The Best Horror Books of 2024

The Devil by Name, by Keith Rosson

In 2023’s Fever House, Keith Rosson brought the world to the edge of apocalypse. It’s a dense, punk-inflected pressure-cooker of street violence, shady government shenanigans, and diabolical magic. The sequel, The Devil By Name, is both more of the same and something quite different. Following the broadcast of Fever House’s cursed audio file, the zombie-esque menace has spread beyond Portland. A reluctant group of survivors are pulled into a confrontation with a rogue government agent and a rising demonic power. Rosson continues to trace the spreading ripples generated by the first book’s cliffhanger ending, but replaces the tight, real-time focus with a nightmarish road trip across a broken America. It’s a bigger story, more relaxed and sprawling in the telling, but with the same unpredictable energy and flights of comic book excess.My advice: read this duology as one single grand, mutating epic.

Sacrificial Animals, by Kailee Pedersen

Very early in Sacrificial Animals, there’s a scene that warns us Kailee Pedersen is not screwing around. The cruelty of a foxhunt reverberates throughout the novel, hanging over Nick and Joshua’s reluctant return to their Nebraska farm, where their father has called them to witness his dying. All of the tension between father and sons can be traced back to that early brutality, but Pedersen’s Gothic anti-pastoral is twisted further by the presence of Joshua’s wife, Emilia, whose Asian heritage allows a late injection of Chinese folklore into Midwestern horrors. Pedersen draws on her own childhood as a Chinese adoptee growing up on a farm, and the authenticity shows. Restrained and ornate though the prose may be, Sacrificial Animals is savage in its details and saturated with dread.

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Pay the Piper, by George A. Romero and Daniel Kraus

Pay the Piper is Daniel Kraus’ second posthumous collaboration with the great George Romero. As in 2020’s The Living Dead, Kraus worked from notes to complete Romero’s vision, but this time around—perhaps freed from the weight of the filmmaker’s undead iconography—Kraus’ feels like the driving imagination of the story. The plot centers on Alligator Point, a town as mired in injustice as it is swampland. It’s a classic small-town horror set-up, with personal histories and enmities that reach far back into history and entwine with the presence of the Piper, a shape-shifting, child-killing entity who appears sparingly, but with startling violence. There are surface-level comparisons to be made to well-known horror stories (most obviously, Stephen King’s IT), but Kraus couldn’t write a derivative book if he tried. Symbolic sceneries, Cajun patois, and the fey charm of Pontiac, Kraus’ nine-year protagonist, combine into a satisfyingly eccentric take on local monsters and ancient histories.

Not a Speck of Light, by Laird Barron

A Laird Barron collection is always a reason to celebrate, and this one has been gestating longer than usual. Not a Speck of Light, his first collection of stories in eight years, cements Barron’s standing as the contemporary horror writer most adept at meshing cosmic high strangeness with muscular noir—like Jack London dabbling in the Lovecraftian mythos. Stories contain eerie entities attracted to disaster sites; meanwhile, a cyborg war dog reflects on its immortal war against humanity’s many enemies, and in “The Glorification of Custer Poe,” we meet a Confederate soldier pursued by his own grizzly sins (and yes, that’s a pun of sorts!). These are some of the more easily-resolved stories in the collection; others you may have to read slowly, or more than once, to fully grasp their slippery logic. This is the magic of Laird Barron: he provides too many pieces of the jigsaw and an excess of possible pictures to assemble. It’s our job to find the one that works. Nowhere is this technique more effective than in the collection’s penultimate story, “Tiptoe”—the best horror story I’ve read in many years.

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A Sunny Place for Shady People, by Mariana Enriquez (translated by Megan McDowell)

A fellow master of concise, uncanny horrors, Mariana Enriquez returns to the short story, following her experiment with maximalism in 2023’s Our Share of Night. The new collection’s title story refocuses the grim real-life fate of Elisa Lam, who’s become a subject of online speculation after her body was found in a hotel water tank in 2013. In lesser hands, such a story could be a travesty of exploitation, but Enriquez has made her name in exposing the mistreatment and brutality meted out to women, often deploying horror as a sheer gauze pulled across the very real violence of the world. Other stories in A Sunny Place for Shady People range from the allusive and elusive to the grimly physical. “Face of Disgrace” literalizes the notion of faceless victimhood, while “Hyena Hymns” features a haunted dress that imposes the wounds of historical torture onto the wearer. The best stories, however, concern children. “The Refrigerator Cemetery” depicts a macabre game played among the shells of abandoned appliances, and “Black Eyes,” Enriquez repurposes another famous piece of internet lore in the attempts of two suspect children to penetrate the fragile safety of the narrator’s car. Chilling, grotesque, and slyly funny, A Sunny Place for Shady People is the author’s return to what she does best—and better than most.

