New Must-Read Horror Books

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.

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.

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.

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.

What if you could enter the mind of the person you love the most? Blisteringly smart, thought-provoking, and shocking, Immaculate Conception offers us a portrait of close friendship — achingly tender and twisted — that captures the tenuous line between love and possession that will haunt you long after you turn the final page.

They call them wayward girls. And they’re sent to the Wellwood House in St. Augustine, Florida, where unwed mothers are hidden by their families to have their babies in secret, to give them up for adoption, and most important of all, to forget any of it ever happened. Everything the girls do is strictly controlled by the adults who claim they know what’s best for them. But when one girl finds an occult book about witchcraft, power is in the hands of the girls for the first time in their lives. But power can destroy as easily as it creates, and it’s never given freely. There’s always a price to be paid … and it’s usually paid in blood.

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.

London, 1925. Glamorous medium Gloria Sutter made her fortune helping the bereaved contact loved ones killed during the Great War. Now she’s been murdered at one of her own séances, after leaving a message requesting the help of her former friend and sole rival, Ellie Winter. As Ellie tries to uncover the sinister mysteries of Gloria’s life and death, an insidious evil force begins to undermine her quest for clues, a force determined to bury the truth, and whoever seeks to expose it …

When a demonic presence awakens deep in a Mexican silver mine, the young woman it seizes must turn to the one man she shouldn’t trust … from bestselling author Isabel Cañas.

Blue skies, empty land — and enough wide-open space to hide a horrifying secret. A woman with a past, a mysterious trunk, a town on the edge of nowhere, and an “absorbing, powerful” (BuzzFeed) new vision of the American West, from the award-winning author of The Changeling.

In this game, there’s one rule: Survive. 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. To save herself, she will have to play to win. But in this house, victory is earned with blood.

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.

Sam Vines is struggling. Turns out the snorkelers are looking for an ultra-luxury boating experience, not the single-handed, rarely sober, snarky stylings of sailboat captain Samantha Vines. So it’s a good thing when her former crewmate asks her to help deliver a massive, hundred-year-old sailboat from Seattle to England. The Blackwatch is a huge boat. An ancient boat. It’s also probably (definitely) haunted. Sam’s alcohol withdrawal (sobriety is important at sea) has her doubting her senses, but when one crewmate disappears and another has a gruesome accident, she knows that this simple delivery job has spiraled into something sinister. By turns terrifying, darkly funny, thought-provoking, and heartfelt, The Night That Finds Us All is a seductive, nautical nightmare.

A gothic feminist body horror in two timelines revolving around three Anatomical Venuses — ultrarealistic wax figures of women — that come to life at night to murder men who have wronged them.

Hong Kong, 1953: In a remote mansion, witnesses insist a massacre took place. The police see nothing but pristine rooms and declare it a collective hallucination. Until decades later, when one witness returns … from the Edgar®-nominated author of The Last Russian Doll.

These wholly original and shiver-inducing tales introduce readers to ghosts, curses, hauntings, monstrous creatures, complex family legacies, desperate deeds, and chilling acts of revenge. Introduced and contextualized by bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones, these stories are a celebration of Indigenous peoples’ survival and imagination, and a glorious reveling in all the things an ill-advised whistle might summon.

In this Southern gothic horror debut, a young Black woman abandons her life in 1960s Chicago for a position with a mysterious family in New Orleans, only to discover the dark truth: They’re under a curse, and they think she can break it.

In the latest jaw-dropping thriller from New York Times bestselling author Riley Sager, a man must contend with the long-ago disappearance of his childhood best friend — and the dark secrets lurking just beyond the safe confines of his picture-perfect neighborhood.

“A dark and heady dream of a book” (Alix E. Harrow) about a ruined mansion by the sea, the djinn that haunts it, and a curious girl who unearths the tragedy that happened there a hundred years previous.

#1 New York Times bestselling author Nicola Yoon’s daring new work of dystopian horror is a propulsive satire set in an all-Black gated community. For fans of The Sellout and Erasure, with a shocking ending you’ll never see coming, Jodi Picoult calls it “brilliant, provocative, seminal … Your book club will be discussing this one for DAYS.”

A young Black girl goes missing in the woods outside her white rust belt town. But she’s not the first — and she may not be the last…