The Best Horror Books of 2023 Will Scare You Sh*tless (2024)

The screaming never stops. Straight from a 2022 that featured some of the best horror fiction in recent memory, we’ve hurtled into another banner year. 2023 has served up a fresh platter of bloody morsels and sweet, sickly delights to suit every morbid appetite. (There, that’s the obligatorily gruesome metaphor checked off.)

Horror truly is enjoying a renaissance. Maybe it’s because of the pandemic, as authors have had more time than ever to sit and mull over their darkest fantasies. Or maybe a whole generation raised on Stephen King has finally come of age and taken the reins. Whatever the reason, the genre is now more expansive, more inclusive, and more innovative than at any point in its history. That upward trajectory looks to reach new heights throughout the year, with horror creeping in to dominate the literary landscape from several directions at once. There are major titles from huge names, nasty little gems from literary darlings, and, as ever, the small presses continue to push the genre in new, outrageous directions.

Plus, horror is a broad church. Anyone can attend. Whether you’re looking for a story that will chill your blood, darken your soul, or turn your stomach, this year’s macabre offerings will provide. It’s scary out there alone though, so let us be your guide.

Ronald Malfi is an under-the-radar master of disruption. Like most of the great American horror writers, he paints authentic scenes of the everyday, then applies a blowtorch to the canvas. The five novellas in They Lurk are the perfect entry point to his patented collision of the routine and the fantastic. Each hinges on a compelling, yet oh-so simple conceit: the backwoods cryptid noir of “Skullbelly,” a frigid twist on spiritual possession in “The Separation,” or the hideous act of self-obliteration in “The Stranger.” What elevates these stories above just a cool idea, though, is the effort that Malfi invests in his characters. He has no right to make us give a damn about characters fleshed out in so few pages. Yet somehow he does. And we do.

Did you know that they’re lying to you about apples? Don’t believe me? Read Black River Orchard. It exposes the lie at the rotten core of Big Fruit: there are hundreds, thousands of apple flavors that they’re keeping from you. If that isn’t enough of a shock, Chuck Wendig also bakes small town mayhem, elaborate lore, and even a hint of demonology into this epic autumnal pie. Black River Orchard harkens back to the blockbuster tomes of the ‘80s, following an extended cast of characters situated in a living, breathing town that’s coming undone under the malign influence of a cursed apple tree. Think the fabricated faux-history of John Langan’s The Fisherman, mixed with the paranoia of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, all finished off with a hint of The Tommyknockers’ mad self-improvement fixation. It’s a big, bombastic novel that reminds me how truly fun this genre can be.

After leading a cinematic renaissance for Black horror, Jordan Peele has turned his attention, however briefly, to the literary. In Out There Screaming, he curates a roster of established names and breakthrough talent to showcase the abundant variety of macabre Black storytelling. It’s clearly conceived as a landmark collection, and it fulfills the brief. N.K. Jemisin opens proceedings with the standout “Reckless Eyeballing,” spinning police brutality into surrealist body horror. Tananarive Due’s tale of a demonic reckoning aboard a Montgomery-bound freedom ride feels passed-down rather than written. But focus is not centered on historical trauma. Many of these nineteen stories offer an exhilarating sense of Black horror’s rush to explore new futures and alternative presents. Nnedi Okorafor’s “Dark Home” employs a supernatural besiegement to examine the clash between tradition and modernity. L.D. Lewis’ “Flicker” offers a refreshingly unpolitical apocalypse, while Lesley Nneka Arimah’s “Invasion of the Baby Snatchers” builds a whole paranoid world of horror sci-fi in less than two dozen pages. And these are just a few of the highlights. We can only hope that Peele will put some of these stories up on the big screen.

Rachel Harrison is one of very few writers who I read by default. No one is better at balancing wry millennial observation with genuine paranormal nastiness. When Vesper makes a brief return to the bosom of her fundamentalist family, she’s forced to reconsider the power of their belief, face the secrets of her own parentage, and confront the very real threat of Armageddon. Early in the book, there’s a reveal that had me physically punching the air in admiration at the author’s sleight of hand. From that point onward, Black Sheep is a sprint across a high wire strung between satirical self-awareness and authentic scares, but Harrison has perfect control over her novel’s excesses. Never too knowing or naïve, Black Sheep is Harrison’s best book since her debut, The Return, and Vesper is the queen of her hard-to-like-but-impossible-not-to-love protagonists.

