New Must-Read Horror Books

A woman must confront the demons of her past when she attempts to fix up her childhood home in this devilishly clever take on the haunted house novel from the author of Black Sheep and So Thirsty.

In this riveting dark fantasy debut, a woman with missing memories fights to survive a war-torn world of necromancy and alchemy — and the man tasked with unearthing the deepest secrets of her past.

Twenty years ago, Max Brooks shared the first-hand experiences of the survivors of the Zombie War in the powerful oral history, World War Z. Brooks traveled across the U.S. and throughout the world to record the harrowing testimony of those who came face-to-face with the living dead. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years. This deluxe slipcase edition of the #1 New York Times bestselling novel chronicling the Zombie War brings the dead to life with stunning new features!

An eerie, hypnotic debut about friendship, desire, and memory set against the sultry backdrop of Florida’s swamplands. Against this disquieting setting, where lizards dart in and out of porches and alligators peek from dark waters, Gonzalez weaves a surreal, unforgettable story about the dizzying power of early friendship and the lengths we’ll go to earn love and acceptance — even at the risk of losing ourselves entirely.

For fear of summoning evil spirits, Native superstition says you should never, ever whistle at night. A young man is haunted by a mythological specter bent on stealing everything he loves in this unsettling horror from the author of Indian Burial Ground and Sisters of the Lost Nation.

Hyper-competent Ellie thinks she’s going through perimenopause, but discovers she’s actually turning into a werewolf in this feminist, dark-comedy debut. A deeply gratifying, highly addictive and provocative read, Femme Feral is an exhilarating expression of feminine rage, with a warning: If you swallow your anger, it’s sure to come back with a bite.

We Need to Talk about Kevin as if written by Jason Reynolds and Tananarive Due meets Model Home by Rivers Solomon in an innovative twist on the haunted house novel: About a mother desperate to protect her sons from the twin specters of gun violence and otherworldly menace in their public housing project.

A diabolical collection of stories featuring achingly human characters whose lives intertwine with ghosts, goblins, and the macabre, by “Buenos Aires’s sorceress of horror” (Samanta Schweblin, The New York Times). Lyrical and hypnotic, heart-stopping and deeply moving, Enriquez’s stories never fail to enthrall, entertain, and leave us shaken.

This “darkly romantic and completely absorbing” (The New York Times) slow-burn gothic fantasy romance follows a young woman haunted by the ghosts of her past and a ruthless merchant known as the Saint of Silence, who promises her greatest desire in return for her darkest secret …

Five high school friends are bonded by an oath to protect one another no matter what. Then, on a camping trip in the middle of the forest, they find something extraordinary: A mysterious staircase to nowhere. One friend walks up — and never comes back down. Then the staircase disappears. Twenty years later, the staircase has reappeared. Now the group returns to find the lost boy — and what lies beyond the staircase in the woods …

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.

The devil was as my mother and grandmother had always described him: Polite enough that you might forget yourself, so beautiful that you’d want to, so dangerous if you did … A hundred years ago, a witch sold her soul to save her life — but now she must stop the devil from collecting his due in this gripping and nuanced debut horror novel.

Jordan Peele’s Us meets The School for Good Mothers in this horror-tinged intergenerational saga, as a single mother’s doppelganger forces her to confront the legacy of violence that has shaped every woman in their family. Following the relentless specter of generational trauma as it is handed down from mother to daughter, The Hunger We Pass Down asks what it might take to break the cycle: Heroism, depravity, or both.

When a young girl goes missing, the ghosts of the past collide with her family’s secrets in a mesmerizing Native American Southern Gothic novel. Steeped in Indigenous folklore and drawing from the author’s own family history, If the Dead Belong Here examines what it means to be haunted — both by the supernatural and by terrors of our own making.

A debut Gothic horror set in 1870s Brazil — a tale of creeping suspense in which a young pregnant woman finds herself unable to escape her lover’s isolated family home, and a family’s deal with the devil goes terribly wrong.

In this deliriously inventive twist on The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Argentine powerhouse Diego Muzzio conjures a haunting story of shattering war trauma and the disturbing proximity of sanity and madness in his English-language debut. With an ingenious structure that creates doubling and uncertainty at every turn, The Eye of Goliath is a masterfully tense novel that unites classic gothic atmospheres with disturbingly modern psychological horror.

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.