It’s officially spooky season and I, as a fall girlie, have risen from my summer slumber. To mark my return to my best self, I have curated for you a list of must read horrors for your fall TBR. I’ve got a little bit of everything sprinkled on here with more spooky reads coming for the whole haunting season.
Slewfoot by Brom
I read this book last fall and I can guarantee that you won’t be reading this with the lights off. Brom knows exactly how to submerge you into this dark tale of injustice and revenge. I at many times found myself holding my breath waiting for something to jump out at me from the book itself. Richly atmospheric and satisfying, it’s the perfect book to start every spooky season.
Publisher Synopsis
A USA TODAY BESTSELLER!
Set in Colonial New England, Slewfoot is a tale of magic and mystery, of triumph and terror as only dark fantasist Brom can tell it.
Connecticut, 1666: An ancient spirit awakens in a dark wood. The wildfolk call him Father, slayer, protector. The colonists call him Slewfoot, demon, devil. To Abitha, a recently widowed outcast, alone and vulnerable in her pious village, he is the only one she can turn to for help.
Together, they ignite a battle between pagan and Puritan – one that threatens to destroy the entire village, leaving nothing but ashes and bloodshed in their wake.
This terrifying tale of bewitchery features more than two dozen of Brom’s haunting full-color paintings and brilliant endpapers, fully immersing readers in this wild and unforgiving world.
Title Information
Publisher: Tor Nightfire
Series: No
Pages: 336
Genres: Fiction, Horror, Fantasy, Dark Fantasy, Horror – Monsters & Creatures, Horror – Occult & Supernatural
Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix
Grady Hendrix is a genius of horror with many titles on the New York Times bestseller list. I love a dark tale of feminine rage and devouring your demons! This title is sure to be one you wish you could read again for the first time.
Publisher Synopsis
“Superb … a perfect horror for our imperfect age.” – The New York Times
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES AND USA TODAY BESTSELLER
They were never girls, they were witches . . . .
They call them wayward girls. Loose girls. Girls who grew up too fast. 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.
Fifteen-year-old Fern arrives at the home in the sweltering summer of 1970, pregnant, frightened, and alone. Under the watchful eye of the stern Miss Wellwood, she meets a dozen other girls in the same predicament. There’s Rose, a hippie who insists she’s going to find a way to keep her baby and escape to a commune. And Zinnia, a budding musician who plans to marry her baby’s father. And Holly, a wisp of a girl, barely fourteen, mute and pregnant by no-one-knows-who.
Everything the girls eat, every moment of their waking day, and everything they’re allowed to talk about is strictly controlled by the adults who claim they know what’s best for them. Then Fern meets a librarian who gives her an occult book about witchcraft, and 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.
Title Information
Publisher: Berkley
Series: No
Pages: 512
Genres: Fiction, Horror, Mystery, Horror – General, Thriller, Thriller – Suspense, Thriller – Psychological
We Used to Live Here by Marcus Kliewer
The perfect dream home gone horribly wrong. As Kliewer’s debut novel, this story was originally on Reddit as a short, then was so wildly popular that the film rights were acquired before the full-length novel was completed. I love the cover of this one because it just gives that something is off vibe. That easily overlooked red flag that comes back to haunt you. Creepy and queer, it’s sure to haunt you long after the last page is turned.
Publisher Synopsis
From an author “destined to become a titan of the macabre and unsettling” (Erin A. Craig, #1 New York Times bestselling author), a haunting debut—soon to be a Netflix original movie—about two homeowners whose lives are turned upside down when the house’s previous residents unexpectedly visit.
As a young, queer couple who flip houses, Charlie and Eve can’t believe the killer deal they’ve just gotten on an old house in a picturesque neighborhood. As they’re working in the house one day, there’s a knock on the door. A man stands there with his family, claiming to have lived there years before and asking if it would be alright if he showed his kids around. People pleaser to a fault, Eve lets them in.
As soon as the strangers enter their home, inexplicable things start happening, including the family’s youngest child going missing and a ghostly presence materializing in the basement. Even more weird, the family can’t seem to take the hint that their visit should be over. And when Charlie suddenly vanishes, Eve slowly loses her grip on reality. Something is terribly wrong with the house and with the visiting family—or is Eve just imagining things?
