Horror Lit - Books Reviews, News and Discussions

An apocalyptic world turned into a pitch-black sea of nothingness, but smuggler Rosi and her crew of survivors aren’t alone. Something hungry lurks below…

We’ve picked out five psychedelic horror novels that will leave you feeling stunned—and possibly wanting more.

There are some genuinely great horror retellings coming out this year that you should consider preordering and/or adding to your library hold list. And never fear about waiting. You’re going to be treated to a couple of recommendations for books you can pick up right now.

(( Paywalled - use a “read only” addon like Reader View for firefox))

I’ve got my Top 10 Anthologies and my Top 10 Collections of 2025 for you. These are in no particular order, except for the number 1 spots, and I’m including links for the books for you in case you’re interested in checking them out.

When a character that you created becomes so embraced by the public at large that it manages to warrant a biography all its own, you know you created something that will stand the test of time – such is the case for author Thomas Harris and his monstrously evil cannibal, Hannibal Lecter.

The horror revival continues! And it’s so damn hard to narrow down my favorites, which is why this list has twenty titles. There are epic historicals, cutting satires, folk horror, religious horror, cultural reckonings, and so much more.

Every month, io9 compiles a list of the new sci-fi, fantasy, and horror books coming out that we think will excite our readers the most. As we started looking back on all the pages and pages that hit bookshelves in 2025, we dreamed up a fun spin on the annual “Best Books of the Year” lists you start to see everywhere in December.

Horror books, by definition, are meant to keep you up a bit longer at night, wondering if the shadow outside your window is really the tree that has stood there forever or some newfound apparition. That’s all fair and square. However, some horror books burrow deep into your brain, and yet you remain grateful for every troubling revelation. These are the horror novels that hit me in that perfect sweet spot where fear meets fascination.

There’s something especially chilling (ba-dum-tss) about winter horror novels. I’m talking: frigid air that steals breath from lungs; blizzards and avalanches trapping people in cabins, haunted hotels, and/or rest stops; barren, icy settings that provide the perfect backdrops for stories of revenge, death, and trauma; and heavy snow and biting winds hiding whatever evil is lurking out there in the dark.

Unexplainable events are common horror fodder, but perhaps even more terrifying are events whose source is so diffuse, so unplaceable, that our framework of mortal cause and effect cannot contain it.

Okay, But Why are They Singing?

The bestselling author behind disturbing body horror novels like The Troop and The Queen, Nick Cutter, is venturing back into the wilderness next year with new horror novel, The Dorians.

crosspostato da: https://lemmy.world/post/38976838

Getting several new Stephen King adaptations in a given year isn’t surprising to horror fans, but this year has an added dimension of intrigue for longtime Constant Readers. Two of the King films released in 2025 – The Long Walk and The Running Man – were originally released under a different name.

If you’re looking to keep the scares going throughout November and beyond, here are seven books you’ll want to add to your TBR. Happy reading, horror fans.

Following up on the success of A Mountain Walked, this volume presents another dozen tales of the Cthulhu Mythos that show how H. P. Lovecraft’s motifs, conceptions, and imagery have affected an entire century of weird writing. Beginning with a delightful parody of Lovecraft written by Edith Miniter in 1921, this anthology features “The Red Brain,” a story of incalculable cosmic horror by Donald Wandrei; “The Beast of Averoigne,” in which Clark Ashton Smith plays a riff on “The Dunwich Horror”; and C. Hall Thompson’s “The Will of Claude Ashur,” an ingenious adaptation of “The Thing on the Doorstep.”

We Used to Live Here by Marcus Kliewer is a gripping psychological thriller that masterfully blends elements of horror and suspense. The story follows Eve and Charlie, a young couple who find themselves trapped in a web of paranoia, eerie visitors, and unexplainable events after they move into an old house.

One night, Jess, a struggling actress, finds a five-year-old runaway hiding in the bushes outside her apartment. After a violent, bloody encounter with the boy’s father, she and the boy find themselves running for their lives.

Edited by Gabino Iglesias and Andrew Cull

September is here, the gateway to Halloween is open, and that means in the horror publishing world, everyone is putting out some of their absolute best.

https://antonyfb.com/blog/reading-pushing-daisy.html

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54566785-a-song-for-the-void

Here are 7 terrifying cosmic horror books I've read and enjoyed. There's also a bonus entry at the end, so that makes it 8 books. Make sure to add them to your TBR!

