The Best Horror Books by Women

There is something strange about Silver House. The cavernous mansion is filled with secret passages, buried secrets, and even xenophobic tendencies. It also seems to have a stranglehold on the Silver women who have lived there for four generations …

Three women in three different eras encounter danger and witchcraft in this eerie multigenerational horror saga from the New York Times bestselling author of Mexican Gothic.

Ten years ago, three sisters disappeared only to return a month later, but with no memory of what happened to them. Now, one of the sisters has gone missing again, and as the other two go searching for her, they start to unravel the mystery of their childhood disappearance and nothing is what it seems.

Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams — invasive images of blood and brutality — torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce meat altogether. It’s a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. Celebrated by critics around the world, The Vegetarian is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman’s struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her.

Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. Beloved is also a horror novel. The hallmarks of a ghost story or gothic tale are all there — mysterious hauntings, family trauma, buried secrets, tragic deaths, and discomfiting truths about the human condition. Morrison’s prose is obviously superlative, and she confronts readers with the utter agony endured by survivors of American slavery. It’s an eerie, disorienting, heartbreaking, beautiful book.

Jasmyn and King Williams move their family to the planned Black utopia of Liberty, California hoping to find a community of like-minded people, a place where their growing family can thrive. Jasmyn expected to find liberals and social justice activists striving for racial equality, but Liberty residents seem more focused on booking spa treatments and ignoring the world’s troubles. Then Jasmyn discovers a terrible secret about Liberty and its founders. Will the truth destroy her world in ways she never could have imagined? The hotly-anticipated and endlessly provocative thriller of race and privilege set in an all-Black gated community from #1 New York Times bestselling author Nicola Yoon.

A pitch-perfect Victorian ghost story of a wraithlike apparition who haunts a rural English town. All the traditional markers are here: Creepy kids, unexplained screams, family secrets, and a horrifying late-in-the-game shock. One of those books that proves that the classic moves still work wonders.

A young woman living in a rigid, puritanical society discovers dark powers within herself in this stunning, feminist fantasy debut.

A darkly funny domestic horror novel about a woman who must take drastic measures to save her husband and herself from the vengeful ghost of her mother-in-law.

On an unnamed island, objects are disappearing: First hats, then ribbons, birds, roses … Most of the inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few able to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten. When a young writer discovers that her editor is in danger, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards, and together they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past. Powerful and provocative, The Memory Police is a stunning novel about the trauma of loss.

When Noemi receives an urgent letter from her cousin begging her to come and save her from a mysterious doom, Noemi finds herself isolated in a mansion in the Mexican countryside, alongside her cousin’s new husband and his unsettling family members. There are many secrets behind the walls of the house, and Noemi must uncover the truth before it’s walls close in around her.

A novel of family, secrets, ghosts and homecoming set on the seaside cliffs of Maine, by the New York Times bestselling author of Friends and Strangers. Enthralling, richly imagined, filled with psychic mediums and charlatans, spirits and past lives, mothers, marriage, and the legacy of alcoholism, this is a deeply moving novel about the land we inhabit, the women who came before us, and the ways in which none of us will ever truly leave this earth.

A young woman is drawn into a dangerous game after being invited to the mazelike home of her childhood friend, a rumored witch, in this gothic horror set in 1986 Philippines. In this game, there’s one rule: survive. To save herself, she will have to play to win. But in this house, victory is earned with blood. A lush new voice in horror arises in this riveting gothic set against the upheaval of 1986 Philippines and the People Power Revolution.

This mesmerizing novel tells the story of a brutal murder in the staid Tokyo suburbs, as a young mother who works the night shift making boxed lunches strangles her abusive husband and then seeks the help of her coworkers to dispose of the body and cover up her crime. This leads to a terrifying foray into the violent underbelly of Japanese society. At once a masterpiece of literary suspense and pitch-black comedy of gender warfare, Out is also a moving evocation of the pressures and prejudices that drive women to extreme deeds, and the friendships that bolster them in the aftermath.

