Best Horror Books of the Century So Far

What would you do if your teen daughter seemed possessed? If you're the Barrett family, desperate to make enough money to get by while also treating your 14 year-old's severe psychiatric distress, you invite a reality TV show to film her exorcism. Fifteen years later, the younger sister, Merry, now 23, looks back at her family's sudden brush with media exploitation and her sister Majorie's supposed haunting. But was any of it real? This psychological horror novel blurs the lines between memory and media distortions of reality. It digs deep into the distinct anxieties and horrors that define the modern century.

In the midst of an explosion of paranormal romance and dystopia, Blake burst onto the YA scene with this haunting—and romantic—ghost story in 2011. It follows Cas Lowood, who has an unusual talent for killing the dead. Alongside his mother and cat, Cas travels the country looking to help communities put an end to their local hauntings. But his investigation into legend Anna Dressed in Blood is unlike any ghost he's seen before—and despite her murderous history, she spares his life. This series scratches the itch of Supernatural and Buffy fans and serves as a reminder of how scary—and how scarily fun—playing with popular horror tropes can be.

In this Nebula Award-winning 2014 novel, a team of four women heads out on an expedition to study Area X, a quarantined location where nature has mutated. It went on to be made into the 2018 movie of the same name starring Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, Tuva Novotny, and Oscar Isaac. The appeal of this strange little book can be seen in how the reviews can't seem to agree on a genre: it's sci-fi horror, eco-horror, a fantasy thriller, cosmic horror, an old-fashioned gothic, weird fiction, a psychological thriller. Whatever it is, it made us never look at mushrooms the same way again.

If your favorite flavor of horror is sick and depraved, then Ryu Murakami should go to the top of your TBR. His novels are gritty, upsetting looks at depravity amongst humanity. Audition is a shining example of his work. It was originally published in Japan in 1997 and translated into English in 2009, following the continued success of its 1999 film adaptation. It's about a widower who doesn't know how to meet women, so he stages film auditions for a fake movie in order to talk to actresses and try to connect with one. It actually works when he meets a former ballerina, but his ploy blows up spectacularly when her secrets are revealed.

Bat Eater is a book I think about constantly. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Cora witnesses the murder of her sister Delilah. Cora works as a crime scene cleaner in Chinatown, where Asian women seem to be targeted by a serial killer who leaves mutilated bats as a signature. Haunted by more than her grief, Cora must attempt to save Delilah from becoming a hungry ghost. This novel captures the anxiety and trauma of the early COVID-19 days with visceral imagery and surprisingly funny characters. Holding a mirror up to 21st-century racism, Bat Eater is part murder mystery, part terrifying ghost story. 

This apocalyptic thriller is one of the biggest horror debuts of the 21st century. It's about a future where something arrives that makes people lose their minds if they see it, becoming filled with an uncontrollable rage. (In the real world, we call that "the news.") So it's not surprising that five years after it appeared, there are not a lot of people left alive. One survivor is Malorie, who hides away in a boarded-up house with two children and a few others. But resources are scarce, so she makes the difficult decision to travel to a rumored safe haven twenty miles away. But they'll have to do it blindfolded for the whole journey.

In this satirical graphic novel, Lubchansky blends together supernatural horror with the everyday horrors of misgendering and anti-trans bigotry. Sammie is a transfemme person who has been invited to an old friend's bachelor's party as the "best man." There, they seem to be the only one to notice the deadly cult at the hotel that is sacrificing people to an eldritch being. This is such a fun read, grounded by Sammie's refusal to be swept up in the cult of cisheteromasculinity around them. As Carmen Maria Machado put it, it's a "witty, tender romp through the cosmic horror of being alive."

Samantha is a scholarship student in a selective MFA program who finds herself drawn into the clique of rich girls in her cohort, who all call each other Bunny. Their unofficial "Workshops" involve strange rituals, and Samantha soon loses touch with her old life, including her best friend, Ava. This went viral on BookTok, and no wonder: it's a mash-up of two of the platform's favorite genres, dark academia and weird girl fiction. It's a campy horror novel that blends dark comedy and gore to great effect.

