Best Horror Books

Rowan Caine writes a letter from prison, claiming to be innocent of the child's death she is accused of. She was a nanny at a remote Scottish smart-house — a high-tech home that watched her every move, recorded every conversation, and whose previous nannies kept leaving without explanation. A locked-room thriller for the surveillance age.

Andy McGee and his eight-year-old daughter Charlie are on the run from a shadowy government agency called The Shop after years of experiments have left Charlie with pyrokinetic abilities she can barely control. The more frightened Charlie becomes, the larger and less predictable her fires.

Mary Yellan arrives at Jamaica Inn on the Cornish moors to live with her aunt, and finds a place of terror run by her brutal uncle Joss Merlyn, who is involved in wrecking ships on the coast for their cargo.

Hal is a tarot card reader barely surviving on Brighton pier. When a solicitor's letter arrives informing her she's named in a will she has no right to inherit, Hal travels to Trepassen House — a decaying Cornish mansion where the eccentric Westaway family is gathering — and decides to pretend to be the granddaughter she isn't.

The Pyncheon family has lived for generations under the shadow of a curse laid by a man their ancestor wrongly executed for witchcraft. Hawthorne's second novel is a Gothic meditation on inherited guilt — the way the sins of the ancestors persist in the family's blood, property, and character.

Set in a twenty-first century England that has adopted republican government, Mary Shelley's visionary 1826 novel follows Lionel Verney as a plague sweeps across the world, wiping out humanity one country at a time, until he walks the earth alone — the last human survivor. One of the earliest and most devastating pandemic novels ever written.

Gwynplaine, whose mouth was surgically carved into a permanent grin as a child by a gang called the Comprachicos, grows up as a carnival performer and discovers he is an English peer. Hugo's most melodramatic novel is also his most direct examination of disfigurement, spectacle, and the face made into a mask by forces outside the self.

The third Cemetery of Forgotten Books novel returns to Daniel Sempere and reveals the backstory of Fermín Romero de Torres — his imprisonment in Montjuïc Castle during the early Franco years — connecting the series' mysteries to the specific historical violence of the Spanish Civil War's aftermath.

A young governess at a remote English estate becomes convinced that the children in her charge are in contact with the malevolent spirits of two dead servants.

A friendly St. Bernard contracts rabies and traps a mother and her young son inside a broken-down car on a sweltering summer day in rural Maine. With no supernatural element, King strips horror down to its barest components: an animal, heat, thirst, and time running out.

The ka-tet fractures across time and world: Susannah is drawn to New York, 1999, carrying a demonic child that may doom or save the Tower; Roland and Eddie travel to Maine, 1977, where they must obtain the land for a vacant lot and encounter a young writer named Stephen King working on a novel called The Gunslinger. The meta-fictional stakes escalate dramatically.

When the eminent Egyptologist Abel Trelawny falls into a mysterious coma, his daughter Margaret and young barrister Malcolm Ross find themselves drawn into the terrifying legacy of an ancient Egyptian queen — and an experiment in resurrection that may unleash something the modern world is wholly unprepared for.

An invisible, impenetrable dome descends without warning on the small town of Chester's Mill, Maine, sealing it off from the outside world. As resources dwindle and communication with the exterior becomes impossible, the town's worst political instincts emerge with terrifying speed.

Written in 1819 but suppressed by Shelley's father and unpublished until 1959, Mathilda is a harrowing gothic novella about a young woman destroyed by her father's incestuous obsession and her subsequent withdrawal into grief. Autobiographical in its emotional truth, it is among the most painfully honest works Shelley ever wrote.

A morbidly obese lawyer accidentally kills an old Romani woman with his car and receives a single word from her ancient father — 'thinner' — triggering an unstoppable supernatural curse that begins to consume him.

Mark Spitz is a sweeper — part of a civilian unit tasked with clearing zombies from lower Manhattan after a plague. The novel covers three days of his work, interspersed with flashbacks to the collapse and his survival of it. A literary zombie novel about grief, memory, and the texture of the American city in ruins.

The Southern Reach trilogy concludes with three parallel timelines: Control and Ghost Bird inside Area X, the former Director on the last expedition she ever launched, and the original lighthouse keeper in the years before Area X appeared.

The origin story of Hannibal Lecter: from his aristocratic Lithuanian childhood through the traumatic events of the Second World War that broke something fundamental, to the first murders in post-war Europe and Japan. A prequel that traces the specific losses and grievances that created the most celebrated fictional cannibal.

American twins inherit a flat overlooking Highgate Cemetery in London from an aunt they never met — and find themselves entangled with a ghost, the aunt's former lover, and a mystery about the family's past.

Stoker's final novel pits a young Englishman against an ancient, monstrous entity lurking beneath the English countryside — part gothic horror, part folk legend, part fever dream. Lady Arabella March conceals a terrifying secret in her estate, and only Adam Salton can confront the primordial evil coiled beneath Mercy Farm.

Set in fourteenth-century Italy, Valperga follows the rise of the condottiere Castruccio Castracani — a real historical figure — from boyhood idealism to tyrannical power, through the eyes of Euthanasia, the remarkable Countess of Valperga, who loves him and watches him be destroyed by ambition.

The new director of the Southern Reach — the agency that monitors Area X — inherits a dysfunctional organisation, a returned Biologist who cannot remember her expedition, and the dawning realisation that the border between Area X and the outside world may not be where anyone thought.

On the rugged Scottish coast near Cruden Bay, Archibald Hunter is drawn into a web of mystery involving second sight, hidden treasure connected to the Spanish Armada, and dangerous conspirators — as well as a romance with the spirited American Marjory Drake.

Rupert Sent Leger inherits a fortune and travels to a Balkan land called the Land of the Blue Mountains, where he encounters a mysterious woman in a shroud who may be a vampire — or a princess in disguise. Gothic horror merges with Ruritanian adventure in Stoker's politically ambitious late novel.