Leopoldo Gout’s 2023 horror novel Piñata is a jaw-dropping contribution to the exorcism story sub-genre, playing with tropes we know and bringing in new scares that distinguish it among its counterparts. It’s about cursed artifacts, colonization, ancestral interconnectedness across time and space, rage, femicide, and sisterhood.

From Josh Malerman, the author of Bird Box, comes a collection of five spellbinding novellas called Spin a Black Yarn.

Acclaimed author Catriona Ward’s most recent novel, Looking Glass Sound, is about murder, the deception, thievery, and magic in the art of writing, witchcraft, the horror of the ocean, and the bonds of friendship.

Part mystery part horror, The Paleontologist is a fast-paced, thought-provoking story about chasing the truth, the expansiveness of geologic time, and the ripples of violence through the eras.

Tananarive Due’s most recent novel, The Reformatory, is a beyond-horrifying, semi-fictional story about a young man’s torturous imprisonment in the evil Gracetown School for Boys— nicknamed the Reformatory— and his family’s daring efforts in the face of Jim Crow era Florida to free him.

Chuck Tingle’s Camp Damascus is a thrilling coming-of-age horror story set in rural Montana in a deeply religious community called Kingdom of Pine, which owns and operates the most successful gay conversion camp in the country, Camp Damascus.

Divisive and provocative, Tell Me I’m Worthless is Alison Rumfitt’s debut novel about a fascist haunted house terrorizing Alice, a trans sex worker, Ila, an infamous TERF, and Hannah, the third wheel to Alice and Ila’s fucked up dynamic.

This book is about our expectations, the lies we tell ourselves and others, and how we covet. Early in the book, Hand tells us that Hill House plays with people’s expectations. As readers, we always go in with at least some expectations for what’s to come, and often times we are let down, or even manipulated. Perhaps both. Hill House manipulates, too. It takes our characters’ insecurities, fears, and anxieties, then twists them into reality. Likewise, the book so manipulates our assumptions as readers, dredging up a sense of unease that deepens into captivation.

What would happen if, suddenly, a large swath of the population saw something that wasn’t there, something that makes them afraid enough to turn to violence deemed necessary?

If you’re looking for a good haunted house story but in a setting that’s not an old, abandoned, Victorian mansion, check out Horrorstor. 

This book reminds you why you may have disliked adults as a child. 

Jackson has the uncanny ability to plant horrifying images in your head.

Read along as we explore Appalachia and magical realism through two Kentucky texts: the novel, A Woman in Time and the videogame, Kentucky Route Zero.