Boys in the Valley is the most frightening novel of the year. There, I said it! The story takes place in an isolated Pennsylvania orphanage in 1905, where the boys’ lives of drudgery, clerical surveillance, and casual cruelty are bad enough, but the arrival of policemen and their demonically possessed prisoner kicks things up a notch or two on the “oh sh*t” scale. When hell breaks out (very quickly), it falls to Peter, the most senior of the boys, to differentiate evil from innocence and keep his peers alive. What follows is a blueprint for the creation of steady, unsettling dread, with enough explosions of outright horror to release the pressure, like pus from a wound. It’s easy to overfocus on how horrific a book is, but there are other things at play here than fear alone. Emotion, characterization, pacing: each is critical in making us care enough to be frightened. But Boys in the Valley is as committed to hurting the heart as it is to shocking the system. Between this and last year’s A Child Alone with Strangers, Fracassi looks to be at the very vanguard of the next great charge in horror.

Nat Cassidy describes his second novel as ‘Salem’s Lot meets Rosemary’s Baby. It’s a fair claim. It is a novel about an unassuming couple who move into a prestigious New York apartment complex where, rather than falling prey to elderly satanists, they come up against something a touch more vampiric. There are babies involved, and a duplicitous husband who plays upon his wife’s vulnerabilities, and yet you can know all of this and still delight in Nestlings as entirely its own horror story. It’s a novel of New York, of antisemitism, of a marriage in disarray. Each of these elements is written with an enthusiasm that bounds off the page. Much of Nestlings’ individuality results from the care with which Cassidy traces the contours of Ana and Reid’s marriage, both the love and the falling apart, but there are also things waiting in the bowels of The Deptford for which no amount of horror reading could prepare you.

Ghost dinosaurs! Has any pairing of words ever sounded more loaded with possibility, or more worryingly like a gimmick? Have no fear—Luke Dumas’ sophom*ore novel is not the literary Sharknado that the words “ghost dinosaurs” would have you believe. Quite the opposite; it’s a moving, sorrowful story of secrecy, institutional rot, and the everlasting power of love and loss that even geological eons cannot diminish. When Simon takes up the role of head paleontologist in his hometown museum, he becomes obsessed with solving the mystery of his sister’s abduction from that very institution decades before. In the process, he unearths plenty of skeletons, both literal and figurative, some of which belong to the prehistoric entity roaming the exhibit halls. The Paleontologist is a mixture of sober Gothic and B-movie flamboyance. It’s a family drama, a crime procedural, and a social critique, but did I mention the GHOST DINOSAURS?!

Perhaps the most shocking thing about The Reformatory is that it’s based in truth. Due’s depiction of a brutal juvenile reform facility is based on the heinous history of the Dozier School for Boys, where her great uncle, Robert Stephens, died in 1937. The horrors inflicted on the boys in Due’s novel are drawn from very real accounts of beatings, torture, rape, and murder. Due does not flinch from this reality. What she does do is introduce ghosts, or haints, which plague and aid the fictionalized Robert Stephens during his internment. Meanwhile, beyond the prison, Robert’s sister Gloria navigates the wider (but no less oppressive) corridors of institutional racism in 1950s Florida. The novel bounces between Gloria’s legal efforts to free Robert and his desperate attempts to survive and escape—twin strands that coil around each other in a tightening narrative helix. The Reformatory belongs in the god-tier of modern ghost stories, sitting comfortably alongside Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Stephen King’s The Shining, and Peter Straub’s Ghost Story. It’s exactly that good.

Ally Wilkes has a thing for dropping men in the older, colder reaches of the world, and subjecting them to a lot more than ice, hunger, and polar bears. Her first novel, All the White Spaces, follows Edwardian explorers to cosmic annihilation in Antarctica; by contrast, Where the Dead Wait heads to the great northern wastes for a reckoning with more personal demons. In the 1860s, Captain William Day and his crew resort to cannibalism to survive the wilderness of the polar winter. Twenty years later, Day must return to the scene of his ordeal (and shame) to rescue both his own reputation and the man who has “haunted his life.” Wilkes may be covering similar frozen ground as her debut, but this is a richer story than even that first, startlingly good effort. The author has a knack for balancing ephemeral terror with gritty, grounded human suffering. Where the Dead Wait is a book that conveys its horrors both in the words that are printed and in the subtle, slanted inferences of things neither spoken nor written.