Title Information
Publisher: Atria/ Emily Bestseller Books
Series: No
Pages: 320
Genres: Fiction, Horror, Mystery, Thriller, Thriller – Suspense, Thriller – Supernatural, Horror – General
Only Spell Deep by Ava Morgyn
This title I chose from NetGalley as an ARC last year and it has stuck with me since. I will likely be rereading this one because I love a witchy gothic tale. Described as Rebecca meets The Craft I could not put this one down. It has familial secrets, multigenerational curses, and a lot of tension.
Publisher Synopsis
From the USA Today bestselling author of The Bane Witch!
Judeth Cole has always had certain uncanny abilities. But when she arrived at Solidago, her grandfather’s estate by the sea, she was forced to keep them secret. There she lived a harsh life under his rule and the haunting legacy of her late grandmother, Aurelia. Until the fateful day she ignited a fire with her magic. It was the last time she saw her family alive.
Seventeen years later, she’s living in Seattle as Jude Clark, and failing at life, when she makes a last detour through her favorite bookstore, selecting a book to read as she waits to die. But when she pulls it from the shelf, an invitation to her for a clandestine midnight meeting slips out.
Jude is quickly swept up into a world of secrets and magic, discovering a circle of powerful new companions led by the mysterious, enigmatic Arla. The source of their magic, Arla tells her, is an entity, trapped and bound, that they call The Fathom. But Jude swiftly realizes Arla wants this power all to herself, and that she’s willing to kill for it.
Terrified, Jude turns to Levi, the handsome bookseller who’s seen her at her worst. With his help, she begins a research journey that leads her all the way back to Solidago, the house she swore to never return to. Now, the Fathom threatening to break free and Arla on the hunt, Jude must finally face her past to save her future.
Ava Morgyn’s Only Spell Deep is a novel that takes readers on a journey into a dark, glittering world of magic, a place where power should never be caged and misplaced trust can have deadly consequences.
Title Information
Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin
Series: No
Pages: 352
Genres: Fiction, Horror – Occult & Supernatural, Popular Fiction, Paranormal, Witches, Romance, Horror
You Should Have Been Nicer to My Mom by Vincent Tirado
Another gothic domestic horror for you. I honestly have to stop myself from piling these up in a list because I LOVE a great gothic novel. The eerie atmosphere, the unseen horror lurking in the shadows, I want to read them all. This cover reminds me of the 2006 animated film Monster House which honestly sums up the kind of weird kid I was because I loved that movie!
Publisher Synopsis
Demons clash with inheritance claims as secrets unfold and violence is unleashed over twelve harrowing hours trapped in a house with the worst thing imaginable: family.
When Papi Ramon, the patriarch of the wealthy Abreu family dies, he gives the family one last message in the will: “One of you is el bacà, the demon that I made a deal with. Get rid of them or you will be damned.” Xiomara, the uncontested favorite of Papi Ramon (and therefore the least liked in the family), watches as everyone dismisses this as the joke of a senile old man and demands the lawyer obtain the previous will Papi wrote.
While the lawyer drives back to his office, a storm breaks out, forcing the entire family—Xiomara’s aunts and uncles and cousins—to remain in the house. And the words of Papi’s will hangs over their heads even heavier than the rain clouds. Over the course of the night, scandal after scandal is revealed to the public about the family. Suddenly a tense few hours of surviving her family turns into a vicious night of recrimination, violence, accusations…and murder.
Xiomara is faced with an impossible task: uproot a demon and somehow kill it or excise the ghosts that linger within her own family.
And the clock is ticking…
Title Information
Publisher: William Morrow
Series: No
Pages: 256
Genres: Fiction, Popular Fiction, Horror, Horror – Gothic, Mystery, LGBTQ, Psychological, Thriller, Thriller – Domestic
Midnight Timetable by Bora Chung
I absolutely had to include a translation because I deeply believe that we should be reading stories from all over the world. And as a girl that loves BTS you know that I didn’t just stop at Kpop. Now I consume a decent amount of Korean media, including books. Written as a series of interconnected stories that are more unnerving than anything else. A literary style of prose that showcases the horrors of mundane life.
