There’s a long-standing theory that in times of real-world strife, readers lose their appetite for fictional horrors. That has never been true. The carnage of pulp magazines only gained popularity after the world wars, while Vietnam and the end of the hippie dream led directly to The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, and the ascendency of Stephen King. And now our freshly unstable world is proving fertile ground for the growth of new budding nightmares.
So far, 2024 has been brimming with fantastic horror stories. I’ve done my absolute best to curate a list of the must-read titles released up to this point. The most promising element of the list below is in the breadth, depth, and variety of the darkness at play. Unlike previous “golden” eras of horror, there is no dominant trend. Rather, horror writers are digging their own grim tunnels into territory old and new. Retro haunted-house stories sit alongside extreme body horror. Whimsical horror comedies work in tandem with serious political subcurrents. Horror is not just responding to the perma-crisis we’re all living through; it’s providing respite and escape from it. Horror teaches as much as it terrifies. It heals as much as it hurts.
This list contains titles from the whole spectrum of the genre. There are stories to satisfy the most bloodthirsty tastes, and some that will lead the uneasy on their first forays into the shadowy end of the library. Stay with us, because we’ll be updating the list as the year continues.
Enjoy. It’s good to be scared.
In 2023’s Fever House, Keith Rosson brought the world to the edge of apocalypse. It’s a dense, punk-inflected pressure cooker of street violence, shady government shenanigans, and diabolical magic. The sequel, The Devil by Name, is both more of the same and something quite different. Following the broadcast of Fever House’s cursed audio file, the zombie-esque menace has spread beyond Portland. A reluctant group of survivors are pulled into a confrontation with a rogue government agent and a rising demonic power. Rosson continues to trace the spreading ripples generated by the first book’s cliff-hanger ending but replaces the tight, real-time focus with a nightmarish road trip across a broken America. It’s a bigger story, more relaxed and sprawling in the telling, but with the same unpredictable energy and flights of comic-book excess. My advice: Read this duology as one single grand, mutating epic.
Very early in Sacrificial Animals, there’s a scene that warns us Kailee Pedersen is not screwing around. The cruelty of a foxhunt reverberates throughout the novel, hanging over Nick and Joshua’s reluctant return to their Nebraska farm, where their father has called them to witness his dying. All of the tension between father and sons can be traced back to that early brutality, but Pedersen’s Gothic anti-pastoral is twisted further by the presence of Joshua’s wife, Emilia, whose Asian heritage allows a late injection of Chinese folklore into midwestern horrors. Pedersen draws on her own childhood as a Chinese adoptee growing up on a farm, and the authenticity shows. Restrained and ornate though the prose may be, Sacrificial Animals is savage in its details and saturated with dread.
Pay the Piper is Daniel Kraus’ second posthumous collaboration with the great George Romero. As in 2020’s The Living Dead, Kraus worked from notes to complete Romero’s vision, but this time around—perhaps freed from the weight of the filmmaker’s undead iconography—Kraus’ feels like the driving imagination of the story. The plot centres on Alligator Point, a town as mired in injustice as it is in swampland. It’s a classic small-town horror setup, with personal histories and enmities that reach far back into history and entwine with the presence of the Piper, a shape-shifting, child-killing entity who appears sparingly but with startling violence. There are surface-level comparisons to be made to well-known horror stories (most obviously, Stephen King’s IT), but Kraus couldn’t write a derivative book if he tried. Symbolic sceneries, Cajun patois, and the fey charm of Pontiac, Kraus’ nine-year-old protagonist, combine into a satisfyingly eccentric take on local monsters and ancient histories.
