Bentley Little's books, in order, are:
- The Revelation (1990)
- The Mailman (1991)
- Death Instinct (1992) (writing as Phillip Emmons) aka Evil Deeds
- The Summoning (1993)
- The Night School (1994) (re-released as University in 1995)
- Dominion (1996)
- The Ignored (1997)
- Guests (1997) (updated and re-released in the U.S as The Town (2000))
- The Store (1998)
- The House (1999)
- The Walking (2000)
- The Association (2001)
- The Return (2002)
- The Policy (2003)
- The Resort (2004)
- Dispatch (2005)
- The Burning (2006)
- The Vanishing (2007)
- The Academy (2008)
- His Father's Son (2009)
- The Disappearance (2010)
- The Haunted (2012)
- The Consultant (2015)
- The Handyman (2017)
- The Bank (2019)
- Gloria (2021)
- DMV (2023)
His short story “The Washingtonians” was adapted into an episode of Masters of Horror in 2007. His novel The Consultant served as the basis for the streaming series of the same name.
This author's work includes examples of:
- Abusive Parents - "Life with Father" features a couple of girls who live with their father who is extremely obsessed with recycling everything they use, eat, and create. He is so obsessed that he forces the elder daughter to help him "recycle his seed". The elder daughter gives herself up to keep him from harming her younger sister.
- Alien Geometries - At one point in The Consultant, the antagonist, Regus Patoff, sends a fellow consultant to his otherworldly corporate office, where there's numerous hallways and misaligned doors without end. Shows up in other books as well, generally to indicate malign supernatural influence. For instance, the interior of the First People's Bank in The Bank is shown to be larger than the lot it occupies.
- Ambiguously Human: Many of his antagonists are people of uncertain origin and obvious supernatural nature who may or may not be human. Some of them might have started out human, while others were probably always whatever they are.
- Ancient Conspiracy - Occurs often. "Colony" reveals that America never won its independence from Britain and still answers to the Queen. Kennedy was assassinated for not following orders. Perhaps this fact has to do with...
- Beethoven Was an Alien Spy - ..."The Washingtonians" revealing that George Washington was a murderous cannibal.
- Black Speech - In The Vanishing, this sounds normal to a character who discovers he can read it (thanks to unknowingly being a descendant of the race of monsters who originated it), but when he finishes reading it aloud, the people around him inform him he's been screaming like a wild animal. Even trying to read in a whisper isn't enough to lessen the language's cacophonous effect. Also, speaking it makes plants grow.
- Blessed with Suck - The short story "Estoppel" puts this spin on a variety of Reality Warping. The protagonist's ability is that anything he says out loud about himself becomes true. As a result, he has to be very very careful about what he says, lest he accidentally rewrite his (and the world's) history in disastrous ways or trap himself into a form incapable of speech. And that's without even getting into the issue of talking in his sleep.
- Brown Note - One of Little's Hot Blood anthology stories features a code of numbers that causes anyone who looks at it to experience a crippling orgasm. The military briefly considers using it as a weapon to use against enemy nations.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive - Newman King, founder and CEO of the eponymous retail chain of The Store. Whereas the average CEO causes suffering as a side-effect of their ruthless pursuit of profit, King and his organization go out of their way to cause completely unnecessary suffering on top of the side-effects of his ruthless pursuit of profit. The company's corporate motto might as well be "For the Evulz." The Store sets up shop in small towns, buys the local government and puts small business owners out of business, like a relatively normal company might. But then it also does things like buy up the town's utilities so it can spy on people's phone calls and e-mails, murder small business owners, force employees to go out and beat the homeless, stock child pornography and other bizarre, illegal products, whore out female employees, sic zombies on people, trick a man into having sex with his own daughter and send his wife the videotape of it, etc.
- The insurance agent(s) in The Policy fits this trope. So does Regus Patoff, the eponymous antagonist in The Consultant.
- Creator Provincialism: As small New England towns are to King and small Northern California towns are to Koontz, small Southwestern towns are to Little, though he occasionally sets his stories in Californian suburbs as well.
- Creepy Child - Though the antagonist in The House is said to be some sort of demonic entity, she appears as a 10-year-old Depraved Bisexual.
- The 10-year old in Evil Deeds who is identified as an idiot savant- a learning or mentally handicapped person who excels in one particular area. Unfortunately for those who encounter him, his specialty turns out to be inflicting pain and death upon others.
