These are the forty books which I have selected as my top influences; these are in no particular order except Wuthering Heights will always be at the top.

  1. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
  2. Dracula by Bram Stoker
  3. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
  4. Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Braddon
  5. Precious Bane by Mary Webb
  6. I the Jury by Mickey Spillane
  7. From Russia with Love by Ian Fleming
  8. The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
  9. Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence
  10. Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson
  11. Chickamauga by Ambrose Bierce
  12. The Leatherstocking Tales by James Fenimore Cooper
  13. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
  14. Mr Greedy by Roger Hargreaves
  15. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
  16. Pudd'n Head Wilson by Mark Twain
  17. Tales of the Mysterious and Macabre by Algernon Blackwood
  18. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
  19. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
  20. Sherlock Holmes Stories by Arthur Conan Doyle
  21. Heino and Hanno by Else Jung
  22. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  23. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
  24. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
  25. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
  26. Centennial by James A Michener
  27. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
  28. The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault
  29. Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
  30. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
  31. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
  32. Varney the Vampyre, or, The Feast of Blood by James Malcolm Rymer
  33. The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham
  34. The Divided Self by R.D. Laing
  35. Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
  36. The Beetle by Richard Marsh
  37. The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens
  38. Horse Under Water by Len Deighton
  39. The Great Tontine by Hawley Smart
  40. Christine by Stephen King