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It has been another banner year for literary horror. Somehow, as the world gets scarier, the writers penning our nightmares still manage to keep up. What follows is merely a sprinkling — a light blood spatter — of the new horror novels that kept us awake for all the right reasons this year. From techno terrors to rural cannibalism, angelic visitations to squirmy alien sex, there is something for every spooky vibe — into the Halloween season and beyond.
Wake Up and Open Your Eyes, by Clay McLeod Chapman
Remember back in January, when we all worried how bad the political landscape could get in 2025? And then it even surprised the most pessimistic of us? Well, it didn’t surprise Clay McLeod Chapman. Wake Up and Open Your Eyes is an allegory of polarization and media saturation, in which right-wing viral media spreads demonic possession like a plague. Communities are ripped apart, families are trapped in a downward doom spiral, and a certain encounter between an infected mother and her son proves that nothing left is sacred. At times grim, at others gleefully disgusting, Chapman’s latest is a state-of-the-nation address written in blood.
Old Soul, by Susan Barker
Susan Barker has a gift for the kaleidoscopic novel. Her debut, Sayonara Bar, flickers around the characters frequenting a Japanese hostess lounge, while The Incarnations traces a single soul across a thousand years. In Old Soul, Barker has adapted the novel-as-stories form to truly frightening effect. A series of uncanny, globe-spanning deaths is linked by the presence of an enigmatic woman. As the haunted protagonist, Jake, tracks her across continents and centuries, he gradually unveils a curse of cosmic proportions. Old Soul is a novel of great variety, leaping from the gothic dampness of rural Wales to the sun-bleached Mojave to the urban gleam of Japan, but the connective tissue thrums with uncanny currents. It’s a quiet, unsettling triumph.
The Lamb, by Lucy Rose
The Lamb is a rare and welcome word-of-mouth success from England’s neglected north. Set in an isolated stretch of the Lake District, it revolves around the deeply unhealthy relationship between young Margot, her domineering mother, and their unwilling food source. The scenes of cannibalism are queasily effective — even appetizing in the most unsettling way — but it’s Margot’s isolation and loneliness that leaves the sourest taste in your mouth. Lucy Rose excels at capturing the beautiful imprisonment of rural English life, and her writing flits between graphic horror and fablelike impressionism, both necessary registers for the battle between nature and nurture at the core of the book. It’s a stunning debut and a landmark of regional British genre fiction.
Victorian Psycho, by Virginia Feito
Sometimes horror readers just want to have fun. What fun means depends entirely on your personal tolerances, of course, but if you can see the funny side of family annihilation, infanticide, and vicious cruelty, then Virginia Feito’s Victorian Psycho is the book for you. When Winifred Notty accepts the role of governess to the Pound family, she begins a campaign of malice that leaves almost everyone dead. The title (and description) may suggest an allusion to Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, but Feito has done much more than transpose that ’90s controversy to a period setting. She’s written a much lighter, less grueling book than Ellis’s, but it’s nonetheless substantial enough to address the misogyny, inequality, and patriarchal exploitation that seems to have spanned the centuries intact. You’ll read it in a day, and you may need to take a shower afterward — but you’ll have fun watching Winifred do her worst.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, by Stephen Graham Jones
“I am America’s worst nightmare: The Indian who wouldn’t die.” Thus speaks Good Stab, the Blackfeet narrator at the heart of Stephen Graham Jones’s epic novel of blood, vengeance, and genocide. With all of that in play, the vampire may seem hardly necessary, but Jones uses his unique spin on the bloodsucker to trace the hard legacy of Manifest Destiny and the excavation of Indigenous American culture. The book roams in time, from a Lutheran minister’s interview with the vampire in 1912 Montana to a present-day academic study. It’s quintessentially Jones in all its flouted literary rules and structural left turns, but the author’s unique voice has never been better suited to the story he is trying to tell.
Rekt, by Alex Gonzalez
After Netflix’s Adolescence directed mainstream attention to the toxic sludge awaiting young men online, Rekt drives the point home in the most disturbing ways. When Sammy Dominguez turns to the internet to assuage his grief, he stumbles across a website that offers the chance to view the lethal accidents, suicides, and murders befalling people he knows — even when some of them are still alive IRL. As his obsession grows, he’s drawn further into horror in pursuit of the truth of the impossible site. It’s a hypercontemporary cautionary tale about treading too far into online spaces and what the digital word can take from us. Gonzalez has written the darkest novel on this list, and even its trigger warnings should come with trigger warnings. Yet Rekt is so smart, so bleakly funny, and so of-the-moment that it more than earns the right to its depravities.