Coup de Grâce, by Sofia Ajram

Liminality is having a bit of a moment in horror: The Backrooms is clipping TikTokers out of reality, Silent Hill 2 is back with better-rendered mist, and films like Skinamarink and The Outwaters are setting film festivals a-chatter. Into this zeitgeist strides Sofia Ajram with a big literary “hold my beer.” Her debut novella traps the suicidal narrator in a limitless subway station. Is this impossible space real? Does it exist as an externalization of his internal mental state, or as an allegory for depression? And what, if anything, is in there with him? Coup De Grâce is equal parts fun and frantic desolation. In her references to early online folklore and a late metafictional flourish, Ajram speaks to horror’s uber-contemporary fascination with trauma and mental health, but also to the current vogue for ‘90s and ‘00s nostalgia. Like all good liminal architecture, Coup De Grâce contains far more than its space should allow, and it unfolds like cursed origami.

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So Thirsty, by Rachel Harrison

Rachel Harrison has a special knack for reconfiguring horror tropes as a reflection of post-millennial angst. She’s worked with witches, werewolves, cults, and now, with So Thirsty, she’s come for the vampires. When risk-averse Sloane and her hedonistic friend Naomi cross paths with a band of vamps, they’re forced to confront the realities of an immortal life lived in the shadows. It’s not all bad news, though—there’s passion, freedom, and friendship to be found once the ticking clock of a normal life comes to a halt. Harrison blends two traditions of vampire fiction into one story: there’s gore and violence aplenty, but also eroticism and romance. Linking both strands is a pointed observation on female aging in contemporary culture. It’s a sex-drizzled, blood-soaked treat, but like all of Harrison’s fiction, it has something angry and urgent to say about the conditions of reality.

American Rapture, by CJ Leede

There are many fictional apocalypses threatening the U.S. these days, but few pose the lurid potential of American Rapture’s hyper-sexualized plague. The book follows sheltered Catholic schoolgirl Sophie on a Midwest odyssey, where lust has become synonymous with death, and her own burgeoning sexuality could be a sign of infection. Though it’s a horrific premise, with scenes of grotesque violence and deeply uncomfortable sexual encounters, Leede never allows the story to descend into titillation or exploitation. She turns the pornographic gaze against itself, gleefully delighting in her satire of a schizophrenic American morality concerning sex and purity. Somehow, American Rapture is both a taboo-shredding nightmare and a sex-positive coming-of-age story. Though I warn you, for a certain type of reader, the ending may prove more upsetting than anything else you’ll read in 2024.

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Rest Stop. by Nat Cassidy

Novellas are great, but too often they leave me wanting more. More character, more plot, more incident, and more emotion. Rest Stop is a full serving of all of those ingredients, in just 150 pages. By the time Abraham is locked into a gas station bathroom by a homicidal maniac, we already know about his unrequited love, his conflicted Jewish faith, and his fragile relationships with friends and family—and we’re only a few dozen pages in! It’s a bravura feat of efficiency that leaves Cassidy plenty of room to eke out Abraham’s torment at the hands of his googly-eyed assailant. What follows is part creature-feature (arachnophobes beware!) and part Beckettian character study. My point is that Cassidy packs a whole damn story into Rest Stop, without a word wasted. This is what a novella is supposed to be.

This Cursed House, by Del Sandeen

It’s 1962, and Jemma Barker has answered a strange invitation to leave Chicago for New Orleans, to take up employment in the mansion of the reclusive Duchon family. Once she arrives, she finds a Halloween advent calendar of Southern Gothic delights: ghosts, curses, hidden rooms, family secrets, and incestuous desires. Simmering beneath it all is the more awful and persistent trace of colorism, which Sandeen is clear to distinguish from the genre’s more often-tread and binary treatment of prejudice. Heavy as the theme is, This Cursed House is never less than absolutely fun. It’s self-aware but never self-conscious, and Sandeen pauses the breakneck pace only to ensure that you have a moment to fully grasp the secrets buried in its lineages and family trees, like Wuthering Heights transposed to the Big Easy. It’s such ripe Gothic that if you squeezed it, I’m half convinced blood-red juice would stain your hands.