In this eerie dark academia novel about guilt, isolation, and scholarship, Catherine House looms behind secured gates in a Pennsylvania forest. Among maples and pines, students attend for free but must dedicate three continuous years to their studies. Willful Ines Murillo suspects the elite alma mater of famous artists, writers, and U.S. presidents is hiding something, and she intends to expose their secrets. Thomas’s debut novel brims with such suspenseful prose and a slow build that the sound of turning a page made me flinch: “Everyone here was here desperately. All of us, for one reason or another, had nowhere else to go.”

Sara Gran's 2003 novel offers a first-hand account of demonic possession. Protagonist Amanda is forced to watch her life unravel when she descends into madness. As her life falls apart around her, Amanda feels her control slipping away. When she eschews help from the one person who believes something may be wrong with her, she seals her fate—and the fate of her soul in the process. Gripping, haunting, and totally engrossing, Paul Tremblay calls this "a perfect horror novel."

Another impressive and chilling debut on our list is this 2008 Japanese novel, translated into English in 2014. The beginning, in which a teacher's young child dies while visiting the school, is horrifying enough. So hold on to your butts, because it gets even more upsetting. After Yuko Moriguchi loses her four-year-old child, she's overcome with grief and resigns from her job at the school. But before she leaves, she gathers her students together to tell them a story, which grows more alarming as it goes on, and exposes the terrible deeds of two of the kids in her class. And for these kids, school may be out forever...

Sookie Stackhouse not only made a name for herself in Harris's bestselling Southern Vampires series, but she also found an incredibly eager and loyal audience in the series' leap to television in True Blood. Stackhouse is a small-town telepathic waitress who becomes a paranormal sleuth. She's got a knack for taking down vampires while serving up the kind of charm you'd expect of a well-written and imperfect character born and bred in Louisiana. Harris found the perfect marriage of mystery and romance, overlaid with the horror that defines vampire lore, and her series still entrances readers two decades after its initial publication.

This Japanese cult classic horror manga series is about bored high school student Light Yagami, who accidentally discovers the lost notebook of a Shinigami death god. The book gives the user unimaginable power, because whenever the name of a human is marked down on its pages, that person dies. Light sees the Death Note as a way to get rid of evil people who do more harm than good in the world. But when an inordinate number of criminals drop dead, it arouses the suspicions of a famous detective, and soon Light finds himself the subject of an investigation and a stalker.

In this imaginative alternate history, the U.S. Civil War is disrupted when fallen soldiers start rising again as zombies. Black and Indigenous children are trained to fight the zombies and protect wealthy white families. But as Jane McKeene prepares to graduate from her combat school in Baltimore, she gets caught up in a conspiracy where the living are just as dangerous to her as the undead. Justina Ireland’s immersive worldbuilding, deeply layered characters, and nuanced view of the Civil War and Reconstruction allows this book to reach far beyond the bounds of your average young adult horror novel. It’s an action-packed thriller with a fantastic premise that offers a savvy perspective on American history.

Carmen Maria Machado is one of today’s most notable writers, known for clever funhouse-mirror-esque distortions of familiar genres and tropes. Her Body and Other Parties was Machado’s debut, a razor-sharp, surrealist, queer short story collection of modern folkloric horror. “The Husband Stitch” weaves the urban legend of the Girl with the Green Ribbon into a haunting narrative about misogyny, marriage, and motherhood. “Eight Bites” uses body horror to examine fatphobia and disordered eating. “Especially Heinous” examines pop culture presentations of sexual violence through a fantastical flipping of the TV show Law & Order: SVU. Machado’s brilliance shines through every one of these darkly seductive tales.

This metafictional, epistolary novel was published in 2000, but it still feels utterly unique. It's about a haunted house, a documentary, and an academic reflection on the documentary. It's the size of a textbook, packed full of footnotes and appendices. Some pages require being read in a mirror or have the text spiral on itself. It's a reading experience like no other: during a chase scene, there are only a few words per page, so you flip through at a sprint. It isn't a perfect book; it drags, at times, and Johnny Truant is insufferable. Regardless, it's unforgettable, and it's one of the most influential horror books ever written.