August horror novels are turning up the heat for the last long month of summer. So if you’re looking to make your final beach reading days a little bit spookier, I’ve got you, horror fans. I’ve got a lot of new releases from big horror favorites, including Haley Piper, Gretchen Felker-Martin, Ania Ahlborn, and more. And of course, your new favorite horror author might just be on this list as well. So get your TBR pile ready, because you’re going to add many more horror reads to your stack.

Summerween is the celebration of all things spooky, beginning in the month of July.

June’s new horror books include a cattle drive pursued by something terrifying, Succession by way of a Greek cult, a celebrity ghost, squirrel survival, a cyberterrorist in virtual reality, a psychiatrist and a serial killer linked by blood, the true horror of a beach town in the off-season, and much, much more.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123015307

April is the perfect time to dive into spine-tingling reads that will keep you up at night! Whether you love supernatural thrillers, gothic mysteries, or psychological horror, our list of the Best Horror Books to Read in April 2025, curated by Storizen, has something for every horror fan.

John Langan, author of the Bram Stoker Award-winning novel The Fisherman, returns with ten tales of cosmic horror. In these stories, he continues to chart the course of 21st Century weird fiction, from the unfamiliar to the familial, the unfathomably distant to the intimate.

https://pbfcomics.com

Horrorstör is a 2014 horror comedy novel written by Grady Hendrix and illustrated by Michael Rogalski. The novel is set in ORSK, an IKEA-like store, where a group of employees - including store manager Basil and employees Amy and Ruth Anne - stay overnight to investigate strange supernatural occurrences. The story follows Amy, who is unhappy with her job at ORSK. As the group investigates the store, they discover that the land was previously the site of a prison with a cruel warden named Worth. The ghosts of the prisoners, known as "penitents", haunt the store and try to capture the employees. Amy and Basil manage to escape the store before it floods, but the other employees are not so lucky. In the end, a new store called Planet Baby is built on the site, and Amy and Basil vow to rescue the remaining employees trapped inside.

(...)His books don’t just scare you—they stick with you, lurking in the back of your mind like an uninvited ghost. But which of Stephen King’s Best Horror Novels truly deserve the crown for “Most Likely to Wreck Your Sanity”? That’s what we’re here to find out. Do you agree with our picks? (...)

March is going to be a stellar month for new horror releases. Some of my most anticipated horror novels of the year are coming out this month. Some big names in horror have brand new books releasing in March, which is going to have the horror world buzzing. Plus, as always, we’re getting new horror from authors that are going to be new to you. And what’s more exciting than finding a new voice in horror?

https://www.bookishelf.com/shroud-by-adrian-tchaikovsky/?amp -

Cannibalistic women, man-eating plants, and demonic forces—oh my! 2025 has arrived, bringing with it a fresh wave of chilling new horror books that are bound to keep you up at night.

Paul Tremblay, the Bram Stoker Award-winning horror novelist and author behind The Cabin at the End of the World, which was adapted by M. Night Shyamalan in 2023.

https://screenrant.com/horror-books-coming-february-2025-list/

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24800.House_of_Leaves

This is sort of a mosaic novel written by two weird horror authors (that I know personally, hope it's okay to promote my friend's work here) with different styles and outlooks.

(...)Cosmic horror generally revolves around humanity's contact with an Eldritch Abomination: a being so incomprehensible that merely laying eyes on it is enough to drive a person to the brink of insanity. In many cases, those who have seen the creature are the lucky ones, because they've already cracked. The folks who haven't met it yet must live in constant fear of first contact, which lends cosmic horror stories a delicious ramp of terror that lies in wait. (...)

https://screenrant.com/horror-books-coming-out-2025-list/

Heavy Oceans by Tyler Jones is a psychological crime novel that explores family bonds under extreme circumstances. The story follows Jamie Fletcher, a new father, who travels to Hawaii to reconnect with his estranged brother, Eric. After a violent incident, they find themselves on a fishing boat facing cosmic horrors as a sinkhole opens beneath them. The narrative blends survival and existential dread, though some character arcs feel unresolved by the end. Overall, it offers a gripping mix of family drama and deep-sea terror.