- Fan Disservice: The Store. At first you think his description of the protagonist's silent tryst with the mystery woman in Dallas is fanservice... until he discovers via videotape that said woman was his eldest daughter. Whether or not she remembers it is left intentionally ambiguous.
- For the Evulz -
- The Store is about a Walmart-esque retail chain that goes far out of its way to be as oppressive and cause as much unnecessary suffering as it can.
- The Association, The Policy, The Academy, and The Consultant all do the same with an HOA, an insurance company, a charter school, and an tech/software development company, respectively.
- Gorn: Big time. Little is also notable for not just using visceral gorn (ie blood and guts and death); to make situations more disturbing and horrible, he will happily utilize the gorn equivalents of toilet humor (toilet horror?), Fan Disservice, Hotter and Sexier (except it's anything but), social interaction, and so on. In the Little horror rainbow, blood and guts is just one of the colors he'll paint with.
- Humanoid Abomination: A number of these show up. Probably the most obvious of these is the cup hu girngsi from The Summoning. While called a vampire, it is not undead, but rather an ancient and evil thing that was never human to begin with.
- The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday - The Store: A nice little patch of land turns up bulldozed one day. Despite a dead guy under some knocked-over trees, the eponymous store is built and all kinds of horrors, mundane and supernatural happen. Anything can be bought, if you ask the right questions. From the oddly possible, powerful firecrackers for a nickel, to the insanely impossible, such as a video game called 'N*** gerKill' (not censored) . Eventually the whole place goes cockeyed, the villains seemingly defeated but...a small farmer's market several hundred miles away terrifies a traveling couple.
- Mage Species: In The Walking, witches are a subset of humanity who possess the hereditary ability to perform magic. Isabella is implied to belong to a different Mage Species than the other witches in the story - she is immortal and feeds off the power of other witches, but it's never made clear if she is a witch who made herself immortal or the last of some primeval race of witch-eaters.
- Mars Needs Women - The Vanishing centers around the modern descendants of 19th-century couplings between humans and a secret race of monsters who, despite being hideous 8 foot tall Mix-and-Match Critters who speak in Black Speech, have a practically supernatural sexual appeal that makes them irresistible to humans. As a result, they don't need to chase or abduct human women or men; the humans tend to seek them out, usually just for a quickie, but sometimes going on to abandon their families to go live amongst the monsters.
- Protection Racket: The insurance company in The Policy is in fact one of these, with a supernatural twist. The Ambiguously Human insurance agent offers policies that unfailingly protect against whatever the policy is for, even things that an insurance company shouldn't be able to do anything about, like criminal conviction. If anyone refuses a policy or fails to pay for it, the thing that policy protects against will happen to them. People eventually get so beaten down that they sign up for whatever the insurance man offers them, but at some point the policies become too much for them to pay for and the company destroys their lives when they run out of money.
- Rule of Scary - Somewhere between the cult of women who
have sex with a tire iron once used by James Dean and the humanoid figures in trenchcoats who are faceless except for their huge disembodied grins, you'll realize that absolutely none of the horrifying, insane things that happen in his novels make the least bit of sense; your best bet is to simply assume that the evil... whatever...that's causing it is powerful enough to warp reality and do whatever the hell it wants. Even making that assumption, most of it still comes across as lunacy. Extremely creepy lunacy. - Sexual Karma: Subverted in University (a.k.a. The Night School). The two student protagonists are among the "good" minority on the titular campus. However, whenever they make love, the evil force suddenly takes them over and they have rough, dirty sex that leaves them very sore and often bleeding. Even at the end, after the campus is destroyed, they're still "infected" and continue to enjoy a kinky BDSM-style sex life.
- Snuff Film - A snuff show appears in "The Show". It ends with the protagonist discovering that his mother has willingly signed up for it as a way of committing suicide due to her unhappy marriage.
- Stepford Suburbia - Bonita Vista, the Utah gated community in The Association ruled over by a truly Draconian homeowner's association.
- The Titling:
- The Summoning
- The Walking
- The Burning
- The Vanishing
- Torn Apart by the Mob - In Dominion, Maenads are eventually revealed as the main antagonists for the first half of the story, during which they tear their victims to shreds and conspire to reawaken Dionysus.