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The Redemption of Morgan Bright, by Chris Panatier

This novel may open with a woman in a nightgown fleeing a creepy asylum, but The Redemption of Morgan Bright is far from a traditional gothic chiller. When Morgan inveigles her way into Hollyhock Asylum, she’s seeking answers regarding her sister’s mysterious death. Once inside, she’s assaulted by punishing systems of control and the oppressive presence of another personality inside her own head. Is she mad? Has the system made her so? Or is something else going on? (Spoiler: It’s option three.) This novel provides a chilling twist on the unreliable-narrator trope, as well as a contemporary restaging of Nellie Bly’s exposure of psychiatric cruelties. Panatier nods often to a past (the warden is named Althea Edevane, a name dripping with Victorian Gothic menace), but within the asylum walls, echoes of antiquated maltreatment go hand-in-hand with future-punk exploitation. The Redemption of Morgan Bright suggests that our treatment of the vulnerable never changes. Or if it does, it’s only for the worse.

All the Fiends of Hell, by Adam L.G. Nevill

Nevill’s stories are full of tight interiors, narrow minds, and entities that slip under a reader’s defenses. In All the Fiends of Hell, he’s done it again, but on a broader apocalyptic canvas. Granted, we only see the British portion of Armageddon, but that’s more than enough. Following a night of mass abduction by otherworldly forces, a few weak, sickly survivors are left alone under a crimson sky. Well, not alone exactly—there are also hideous monsters who can only be seen in the ruby-red light. We join an everyman and two children on a desperate race to the ocean, carrying the last, lingering shreds of forlorn hope. But hopelessness is the point of the novel, whose central question is: What keeps us going when nothing good remains? All the Fiends of Hell is an especially grim and very British Armageddon. It’s The Road as envisioned by Ken Loach. It’s also Nevill’s best book in some time.

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Small Town Horror, by Ronald Malfi

The title of Malfi’s latest novel sets expectations of Stephen King or Norman Rockwell’s Americana. It turns out to be much stranger than that. When old friends reunite in their hometown, an inevitable showdown with their past quickly tips into the surreal. Weird ash falls from the sky, basements become liminal spaces, and a gridwork of hairy wires is discovered just beneath the surface of the town. Amid all of this craziness, Malfi does what he does best: He creates fully fleshed-out characters and pitches them into uncomfortable and very realistic situations. Small Town Horror defies assumption. It’s no nostalgia trip back to a rosy childhood, nor is it an ode to friendship. Thomas Wolfe famously wrote, “You can’t go home again”; in this novel, Malfi asks why the hell you would want to.

No Gods, Only Chaos, by L.P. Hernandez

What a showcase 2024 has been for the imaginative range of L.P. Hernandez! His second entry on this list, No Gods, Only Chaos, is a collection of stories ranging from dark fantasy to creature feature, containing some of the most abhorrent crimes imaginable. Each story is an act of ventriloquism. Whether Hernandez is adopting the Dust Bowl drawl of “From the Red Dirt,” mouthing Gen Z idioms in “The Last of Our Kind,” or exploring the broken mind of a neurodivergent killer in “The Bystander,” he obscures himself entirely within his characters and narrative voices. “Family Annihilator” is the most memorable story in the collection, and even darker than its title suggests. It’s an utterly shocking piece of fiction, though not without a trace of void-black comedy. Maybe memorable is too mild a word. Unforgettable, incurable, bedeviling…it’s a story that leaves a stain. Anyone looking for a truly exciting new name in horror fiction will find something here to love or flinch away from.

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Horror Movie, by Paul Tremblay

There are two major strands of anxiety in Tremblay’s work. One is the psychological ambiguity of his characters; the second is his appetite for experimentation and self-awareness. Horror Movie is the most effective balancing of the two since the author’s landmark A Head Full of Ghosts. A retrospective arc details the making of a cursed film in the nineties, while in the present day, the lone surviving member of the cast works toward a remake. Any dissonance between the two accounts is further complicated by a full reproduction of the original script—and kudos to Tremblay for coming up with a screenplay that evolves from a parody of art-horror to a genuinely disturbing piece of work. There’s plenty of meta commentary about horror cinema (including one agonizingly extended scene that’s just begging for a bold director to adapt), but Tremblay hasn’t forgotten to include moments of crowd-pleasing savagery, torture, and dismemberment. It makes for a book that equally thrills the head and the gut.