Publisher Synopsis
*A FINALIST FOR THE LOCUS AWARD FOR BEST TRANSLATED NOVEL*
“Like the objects collected in this deliciously haunting book, Midnight Timetable will absorb you in the shadows of its imagination, marvelous oddness, humor, and heart.”
—Gerardo Sámano Córdova
From the author and translator of the National Book Award finalist and Booker Prize shortlisted Cursed Bunny, comes a novel-in-ghost-stories, set in a mysterious research center that houses cursed objects, where those who open the wrong door might find it’s disappeared behind them, or that the echoing footsteps they’re running from are their own…
The acclaimed Korean horror and sci-fi writer’s goosebump-inducing new book follows an employee on the night shift at the Institute. They soon learn why some employees don’t last long at the center. The handkerchief in Room 302 once belonged to the late mother of two sons, whose rivalry imbues the handkerchief with undue power and unravels the lives of those who seek to possess it. Meanwhile a live-streaming, ghost-chasing employee steals a cursed sneaker down the hall, but later finds he can’t escape its tread. The cat in Room 206 begins to reveal the crimes of its former family, wanting to understand its own path to the Institute’s dimly lit halls.
But Chung’s haunted institute isn’t just a chilling place to play. As in her astounding collections Cursed Bunny and Your Utopia, these violent allegories subtly excavate the horrors of animal cosmetic testing, “conversion therapy,” domestic abuse, and late-stage capitalism. Equal parts bone-chilling, wryly funny, and deeply political, Midnight Timetable is a masterful work of literary horror from one of our time’s greatest imaginations.
Title Information
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Series: No
Pages: 208
Genres: Literary Fiction, Horror, Popular Fiction, World Literature – Korea, Horror – General, Absurdist, Translation
The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis
Another creepy horror novel that you can read AND watch this spooky season. I am digging this homage to his other pop culture classic American Psycho with the slicked back hair and the little bit of blood spatter on that crisp white shirt. Clever and creepy all rolled into one.
Publisher Synopsis
NOW AN FX DRAMA SERIES • NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • A novel of sensational literary and psychological suspense from the best-selling author of Less Than Zero and American Psycho that tracks a group of privileged high school friends in a vibrantly fictionalized 1980s Los Angeles as a serial killer strikes across the city
“A thrilling page turner from Ellis, who revisits the world that made him a literary star with a stylish scary new story that doesn’t disappoint.” –Town & Country
Bret Easton Ellis’s masterful new novel is a story about the end of innocence, and the perilous passage from adolescence into adulthood, set in a vibrantly fictionalized Los Angeles in 1981 as a serial killer begins targeting teenagers throughout the city.
Seventeen-year-old Bret is a senior at the exclusive Buckley prep school when a new student arrives with a mysterious past. Robert Mallory is bright, handsome, charismatic, and shielding a secret from Bret and his friends even as he becomes a part of their tightly knit circle. Bret’s obsession with Mallory is equaled only by his increasingly unsettling preoccupation with the Trawler, a serial killer on the loose who seems to be drawing ever closer to Bret and his friends, taunting them—and Bret in particular—with grotesque threats and horrific, sharply local acts of violence. The coincidences are uncanny, but they are also filtered through the imagination of a teenager whose gifts for constructing narrative from the filaments of his own life are about to make him one of the most explosive literary sensations of his generation. Can he trust his friends—or his own mind—to make sense of the danger they appear to be in? Thwarted by the world and by his own innate desires, buffeted by unhealthy fixations, he spirals into paranoia and isolation as the relationship between the Trawler and Robert Mallory hurtles inexorably toward a collision.
Set against the intensely vivid and nostalgic backdrop of pre-Less Than Zero L.A., The Shards is a mesmerizing fusing of fact and fiction, the real and the imagined, that brilliantly explores the emotional fabric of Bret’s life at seventeen—sex and jealousy, obsession and murderous rage. Gripping, sly, suspenseful, deeply haunting, and often darkly funny, The Shards is Ellis at his inimitable best.
