As a child, my family and I would make scary movies to watch at our own annual family film festival. Horror has always been a passion of mine. The way horror can evoke emotions in you that you can’t otherwise access is a special kind of high. As a horror movie/game/book aficionado, I’ve tried to weave elements of horror into my stories. My favorite types of scary stories are the ones that would stand on their own, even if the ghosts were taken away. I am so passionate about horror with heart, which can be hard to find in a world of slasher movies and true crime.
I live and breathe horror, but I’ve never really found a book that could evoke the same emotions as a horror movie–until I read this book. There is something so subtle about the horror in it that I almost have a hard time pegging what was so scary about it.
There weren’t jump scares, possessions, or gore. It was just a well-written family drama that happened to involve a haunted house. The descriptions of the home and the oh-so-subtle hauntings that could almost be explained away as natural phenomena were my favorite parts of this story.
In the latest thriller from New York Times bestseller Riley Sager, a woman returns to the house made famous by her father’s bestselling horror memoir. Is the place really haunted by evil forces, as her father claimed? Or are there more earthbound—and dangerous—secrets hidden within its walls?
What was it like? Living in that house.
Maggie Holt is used to such questions. Twenty-five years ago, she and her parents, Ewan and Jess, moved into Baneberry Hall, a rambling Victorian estate in the Vermont woods. They spent three weeks there before fleeing in the dead of night, an ordeal Ewan later…
I’ve always been fascinated by the Salem Witch Trials (my youngest daughter is even named Salem), and so, in my search for a good modern take on them, I stumbled across this book. The fact that it was based on a true story immediately drew me in.
Like other books on this list, this story isn’t outright horror. It’s subtle. Rather than using ghosts and violence to scare the reader, this book focused on mob mentality, hysteria, and bias in a way that was so real and relatable that it felt like this could actually happen to me or someone I know.
I think the most effective horror puts you into a situation that’s so familiar and plausible that it keeps you looking over your shoulder. In my opinion, people are always much scarier than ghosts, and so this book that studied mob mentality chilled me with just how easily I could see this happening in my life.
A chilling mystery based on true events, from New York Times bestselling author Katherine Howe.
It’s senior year, and St. Joan’s Academy is a pressure cooker. Grades, college applications, boys’ texts: Through it all, Colleen Rowley and her friends keep it together. Until the school’s queen bee suddenly falls into uncontrollable tics in the middle of class.
The mystery illness spreads to the school's popular clique, then more students and symptoms follow: seizures, hair loss, violent coughing fits. St. Joan’s buzzes with rumor; rumor erupts into full-blown panic.
Everyone scrambles to find something, or someone, to blame. Pollution? Stress? Are…
It's 1943, and World War II has gripped the nation, including the Stilwell family in Jacksonville, Alabama. Rationing, bomb drills, patriotism, and a changing South barrage their way of life. Neighboring Fort McClellan has brought the world to their doorstep in the form of young soldiers from all over the…
I typically like to read original fiction rather than a video game story adapted into a book, but this book was the exception. I love it when a story focuses on social issues and the way they affect ordinary people. Even though the world and location of Bioshock are fantastical, the self-serving and corrupt capitalistic society hits too close to home.
Seeing the worst of humanity and the way things quickly devolve into chaos and anarchy when society's basic needs are ignored in favor of profit absolutely terrified me. And while, yes, there are definitely traditionally scary things in this story, the scariest thing about it is the lack of human compassion the residents of Rapture have for each other.
Even if the book didn’t have the terrifying Splicers climbing on the ceilings or the precariously built city at the bottom of the ocean, its unflinching look at the negative effects that unchecked capitalism can have on people was scary enough on its own.
After barely surviving a plane crash, a man discovers an undersea city called Rapture, a failed utopia created by Jack Ryan, a man who looked to embrace a world surrounding the objectivist ideals of Ayn Rand. Power and greed have run amok and the city has succumbed to civil war and the only question is who really deserves to survive this maniacal debacle of science gone mad.
I’ll admit that I only read this book in high school because it was assigned reading in my English class, but even as a disinterested teenager, the story has stuck with me for decades. It showed me that regular people are usually much scarier and more sinister than any kind of paranormal force.
I remember reading this book and feeling an overwhelming sense of dread. I wondered how anarchy could spread so quickly and was horrified by the idea that it could happen in the real world. I love that this book didn’t rely on traditional horror tropes to be scary.
Honestly, I’m not even sure horror is what Golding was going for, but he definitely mastered it, even if unintentionally. There’s nothing scarier than seeing how quickly human nature breaks down into something unrecognizable in the absence of order.
A plane crashes on a desert island and the only survivors, a group of schoolboys, assemble on the beach and wait to be rescued. By day they inhabit a land of bright fantastic birds and dark blue seas, but at night their dreams are haunted by the image of a terrifying beast. As the boys' delicate sense of order fades, so their childish dreams are transformed into something more primitive, and their behaviour starts to take on a murderous, savage significance.
First published in 1954, Lord of the Flies is one of the most celebrated and widely read of modern…
David Fletcher needs a surgeon, stat! But when he captures a British merchantman in the Caribbean, what he gets is Charley Alcott, an apprentice physician barely old enough to shave. Needs must, and Captain Fletcher takes the prisoner back aboard his ship with orders to do his best or he’ll…
I love Edgar Allan Poe. His stories are so visceral and yet so simplistic in their scares. Of all of the stories by Poe, however, I think this book was a bit of a sleeper agent for me. It wasn’t until COVID-19 happened that I really saw how terrifying this story really was.
The idea of the rich hiding out from a plague that’s destroying the world was much too relatable in 2020. Just like in other titles in this list, the actual ghost itself isn’t necessarily what’s scary. It’s what the ghost represents. Not just death but pride, privilege, selfishness, guilt, and apathy.
Re-reading this book back in 2020 was an experience much too understandable, and it really scared me in a way it hadn’t before. The message Poe was trying to convey stuck with me in a new and horrifying way.
Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.
Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil.
Arguably America's most influential short story writer, Edgar Allan Poe's tales of suspense never fail to spook…
When a group of amateur ghost hunters receives an anonymous letter promising a ghostly adventure and cash reward if they can solve a mystery that’s been buried for decades, they have no choice but to accept.
But everything is not as it seems as each clue uncovered hints at a more personal connection to a long-forgotten murder plot and a modern-day sinister cover-up. With scares, humor, mystery, and romance, Parrish delivers a little bit of everything for anyone looking for a great Halloween read.
Hunted by those who want to study his gravity powers, Jes makes his way to the best place for a mixed-species fugitive to blend in: the pleasure moon where everyone just wants to be lost in the party. It doesn’t take long for him to catch the attention of the…
Clara and Angelica Grace have never met ghosts. They’ve never sailed on a tall ship, ridden wild unicorns, or fought with magical weapons. Instead, the teenage twins have a wretched existence, ignored by their troubled parents in a rundown home and tormented by the town’s snobs.
