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. This is page 5 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonLockwood & Co. is the smallest agency in the ghost-haunting trade, and the larger firm run by Quill Kipps keeps taking its cases. When a job to seal a coffin goes wrong and something powerful is released, the small agency is left with the task of recovering it before it does damage across London, with its reputation and its rivals both working against it.
Rating coming soonDriving home on New Year's Eve, the cocktail waitress Sookie Stackhouse finds a man running along the road with no clothes on and no idea who he is. She knows him, because the vampire Eric has been one of the most dangerous people in her life for years, and the person beside her in the car is frightened, polite and entirely unlike himself.
Rating coming soonSookie Stackhouse notices her brother Jason's eyes beginning to change, which means he is about to become a were-panther for the first time. Then a sniper begins shooting at the local shape-changers, taking one victim at a time, and Jason's new companions start to wonder whether the newest member of their pack is the one holding the rifle.
Rating coming soonDown an alley beside a pub, through a small iron door in a brick wall, there is a house that is not always there. Those who find it see what they most want to see, including people and places that cannot be real, and the brother and sister who live in it have been waiting a long time for guests.
Rating coming soonSookie Stackhouse is a cocktail waitress in Bon Temps, Louisiana, who can hear other people's thoughts, and she has had a run of bad luck. A colleague of hers is murdered and nobody seems to take it seriously, and then she is attacked by a creature that leaves her poisoned. The local vampires save her life by drawing the poison out, and when one of them asks her to do something in return, she agrees. The favour takes her to Dallas to use her telepathy to find a vampire who has gone missing.
Rating coming soonAnya is a Russian emigre at a New England private school, embarrassed by her family and unhappy with her body and her social life. When she skips school and falls down a dry well in the woods, she finds a skeleton at the bottom and meets the ghost of Emily, a girl her own age who died ninety years earlier. Emily offers to be her friend and to help her, which is a good deal more than anyone else at school has done.
Rating coming soonBlake has always been the cautious brother, and Quinn, two years younger, is the one who wants to ride the Kamikaze. At an amusement park one evening Blake wins a game of ball toss and is given a ticket to another park, one that is invitation-only and open through the night. He takes Quinn and two friends with him, and every ride there turns out to be a test that has to be survived before sunrise.
Rating coming soonMaggie is twelve and has been thrown out of more boarding schools and foster homes than she can count, for lying, stealing and disobedience. Her only living relatives are two great-aunts, who take her into a large stone house called Adelphi Hills that was once a boarding school and looks like a prison, planning to reform her with rigid rules about food and exercise. Alone in the empty rooms, she begins to hear whispering from behind a closet door.
Rating coming soonJohnny Maxwell is twelve and takes a shortcut home through the local cemetery, where he meets the spirit of Alderman Thomas Bowler and discovers that he can talk to the dead. The other occupants of the cemetery object to being called ghosts, and they have a problem: the council has sold their neglected graveyard to a developer. Johnny and his friends take on the job of stopping it.
Rating coming soonPierce tries to go back to the life she had before the accident and finds that she is never quite alone: somebody is always watching her. She moves to a new town and a new school in the hope of starting again, and he finds her there too. She knows that he is not a guardian angel and that the dark world he comes from is not heaven, and she cannot keep away from him, least of all when he appears exactly at the moment she needs him.
Rating coming soonGalaxy Stern is the least likely member of Yale's freshman class: she dropped out of school early in Los Angeles and by the age of twenty was the sole survivor of a multiple homicide. In her hospital bed she is offered a second chance, a place at Yale, and she takes it. She can see ghosts, and she has been recruited into Lethe, the ninth house, to keep watch over the eight secret societies that practise dangerous occult magic.
Rating coming soonThe vampire world is in crisis. Vampires have been proliferating out of control, and burnings have begun around the world, massacres on the scale of those carried out by Akasha in The Queen of the Damned. Old vampires, roused from their sleep in the earth, are doing the bidding of a Voice that commands them to burn the mavericks of their own kind in cities from Paris and Mumbai to Hong Kong, Kyoto and San Francisco.
Rating coming soonDale Stewart was once a respected college professor and a novelist, and he has wrecked his career and his marriage. In the last hours of Halloween he returns to Elm Haven, the dying town where he grew up, hoping to find peace in isolation, and moves into a long-deserted farmhouse on its outskirts: the one-time home of a strange and brilliant friend who died in a grisly accident in the summer of 1960.
Rating coming soonWill's brother Shawn is dead, shot on the street, and everybody in the building knows the rules that come afterwards: nobody cries, nobody tells, and somebody pays. Will takes the gun out of his brother's drawer, steps into the lift on the eighth floor and rides it down, meaning to keep the third rule. Seven floors is not a long way, but there is time in it for one more conversation with the people he has lost.
Rating coming soonIn 1941 the Lecter family's castle in Lithuania is overrun and the boy Hannibal, eight years old, loses the people he loves in the winter that follows. He grows up after the war in France, in the care of his uncle's widow, Lady Murasaki, and decides that he will find the men who took his family and deal with them himself.