A Laird Barron collection is always a reason to celebrate, and this one has been gestating longer than usual. Not a Speck of Light, his first collection of stories in eight years, cements Barron’s standing as the contemporary horror writer most adept at meshing cosmic high strangeness with muscular noir—like Jack London dabbling in the Lovecraftian mythos. Stories contain eerie entities attracted to disaster sites; meanwhile, a cyborg war dog reflects on its immortal war against humanity’s many enemies, and in “The Glorification of Custer Poe,” we meet a Confederate soldier pursued by his own grizzly sins (and yes, that’s a pun of sorts!). These are some of the more easily resolved stories in the collection; others you may have to read slowly, or more than once, to fully grasp their slippery logic. This is the magic of Laird Barron: He provides too many pieces of the jigsaw and an excess of possible pictures to assemble. It’s our job to find the one that works. Nowhere is this technique more effective than in the collection’s penultimate story, “Tiptoe”—the best horror story I’ve read in many years.
A fellow master of concise, uncanny horrors, Mariana Enriquez returns to the short story, following her experiment with maximalism in 2023’s Our Share of Night. The new collection’s title story refocuses the grim real-life fate of Elisa Lam, who’s become a subject of online speculation after her body was found in a hotel water tank in 2013. In lesser hands, such a story could be a travesty of exploitation, but Enriquez has made her name in exposing the mistreatment and brutality meted out to women, often deploying horror as a sheer gauze pulled across the very real violence of the world. Other stories in A Sunny Place for Shady People range from the allusive and elusive to the grimly physical. “Face of Disgrace” literalises the notion of faceless victimhood, while “Hyena Hymns” features a haunted dress that imposes the wounds of historical torture onto the wearer. The best stories, however, concern children. “The Refrigerator Cemetery” depicts a macabre game played among the shells of abandoned appliances, and in “Black Eyes” Enriquez repurposes another famous piece of Internet lore in the attempts of two suspect children to penetrate the fragile safety of the narrator’s car. Chilling, grotesque, and slyly funny, A Sunny Place for Shady People is the author’s return to what she does best—and better than most.
Liminality is having a bit of a moment in horror: The Backrooms is clipping TikTokers out of reality, Silent Hill 2 is back with better-rendered mist, and films like Skinamarink and The Outwaters are setting film festivals achatter. Into this zeitgeist strides Sofia Ajram with a big literary “hold my beer.” Her debut novella traps the suicidal narrator in a limitless subway station. Is this impossible space real? Does it exist as an externalisation of his internal mental state or as an allegory for depression? And what, if anything, is in there with him? Coup de Grâce is equal parts fun and frantic desolation. In her references to early online folklore and a late metafictional flourish, Ajram speaks to horror’s uber-contemporary fascination with trauma and mental health but also to the current vogue for ’90s and ’00s nostalgia. Like all good liminal architecture, Coup de Grâce contains far more than its space should allow, and it unfolds like cursed origami.
Rachel Harrison has a special knack for reconfiguring horror tropes as a reflection of post-millennial angst. She’s worked with witches, werewolves, cults, and now, with So Thirsty, she’s come for the vampires. When risk-averse Sloane and her hedonistic friend Naomi cross paths with a band of vamps, they’re forced to confront the realities of an immortal life lived in the shadows. It’s not all bad news, though—there’s passion, freedom, and friendship to be found once the ticking clock of a normal life comes to a halt. Harrison blends two traditions of vampire fiction into one story: There’s gore and violence aplenty but also eroticism and romance. Linking both strands is a pointed observation on female aging in contemporary culture. It’s a sex-drizzled, blood-soaked treat, but like all of Harrison’s fiction, it has something angry and urgent to say about the conditions of reality.
Novellas are great, but too often they leave me wanting more. More character, more plot, more incident, and more emotion. Rest Stop is a full serving of all those ingredients in just 150 pages. By the time Abraham is locked into a gas-station bathroom by a homicidal maniac, we already know about his unrequited love, his conflicted Jewish faith, and his fragile relationships with friends and family—and we’re only a few dozen pages in! It’s a bravura feat of efficiency that leaves Cassidy plenty of room to eke out Abraham’s torment at the hands of his googly-eyed assailant. What follows is part creature feature (arachnophobes beware!) and part Beckettian character study. My point is that Cassidy packs a whole damn story into Rest Stop, without a word wasted. This is what a novella is supposed to be.
