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

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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.

They Lurk

Graveyard of Lost Children, by Katrina Monroe

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.

Black River Orchard

The Others Of Edenwell, by Verity M. Holloway

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.

Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror

Maeve Fly, by CJ Leede

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 fucks 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.

Black Sheep

All the Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby

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.

Camp Damascus, by Chuck Tingle

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 sadistic 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.

Boys in the Valley

Looking Glass Sound, by Catriona Ward

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.

Nestlings

Wild Spaces, by S.L. Coney

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.

The Paleontologist: A Novel

Spin a Black Yarn, by Josh Malerman

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.

The Reformatory: A Novel

Where the Dead Wait: A Novel

What Kind of Mother, by Clay McLeod Chapman

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.

How to Sell a Haunted House, by Grady Hendrix

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, by Alison Rumfitt

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.

Lotería, by Cynthia Pelayo

Sometimes you want a short, sharp hit of horror and magic. Lotería uses the conceit of the Mexican card game to deliver over fifty miniature tales, each drawn from the deep well of Latin American folklore and beliefs. Not all are horrific, but the collection tends in that direction, with plenty of ghosts and monsters, vengeful murders and sinister rituals. Pelayo is an award-winning poet, and it shows in her ability to present a startling image without wasting a word. At times, her prose is pared back enough to make Hemingway applaud, but the stories themselves do not lack for atmosphere or unsettling detail. Indeed, as a Puerto Rican born writer, Pelayo creates tiny pocket worlds that are both culturally specific and imaginatively universal. A pink quincea?era dress, a crow’s feather, the scratching from the walls of a little boy’s bedroom:

Lotería’s tiny nightmares hinge on these details, barely glimpsed before they’re gone, but coming together to form a dark celebration of otherworldly Otherness.

The Drift, by C.J. Tudor

After a sequence of novels that push crime fiction to the very cusp of horror, C.J. Tudor has finally tipped over into the guts and gore. The Drift takes place in the aftermath of a global pandemic, focusing on three sets of characters in different apocalyptic varieties of the locked-room mystery. One group is trapped aboard the wreckage of a bus; another wakes up dangling in a broken-down ski lift. The last is situated in the titular research complex, where Very Bad Things Indeed are taking place. Each of the nested stories features a murder, among other pulpy nastiness, but it’s the intricate way the narratives lock together that provides the most satisfying surprise. Tudor may be the queen of British crime fiction, but she’s gunning for the horror throne now.

Don't Fear the Reaper, by Stephen Graham Jones

Back to Proofrock, Idaho, the epicenter of self-aware carnage in Stephen Graham Jones’ award-winning My Heart is a Chainsaw. In this volume, the second of a proposed trilogy, we reconnect with the indomitable and slasher-savvy Jade Daniels for another night of extreme violence and niche movie trivia as the mythic native American killer, Dark Mill South, comes to town. Whereas the first installment demanded the reader slowly peel back layers of trivia to get at the heart of its protagonist, Don’t Fear the Reaper benefits from us already knowing Jade. She’s still fierce, but now she’s unafraid to be vulnerable, and this time she has friends to fight alongside her. It makes for a warmer story that wields both emotion and intellect like a knife. When we look back on this trilogy, we may well see Don’t Fear the Reaper as the horror version of The Empire Strikes Back. Though I’m pretty sure the final part, when it comes, won’t feature anything as cuddly as an Ewok.

Our Share of Night, by Mariana Enriquez

For an author known for tightly written tales of the contemporary uncanny, Mariana Enriquez has certainly embraced maximalism. Our Share of Night is her first novel to be translated into English, and at over 700 pages, it’s epic in every sense of the word. The story spans several decades of Argentina’s military dictatorship, putting the political corruption and human rights abuses to excellent use as both backdrop and allegory for a wholly other kind of devilry. Each of the book’s lengthy segments pivots around different members of the Reyes family, one of a trio of wealthy dynasties in pursuit of occult knowledge. Their decades-long project leaves a trail of bodies—many of them children—and be warned, there are numerous scenes of shocking cruelty that leap, unexpected, from the dark corners of this story. At times, Our Share of Night is mean as hell. It’s also meandering. But the journey, like the lives of its hideously privileged characters, is so very richly textured.

The Spite House, by Johnny Compton

You can trace the tradition of the American ‘Bad Place’ from Edgar Allan Poe through Shirley Jackson, Richard Matheson, and Stephen King, all the way to Johnny Compton and The Spite House. Compton’s starting concept is potent: if a house is built purely for spite, what malignancies might be mixed in with the mortar? He follows up on the premise beautifully, with a redefined notion of what a ghost is, but the real magic trick is how he packs so much more into a relatively compact novel. The backstory that traps the beleaguered Ross family in the Spite House is sufficient for a novel in itself, but Compton adds layers of history and haunting, family curses, madness, and a restrained commentary on racial and economic inequality. Oh, yeah, and it’s properly scary too.