Rating coming soonMaud Ruthyn is seventeen and an orphan, and her father's will leaves her in the care of her uncle Silas, a man the family has spent years not talking about. His house at Bartram-Haugh is run down, his household is unsettling, and the fortune Maud brings with her is the only thing standing between her guardian and ruin.
Rating coming soonA scholar named Melmoth sold his soul for a hundred and fifty extra years of life, and the time he was granted is running out. He travels the world looking for somebody desperate enough to take the bargain off his hands, and the people he visits, prisoners, exiles and the bereaved, each have their own account of the offer he made them.
Rating coming soonThe Dollanganger children lose their father in a car crash, and their mother takes them to live in secret in an enormous house, where their grandmother locks them in an upstairs room and their mother promises the arrangement will soon be over. Days turn into years, and the four of them learn what their mother is prepared to sacrifice for the fortune waiting downstairs.
Rating coming soonRosamond Treverton believes she is the daughter of the mistress of Porthgenna Tower, and twenty years after that woman's death the truth about her parentage is still hidden, written down by a servant and left in an unused room. A blind girl, a lost letter and a house with one door that is never opened carry the secret until somebody finds it.
Rating coming soonThomas Small is thirteen when his family moves from North Carolina to Ohio to live in the house of a long-dead abolitionist, a building full of hidden passages that once sheltered people escaping slavery. His father has taken the lease in order to study the house, and somebody in the town wants them gone.
Rating coming soonThe Baudelaire orphans are separated on a mountain road, with Violet and Klaus left behind while Sunny is carried off by Count Olaf and his troupe. To get their sister back they have to climb the Mortmain Mountains in the cold, follow the marks left by a vanished organisation, and work out who among the people they meet can be trusted.
Rating coming soonOdd Thomas has gone to a monastery in the mountains to live quietly and decide what to do with his life. Then a presence he dreads appears in its halls, a monk goes missing, and something with a taste for violence arrives with the winter storm. Odd has to work out what is inside the abbey before the thing he has seen comes true.
Rating coming soonHarriet and David Lovatt marry young, share a taste for the settled family life they cannot find elsewhere, and buy a large house with room for the children they intend to have. The first four arrive to general disapproval and private happiness. Then Ben is born, and the household that was built for a particular kind of contentment cannot hold him.
Rating coming soonThe Raxter School for Girls has been under quarantine for eighteen months, since the Tox arrived and began changing the island the school stands on. The teachers died first, the girls began to change next, and the supplies the navy brings are only just enough. Hetty is waiting for her friend Byatt to come back from the infirmary.
Rating coming soonThe dead rose on the battlefields of Gettysburg and the American Civil War stopped before it could be won. In the country that emerged, safety depends on a few people doing dangerous work, and the laws require Black and Native American children to attend combat schools to learn how to put the dead back down.
Rating coming soonOllie has been reading a book of ghost stories since her mother died, and the story she keeps returning to is about a girl called Beth, two brothers who loved her, and a bargain with something called the smiling man. Then her school bus breaks down beside a farm, and the story stops being something she is reading.
Rating coming soonEmily was a selfish, wilful and hateful child who died before her thirteenth birthday, and that was a long time ago. Jane is nine and an orphan when she and her young aunt come to spend the summer at her grandmother's house in Massachusetts, and one day in the garden she looks into a reflecting ball and sees a face that is not her own.
Rating coming soonLaurel has not heard from her father since he left her mother when she was small, and she has kept the wound open by reading his novels and following his career. When a stranger comes into her bookshop on Long Island and picks up a copy of the latest one, she has a premonition, and what follows takes her into the family she has never met.
Rating coming soonAmbrosio is the most admired preacher in Madrid, a monk whose reputation for holiness has made him the ornament of his monastery. What he is protecting is a set of vows he has already begun to break, and the novel follows what happens when the temptation he gives in to is one he cannot undo.
Rating coming soonAfter her encounter with a copycat of Jack the Ripper, Rory Deveaux has been living in Bristol under her parents' supervision, and when her therapist suggests she go back to her London school she takes the chance. What she has brought back with her is a new and dangerous ability, and the people who deal with the city's ghosts know about it.
Rating coming soonThe Baudelaire orphans are taken to a boarding school whose motto is Remember You Will Die and whose building looks like a cemetery, where the teachers are unpleasant, the rules are arbitrary and nobody is prepared to sign the permission slips that would let the children sleep anywhere decent. They also make friends for the first time, which is a novelty.
Rating coming soonSusan Marlow returns to Greenwood Manor expecting the house and the aunt she grew up loving. Lady Agatha Gordon has taken in a permanent guest instead: Craig Stanton, a handsome stranger she calls a genius, a man who will shed new light on the Gordon family history, and the only person she trusts. Susan distrusts him on sight, and the harder she tries to keep clear of him the deeper she is drawn into his plans for the house.
Rating coming soonEmily St. Aubert loses her mother and then her father, and finds herself with too little protection and a considerable inheritance. Her aunt's marriage to the Italian Signor Montoni carries the family to a remote castle in the Apennines, where unexplained noises, locked rooms and veiled pictures begin Emily's real troubles. Nothing at Udolpho is explained to her, and very little of it is what it appears.