It’s 1962 and Jemma Barker has answered a strange invitation to leave Chicago for New Orleans, to take up employment in the mansion of the reclusive Duchon family. Once she arrives, she finds a Halloween advent calendar of Southern Gothic delights: ghosts, curses, hidden rooms, family secrets, and incestuous desires. Simmering beneath it all is the more awful and persistent trace of colouirism, which Sandeen is clear to distinguish from the genre’s more often tread and binary treatment of prejudice. Heavy as the theme is, This Cursed House is never less than absolutely fun. It’s self-aware but never self-conscious and Sandeen pauses the breakneck pace only to ensure that you have a moment to fully grasp the secrets buried in its lineages and family trees, like Wuthering Heights transposed to the Big Easy. It’s such ripe Gothic that if you squeezed it, I’m half convinced blood-red juice would stain your hands.
This novel may open with a woman in a nightgown fleeing a creepy asylum, but The Redemption of Morgan Bright is far from a traditional Gothic chiller. When Morgan inveigles her way into Hollyhock Asylum, she’s seeking answers regarding her sister’s mysterious death. Once inside, she’s assaulted by punishing systems of control and the oppressive presence of another personality inside her own head. Is she mad? Has the system made her so? Or is something else going on? (Spoiler: It’s option three.) This novel provides a chilling twist on the unreliable-narrator trope, as well as a contemporary restaging of Nellie Bly’s exposure of psychiatric cruelties. Panatier nods often to the past (the warden is named Althea Edevane, a name dripping with Victorian Gothic menace), but within the asylum walls, echoes of antiquated maltreatment go hand in hand with future-punk exploitation. The Redemption of Morgan Bright suggests that our treatment of the vulnerable never changes. Or if it does, it’s only for the worse.
Nevill’s stories are full of tight interiors, narrow minds, and entities that slip under a reader’s defences. In All the Fiends of Hell, he’s done it again but on a broader apocalyptic canvas. Granted, we only see the British portion of Armageddon, but that’s more than enough. Following a night of mass abduction by otherworldly forces, a few weak, sickly survivors are left alone under a crimson sky. Well, not alone exactly—there are also hideous monsters who can only be seen in the ruby-red light. We join an everyman and two children on a desperate race to the ocean, carrying the last, lingering shreds of forlorn hope. But hopelessness is the point of the novel, whose central question is: What keeps us going when nothing good remains? All the Fiends of Hell is an especially grim and very British Armageddon. It’s The Road as envisioned by Ken Loach. It’s also Nevill’s best book in some time.
The title of Malfi’s latest novel sets expectations of Stephen King or Norman Rockwell’s Americana. It turns out to be much stranger than that. When old friends reunite in their hometown, an inevitable showdown with their past quickly tips into the surreal. Weird ash falls from the sky, basements become liminal spaces, and a grid of hairy wires is discovered just beneath the surface of the town. Amid all of this craziness, Malfi does what he does best: He creates fully fleshed-out characters and pitches them into uncomfortable and very realistic situations. Small Town Horror defies assumption. It’s no nostalgia trip back to a rosy childhood, nor is it an ode to friendship. Thomas Wolfe famously wrote, “You can’t go home again”; in this novel, Malfi asks why the hell you would want to.
What a showcase 2024 has been for the imaginative range of LP Hernandez! One of his two entries on this list, No Gods, Only Chaos is a collection of stories ranging from dark fantasy to creature feature, containing some of the most abhorrent crimes imaginable. Each story is an act of ventriloquism. Whether Hernandez is adopting the dust-bowl drawl of “From the Red Dirt,” mouthing Gen Z idioms in “The Last of Our Kind,” or exploring the broken mind of a neurodivergent killer in “The Bystander,” he obscures himself entirely within his characters and narrative voices. "Family Annihilator” is the most memorable story in the collection and even darker than its title suggests. It’s an utterly shocking piece of fiction, though not without a trace of void-black comedy. Maybe memorable is too mild a word. Unforgettable, incurable, bedeviling… it’s a story that leaves a stain. Anyone looking for a truly exciting new name in horror fiction will find something here to love or flinch away from.