Chuck Tingle is best known for self-published erotica like Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt, but he's also made a name for himself in the horror genre. Lucky Day is about the Low-Probability Event: a day when millions of people died in unlikely ways. That day, Vera came out to her mom, who told her bisexuality doesn't exist—and then died horrifically in front of her. Really, though, this is a story of existential horror and bi erasure: Vera is investigating this phenomenon while trying to understand her own existence in a world that feels meaningless. Chuck Tingle excels at writing horror that is simultaneously absurd, gory, and heartfelt.

In 1950s Mexico, Noemi gets a letter from her newlywed cousin Catalina, summoning her to the small mountain mining town where she lives with her British husband. From the moment Neomi sets foot in her cousin's mansion, she senses that something is very, very wrong. I was deeply uneasy for most of this Gothic delight, a story as unsettling as it is atmospheric. This is just one gem in Silvia Moreno-Garcia's backlist, but she really flexed on the people with this one, establishing there’s truly no genre she can’t do.

A dozen friends told me I had to read Monstrilio. The heartbreaking hook and gross-sounding monster scared me off for too long. But when I finally picked it up, I knew within a few pages that my friends were right: it’s a masterpiece. Grieving the loss of her young son to congenital lung disease, a devastated mother carves out a piece of his lung and places it in a jar. She’s heard folklore of lost loved ones reborn from a bit of flesh, so she feeds and cares for the bit of lung. Just like the stories she’s heard, it grows into something very much alive—but also darker and stranger than the son she lost. With author Gerardo Sámano Córdova's phenomenal prose, this disgusting creature becomes tender, beautiful, and lovable, not just to his distraught mother but also to the reader.

The unsettling stories in this multiple award-nominated collection begin with the belief that many Indigenous cultures share—that whistling at night can not only summon evil spirits but invite them to follow you home. The stories of these evil spirits, ghosts, curses, hauntings, and more are told by an amazing cadre of both well-known and emerging Indigenous authors, from Rebecca Roanhorse to Cherie Dimaline to Richard Van Camp, and more. Monstrous manifestations from Indigenous traditional stories intermix with social horrors, like the effects of colonialism, to paint a viscerally terrifying picture.

Set in the aftermath of Argentina’s military dictatorship, Our Share of Night follows a father and son mourning the devastating loss of their wife and mother. They embark on a road trip to visit her ancestral home and come face to face with her family’s terrifying legacy: a cult in search of immortality, no matter the cost. Enriquez crafts a meditation on grief that’s also a ghost story, one that looks unflinchingly at the darkest parts of humanity and seeks to understand them while never downplaying their horror. This will make you deeply uncomfortable, and you’ll thank Enriquez for it.

It's a Black horror anthology edited by Jordan Peele, director of the modern horror classic Get Out. What more needs to be said? All of the stories in this anthology are fantastic, but there was one about halfway through that so thoroughly freaked me out that I set the book down for a full five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes before being able to pick it up again to finish it. There are stories in this book that call upon fears I didn’t even know I had, and primal fears passed down through generations that I only learned about while reading this anthology.

This book took the public domain text of Pride and Prejudice and added sword fights, cannibalism, and zombies. Suddenly, the Bennet sisters aren’t only looking for a husband worth ten thousand pounds a year. They also must vanquish the zombie hordes in order to survive. Some called it a brilliant reimagining, while others called it a gimmick. But either way, it created renewed interest in Jane Austen, became an instant NYT bestseller, was adapted into a game, graphic novel, and film, and led to other horror/classic mashups, like Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.

The cover of this Locus Award- and Nebula Award-winning book is creepy as hell, and yet, I greatly underestimated how horrifying this novella actually is. P. Djèlí Clark takes the real-life terror of the Klan and brings additional depth by blending paranormal layers that lend themselves so naturally to all of the actual evil that it almost has me convinced that perhaps they actually are demons. It is horror on multiple levels: body horror that makes my skin crawl and ancestral horror that makes my spirit crawl. One of the hardest-hitting novellas I’ve ever read.

