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Horror books

Gothic castles and suburban houses, vampires and possessions, cosmic dread and quiet dread, from the novels that set the rules to this decade. 381 books so far, across 82 series, plus 235 titles with no series listed.

381 books82 series

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Showing 48 of 381 books

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Frankenstein

Mary Shelley · 1818

Victor Frankenstein leaves Geneva for university, throws himself at natural philosophy, and works out how to give life to dead matter. He assembles a man, succeeds, and is so horrified by what he has done that he walks away from it. The creature teaches himself language and history by watching a family through a gap in their wall, and works out what he is: strong, hideous and completely alone, with a maker who will not speak to him. What he asks for first is conversation, and what he asks for next is a companion, which his maker refuses. The novel is told in letters and in the creature's own account, so the person who suffers most is also the one who explains himself.

Classic science fictionRobot and AI

Rating coming soon

'Salem's Lot

Stephen King · 1975

Ben Mears comes back to the small Maine town where he spent his childhood, meaning to write about the house that has frightened him since he was a boy. What he finds is a place where the dead do not stay down and where the first deaths are explained away as accidents. He gathers the few townspeople willing to believe him, and they set out to deal with the vampires that have taken the town.

Vampire horrorModern horrorGothic horror

Rating coming soon

A Certain Hunger

Chelsea G. Summers · 2020

Dorothy Daniels reviews restaurants for a living and is better at it than most of the chefs she writes about: meticulous, clever and never satisfied by what is put in front of her. She moves between Manhattan and Italy, likes sex as much as she likes food, and has never found a partner who lasts. Something she has kept in check for years is no longer in check.

Modern horrorBody horrorPsychological horror

Rating coming soon

A Head Full of Ghosts

Paul Tremblay · 2015

The Barretts are an ordinary New England family until their fourteen-year-old daughter Marjorie starts behaving in ways her doctors cannot stop or explain. Out of options, her parents turn to a local Catholic priest, who decides the girl is possessed and proposes an exorcism. Father Wanderly also brings in a television production company, which proposes to film the family's crisis.

Occult and possessionPsychological horrorModern horror

Rating coming soon

At the Mountains of Madness

H. P. Lovecraft · 1936

An Antarctic expedition in 1930 goes badly wrong, and what happened is set down afterwards as a recollection. Beyond the ice the party finds the ruins of a civilisation far older than the human race, and murals and sculptures that record a history of the planet nobody was meant to read. What the expedition meets there is why the account exists at all.

Cosmic horrorWeird fictionClassic horror

Rating coming soon

Beloved

Toni Morrison · 1987

Sethe escaped slavery at a cost that included a husband and a child, and now lives on the edge of a small Ohio town in the years after the Civil War. Her household is her mother-in-law Baby Suggs, her daughter Denver, and a house with room for one more. The young woman who arrives and calls herself Beloved pulls the family's buried history back into the open.

Ghost storySouthern gothicHistorical horror

Rating coming soon

Bunny

Mona Awad · 2019

Samantha is a scholarship student in a selective New England writing programme and has no patience for the wealthy cohort she is stuck with, a set of rich girls who share one name, one wardrobe and one voice: Bunny. She accepts an invitation to their private salon, drops the one friend she has, and finds their sweet, sinister world very hard to step back out of.

Modern horrorPsychological horrorWeird fiction

Rating coming soon

Carmilla

Sheridan Le Fanu · 1872

A young woman becomes the target of a vampire who calls herself Carmilla, and whose interest in her is romantic as much as it is predatory. The name turns out to be an anagram of the visitor's real one, Mircalla, Countess Karnstein. The story was first published as a serial in 1871 and 1872.

Gothic horrorVampire horrorClassic horror

Rating coming soon

Dracula

Bram Stoker · 1897

Jonathan Harker, a solicitor, travels to a castle in Transylvania to settle a client's affairs and finds that his host is not alive. Count Dracula soon leaves for England, where he begins feeding on the people of a seaside town. Told through letters, diaries and newspaper reports rather than by a single narrator, the book follows Harker and the group led by Professor Van Helsing who set out to destroy him.

Gothic horrorVampire horrorClassic horror

Rating coming soon

Ghost Story

Peter Straub · 1979

After his uncle dies, the writer Don Wanderley comes to Milburn in upstate New York, where the death turns out to be tangled up with a group of older men who meet to tell one another ghost stories. They call themselves the Chowder Society, and their shared past, and what the society has been telling itself about it, is where the trouble comes from.

