When I was a teenager, I read horror fiction like that kid from The Sixth Sense saw dead people: all the time. Stephen King, Clive Barker, John Skipp, Craig Spector and the other members of the so-called "splatterpunk" school were my literary heroes for pushing the boundaries of the genre - and quite often, good taste. Three horror writers in particular, though, served as my gateway drug into crime fiction. All at once I realized that crime fiction could be as intense as the scary stuff I was digging - you didn't need zombies, monsters or demons. All you need are flawed human beings making bad decisions on the worst days of their lives.

Joe R. Lansdale's Cold in July (1989) was the first crime novel I read - or least, the first novel where I realized that, "Hey, this crime stuff is cool." I was a huge fan of Lansdale's horror stories, so I happily paid my $3.50 for that Bantam paperback which promised "a breathtaking novel of murder and suspense." Damn, did Lansdale deliver. Richard Dane shoots a burglar during a home invasion and spends the next 190 pages paying for it. You wouldn't believe how many surprises Lansdale packs into this slender, one-sitting read.

Similarly, I knew David J. Schow's name from short horror stories and his trailblazing horror movie-themed anthology Silver Scream. But his first novel, The Kill Riff (1988), isn't really horror at all - it's a down-and-dirty revenge thriller. Lucas Ellington's daughter was trampled to death at a rock concert, so he decides to go after those responsible. Namely, the band. Nobody packs as much muscle into a sentence as Schow. I mean, check out the opening line: "This time he would pull the trigger without blinking."

And finally, Robert Ferrigno wasn't known as a horror writer, but his debut The Horse Latitudes (1990) sure sounded like one, based on the back cover copy: "...a dangerous woman vanishes - lost in a dark California carnival of mad science, kinky sex, drug deals, sadism and murder." I still have that day-glo Avon paperback, and still marvel at lines like: "There were nights Danny missed Lauren so bad that he wanted to take a fat man and throw him through a plate-glass window." Noir has many definitions, but sometimes it means the monsters are us.