One of the leading horror writers of today is Rachel Harrison, who has quickly become this decade's Queen of Scream. Starting in 2020 with The Return, she's released eight books, each a unique take on different monsters or situations from horror. Each is fun and fresh, like her third novel, Such Sharp Teeth, about werewolves. Harrison gives the "reluctantly going back home" trope a twist when a young woman returning to her hometown to help her pregnant sister is attacked by an unknown creature. It's refreshing how she immediately recognizes she may be turning into a werewolf, as her body and cravings start to change, and her rage rises.

This internationally bestselling, award-winning novel by Argentinian author Agustina Bazterrica was an excellent read to begin with, but then it was translated into English in 2020, six months into a worldwide pandemic. It's a deliciously upsetting, sobering novel of the literal and metaphorical death of humanity. This story about a virus that made animal meat inedible to humans, so they choose to legally and humanely (ha) eat people instead, captured the imaginations of millions. After all, the whole world had been turned upside down, and who knew what was going to come next? Maybe cannibalism was on the table, pun intended.

LaValle is no stranger to blending genres to make truly unforgettable and nuanced horror, but The Ballad of Black Tom may be his most subversive. The retelling of H.P. Lovecraft's existential horror story "The Horror at Red Hook" is a sort of reclaiming. In it, a 20-year-old Black musician living in 1920s Harlem sets out to deliver a magical book, and comes across a man who offers him freedom from the existential terror of living as a Black person in America. It's that same kind of all-encompassing, suffocating cosmic terror that Lovecraft, a raging racist, was known for.

Jones has been writing horror from the perspective of Indigenous Americans since the turn of the century, and this may be his best work. On the third day of reading it, I had a nightmare, but probably not why you think. The monsters here are supernatural and all-consuming, but the true horror is the very real story that's told of the Marias Massacre, where around 200 Blackfeet were murdered in the dead of winter. The story is told through a journal written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor. In it, he records his time with a Blackfeet man who has peculiar eating habits and revenge on his mind.

M.R. Carey’s chilling novel has left a lasting impression on zombie horror this century. Its London setting gives it a great 28 Days Later feel, too. Melanie lives in her cell at an eerie army base, getting strapped into a wheelchair and taken by gunpoint to school. She doesn’t know what the outside world is like, and she doesn’t know there’s something very unique about her and her classmates. This creepy and suspenseful Audie Award-winning book was adapted to a film starring Glenn Close, who plays a very scary doctor. It won a number of indie film awards, cementing it into the zombie movie zeitgeist this century, too.

While Mexican Gothic’s success helped pave the way for Latina and Hispanic horror writers like Isabel Cañas to receive the book deals they deserve, Cañas’ debut is a compelling horror in its own right, set in early 19th-century rural Mexico. Like its frequent comps, Mexican Gothic and Rebecca, The Hacienda harkens back to one of my favorite gruesome fairytales — “Bluebeard.” Cañas tackles colonialism, social status, and structural gender inequity through the lens of this horror retelling about a young woman trapped in a house full of secrets and horrors. It’s a beautifully written, haunting gothic that has some truly terrifying moments.

Alma Katsu’s fictional take on the Donner Party story adds supernatural elements to explain one of the most gruesome events in the history of the American West. A large group of travelers dreams of what awaits them in the West, but as secrets emerge and a string of tragedies pushes them to the brink of madness, members of the party begin to disappear. Is this all just a case of bad luck? Bad choices? Or is it something more sinister… and hungry? Katsu’s backlist contains several titles that could have made it to this list, but The Hunger is top-tier.

When looking at the best horror novels, don't underestimate the power of children's horror. Lifelong fans of the genre were hooked by books like Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Bunnicula, and the Goosebumps series. One of the best recent examples is The Jumbies, a middle grade horror/fantasy novel that draws on Caribbean folklore to tell the story of a girl defending the island she calls home from a supernatural threat. It's also a great conversation starter with kids about colonization and resistance.

Scott Hawkins’s horror fantasy debut is so bananapants (in the best possible way) that it’s impossible to summarize, especially without spoiling any of the wild ride. To this day, it remains so unique that there is no clear comp to give—and let me tell you, fans ask a lot! That a novel this dark, this wild, spanning this many topics—all while keeping the reader in the dark about what is happening—was not only able to reach such a large audience but one that remained obsessed, desperate to discuss it, and hungry for more like it, is a testament to Hawkins’s mastery as a writer.