There are two major strands of anxiety in Tremblay’s work. One is the psychological ambiguity of his characters; the second is his appetite for experimentation and self-awareness. Horror Movie is the most effective balancing of the two since the author’s landmark A Head Full of Ghosts. A retrospective arc details the making of a cursed film in the nineties, while in the present day, the lone surviving member of the cast works toward a remake. Any dissonance between the two accounts is further complicated by a full reproduction of the original script—and kudos to Tremblay for coming up with a screenplay that evolves from a parody of art horror to a genuinely disturbing piece of work. There’s plenty of meta commentary about horror cinema (including one agonizingly extended scene that’s just begging for a bold director to adapt), but Tremblay hasn’t forgotten to include moments of crowd-pleasing savagery, torture, and dismemberment. It makes for a book that equally thrills the head and the gut.
There have been plenty of nostalgic horror novels in recent years, but few have captured the laconic charm of the eighties and nineties paperback boom quite like Lost Man’s Lane. The elevator pitch would be “Boy takes a summer job as the assistant to a private detective and helps solve a supernatural crime,” but that’s really only one element of this long, meandering tale involving rattlesnakes, rock climbing, young love, family dynamics, and unusual friendships. Carson manages to tie off each strand in a neat and emotionally satisfying bow, even if it seems unlikely. There’s a lazy pace to his plotting, more reminiscent of a sprawling bildungsroman like The Goldfinch than any contemporary horror fiction. Lost Man’s Lane is the kind of horror novel “they” used to write. A big swing of a book, best enjoyed in a hammock with ice-cold lemonade.
Speaking of nostalgic horror, King’s latest collection of short stories reads like a homecoming. Most of the dozen stories feature a callback or a thematic link to his expansive bibliography; they also vary significantly in length, from the two-hundred-page crime nightmare “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream” to razor-sharp shorts like “The Fifth Step.” The shorter stories read like nasty little jokes that would be comfortably at home in King’s collections from the seventies and eighties, while “The Dreamers” is proof that he’s still more than capable of a writing a full-blooded nightmare to equal Revival or Pet Sematary, complete with Lovecraftian hints of things lurking beneath the wall of rationality. The best of the stories benefit from a life well-lived, with a shared focus on grief and mortality. It’s evident in the horror of “Rattlesnakes” (an unexpectedly haunting pseudo sequel to Cujo) and in the gentler man’s-best-friendship of “Laurie.” The closing story stands above all, though. “The Answer Man” packs a whole human life into eighty pages, mundane but with occasional glimpses of the mystery beyond. It’s a story only King could write, and we should all be grateful he has.
Fans of Gothic fiction will feel immediately at home in Midnight Rooms. It is 1840, and the orphaned, biracial Orabella subsists on the cusp of spinsterhood before gambling debts and plot conventions lead her into marriage with the devilishly appealing Elias Blakersby. So far, so retro, and much of the reader’s early comfort is due to Orabella’s familiar discomfort in her new home. However, once the story settles in the gloomy Korringhill Manor, Coles defies expectations. As Orabella endures long nights locked in her quarters, interspersed with animalistic revelries and dreams of meat, the faux-Victorian framework collapses into fragments and fever dreams more recognisable from modernist fiction. Imagine Jane Eyre or Rebecca as rewritten by Virginia Woolf. I could not, hand on heart, say that I’ve grasped all the implications and secrets of this book or its strange household, but the disorienting flow of language makes Midnight Rooms one of the most remarkably written books of the year.