Ghost storyModern horrorGothic horror

Rating coming soon

Hell House

Richard Matheson · 1971

A dying millionaire offers a physicist and two mediums a large sum each if they can settle whether anything survives death. They choose the Belasco House in Maine to work in, a place shut up since 1949 after years of drink, drugs and worse, and known locally as Hell House. One of the mediums has been inside it before.

Haunted houseOccult and possessionModern horror

Rating coming soon

Hex

Thomas Olde Heuvelt · 2016

Black Spring in the Hudson Valley is watched by more cameras than a small town should need. The reason is a seventeenth-century woman the locals call the Black Rock Witch, whose mouth and eyes were stitched shut, and who walks the streets and enters houses as she likes. The elders keep Black Spring sealed off to stop the curse spreading; the teenagers, bored, put the haunting online.

Folk horrorModern horrorOccult and possession

Rating coming soon

Hidden Pictures

Jason Rekulak · 2022

Mallory Quinn is out of rehab and glad of the job: looking after five-year-old Teddy Maxwell in a comfortable house, with a room of her own and a routine that suits her. Teddy draws constantly, mostly trees and animals, until he produces a picture of a man in a wood dragging a woman's body. Later drawings start matching details from a case that was never solved.

Psychological horrorGhost storyModern horror

Rating coming soon

House of Leaves

Mark Z. Danielewski · 2000

A family discovers that their house is bigger inside than it is outside, and that the extra space keeps growing. Their attempts to measure it and film it become a documentary called The Navidson Record, and the novel around that record is assembled from a recovered manuscript, footnotes, letters and commentary. It is the author's debut, published in 2000.

Haunted houseWeird fictionModern horror

Rating coming soon

How to Sell a Haunted House

Grady Hendrix · 2023

Louise's parents die suddenly, and she flies with her daughter to the South Carolina house she grew up in to get it ready for sale. It is packed with what is left of her mother's decades of puppets and dolls and her father's academic papers, and clearing it means working with her brother Mark, who stayed in town and resents her. The house, it turns out, has no intention of being sold.

Haunted houseDomestic horrorModern horror

Rating coming soon

I Am Legend

Richard Matheson · 1954

A plague carried on dust storms has killed most of the population and turned the rest into pale, nocturnal things that come for Robert Neville every night. He fortifies his house, keeps up the old protections that hold them off, and spends his days driving through a city with nobody else in it, looking for supplies and for a way to understand what everyone else has become.

Vampire horrorPost-apocalypticModern horror

Rating coming soon

Interview with the Vampire

Anne Rice · 1976

Louis tells his life story, beginning with the night the vampire Lestat turned him in New Orleans and then taught him what being one of the undead involves, whether or not Louis wanted the lessons. Later he finds a lost child, Claudia, and makes her a vampire too, leaving a grown woman's mind sealed inside a body that never ages. The two of them become allies against Lestat.

Vampire horrorGothic horrorHistorical horror

Rating coming soon

It

Stephen King · 1986

Children keep dying in a small Maine town, and whatever is responsible wears the shape of whatever frightens its victim most, usually a clown called Pennywise. Seven friends work out as children that it is far older than the town and that it feeds on fear, and that knowing what it is does not make it any easier to face.

Monster horrorModern horrorCreature feature

Rating coming soon

Mexican Gothic

Silvia Moreno-Garcia · 2020

Noemi Taboada's cousin writes from her new marriage asking to be rescued from a doom she cannot explain, and says her English husband means to poison her. Noemi's father sends her to High Place, the family's house in the mountains, where the Doyles are unwelcoming, Catalina is kept from her, and the house itself starts turning up in Noemi's dreams.

Gothic horrorHaunted houseLatin American horror

Rating coming soon

My Heart Is a Chainsaw

Stephen Graham Jones · 2021

Jade Daniels knows more about slasher films than anyone else in Proofrock, Idaho, which is why she recognises the shape of what is happening when the town starts losing people. The place has the right ingredients: a lake, an old summer camp where a massacre took place fifty years ago, and a new luxury development cutting into the national forest. Nobody else is treating any of it as a pattern.