The challenge: Spend a week hiding in an abandoned amusement park and don’t get caught. The prize: enough money to change everything. Even though everyone is desperate to win — to seize a dream future or escape a haunting past — Mack is sure she can beat her competitors. All she has to do is hide, and she’s an expert at that. It’s the reason she’s alive and her family isn’t. But as the people around her begin disappearing one by one, Mack realizes that this competition is even more sinister than she imagined and that together might be the only way to survive.

Imagine if the Sackler family had a demon at their beck and call. Historical horror maven Alma Katsu turns her talents to the modern world for the first time, in this terrifying tale about an all-powerful family with an ancient evil under its thumb.

Before college starts, two best friends go on one last trip together — a three-day hike in the woods of a local National Park. As tensions build, what started off as a great adventure soon gets derailed by evil forces. Will their friendship survive the weekend? Will they survive at all?

A young couple find themselves haunted by a string of gruesome murders committed along an old deserted road in this terrifying new novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Cold Cases.

Classics are classics for a reason, and nobody writes quite like Shirley Jackson. The Haunting of Hill House is a masterclass in how to walk the knife’s edge, narratively speaking, between a protagonist’s fractured psyche and actual supernatural happenings. Jackson keeps you just a little bit off-balance on every page, and by the end of the book you won’t know up from down.

A deliciously dark horror reimagining of a Greek tragedy, by Ivy Pochoda, winner of the LA Times Book Prize. Lena wants her life back. Her wealthy, controlling, humorless husband has just died, and now she contends with her controlling, humorless son, Drew. Lena years to rediscover her true nature and is intrigued by a group of women living in tents on the beach. Soon she’ll find that an ancient God stirs on the beach, awakening dark desires of women across the island. The only question left will be whether Lena will join them, and what it will cost her. Ecstasy is a riveting, darkly poetic, one-sitting read about empowerment, desire, and what happens when women reject the roles set out for them.

What makes Schweblin’s Little Eyes so scary, is that it seems like it could be happening in our world right now. In this world people can buy a device called a “kentuki,” a toy with cameras for eyes, wheels, motor, and a person who lives virtually inside. People can sign up to be either the keeper of the toy, or the dweller living inside. What starts out as a way to bring people together across the globe, turns into something so sinister, you can’t look away.

Vampire hunter Anita Blake is no stranger to killing monsters. It’s part of her job as a Preternatural U.S. Marshal, after all. But even her experience isn’t enough to stop something that is bent on destroying everything — and everyone — she loves.

Laura Purcell’s novel is an atmospheric slice of Victorian Gothic goodness: Elsie, pregnant and widowed only a few weeks into her marriage, moves to her late husband’s crumbling family estate. But there’s no comfort for her there – just hostile townsfolk, recalcitrant servants, and a painted wooden figure that looks exactly like Elsie, and whose eyes have an unnerving tendency to follow her around the room.

Three girls, one supernatural killer on the loose … From the author of the New York Times bestseller House of Hollow comes a darkly seductive witchy thriller where, though both men and demons lurk in the shadows, girls refuse to go quietly into the night.

1944: As World War II rages on, the threat has come to the home front. In a remote corner of Idaho, Meiko Briggs and her daughter, Aiko, are desperate to return home. Following Meiko’s husband’s enlistment as an air force pilot in the Pacific months prior, Meiko and Aiko were taken from their home in Seattle and sent to one of the internment camps in the Midwest. Mother and daughter attempt to hold on to elements of their old life in the camp when a mysterious disease begins to spread among those interned. Inspired by the Japanese yokai and the jorogumo spider demon, The Fervor explores the horrors of the supernatural beyond just the threat of the occult.

In 1948, Irene Willard, who’s had five previous miscarriages in a quest to give her beloved husband the child he desperately desires, is now pregnant again. She comes to an isolated house-cum-hospital in the Berkshires. Here she discovers a long-forgotten walled garden on the spacious grounds, a place imbued with its own powers and pulls. As the doctors’ plans begin to crumble, Irene and her fellow patients make a desperate bid to harness the power of the garden for themselves — and face the unthinkable risks associated with such incalculable rewards. An eerie, masterful novel about pregnancy as a haunted house and the ways the female body has always been policed and manipulated, from the award-winning author of The Illness Lesson.