Lost Man’s Lane, by Scott Carson

There have been plenty of nostalgic horror novels in recent years, but few have captured the laconic charm of the eighties and nineties paperback boom quite like Lost Man’s Lane. The elevator pitch would be “Boy takes a summer job as the assistant to a private detective and helps solve a supernatural crime,” but that’s really only one element of this long, meandering tale involving rattlesnakes, rock-climbing, young love, family dynamics, and unusual friendships. Carson manages to tie off each strand in a neat and emotionally satisfying bow, even if it seems unlikely. There’s a lazy pace to his plotting, more reminiscent of a sprawling bildungsroman like The Goldfinch than any contemporary horror fiction. Lost Man’s Lane is the kind of horror novel “they” used to write. A big swing of a book, best enjoyed in a hammock with ice-cold lemonade.

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You Like It Darker, by Stephen King

Speaking of nostalgic horror, King’s latest collection of short stories reads like a homecoming. Most of the dozen stories feature a callback or a thematic link to his expansive bibliography; they also vary significantly in length, from the two-hundred-page crime-nightmare “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream” to razor-sharp shorts like “The Fifth Step.” The shorter stories read like nasty little jokes that would be comfortably at home in King’s collections from the seventies and eighties, while “The Dreamers” is proof that he’s still more than capable of a writing a full-blooded nightmare to equal Revival or Pet Sematary, complete with Lovecraftian hints of things lurking beneath the wall of rationality. The best of the stories benefit from a life well-lived, with a shared focus on grief and mortality. It’s evident in the horror of “Rattlesnakes” (an unexpectedly haunting pseudo-sequel to Cujo) and in the gentler man’s-best-friendship of “Laurie.” The closing story stands above all, though. “The Answer Man” packs a whole human life into eighty pages, mundane but with occasional glimpses of the mystery beyond. It’s a story only King could write, and we should all be grateful he has.

Read an excerpt from the book and an interview with King here at Esquire.

Midnight Rooms, by Donyae Coles

Fans of Gothic fiction will feel immediately at home in Midnight Rooms. It is 1840, and the orphaned, biracial Orabella subsists on the cusp of spinsterhood before gambling debts and plot conventions lead her into marriage with the devilishly appealing Elias Blakersby. So far, so retro, and much of the reader’s early comfort is due to Orabella’s familiar discomfort in her new home. However, once the story settles in the gloomy Korringhill Manor, Coles defies expectations. As Orabella endures long nights locked in her quarters, interspersed with animalistic revelries and dreams of meat, the faux-Victorian framework collapses into fragments and fever dreams more recognizable from modernist fiction. Imagine Jane Eyre or Rebecca as rewritten by Virginia Woolf. I could not, hand on heart, say that I’ve grasped all the implications and secrets of this book or its strange household, but the disorienting flow of language makes Midnight Rooms one of the most remarkably written books of the year.

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Bury Your Gays, by Chuck Tingle

Tingle has the rare ability to write very frightening stories about joy—his monsters are literally and metaphorically agents of unhappiness and suppression. In Bury Your Gays, said monsters are the Hollywood studio execs who pressure the closeted Misha to rewrite his script because the algorithm dictates that audiences want characters “alive and straight, or gay and dead.” When Misha refuses, he’s menaced by a whole other monstrous pantheon, who look worryingly like the horrible things he’s written into movies. Tingle shows an incredible flair for originality in thinking up these creatures, but in Mrs. Why, he may have created the next great horror icon! She haunts my dreams like nothing has since I watched that damn video from The Ring. Bury Your Gays is many things at once: a toy box overstuffed with nightmares, a meta depiction of Hollywood, and an invective against the cynicism of “rainbow capitalism.” It’s also just a joyous horror story, inventively told, and with a greater balance of heart, humor, and genuine scares than anything else written this year.

I Was a Teenage Slasher, by Stephen Graham Jones

Only Stephen Graham Jones could get away with this. A first-person, stream-of-consciousness, coming-of-age memoir about the making of a serial killer—it shouldn’t work. It should be received with the same ire and disgust as American Psycho. But the difference between the two books—and the difference between Stephen Graham Jones and Bret Easton Ellis—is emotion. Patrick Bateman was a dispassionate automaton; I Was a Teenage Slasher’s Tolly Driver is a sympathetic outcast and a victim of fate. Ellis wrote to make a point; Jones writes to tell a story and to move the reader. At different moments, we’re moved to laughter, because Jones is very happy to push toward parody or comic-book excess, but at others, especially in the novel’s later stages, we’re more likely moved to tears. If there’s any concern that Jones had nothing left to say about slashers in the wake of his Indian Lake Trilogy, this book puts it to bed. I Was a Teenage Slasher is somehow ridiculous and grounded, affected and honest, horrifying and heartfelt, all at the same time.