When the Wolf Comes Home, by Nat Cassidy
After two well-received novels (Mary, Nestlings), Nat Cassidy erupted into the forefront of the horror scene in 2025 with this meditation on the nature of fear and the power of childhood imagination. When wannabe actress Jess returns home from an awful diner shift, she encounters a cowering boy and the monstrous creature hell-bent on catching him. What follows is a roaring road trip, a mad cross between Terminator 2 and Stephen King’s Firestarter. But that’s just the beginning. Once the novel has time to take a breath, it undergoes a transformation into a far stranger, more emotional journey than even the most genre-savvy horror fan could anticipate. When the Wolf Comes Home is that rare thing: a true and genuine modern classic.
Angel Down, by Daniel Kraus
The mud, blood, and bombardment of the World War I trenches forms the backdrop to the most audacious horror novel of the year. Daniel Kraus’s latest high-concept literary trapeze act follows a band of dishonorable soldiers on a mission to rescue a fallen angel from the mire of no-man’s-land. What ensues is an internal war to match the grander struggle, as each man tussles with his own worst nature in light of what the angel can offer. It’s a hypervivid depiction of war, shorn of any glory — a prose wall of taste, touch, smell, and the worst sights in the world. And it’s all told in one single, winding 300-page sentence. Don’t be put off by the experimentation, though; Kraus’s writing traps the eye just as it repels the senses. Angel Down is very readable and very distressing.
House of Monstrous Women, by Daphne Fama
Three young people are invited to the home of a childhood friend. There, they are inducted into a game that will award the winner their greatest desire. The only trouble is the game board itself: a labyrinthine house, with its hundreds of rooms and corridors, haunted by apparitions and prowled by folkloric creatures. Daphne Fama’s most gothic game of hide-and-seek is set against the Philippine’s People Power Revolution of 1986. It’s an original moment through which to refract the gothic’s endless fascination with social anxiety and class upheaval, and a welcome new perspective for horror fiction. House of Monstrous Women starts slow, as befitting a good gothic novel, but once things accelerate, the book embarks on an exhilarating charge to the finish via all manner of hauntings, insects, and monstrous winged things.
Coffin Moon, by Keith Rosson
Keith Rosson charged onto every horror fan’s must-read list in 2023 after his novel Fever House and its sequel received glowing endorsements from the First Family of Horror: Stephen King and Joe Hill. Now, Rosson has followed that rare, raw duo with something even better. Coffin Moon is a ’70s-set vampire novel featuring a version of the undead that is not just the antithesis of the suave and sophisticated Bela Lugosi type, but one that would take great delight in curb-stomping Dracula and stealing his wallet. It’s a revenge novel at heart, in which a PTSD-stricken veteran and his adopted daughter pursue the vampire who has destroyed their family. This simple premise nonetheless hints at a deeper mythology underpinning our everyday life (think John Wick’s assassin subculture, but with fangs). It’s gory and gratuitously violent, but all that blood is pumped through a warm, well-intentioned heart. Just fantastic stuff!
Play Nice, by Rachel Harrison
Haunted houses are back, baby! And who better to put a contemporary spin on infested architecture than Rachel Harrison, the doyenne of angsty, millennial horror fiction. Her sixth novel, Play Nice reads like The Amityville Horror through a cursed Instagram filter. When online influencer Clio inherits her childhood home, she welcomes it as a new opportunity for content creation and a chance to confront the half-memories and buried childhood traumas that occurred in the house. As usual, Harrison nimbly walks the line between authentic scares and postmodern humor, but Play Nice gives a little more ventilation to both. Clio’s snark and self-confidence provides levity, but when it switches gear, Play Nice is easily Harrison’s most unsettling book since her debut, The Return. It’s a novel that horror fans will enjoy with a nod of recognition and a wry smile at the stunts Harrison pulls, but it also opens the door wide for visitors to the genre.