This Bram Stoker Award-winning sci-fi horror novel follows Gyre, who lied her way into getting a high-paying caving job on another planet. Once she's alone in the tunnels, she learns that her handler has control of her suit and has no qualms about drugging her to manipulate her. Meanwhile, her supplies are disappearing, and monstrous creatures lurk just out of sight. This survival horror novel is intensely claustrophobic, but it's the psychological horror that makes it truly unsettling. Plus, there's the toxic and compelling F/F relationship. It's The Descent meets The Martian meets Killing Eve. I read this in one heart-racing sitting.

Published in the early aughts, Klein's boarding-school-meets-vampire story is a cult favorite and has served as inspiration for numerous horror writers since. The unreliable narrator presents the tale through a diary, and it's packed with literary allusions that connect to her current experiences. As our narrator watches her best friend Lucy grow closer and closer to the strange new girl Ernessa, the narrator's fascination with Ernessa increasingly leans into fear of her. Perhaps what makes this book one of the best of the century, though, is that none of what's been described here is what the story is about at all.

In this multi-award-winning novel, Due writes of the horrors of the Jim Crow South. It's 1950 in Florida when 12-year-old Robbie is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown reformatory for kicking a wealthy white boy in defense of his sister. He can see ghosts, and the ones he sees at the reformatory warn him of all the horrors of the institution and what may befall him if he stays. While The Reformatory may be Due's bestselling work, she's been releasing classic, groundbreaking horror titles, like The Good House and The Between, since 1995, which have earned her the title of The Queen of Black Horror.

The Ring has appeared in many forms, including a 2002 American horror film, which drove the demand for an English translation of the novel a year later. It's about a mysterious videotape that causes people to die within a week of watching it if they don't perform a specific task. When four teenagers die from heart failure, the journalist uncle of one of them decides to do some digging into the video. This book was originally published in Japan in 1991, which explains why so many people were afraid of a VHS cassette, and it became one of the most successful Japanese novels of all time. Sadly, its author, Koji Suzuki, died earlier this year.

Bleak and beautiful, awful and optimistic, The Road is a singular reading experience. A man and his son drag themselves through an unyielding wasteland in the hope of keeping hope. Inspired by conversations with McCarthy’s young son, the relationship between the two main characters explores the ends we would go to survive–and the ends we would not. Modern readers must grapple with the reality of McCarthy’s life; should they choose to take on The Road, there are grim wonders to behold.

As if being pursued by a serial killer isn't bad enough, the women in this book, which became a TV series with Elisabeth Moss, must contend with one who can travel through time. Harper Curtis is a vicious murderer who discovers an unusual house in Chicago that allows him to move back and forth through time, where he gleefully picks his victims, his special "shining girls." After he kills them, he vanishes without a trace. Kirby Mazrachi is a reporter who notices a pattern and begins chasing the story of a serial killer who can't possibly be operating for as long as he has. But then she stumbles upon the horrifying, unbelievable answers.

Jon Klassen is known for creating children’s books with an adult/suspenseful edge to them. In this retelling of a Tyrolean folktale, a little girl runs away from an unnamed danger only to find a spooky, empty house with a talking skull inside. The skull is afraid of the headless skeleton who chases it every night. In this spookily illustrated early reader, Klassen leans into classic horror elements while walking the thin line of a genuinely scary story and one that is also, somehow, both age-appropriate and heartwarming.

In 1990s Charleston, a bored suburban housewife’s one escapist outlet is her true-crime-loving book club. Then, a violent attack by an elderly neighbor brings a mysterious man into their lives, and kids begin going missing in the neighborhood. They’re pretty sure the new guy in town has something to do with it… too bad our main character already invited him in. Hendrix’s take on vampire horror is a romp of a good time, blending satire and scares in the Hendrix way (with blood and gore and grossness). I’ve never recovered from the attic scene with the cockroach: don’t say you weren’t warned.