https://readjumpscares.com/2025s-new-horror-books/

The definition of scary changes from person to person. For some, it might be ghosts and haunted houses. For others, serial killers. For still others, the most frightening things are the ones that go bump in the night, unseen.

https://books2read.com/Unfathomable

Coming soon from Titan Books is Secret Lives of the Dead by Tim Lebbon, author of The Silence. His latest novel is a dark folk horror tale of a deadly family curse, crime, and murder. Dread Central is excited to exclusively reveal the cover for the upcoming novel, as well as an excerpt to give you a taste of Lebbon’s new piece of horror.

King has a vast catalog of books to choose from that could take a horror lover years to get through, yet some may be searching for other horror authors that can reproduce the same magic as King. Fortunately, there are lots of writers in the horror scene who are publishing incredible books that are just as creepy as any standard King book. On top of that, some of these authors are King collaborators, giving them an even greater connection to the horror legend. All in all, these authors are worth checking out for those readers who love being scared.

Stephen King’s next novel has been announced and detailed by Entertainment Weekly this afternoon. The outlet reports that King’s Never Flinch will be released on May 27, 2025.

Blindsight is a unique kind of first-contact novel. Its focus is not on humanity’s first meeting with an alien civilization, but rather that this civilization is highly intelligent, yet lacks consciousness.

It’s been another massive year for horror, whether we’re talking about film, TV, or books. On that note, the literary world is teeming with spine-tingling graphic novels, nonfiction books, and unsettling novels to keep you busy this Halloween season and beyond.

Curdle Creek By Yvonne Battle-Felton

The balancing point of “cozy Lovecraftian horror” is going to be subjective. It needs to at least work as a weird tale on its own; it needs to be a part of or allude to the Mythos in a way that the readers can recognize and respond to. Jose Cruz’ four elements of Familiarity, Sensuousness, Distance, and Fun are all important—but three of those, at least, are typical of most Mythos stories by default. Readers rarely identify with finding our great-great-great-grandma was a Deep One or Ape Princess, or experience the anxiety of living in the attic room of a witch house and dealing with an extradimensional rodent infestation when they really should be focusing on their finals. The Fun aspect of cozy horror is probably the trickiest and most argumentative aspect of the whole business.

https://lithub.com/10-works-of-literary-horror-you-should-read/

Horror books teachings.

We’re coming into my favorite time of year, and if you’re a horror fan like me, you’re probably just as excited as I am for the autumn months. Of course, we read horror all year around, but there’s something about reading horror in the fall that just hits different. They don’t call it spooky season for nothing, after all! And in fall 2024, we’re getting so many exciting new horror reads to get us through our favorite season.

All Tomorrows book - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Tomorrows

It is the story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of a "haunting"; Theodora, the lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the future heir of Hill House. At first, their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable phenomena. But Hill House is gathering its powers—and soon it will choose one of them to make its own.

As readers and writers, there are many immediate images that we conjure when imagining the weird tale.

This post is all about 23 must-read Cosmic Horror Books, you need to read as soon as possible!

Powerful. Brutal. Bursting at the seams with cosmic horror, ennui, violence and self-annihilation. There are many ways to describe Laird Barron’s latest collection, NOT A SPECK OF LIGHT: Stories (Bad Hand Books, 370 pp., paperback, $19.99), but superb works just fine.

*“With this debut novella, Ajram delves into shadowy liminal spaces, allowing readers to guide the main character deeper into a nightmarish labyrinth with no escape.”*

Here are eight great weird horror novels to lean into that feeling of being unsettled for no discernable reason.

https://screenrant.com/horror-books-terrifying-not-scared-easily/

Brad Anderson’s Session 9 has been one of my favorite psychological horror films ever since I caught a theatrical screening of it at a 24 hour horror marathon in 2001, so it’s cool to hear that horror and dark fantasy author Christian Francis – who has previously written novelizations of the films Wishmaster, Titan Find/Creature, and Vamp – is giving Anderson‘s cult classic the novelization treatment, with Echo Horror Publications planning to send the book out into the world on October 4th – just in time for Halloween season reading!