Modern horrorPsychological horror

Rating coming soon

Nothing But Blackened Teeth

Cassandra Khaw · 2021

Five friends travel to Japan for a wedding, held in a Heian-era mansion where a bride was buried alive in the foundations and where a girl was walled up in the house every year afterwards. They have come for the atmosphere. The dead are there, and so are the grudges the group brought with them.

Japanese horrorHaunted houseModern horror

Rating coming soon

Ring

Koji Suzuki · 1991

Kazuyuki Asakawa, a reporter, looks into the deaths of his niece and three other teenagers, four young people who died together in a manner nobody can explain. Following their last movements takes him to a resort, where he finds an unmarked videotape whose warning tells him he has a week left to live. The part of the tape that is supposed to explain how to survive has been taped over.

Japanese horrorModern horrorOccult and possession

Rating coming soon

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Robert Louis Stevenson · 1886

Gabriel Utterson is a London lawyer whose old friend, Dr Henry Jekyll, has made a will leaving everything to a violent stranger called Edward Hyde. Utterson cannot see what the two men have to do with each other or why Jekyll protects Hyde, and he starts asking questions the doctor does not want answered. What he finds is worse than a bad will.

Gothic horrorClassic horrorPsychological horror

Rating coming soon

The Ballad of Black Tom

Victor LaValle · 2016

Tommy Tester lives in 1920s Harlem, plays guitar where he can and runs occult errands on the side. A delivery to a sorceress and a party at a rich man's house put him in the way of powers that should have no interest in him at all. The novella reworks a Lovecraft story and gives the tale to a Black man to tell.

Cosmic horrorWeird fictionHistorical horror

Rating coming soon

The Changeling

Victor LaValle · 2017

Apollo Kagwa deals in rare books, has dreams he has never been able to explain, and is determined to be a better father than the one who left him. When his wife Emma starts pulling away from their baby son he puts it down to exhaustion or depression, until the night she does something unforgivable and disappears. Finding her takes him into an enchanted world where the old stories are true.

Modern horrorFolk horror

Rating coming soon

The Devil Takes You Home

Gabino Iglesias · 2022

Mario's four-year-old daughter is diagnosed with leukaemia, he loses his job and his health insurance, and the treatment does not work. To pay for it he takes work as a hired killer, and once that door is open it does not shut. When his daughter dies and his wife leaves, a final job, robbing a cartel's cash shipment, looks like the only way out.

Modern horrorLatin American horrorCrime thriller

Rating coming soon

The Elementals

Michael McDowell · 1981

Beldame is a strip of land on the Gulf where three Victorian summer houses were built and sand has been swallowing the place ever since. Two are still used by the McCray and Savage families from Mobile; the third is being left to fill up, and something is living in it. This summer the families arrive with a funeral behind them and a divorce ahead.

Southern gothicHaunted houseModern horror

Rating coming soon

The Exorcist

William Peter Blatty · 1971

Regan MacNeil is eleven, her mother is a film actress, and the behaviour that begins in their Washington house is not an illness any doctor can name or treat. When medicine fails, two priests are brought in to attempt an exorcism on the girl. The novel grew out of a case of possession and exorcism its author heard about as a university student, and it is set in the neighbourhood around that campus.

Occult and possessionClassic horrorModern horror

Rating coming soon

The Fisherman

John Langan · 2016

Abe and Dan are widowers who fish together in the woods of upstate New York, and the shared habit is the one thing keeping either of them upright. When they hear about a creek where the fishing is meant to be extraordinary, and where the catch is supposed to be able to undo a loss, they treat it as a tall story. Then they follow it up the water and into an older story about a bargain, a long-kept secret and a man called Der Fisher.

Cosmic horrorWeird fictionModern horror

Rating coming soon

The Haunting of Hill House

Shirley Jackson · 1959

Four people come to Hill House: an occult scholar who wants evidence that a haunting is real, his assistant, a friendless young woman with nowhere else to go, and the man who will inherit the house. They expect a few odd noises and some inexplicable events. Instead the house works on each of them in turn, and it becomes clear that it has been choosing.

Haunted houseGothic horrorClassic horror

Rating coming soon

The Hellbound Heart

Clive Barker · 1986

A man who has tried every pleasure he can find buys a puzzle box and solves it, which opens a door for the Cenobites: beings who make no distinction between pain and pleasure, and who are in no hurry to give back what they are given. The box is known as the LeMarchand Configuration, and it is not a toy.