The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre, by Philip Fracassi
What if a killer was running amok in an old-folks home? It may sound like little more than a clever spin on the slasher genre or a darkly tinted version of Richard Osman’s megaselling Thursday Murder Club. But as with all Fracassi’s fiction, the neatness of the elevator pitch belies the story’s profound humanity. Autumn Springs is populated by finely wrought individuals, led by the indomitable Rose and her roguish friend Miller. The wider cast includes a movie-obsessed intellectual, an aging beauty with undimmed desires, and a sweet dementia patient anchored to earth by the memory of his dog. The character work elevates this far above your usual slasher or whodunit, and has a lot to say about the threat of solitude always darkening the edges of old age. But at its heart, Autumn Springs is a celebration of love, wisdom, and the value of people too often relegated to the margins of a story.
Spread Me, by Sarah Gailey
From the title alone, you might presume that Sarah Gailey’s novel is just a tiny bit horny. You would be right, but you’d probably still underestimate the sheer eccentricity of the eroticism that ensues when scientists on an isolated desert base unearth a long-dormant virus. The infected fall prey to rampant disinhibition, in a sex-positive blend of John Carpenter’s The Thing and ’90s sexploitation sci-fi “classic” Species. But unlike the exclusively male community of the former, and the latter’s heteronormative male gaze, Gailey presents sexuality as fluid beyond all boundaries. In one taste-establishing scene, the protagonist, Dr. Kinsey, masturbates to images of bacteria. Spread Me offers far more than weird smut, however. It’s a tour de force of weird fiction; a short novel full of body horror that asks important questions about sexual shame and consent, while gleefully provoking some distinctly uncomfortable arousal. Or maybe that’s just me.
The October Film Haunt, by Michael Wehunt
It’s hard to synopsize The October Film Haunt in anything less than an essay, so I’ll just list some of the key concepts in play. There’s a cursed avant-garde horror movie that may be an occult ritual. There’s a Slender Man–esque legend with an associated real-world tragedy. There’s a cult of film fans making a movie against the actors’ will. And there’s a demon that may be emerging from celluloid and Reddit pages to possess people. Wehunt has written one of the great internet horror stories, a book for the terminally online, who remember the early days of online legend and forum culture with nostalgia. If you’ve ever delved into the recesses of Wikipedia at 3 a.m., reading about madness and mysticism and things that may or may not be real, The October Film Haunt will tweak your rabbit-hole tendencies. But be warned: This is not an easy book, and it may not be safe. Wehunt blurs reality and fiction, confounds any expectations, and makes you feel like you’re participating in a dark ritual with each turned page.
Itch, by Gemma Amor
When Josie returns to her grim British hometown after the fallout of a toxic relationship, she thinks she’s at an all-time low. But the discovery of a woman’s body — and a very strange encounter with the ants colonizing it — soon proves that things can always get worse. There is a lot going on in Itch, but in 300-something pages, Gemma Amor stacks folk horror, body horror, a ’90s-style serial-killer thriller, and a heavy dose of female rage into something satisfying and self-supporting. Nature infects everything, from the woodland murk that surrounds the town to the insects infiltrating Josie’s life, and Amor writes about it all with equal beauty and grotesquerie. Itch is a mad, transgressive triumph, rupturing the membrane between subgenres as effectively as it penetrates the skin of its protagonist.
King Sorrow, by Joe Hill
Joe Hill’s first novel in ten years comes with a lot of expectation. Somehow, it more than exceeds them. King Sorrow is an epic in the manner of the very best ’80s and ’90s horror: expansive, maximalist, a soaring fantastical premise countered by the gravity of the characters. I’m not sure the term horror alone does justice to Hill’s imaginative reach. This 900-page Faustian pact between six young students and an eldritch dragon combines high fantasy, blockbuster action, espionage, politics, and a persistent voltage of romance. But horror connects it all, both in the monsters with wings and those on two legs. There are individual sections of King Sorrow that could stand alone with the best novellas of the year, but it’s the accumulating weight and momentum of the whole that makes this Hill’s masterpiece. He takes an unexpected turn at almost every opportunity, and there is a thrilling sense of character agency, the author merely a guiding hand, a kindly supervisor, allowing his flawed, broken cast to stumble toward some sense of redemption.
Related
- The Best Books of 2025 (So Far)
- 7 New Books You Should Read This October
- The Scariest Horror Movies Hitting Theaters This October
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Neil McRobert
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