Only Stephen Graham Jones could get away with this. A first-person, stream-of-consciousness, coming-of-age memoir about the making of a serial killer—it shouldn’t work. It should be received with the same ire and disgust as American Psycho. But the difference between the two books—and the difference between Stephen Graham Jones and Bret Easton Ellis—is emotion. Patrick Bateman was a dispassionate automaton; I Was a Teenage Slasher’s Tolly Driver is a sympathetic outcast and a victim of fate. Ellis wrote to make a point; Jones writes to tell a story and to move the reader. At different moments, we’re moved to laughter, because Jones is very happy to push toward parody or comic-book excess, but at others, especially in the novel’s later stages, we’re more likely moved to tears. If there’s any concern that Jones had nothing left to say about slashers in the wake of his Indian Lake Trilogy, this book puts it to bed. I Was a Teenage Slasher is somehow ridiculous and grounded, affected and honest, horrifying and heartfelt, all at the same time.
Valencia grew up on the West Coast and lives on the East Coast, but her debut collection is fixated on the desert states. In Mystery Lights, the American Southwest is a stage for slippage between reality and the weird, between horror and beauty, and between speculative and literary fiction. A young girl lost in a cave system meets the mutants who call it home. A newlywed couple’s marriage is founded on—and tested by—their shared sensitivity to ghosts. A corporate wellness retreat (look away, Gwyneth!) is a site for occultism and monstrous transformation. The collection is published by Tin House, which should set expectations about the stories’ literary leanings, but Valencia is not afraid to dip a toe—hell, her whole foot—into the speculative uncanny. If you enjoy the work of Kelly Link or Carmen Maria Machado, you will find much satisfaction in Mystery Lights.
The follow-up to the crunching 2022 hit The Devil Takes You Home is, in some ways, more of the same. Once again, Iglesias casts the grit and gore of street violence against a cosmic backdrop, and he doesn’t hold back from prolonged, brutal beatdowns. However, whereas Devil felt like an assault on the reader’s spirit and good mood, House of Bone and Rain alleviates the bleakness with moments of camaraderie. Rather than one man on a mission, Iglesias sets a group of young, wild friends against the bigger fish responsible for the murder of one of their mothers. The violence is harsh and unflinching but refreshing in its honesty. As one of the heroes says early in the proceedings, this book is not about “the macho bullshit we were raised on.” Instead, House of Bone and Rain is a lament for young, dumb men and the codes they feel pressured to live by. It’s not all human tragedy, though. In a delightful nod to Lovecraft, it turns out that there are even bigger fish playing their part from just offshore…
Each entry in the Clown in a Cornfield trilogy has been bigger and stranger than the last. What began as a sociopolitical spin on the teen slasher became, in the second volume, a commentary on nostalgia, disinformation, demagoguery, and the events of 6 January (among other things). Now, in The Church of Frendo, Cesare caps his project (so far) with a novel that asks questions about religion and the myth of America itself. This all sounds very grand, and rest assured, Cesare packs in plenty of grind-house violence and folk-horror traditions—he even finds a spot for professional wrestling and Juggalos. Just the list of ingredients in this short blurb alone should give you some idea of how madcap and unexpected this book is. Indeed, the idea behind Clown in a Cornfield is so audacious that it’s difficult to believe Cesare could extend it over three volumes and stick the landing. Yet he does. The Church of Frendo is the unpredictable climax to an inimitable trilogy and proof that making horror political doesn’t make it any less fun.
I rarely consider nonfiction titles for this list but Bogutskaya’s treatise on the state of horror is a must-read for anyone seeking a refreshed perspective on the genre. Focused predominantly on horror movies released in the past decade, Feeding the Monster is a worthy successor to Stephen King’s Danse Macabre and other canonical studies. It’s written with the critical rigour of an academic review but invested with all the humour and personality of the smartest blog posts from back when the Internet was fun. One minute Bogutskaya is discussing the symbolic function of hunger in horror or debating the overuse of trauma narratives; the next she’s telling us about her childhood memories of Freddy Krueger or explaining how horror helps her frame an agonizing memory of a hospital visit. It’s the perfect balance of the personal and the political with which to survey a genre that has always ricocheted between those two poles. Read it and you’ll feel smarter the next time you watch a horror movie, while the extensive watch list in the appendix will ensure you have plenty to see.
