The Best Horror Books of 2024 (So Far) (2024)

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 ascendancy 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.

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 a 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 defenses. 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, basem*nts become liminal spaces, and a gridwork 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 L.P. Hernandez! His second entry 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.

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 recognizable 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.

Tingle has the rare ability to write very frightening stories about joy—his monsters are literally and metaphorically agents of unhappiness and suppression. In Bury Your Gays, said monsters are the Hollywood studio execs who pressure the closeted Misha to rewrite his script because the algorithm dictates that audiences want characters “alive and straight, or gay and dead.” When Misha refuses, he’s menaced by a whole other monstrous pantheon, who look worryingly like the horrible things he’s written into movies. Tingle shows an incredible flair for originality in thinking up these creatures, but in Mrs. Why, he may have created the next great horror icon! She haunts my dreams like nothing has since I watched that damn video from The Ring. Bury Your Gays is many things at once: a toy box overstuffed with nightmares, a meta depiction of Hollywood, and an invective against the cynicism of “rainbow capitalism.” It’s also just a joyous horror story, inventively told, and with a greater balance of heart, humor, and genuine scares than anything else written this 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 bullsh*t 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 January 6 (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 grindhouse 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 rigor of an academic review but invested with all the humor 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 Kruger 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 U.S. 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 sympathy. 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 behavior, 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, and 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 its 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 neighborhood 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 centers 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.