Wasps in the Ice Cream, by Tim McGregor

This is a slight outlier on this list, as it’s not so much a horror novel as a coming-of-age story that hangs on the precipice of horror—never quite tipping over, but always threatening to. McGregor takes us to small-town 1987, where Mark Prewitt wastes summer nights with his loser friends (they really are losers, not the cool Stephen King kind). A cruel trick played on the witchy Farrow sisters prompts a tumultuous relationship between Mark and the middle sister. From there, Wasps hints at the supernatural, but revels in the more mundane murk of dysfunctional families, hollow friendships, and small-town intolerance. It’s a Springsteen song in prose form, with a melody twisted just out of tune.

The God of Endings, by Jacqueline Holland

Is immortality a blessing or a curse? That’s the question that drives The God of Endings through centuries and across continents, as we follow Collette LeSange through her many human lifespans. What begins as a traditional vampire tale, satisfyingly taking in both New England and Eastern European lore, soon morphs into a wartime romance, and then again into a psychological thriller in the modern, 80s-set story strand, in which Collette runs a preschool for privileged children. There’s mordant humor in situating a vampire so close to these “little sacks of blood,” but a bond with a troubled child leads to a genuinely shocking climax. Holland has been praised for her lush prose, but ornamentation never gets in the way of a propulsive story, nor obscures the truly terrible possibilities of existence without end.

Pi?ata, by Leopoldo Gout

Possession horror is commonly rooted in Catholic ritual and Judeo-Christian demonology. Leopoldo Gout’s novel spins the entire tradition on its head, switching focus to the indigenous Mexican cultures who suffered under the yoke of the Vatican. A scorching prologue depicts the conquerors’ brutality, establishing a history of colonization, cruelty, and suffering that resurfaces in the present day. When Carmen’s daughter, Luna, removes a Nahua artifact from a pre-Hispanic site, the scorned gods awaken and take a special interest in Carmen’s family. Gout extracts a great deal of unease from incidental domestic moments and microaggressions, but never lets the supernatural machinery still for too long. Pi?ata is a slow-burning story of corruption and cosmic revenge that makes a nice alternative to same old same old scuffles with crosses and holy water.

Abnormal Statistics, by Max Booth III

When I asked Max Booth about his intentions in compiling this collection of ultra-bleak short stories, he said, “Maybe I like to feel bad.” If so, it’s an achievement that he passes on to the reader. The thirteen stories in Abnormal Statistics are filled with lonely people. Outcasts, the bullied, those working the nightshift, and those living itinerant lives in soulless hotels: these are Booth’s people, and he writes about them beautifully and mercilessly. A child falls down a hole and makes a desperate bargain with the monsters beneath his town. A pair of teens commit one of the worst crimes imaginable. A man is forced to choose between the life of his wife and the life of his child, while another unfortunate soul struggles to keep his baby alive in the apocalypse. Abnormal Statistics is not interested in your hurt feelings or your moral outrage; it wants to hurt you and make you welcome the pain.

Lone Women, by Victor LaValle

In his first novel since 2018, Victor LaValle leaves the hustle and clutter of New York for the wide expanse of 1915’s Montana. Adelaide Henry is a homesteader, one of the “lone women” who braved the dangers of the prairies for a chance at freedom and autonomy. That alone would make for a good novel, but Adelaide’s circumstances are further complicated by two things: her race and the monster trapped in her steamer trunk. Yes, Lone Women is a monster story, but the nature of monstrosity is constantly under debate. LaValle populates his Western with an array of grotesques, killers, hypocrites, and sinners, but he also makes room for diversity that the genre has too long suppressed. It’s a corrective to the founding myth of America, a book filled with bloodshed and pain, but always holding out for the hope of a happy ending.

The Marigold, by Andrew F. Sullivan

Just like the rotting apartment block of the title, The Marigold contains many stories. It’s a techno-thriller, an occult fantasy, and a coming-of-age horror adventure, all taking place in a near-future Toronto plagued by extreme weather and insidious fungus. In particular, Sullivan excels at blurring the lines between dystopian nightmare and our very present environmental crisis. But whenever the drear of the real threatens to overwhelm, Sullivan injects a fresh surreal detail to liven the atmosphere. By the end, as the multiple plot strands coalesce, The Marigold proves to be a light-footed punk tour through our worrying tomorrow. It’s more fun than you think an oppressive urban hellscape could possibly be.

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