Really good haunted houses are few and far between. These days, the spirit-infested home too often falls into high camp or is put to such elevated metaphorical purpose that it forgets to actually be scary. The House of Last Resort has no such problem. When Tommy and Kate relocate from the US to a drowsy Italian village, it’s supposed to be a better life. Of course, their new abode makes a mockery of this well-being kick. The titular house comes complete with hidden rooms, hallucinations, and a historical entanglement in the Catholic Church’s struggle against some very persistent demons. Golden draws on the very best of seventies and eighties pulp-horror influences, with hordes of rats, ambulatory corpses, and a grand diabolic finale. But he makes time for quiet moments of chilling intensity, including a kitchen-table conversation that ranks among the most disquieting scenes of the year. The House of Last Resort is horror that goes hard but never forgets to be fun. It’s the author’s finest novel to date.
If you watched the climbing documentary Free Solo and thought, Okay, climbing a nine-hundred-foot cliff face without a rope is scary but you know what it really needs? Murder ghosts!, then Kiefer’s debut will scratch your itch. This Wretched Valley follows four intrepid fools into the deep Kentucky woods, where they plan to map and climb a brand-new ascent. Of course, like any backcountry worthy of a horror fan’s time, their chosen ground is saturated with bloody history. It doesn’t take kindly to interlopers, either, particularly these vain, self-absorbed numskulls. There are comparisons to be made to Scott Smith’s adventure-horror classic The Ruins, but most crucial is Kiefer’s absolute lack of mercy for her characters. For much of the book, you gleefully anticipate their foreshadowed deaths, but the manner of their end is so brutal and so desolate that you can’t avoid a creeping empathy. Kiefer has stared you down. She has more belly for this than you. She wins.
Lebbon’s most recent novels serve as a loose thematic trilogy, connected by a focus on high-octane adventure and a backdrop of quickening climate disaster. However, whereas Eden and The Last Storm were genre-splicing affairs, Among the Living goes full-bore on the horror, pitting an uneasy assemblage of climate activists and mineral excavators against a viral threat long buried in the Arctic tundra. This is no mere illness, though. What Lebbon conjures up is an intelligent disease, able to control its hosts’ thoughts and behaviour, creating a paranoiac trap in which the characters cannot even trust their own motivations. It’s easy to think of comparisons—The Thing, The Last of Us—but Lebbon brings a flair for action scenes and his experience with endurance sport, propelling the story with unexpected physical and psychological dimensions. Fast-paced, compulsive, suitably horrifying: Among the Living reads like Michael Crichton having a particularly bad dream.
If you’re familiar with Canada’s Nahanni Valley, you’ll know that wilderness has a history and lore thick enough to fill several novels. Seriously, you should take a Wikipedia dive; thank me later. All that mystery is buried in the substrata of In the Valley of the Headless Men, but Hernandez’s excursion resembles the surrealism of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, though less cold and less austere. Hernandez has a particular gift for the details of grief: the final sip of a dead mother’s lemonade, a lost child’s sock tucked safely in a purse; each is a small totem of heartbreak. And though the flesh of his novella is pared to the bone, somehow he still accommodates a trio of characters—each with their own arc of loss and redemption—on a shared journey to some ineffable, elusive truth. As for what else waits there, I shan’t tell you. it’s best you decide for yourself… and I’m still not sure that I even really know.
What if an entire neighbourhood became a ghost? Not just the people but the buildings and the street itself? And what if three girls escaped that fate, then returned twenty years later to see what remained of the homes and families they left in that sunlit purgatory? It’s a concept high enough to give you a nosebleed, but Kiste reins it in masterfully, never worrying too much about the mad logic of the situation. Instead, she centres the story on more mundane forms of haunting: the dark gravity of memory, family, and trauma. The Haunting of Velkwood reads like a literary double negative, a brand-new thing emerging from the overlap of Twin Peaks’ suburban uncanny and the melancholy nostalgia of The Virgin Suicides. Kiste doesn’t shy away from these references (David Lynch is everywhere in Velkwood), but she’s still written one of the most original—and downright strange—novels of the year so far.