Title Information
Publisher: Vintage
Series: No
Pages: 608
Genres: Fiction, Popular Fiction, Horror, Coming of Age, Horror – General, Serial Killer
Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker
I love a great folk retelling and this must read horror is sure to leave you reeling. Told across two intersecting timelines this terrifying novel is a new take on the classic haunted house.
Publisher Synopsis
From the critically acclaimed, USA TODAY bestselling, New York Times Top 100, Shirley Jackson Award-winning author of Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng and Hell to Pay, a lyrical, wildly inventive horror novel interwoven with Japanese mythology, following two people living centuries apart who discover a door between their worlds.
October, 2026: Lee Turner doesn’t remember how or why he killed his college roommate. The details are blurred and bloody. All he knows is he has to flee New York and go to the one place that might offer refuge–his father’s new home in Japan, a house hidden by sword ferns and wild ginger. But something is terribly wrong with the house: no animals will come near it, the bedroom window isn’t always a window, and a woman with a sword appears in the yard when night falls.
October, 1877: Sen is a young samurai in exile, hiding from the imperial soldiers in a house behind the sword ferns. A monster came home from war wearing her father’s face, but Sen would do anything to please him, even turn her sword on her own mother. She knows the soldiers will soon slaughter her whole family when she sees a terrible omen: a young foreign man who appears outside her window.
One of these people is a ghost, and one of these stories is a lie.
Something is hiding beneath the house of sword ferns, and Lee and Sen will soon wish they never unburied it.
Title Information
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Series: No
Pages: 352
Genres: Horror, Fantasy, Mystery, Horror – General, Horror – Gothic, Thrillers – Supernatural, Multiple Timelines, Fairy Tales, Folklore, Legends & Mythology, Occult & Supernatural
This Wretched Valley by Jenny Kiefer
If you, like me, were on the edge of your seat watching the climbers of the Empire State Building this year, you will likely be interested in this wilderness horror. The author is also an avid climber and the owner of Butcher Cabin Books which is an all-horror bookstore in Louisville Kentucky! When I saw this cover it took me back to watching The Descent and as someone who has been cave crawling many times before I was not ok for a while after that one!
Publisher Synopsis
A pulse-pounding wilderness horror novel in which four climbers enter Kentucky’s remote backcountry seeking adventure, only to face an ancient supernatural force that turns survival into an unimaginable nightmare.
2024 Bram Stoker AwardÂ(R)ï, Nominee for Superior Achievement in a First Novel
“A hallucinatory nightmare of a novel that blends adventure, horror and historical fiction, and isn’t shy about violence or strangeness.”–New York Times
“If you love wilderness horror, This Wretched Valley is a must-read.”–Alma Katsu, author of The Hunger and The Fervor
This trip is going to be Dylan’s big break. Her geologist friend Clay has discovered an untouched cliff face in the Kentucky wilderness, and she is going to be the first person to climb it. Together with Clay, his research assistant Sylvia, and Dylan’s boyfriend Luke, Dylan is going to document her achievement on Instagram and finally cement her place as the next rising star in rock climbing.
Seven months later, investigators discover three bodies in the trees just off the highway. All are in various states of decay: one a stark, white skeleton; the second emptied of its organs; and the third a mutilated corpse with the tongue, eyes, ears, and fingers removed. But Dylan is still missing–and no trace of her, dead or alive, has been discovered.
As questions multiply and impossible evidence emerges, the mystery surrounding the doomed expedition reveals an ancient force hidden within the forest–one that twists reality, preys on fear, and refuses to let anyone leave unchanged.
Inspired by the enduring mystery of the Dyatlov Pass incident and written by experienced climber Jenny Kiefer, This Wretched Valley combines relentless psychological suspense, visceral body horror, and Appalachian folklore into a terrifying debut that lingers long after the final page.
Title Information
Publisher: Quirk Books
Series: No
Pages: 304
Genres: Horror, Mystery, Horror – Wilderness, Thriller, Thriller – Suspense, Thriller – Supernatural
I hope this list of must read horrors had something for your fall TBR! You can also check out 9 Dark Academia Reads for some more fall inspiration! http://pennysbookshelf.com/dark-academia/
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