Don’t let the age category fool you: this YA novel is the goriest horror book I’ve ever read. Silas is a trans autistic teen in a fantasy version of 1883 London. When he’s sent to Braxton’s Finishing School and Sanitorium, the misogyny, transphobia, and ableism are torturous enough—then spirits contact him to let him know students are dying here, and he’ll have to take the school down before he’s next. Silas’s special interest is surgery, so he sees everything through that lens, making for a blood-and-viscera-soaked read even in the mundane moments. There's one scene of amateur surgery in a bathtub that I will never forget...

One hot summer day, high schooler Yoshiki asks his friend Hikaru if it was really him who came back down the mountain six months ago. This new Hikaru may look and sound like the old one, but Yoshiki knows he’s not real. He’s dangerous. What’s more, he has feelings for Yoshiki. So starts the atmospheric, and at times grotesque, exploration of queerness, grief, and Japanese folklore that took the manga-reading world by storm.

Life was normal for Yeong-hye and her husband—until she began to have nightmares. They were bloody and brutal, and she knew she needed to give up eating meat for good. That decision, though, begins to unravel her marriage and her relationships with her in-laws—they're desperate for her to eat meat while she refuses. Kang's dark story of obsession and power has been aptly compared to Kafka's and, without doubt, has helped fuel growth in and hunger for both "weird girl" lit and translated horror in the United States. This is a book that gets under your skin and doesn't go away. Kudos to the translator for outstanding work.

Zombies are foundational to the horror canon, along with vampires, werewolves, and Frankenstein. What makes The Walking Dead series stand so tall among a sea of other zombie (sorry, walker) books? Because the real horror is never the zombies. The real horror comes in the form of people. Other people. The people we become when everything that makes us truly human is stripped away. And the length of the story is part of what made it great, allowing characters to develop in deep, meaningful ways over time.

If you think you know how this book will go as a remix of Stephen King's Carrie, think again. Tiffany D. Jackson sets her story at a high school in a small Georgia town preparing to host its first integrated prom, with a biracial protagonist who’s been passing as white, until now. So begins a bloody examination of racism, internalized and externalized anti-Blackness, white saviorism, classism, and identity politics. It’s social horror of the best kind, the kind that dares you to even try to look away and where no one gets off easy. 

Short stories are a hallmark of horror, and in this collection, Carroll writes and illustrates five original twisted fairy tales. This visual feast includes a retelling of the beloved story "The Girl With the Green Ribbon" in "A Lady's Hands Are Cold," as well as the blockbuster webcomic "His Face All Red." Carroll's successful expansion from webcomic sensation to traditionally published author is both a time capsule of this century so far and a reminder of how much opportunity creatives have found in sharing their work with a wide and eager audience. This collection earned them a prestigious Eisner Award.

Uzumaki is the most widely acclaimed manga title from one of the most influential horror manga artists. The small town of Kurouzu-cho lies on the coast of Japan, and, according to high schooler Kirir's boyfriend, it's cursed. But what plagues it isn't the usual ghost or evil spirit. Instead, it's a shape—the uzumaki, or the "spiral," is the secret pattern of the world, and it's taking over the small, foggy town. What ensues is a unique blend of cosmic and body horror that will make you itch as much as it leaves you pondering on the nature of things.

I’ve gifted this Indigenous horror novel to everyone I know who enjoys the genre, and they’ve all loved it as much as I have. Kari, who is Chickasaw and Apache, is an edgy, sarcastic, heavy metal enthusiast who doesn’t take shit from anybody. She’s one of my all-time favorite horror protagonists. The narrative is often in conversation with other classic horror writers, like Stephen King. It’s also deeply clever and engrossing. Mainstream publishing finally began to notice Indigenous horror in the late 2010s/early 2020s; with White Horse, Wurth challenges Indigenous stereotypes and offers a unique twist on a ghost story.

Between House of Leaves and World War Z, the 2000s were a decade that reinvented the format of a horror novel. As the subtitle suggests, this is told as a series of accounts of a worldwide zombie outbreak, offering glimpses into different countries' responses to the crisis. The format makes for an absorbing read that can make you forget it's fiction. It was made into a 2013 movie starring Brad Pitt, but as Max Brooks put it, the only thing the book and movie have in common is the title. Try the full-cast audiobook instead. Not every part of this 2006 novel has aged well, but the unique structure alone earns it a place on this list.