Before turning to fiction, Hull wrote the screenplay for Glorious, a cult horror movie about an eldritch entity invoking apocalypse through a glory hole in a public-bathroom stall. Though not a sequel of any kind, Hull’s debut novella shares much of his movie’s grindhouse DNA. It also has a hole of its own in the titular Mouth: an inexplicable toothed orifice in the ground inherited by Randy, a good ol’ all-American drifter. Randy’s attempt to satisfy Mouth’s hunger forces him into a partnership with Abigail, a young woman with secrets to keep and vengeance to seek. Mouth comes in handy there. The novella is rapid and raw and unburdened by plot complexity, but there’s something so endearing about both the book and its innocent monster that you can’t help but cheer them on. Imagine Roger Corman’s take on Frankenstein and you’re somewhere close to Mouth’s goofy charm.
King Nyx is at the softer end of the horror colour chart. There are no ghosts or demons, and there’s barely any blood (though there are life-size marionettes to haunt your dreams). Instead, Bakis has crafted a compelling period mystery centred on the island home of a wealthy tycoon whose wives just keep dying before their time. When a young woman accompanies her husband on a personal writing retreat to the island, everything seems immediately off. The couple are quarantined in a private cabin. She sees strange bearlike figures in the woods and finds mysterious notes aplenty. All the oddity suggests something very wrong is going on in the Big House. It’s all wonderfully bizarre, but buried beneath the novel’s gothic veneer is an interrogation of supposed male genius, balanced so precariously on the shoulders of unremembered women. King Nyx is one of those thrillers that smuggle real substance into their scares without ever taking on a lecturing tone. It’s also a great gateway novel for readers who would usually shy away from horror’s excesses.
Graham Jones made this list in 2022 and again in 2023 with the first two instalments of the Indian Lake Trilogy. Now, with The Angel of Indian Lake, he absolutely sticks the landing. In this third and concluding volume, we return to the bruised and bloodied town of Proofrock, Idaho, for a final confrontation between Jade Daniels and the many monsters in her past, her present, and her head. Just as in the preceding books, Angel begins in the cold chaos of violence and metatextual references, which slowly coalesce into something human, heartfelt, and, by the end, emotionally overwhelming. Unexpected bodies rise and fall, and at no point could even this seasoned horror reader rest easy that the absolute worst would not come to pass. The Angel of Indian Lake is an almost indecent success; Jones should not have been able to guide this freewheeling, snowballing mass of story home. But he does. And like its now-iconic heroine, it remains defiant and unbowed to the end.
As I’ve covered elsewhere, horror has not traditionally been kind to characters of colour. Evans and Fennell’s anthology is sure to become a key text in the Black horror renaissance working to correct that injustice. The stories included here share one crucial characteristic: Each features a young Black female protagonist who must survive—but otherwise, it’s a sprawling survey of horror’s various subsections, every one refreshed by the Black female gaze. LL McKinney’s “Harvester” is nightmarish Americana about a very unusual cornfield. Zakiya Dalila Harris’s “TMI” is an of-the-moment technophobic satire about privacy and identity, while Evans’s “The Brides of Devil’s Bayou” offers old-school Southern Gothic of the finest stripe. The Black Girl Survives in This One may be billed as young-adult literature but stories like Monica Brashears’ “The Skittering Thing” are pure adult-grade nightmare fuel. The best of them pose a question that underlies the entire anthology: Is surviving the same thing as having a happy ending?
