, depending on how vivid your imagination is. Anyway, the monster in this book is actually a massive, derelict space vessel that has literally been to hell and back. The way in which it offs the salvage crew that boards it is pretty much the stuff of nightmares.

Grapes of Wrath