There has been a recent glut of horror novels centered on motherhood, but Katrina Monroe has written the best of them. As the title suggests, Graveyard of Lost Children offers plenty of authentic Gothic scares. There are black-haired specters and corpse-haunted wells, but the most fraught details are reserved for the toil of new motherhood. Following the birth of her daughter, Olivia must reckon with a family legacy of postpartum delusion (or is it?) about changelings and deals with the dead. As Olivia submits to paranoias both valid and imaginary, Graveyard of Lost Children takes the baton extended by Rosemary’s Baby. However, in our less-prudish world, Monroe is able to better examine a mother’s physical suffering. She finds brutal body horror in episiotomies, chafed skin, and Olivia’s reduction to “a liquid bag with holes poked in it, full of blood and piss and milk.” It’s unflinching, necessary, and it will make you more aware of your nipples than ever before.

The Others of Edenwell is a subtle book. Though it’s set in the shadow of the First World War, there is little bombast and few moments of overt nastiness. Instead, the story takes place on the fringes of the cataclysm, in the grounds of the titular Edenwell, a hydropathic resort where soldiers come to recover from their injuries and where the naive Freddie and the troubled Eustace grow close. The war is ever-present but somehow distant, while closer to home, a more personal evil wanders the woods. Holloway has managed a feat of literary mimicry, capturing the strange balance of innocence and cruel experience inherent to fiction of the period. Into this idyll, she then introduces a demonic figure, able to do hideous things with its own spine. Imagine if E.M. Forster wrote a cryptid horror novel and you’re somewhere on the way to understanding the delightful oddness of this book.

Maeve Fly is great fun, if you like that sort of thing. And by “that sort of thing,” I mean gruesome violence, void-black humor, and inappropriate behavior at Disney World. In this ode to excess, young, disaffected Maeve weaves her way through LA, peering out from behind the mask that hides her psychopathy. As the few struts that bind her to society begin to buckle, the meanness of the modern city comes face to face with a woman who has run out of f*cks to give. For a long time, Leede holds the arterial spray in reserve, but when the dam does finally break, Maeve Fly crosses into absolute carnage. Bodies are flayed and power tools are put to uses that would definitely void the warranty. Leede is clearly inspired by Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, but where that novel’s maniac is an abyss in human form, Maeve retains just enough humanity to make her the year’s most compelling anti-anti-ANTI hero.

Stephen King and Barack Obama have both gone out to bat for S.A. Cosby, and with good reason. He writes about the dividing line between rich and poor, Black and white, and the powerful and the weak with a scholar’s scrutiny and the insight of someone who knows this small-town southern stage intimately. When a school shooting leads to the unearthing of child murder in southeast Virginia, the town’s first Black sheriff must navigate local politics, racial prejudice, and entrenched secrecy in order to seek justice. Thus described, All the Sinners Bleed sounds like a typical police procedural, albeit with Gothic overtones. In truth, it’s so much more. Cosby has wrenched the formula into a new shape, fit to accommodate American problems that are hot-button issues, yet still as old as the nation. The book’s evils are grounded in all-too-human devilry, but an apocalyptic frequency thrums through Cosby’s writing.

I can think of few more appropriate settings for a horror novel than a gay conversion facility. The one at the center of Camp Damascus has a 100% success rate, largely due to its very unorthodox techniques, which owe more to Clive Barker’s sad*stic theology than any evangelical hand-wringing. When Rose starts vomiting flies and seeing monstrous figures around town, she is forced from her god-fearing home and onto a collision course with her own demons, both literal and figurative. There is imagery in this book you will not soon forget––Chuck Tingle has a real gift for the ornately horrific––but Camp Damascus is as joyous as it is upsetting. It’s a Queer horror novel that neither shies away from the pain of prejudice nor downplays the victory of self-acceptance. The author’s motto is “love is real.” Though the book suggests that hate is real, too, in the end, Camp Damascus suggests that our better angels can win.