Occult and possessionBody horrorModern horror

Rating coming soon

The Historian

Elizabeth Kostova · 2005

A young woman finds an old book and a bundle of letters in her father's library, each letter addressed to a successor expected to continue a search begun centuries earlier. Following the trail leads her into her father's past, her mother's disappearance and the history of Vlad the Impaler, whose name has been attached to something much older than he was.

Historical horrorVampire horrorGothic horror

Rating coming soon

The Last House on Needless Street

Catriona Ward · 2021

Three of them share the boarded-up house at the end of a dead-end street on the edge of the Washington woods: a girl who is not allowed outside, a man drinking in front of the television and losing pieces of his memory, and a cat with strong opinions about scripture. What holds the household together is not affection, and it is buried somewhere among the birch trees. Then a new neighbour moves in next door.

Psychological horrorModern horrorDomestic horror

Rating coming soon

The Little Stranger

Sarah Waters · 2009

On a hot summer after the war, a country doctor is called out to Hundreds Hall, the crumbling Georgian house he remembers visiting as a boy. The Ayres family are down to a widowed mother and her two grown children, living in a house they can no longer afford to keep. Strange things begin happening there, and the doctor has to decide whether they are the usual miseries of a family in decline.

Ghost storyHistorical horrorPsychological horror

Rating coming soon

The Monk

Matthew Lewis · 1796

Ambrosio is a monk with a reputation for virtue, and Matilda is the young woman who joins the monastery as his pupil, in disguise, because she wants him. He gives in to her, and once that rule is broken the others come more easily, each act worse than the one before. Whatever Matilda is and whatever she is offering him, she is not finished with Ambrosio.

Gothic horrorClassic horrorOccult and possession

Rating coming soon

The Only Good Indians

Stephen Graham Jones · 2020

Ten years ago four Blackfeet men shot a herd of elk outside Browning, Montana, and went home. Something about that hunt was different, and now all four are being stalked and killed in turn by a hunter none of them can name. What is doing it has been waiting a decade.

Modern horrorMonster horrorFolk horror

Rating coming soon

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde · 1890

Basil Hallward paints a portrait of Dorian Gray, a young man whose good looks are the whole of his reputation, and Dorian is frightened of what time will do to him. He wishes that the painting, and not he, would carry the years, and his wish is granted: the portrait ages and rots while his own face stays as it was. Everything he does from then on is recorded in the painting.

Gothic horrorClassic horrorPsychological horror

Rating coming soon

The Reformatory

Tananarive Due · 2023

In 1950 in Florida, twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens is sent to the Gracetown School for Boys for six months after he kicks the son of the town's biggest landowner, who was threatening his sister. Robbie sees the dead, or haints as his mother called them, and the ones at the school show him what happens to boys who are sent out to work and never come back.

Historical horrorSouthern gothicGhost story

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The Ritual

Adam Nevill · 2011

Four friends from university go walking in the far north to get away from their lives for a week, and find they have almost nothing left to say to each other. A shortcut meant to make the hike easier leaves them lost in forest that has been left alone for a very long time. They take shelter in a building they find there and work out that the rites once performed in it were meant to feed something that has not gone away.

Folk horrorMonster horrorModern horror

Rating coming soon

The Shining

Stephen King · 1977

Jack Torrance takes a job as winter caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, a large empty place in the Colorado mountains that closes for the season, and moves in with his wife Wendy and their small son Danny. Danny has a gift the hotel badly wants. The Overlook has a long and violent history, and by the end of the winter it has started working on Jack.

Haunted housePsychological horrorModern horror

Rating coming soon

The Silent Companions

Laura Purcell · 2017

Elsie Bainbridge expected a wealthy marriage and got a husband who died within weeks of the wedding, a crumbling estate called The Bridge, resentful servants and a hostile village. Sent there to see out her pregnancy, her only company is her husband's awkward cousin. Then she finds a locked door, and behind it a painted wooden figure carved to look like a person, with Elsie's own face.

Historical horrorGothic horrorGhost story

Rating coming soon

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

Grady Hendrix · 2020

Patricia Campbell's days belong to her husband, her teenagers and her mother-in-law, and the one evening she keeps for herself is book club, where a group of Charleston women talk about true crime. After an elderly neighbour attacks her, the neighbour's charming nephew James Harris arrives and makes himself useful. Then children begin disappearing on the other side of town, and Patricia starts to suspect him.

