all taken from this goodreads list: The 78 Most Popular Horror Novels of the Past Five Years

  1. bunny, mona awad. weird, dark academia, about a weird little clique of young women. i tried and couldn’t get into it, but i want to try again.
  2. our share of night, mariana enriquez. 600-page brick but sounds really good. “A woman’s mysterious death puts her husband and son on a collision course with her demonic family.”
  3. the september house, carissa orlando. ****“A woman is determined to stay in her dream home even after it becomes a haunted nightmare in this compulsively readable, twisty, and layered debut novel.”
  4. the reformatory, tananarive due. (pronounced “tanna nareev” from what i found.) i keep hearing people say this book is incredible. “A gripping, page-turning novel set in Jim Crow Florida that follows Robert Stephens Jr. as he’s sent to a segregated reform school that is a chamber of terrors where he sees the horrors of racism and injustice, for the living, and the dead.”
  5. the hollow places, t. kingfisher. i like this author, both her writing style and her actual stories. this one is about a woman who finds a portal in her uncle’s house that leads to “madness and terror.”
  6. sign here, claudia lux. this seems like a funny horror, which is way less common than the spooky kind. a guy works in actual Hell and to get a promotion he just needs to get one more member of this rich family to sell their soul.
  7. dead silence, s.a. barnes. i’m a wimp and i don’t want to read about being stuck in space - but if you want to, check this one out! “Titanic meets The Shining in S.A. Barnes’ Dead Silence, a scifi horror novel in which a woman and her crew board a decades-lost luxury cruiser and find the wreckage of a nightmare that hasn't yet ended. A GHOST SHIP. A SALVAGE CREW. UNSPEAKABLE HORRORS.”
  8. mary, nat cassidy. mary is feeling some changes happening to her, and voices in her head are telling her to do awful things. she moves back to her hometown and these things in her head are echoes of a serial killer - “then the killings begin again.” i’ve heard good things about this one too.
  9. never whistle at night, anthology (multiple authors). this is a collection of unsettling dark fiction stories by indigenous authors.
  10. monstrilio, gerardo samano cordova. the description sounds brutal but people have loved this book; it was nominated for goodreads awards in 2023 for best horror and best debut novel. literary horror about a grieving mom who cuts out a piece of her deceased kid’s lung, then it gains sentience and starts to resemble the original kid. sort of. with some new impulses. obviously it’s an emotional book.

xx