There is no way to convey the brilliance or intricacy of Catriona Ward’s latest novel in this short thumbnail sketch. This is the kind of book that doctoral theses will tussle with and still not fully pin down. On one hand, it’s a metafictional experiment, in which the account of a haunting summer in coastal Maine is written and rewritten until the safety of truth is lost. On the other hand, it’s an entertaining piece of American Gothic, featuring a small-town adolescence and the serial killings that stain it. Ward has captured the frigidity of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, combining it with a Stephen King locale and Shirley Jackson’s psychological nuance. If there is any justice in this world, Looking Glass Sound will enter the canon of the classic American macabre. It should be read and studied for decades.

A boy lives with his family by the sea. It’s an idyllic life, filled with natural wonder and humble adventure. Then grandfather arrives and something within the boy begins to stir, to change. It makes his parents worried. It makes his dog, Teach, bark and howl. But it makes grandfather smile. Those are the bare bones of S.L. Coney’s little Lovecraftian gem. The writing is as slippery as the inevitable tentacles, and the truth of the story is something to be circled rather than nailed down. However, if you read my recent article about dogs in fiction, you’ll know that I’m a sucker for a good boy, and Teach is a very good boy indeed. He’s one of the great canine companions in recent horror and the reason that such a slim story is able to bruise your heart so deeply.

Spin a Black Yarn contains five tales that showcase Josh Malerman’s uniquely canted imagination. In “Argyle,” a family man’s deathbed confession alerts his loved ones to the darkness behind a father’s smile. In “Doug and Judy Buy the Housewasher™,” an obnoxious couple are confronted by the horrid truth of their affluence, at the hands of a state-of-the-art household appliance. “Egorov” is a tale of faux-haunting and weird revenge that Poe would be proud of. Each story has its horrors, but the majority are leavened with a wry humor. This can’t be said for “Half the House is Haunted,” though. This eerie twist on the uncanny home is like nothing Malerman has written before. It’s closer to the indeterminate terrors of Shirley Jackson or Paul Tremblay, and when compared with the breeziness elsewhere in the collection, it shows just how versatile a writer Malerman can be. Full of fun and sudden turns, Spin a Black Yarn is a perfect entry point to one of the defining imaginations of twenty-first century horror.

Clay McLeod Chapman made our best horror list in 2022 with Ghost Eaters, and now he’s back again with an even more insane premise than that book’s haunted mushrooms. In What Kind of Mother, Chapman revisits the Chesapeake inlets of his youth for a story that marries esoteric haunting with down-home Southern Gothic. The world of crab fisherman and parking lot palm readers may be ever-so Americana, but when a grieving father returns to town in a desperate search for his vanished son, the Bruce Springsteen song dissolves into screaming psychedelia. I’m making a point of not spoiling anything to do with the plot here, because that would be a crime, but I will say two things: What Kind of Mother contains the single most upsetting paragraph I’ve read this year, and I will never look at a crab the same way again. Am I being opaque? Sure. You’ll thank me.

Grady Hendrix made his name as the horror trickster par excellence. His novels melt down pop culture references, movie tropes, and horror motifs, then mold them into new shapes as darkly camp as they are creepy. Hendrix follows the same recipe in How to Sell a Haunted House, but whips up the emotional stakes and adds in some genuinely unsettling scenes of supernatural weirdness and familial psychodrama. When Louise returns to her childhood home following the sudden death of her parents, she’s forced to contend with both her brother’s resentment and the malign presence that won’t relinquish the house. Do you think puppets are scary? You will.

Tell Me I’m Worthless is a state-of-the-nation howl hidden inside a horror story. Rumfitt’s short, scathing novel represents modern Britain as a haunted and hateful house. Following a hideous night in said Albion House, Alice and Ila’s friendship is in ruins. Alice, a trans woman, finds some meager refuge online, while Ila falls into the clutches of militant gender-critical feminists. As in all good haunted house stories, they must eventually return to the scene of trauma in pursuit of closure, but there are plenty of demons to fight along the way. Rumfitt’s very personal approach to haunting intentionally evokes Shirley Jackson’s American classic The Haunting of Hill House, but this is a book baked in the bleak hostility of British life. The phrase “novel for our time” is overused, but in this case, it’s entirely valid.