Rating coming soonMatilda Weimar flees her lecherous uncle and takes refuge in the ancient Castle of Wolfenbach, where the abandoned chambers hold the horrifying mystery of the missing Countess. The castle is not a safe hiding place for long, because her uncle is still looking for her, and the novel was one of the horrid books named in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey.
Rating coming soonBook the Eighth. Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire, accused of a murder they did not commit, escape into a van belonging to a group called Volunteers Fighting Disease and end up at Heimlich Hospital, a building that is only half finished. It has a Library of Records the children hope will explain their parents' secrets, and their enemy is already inside it.
Rating coming soonMiranda has just become the life of the party, and all she had to do was die. Elevated by the King of the Mantle of Dracul, she goes from high-school theatre hopeful to glamorous fiend in a single night. Her guardian angel, Zachary, has been demoted to human form as her personal assistant, and there is a gala to arrange.
Rating coming soonThe apocalypse has already happened, the world has burned, and something new has grown out of the destruction. Bec is back to face the Demonata, and after centuries of imprisonment she is more powerful than she has ever been, which is fortunate, because the demons are not standing alone any more and Lord Loss is no longer the greatest threat to humanity.
Rating coming soonElena and her friends are starting at the beautiful campus of Dalcrest College, and Stefan and Damon appear to have reached an understanding at last. Leaving Fell's Church does not mean leaving the past behind, however, and students soon begin to disappear from the campus. Elena uncovers a secret that suggests a tragedy ahead of them cannot be avoided.
Rating coming soonErin Wright and her best friend Marty love horror films, especially the Shocker on Shock Street series, where the Toadinator and Ape Face live. When they visit the new Shocker Studio theme park, their tram gets stuck in the Cave of the Living Creeps and the monsters they have watched all their lives start behaving like real ones.
Rating coming soonAbby and Peter are staying with their uncle Jonathan in an eerie old village, and their uncle knows a great deal about Egypt: his living room looks like an ancient tomb. Strange things happen in the house, and Slappy the dummy and other villains have been sighted in the HorrorLand theme park nearby.
Rating coming soonRobby Schwartz writes comic strips on his computer, and his favourite creation is Dr. Maniac, a wicked supervillain with a taste for drama and destruction. Then Dr. Maniac escapes the screen and starts walking around in the real world, while seven ordinary children are trapped inside the HorrorLand theme park and nobody knows how to reach them.
Rating coming soonVictor Frankenstein is sixteen and his twin brother Konrad is dying in the family chateau in the republic of Geneva in the eighteenth century, and the doctors can do nothing for him. In the family's secret library Victor finds an account of the Elixir of Life, and decides that he will make it himself, whatever the ingredients demand.
Rating coming soonKonrad Frankenstein is dead, and his father orders the destruction of the Dark Library that Victor once ransacked looking for a cure. Victor saves a book that promises more than conversation with the dead: a way into their realm. Soon he, Elizabeth and Henry are in the spirit world of the chateau.
Rating coming soonTom Ward is apprenticed to the Spook, and he is dismayed when his master announces that they will spend the winter on Anglezarke Moor. The moor is gloomy and forbidding, and the Spook has his reasons for choosing it. There are two dangerous witches to deal with and a dark mage who wants to raise something ancient.
Rating coming soonDelia's new house was not built as a house. It used to be the Piven Institute for the Care and Correction of Troubled Females, an asylum that local people nicknamed Hysteria Hall, and its rooms and records still belong to the institution. Many of the young women held there were neither insane nor dangerous.
Rating coming soonIn 1888 Will Henry is twelve years old and apprenticed to Dr. Pellinore Warthrop, a New England scientist who hunts real monsters and studies them afterwards. The new quarry is the Wendigo, a creature that starves as it eats, and the hunt takes the pair into country where the monster is not the only danger.
Rating coming soonIn rural Oregon in the 1920s, Hanalee Denney is sixteen, biracial and trying to find the truth about her father's death. The official account says a drunk driver hit him, and nobody in town wants to discuss it further. The Ku Klux Klan is active nearby, and a ghost has begun telling her a different story.
Rating coming soonSofia is new at school and anxious to fit in, so when a group of popular girls invites her into their circle she accepts. The group has decided that Brooklyn, a loner they believe to be evil, needs to be rescued from something inside her. Their remedy is an exorcism, and Sofia is expected to help.
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.
The love story is the plot: fantasy courts, dragon academies and modern cities all count.
676 booksPrimary genreEpic quests, grimdark cities, retold myths and a few very stubborn rabbits.
685 booksPrimary genreGeneration ships, dying empires, robots with opinions and one very unlucky astronaut.
536 booksPrimary genreDetectives, spies, locked rooms and the people who lie to the police.
599 booksPrimary genreCathedrals, courts, trenches and revolutions, all of it set in a past that is doing the work.
580 booksPrimary genreNovels where the prose carries the book: families, cities, memory and the modern self.
575 booksPrimary genreShipwrecks, expeditions, chases, frontiers and people who should have turned back.
324 books