This has been a pretty bleak and bloody list of stories so far. Let Ryan pour some sunshine into your TBR. Bless Your Heart is the tale of the Evans women, a matriarchal dynasty who runs the funeral home in their small, quaint corner of Southeast Texas. Unfortunately, the dead in their town don’t always stay dead, forcing generations of Evanses to moonlight as ghoul killers. During a particularly bad infestation of undead, the elderly Ducey (horror’s best octogenarian for a good while), her daughter Lenore, and her adult granddaughter Grace must deal with the problem while indoctrinating young Grace into their clandestine guardianship. The word that immediately springs to mind is charming, as this novel has plenty of local colour and turns of phrase. However, what elevates Bless Your Heart beyond pastiche is Ryan’s willingness to revel in full-on gore and to follow through on some genuine, last-minute emotional stakes. This was announced as the first in a series of novels, and I can’t wait to see—and try to work out—what’s going to happen next.
In the few years since LaRocca burst onto the horror scene with Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, he has steadily grown a reputation for wielding disgust and excess to singular effect. This new collection contains four novelettes, each spinning around twin themes of obsession and harm. In the title story, an estranged daughter goes home for her father’s funeral, only to discover truly hideous secrets in her family home. “All the Parts of You That Won’t Easily Burn” may go off in a batshit-crazy direction toward the end but the central conceit of a self-harming cult with a penchant for broken glass evokes the very best of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood body horror. It’s the closing story, though—on the surface the smallest and most superficial—that really got under my skin. “Prickle” presents a vicious game of one-upmanship between two elderly friends that takes the book to a gleeful, capering conclusion. It shows that beneath his coat of many nasty colours, LaRocca has a very good (and very dark) sense of humour.
I talk a lot about “fun” horror—the kind of horror that tries to scare you, for sure, but makes the process entertaining, enjoyable, a romp, rather than a raid on your psyche. This is exactly what Thorne delivers in Diavola. As with Christopher Golden’s The House of Last Resort, Thorne transports the reader to a tiny Italian village for some very dysfunctional family drama, though any loving central relationship is replaced with the hilariously maddening repartee between Anna and her siblings. Their scratchy dynamic is a grounding contrast to the supernatural goings-on, revolving around a tower in their villa that should not be opened. Shocker: It’s opened, and craziness ensues. Diavola is a gothic gem, as full of sharply observed characterisation as it is genre tropes. I read it in two sittings and even now I’m not sure if I was supposed to laugh as much as I did. Pack this for your next holiday and avoid talking to your own family.
The Underhistory may be the most intriguing horror novel of the year so far. It’s a blend of ghost story and home-invasion thriller in which a group of criminals descends upon a haunted house in the middle of a guided tour. That’s enough of a concept to set the novel apart but Warren fully commits to a structural conceit that exposes how the architecture of houses and story are one and the same. Each chapter is titled after the whimsical name that the elderly guide, Pera, has given to the rooms of her home. While she takes her customers through the details of the house—all the while trying to placate and manage the bad men in their midst—she also reveals her own gothic history, embedded in the peculiarities of each room. Gradually, we learn that Pera is far more capable than we (or her assailants) imagine her to be. And her house is a very bad place to invade. The Underhistory reads like Shirley Jackson or Catriona Ward at their most gothically playful. It’s a wholly unique intellectual exercise and a deeply compelling page-turner.
Malerman’s Incidents Around the House is [...] a deeply discomfiting, imaginatively ripe, yet ruthlessly efficient novel in which eight-year old Bela is targeted by a malign presence in her home. This “Other Mommy" hounds the girl with a request to “go into your heart.” What follows is a chase narrative of claustrophobic terror that almost transcends articulation. Glimpses of Other Mommy are elusive to the point of impressionism (she has long, hairy arms and “ slides across the floor”). What does this mean? What is she? We never know, as we are only ever given the compromised perspective of a frantic child or a terrified adult. It’s as if Malerman has channelled something into the very sentences of this novel, something that is so much greater than the sum of its linguistic parts. Simply put—and I do not say this lightly—Incidents Around the House is the most purely effective horror novel I have ever read.
