The Best Horror Books to Read for Spooky Season 2024

This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here.

Spooky season never sleeps. The 2024 book scene has already been packed with chillers, thrillers, and killers, before ever even getting to October. Whether you’re looking for something to read on Halloween night or just need some unseasonable goosebumps, we recommend you dig into these scary books!

Heads Will Roll by Josh Winning

G.P. Putnam’s Sons

Summer camp slashers usually star teenagers, but here, Camp Castaway collects famous adults who have been canceled, including sitcom star Willow. After a viral tweet alienates her fans and fiancé, she relishes the opportunity to go electronics-free in the woods… until one of the campers winds up dead and beheaded. Now Willow and her fellow Hollywood rejects must unmask the killer if they have any hope of being welcomed back into the limelight.

I Was A Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones

Saga Press

Stephen Graham Jones gets inside the heads of serial killers with impressive empathy, but his latest foray into the slasher subconscious is more of a darkly funny riff on horror movie tropes. Awkward social outcast Tolly Driver gets possessed by the zombie version of a kid who died from a prank gone wrong. An unwitting vessel, Tolly gets revenge on the cool kids, narrating the killing spree with the wry hindsight of middle age.

Model Home by Rivers Solomon

MCD

Speculative author Rivers Solomon recontextualizes the haunted house story through the lens of race and class: despite supernatural occurrences besieging the Maxwell family in their childhood home, they stubbornly cling to their upper-middle-class lives as the only Black family in a gated Dallas enclave. But when the Maxwell parents die in an apparent murder-suicide, their estranged adult children return to confront the ghosts of their past and the bloody costs of upward mobility.

Smothermoss by Alisa Alering

Tin House Books

In 1980s Appalachia, polar opposite half-sisters Sheila and Angie find common ground when two female hikers are murdered on the Appalachian Trail. While the teenage girls are accustomed to the dark magic of the mountain on which they live, this transgression provokes a ferocity from the land. Meanwhile the sisters must evade a more human danger and avoid becoming the killer’s next victims.

Horror for Weenies: Everything You Need to Know About the Films You’re Too Scared to Watch by Emily C. Hughes

Quirk Books

Not everyone who likes horror is looking to be terrified; these self-proclaimed “weenies” want to know the twists, just without the jump scares. This horror guide breaks down 25 iconic films and crafts a cultural map of the social impact of these stories.

Kill Your Darling by Clay McLeod Chapman

Bad Hand Books

Glenn’s 15-year-old son Billy was brutally murdered 40 years ago, and the killer was never found. But Glenn can’t move on, creating a scrapbook about the life Billy could have led. Hoping to find closure, he enrolls in a writing class to make sense of his son’s awful fate through fiction. But Glenn’s mix of memory and grisly imagining instead exhumes dark secrets from the past; solving the mystery might be worse than letting it be.

Rest Stop by Nat Cassidy

Shortwave Publishing

Even on the best of days, you wouldn’t want to get stuck in a gas station bathroom. But in this novella, this road trip rest stop threatens to become a prison for metal bassist Abe Neer. Locked inside in an effort to flee a googly-eyed attacker, Abe regrets his decision to pull over to the Trumbull Farms Snake and Spider House as he begins to hear something skittering and slithering through the vents.

The Unmothers by Leslie J. Anderson

Quirk Books

This debut’s eerie premise elevates well-worn tropes of folk horror: an insular small town that won’t divulge its dark secrets to the journalist writing a story about the inexplicable birth of a human child to a horse. The specifics are even more unsettling: the journalist is grieving her late husband and recent miscarriage, the town of Raeford survives on the equine industry, and this isn’t the first pregnancy to involve a horse (god).

The Night Guest by Hildur Knútsdóttir and translated by Mary Robinette Kowal

Tor Nightfire

Translated from Icelandic, this disturbing tale explores the psychological horror of sleepwalking. Physically fatigued from restless nights and mentally fatigued from dismissive doctors, Iðunn wears a pedometer to bed, only to discover that she walks 40,000 steps per night and wakes up smelling like the ocean. When she decides to investigate further using her phone camera, Iðunn discovers the deep-seated cause of her nocturnal wanderings.

A Better World by Sarah Langan

Atria Books

This social horror dystopian thriller speaks to our current moment as a family contemplates their escape from mounting climate change and political unrest. Plymouth Valley, an enclosed company town, promises brighter futures but demands gruesome costs from its residents, including bizarre rituals and the menacing mystery behind the upcoming Winter Festival.