Vampire horrorDomestic horrorModern horror

Rating coming soon

The Terror

Dan Simmons · 2007

Two Royal Navy ships sail north in 1845 looking for a passage across the top of the world, and two years later they are still there, frozen in with the coal running low and the food behind it. The novel follows the officers and crews of the Terror and the Erebus as cold, scurvy and each other wear them down, and as something out on the ice starts picking them off.

Historical horrorMonster horrorModern horror

Rating coming soon

The Troop

Nick Cutter · 2014

Every year a scoutmaster takes a group of boys camping in the Canadian wilderness for a weekend, and this year a stranger reaches their camp: emaciated, pale, starving and carrying a man-made parasite inside him. It spreads quickly and they are far from any help. Once they are hungry, frightened and infected, the boys turn on one another.

Body horrorMonster horrorModern horror

Rating coming soon

The Turn of the Screw

Henry James · 1898

A young woman takes her first post as a governess at a remote country house, with two children to look after and instructions from an uncle who does not want to be bothered. She starts seeing the former governess on the stairs and in the garden, and a man who used to work on the estate. Certain that the dead are coming for the children, she takes on the job of protecting them alone.

Gothic horrorGhost storyClassic horror

Rating coming soon

The Vegetarian

Han Kang · 2007

Yeong-hye is a part-time graphic artist and housewife in Seoul who stops eating meat and animal products after a nightmare about human cruelty. The decision is hers, but the people around her treat it as illness, betrayal or a problem to be managed. The novel is told in three parts and follows what her refusal does to her family and to the life they had planned around her.

Psychological horrorDomestic horror

Rating coming soon

The Wasp Factory

Iain Banks · 1984

Frank lives with his father in a remote part of Scotland, where the household runs on the older man's inventions and on Frank's own rituals, which are not like other people's. His mother is long gone and his older brother Eric is locked up in a psychiatric hospital. When Eric escapes and starts heading home, Frank has to get ready for a visit he knows is coming.

Psychological horrorModern horror

Rating coming soon

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Shirley Jackson · 1962

Mary Katherine Blackwood, Merricat to herself, is eighteen and lives with her older sister and their ailing uncle on the family estate, in isolation from the nearby village. Six years ago the family had a tragedy that the three survivors have neither forgotten nor been forgiven for. Then a cousin arrives expecting to be welcomed, and the arrangement the three of them have built starts to come apart.

Gothic horrorPsychological horrorDomestic horror

What fits on this shelf

The horror shelf runs from the eighteenth and nineteenth-century gothic novels that invented the furniture - the castle, the diary, the thing that will not stay buried - through the twentieth-century paperbacks and film-era classics to books published this decade. Ghost stories and haunted houses sit beside vampire and possession novels, cosmic and weird fiction, folk horror, body horror and quiet psychological dread.

A book lands here when it is built to unsettle: a haunting, a monster, a curse, an appetite, or a wrongness the characters cannot name. Crime and horror overlap at the edges, and a thriller that stays on the crime side of the line sits on the mystery shelf instead. Cross-over titles that genuinely belong on both shelves reuse one page and are listed on each.

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Horror books

The horror shelf

Frankenstein

'Salem's Lot

A Certain Hunger

A Head Full of Ghosts

At the Mountains of Madness

Beloved

Bunny

Carmilla

Dracula

Ghost Story

Hell House

Hex

Hidden Pictures

House of Leaves

How to Sell a Haunted House

I Am Legend

Interview with the Vampire

It

Mexican Gothic

My Heart Is a Chainsaw

Nothing But Blackened Teeth

Ring

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

The Ballad of Black Tom

The Changeling

The Devil Takes You Home

The Elementals

The Exorcist

The Fisherman

The Haunting of Hill House

The Hellbound Heart

The Historian

The Last House on Needless Street

The Little Stranger

The Monk

The Only Good Indians

The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Reformatory

The Ritual

The Shining

The Silent Companions

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

The Terror

The Troop

The Turn of the Screw

The Vegetarian

The Wasp Factory

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

What fits on this shelf

The other shelves

Romance

Fantasy

Sci-Fi

Mystery & Thriller

Historical Fiction

Literary Fiction

Adventure

Who writes about these books

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