Horror has (unsurprisingly) become of the best metrics for understanding the world around us, which is, indisputably, Getting Worse. Here are 25 dark, disturbing, and demented tales to help get through what is sure to feel like a very long year. As always, thanks to my CrimeReads colleagues for their contributions to the list below.
January
Dennis Mahoney, Our Winter Monster
(Hell’s Hundred)
A couple on a road trip to fix their marriage instead find themselves stranded in a snowstorm and facing a supernatural threat of epic proportions. This one has the same vibes as cult classic I’m Thinking of Ending Things, but with a snowstorm ratcheting the tension waaay up.
Susan Barker, Old Soul
(Putnam)
This book is THE MOOD, and the mood is dark. Old Soul feels like if Thomas Pynchon’s V was a Georgia O’Keefe painting. At the start of Barker’s latest, two strangers who miss their flight discover a strange supernatural mystery in common: each lost a loved one suddenly and inexplicably, and each of their objects of grief had encountered an unsettling woman just before their untimely demise: a woman who appears never to age and who insists on taking photographs of her chosen victims. What follows is an epic chase around the world to track down evidence of a malevolent killer in hopes of eventually finding the woman herself.
Clay McLeod Chapman, Wake Up and Open Your Eyes
(Quirk)
Clay McLeod Chapman’s upcoming horror novel is the perfect post-Election read: namely, in that it features demonic forces taking possession of their viewers through the TV network Fax News (Just the Fax!) The ways in which the story evolves take the plot in directions that make all of us understand our complicity in the toxicity of today.
Grady Hendrix, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls
(Berkley)
You tell me that this book doesn’t sound like a hell of a good time, exactly the sort of thing to curl up with during the January doldrums! It takes place at a home for pregnant, single young girls—an institution where they can secretly have their babies, outside of public scrutiny. But then one of them gets an occult book… and things ramp up from there. –Olivia Rutigliano, Lit Hub and CrimeReads Editor
February
Kat Dunn, Hungerstone
(Zando)
Before the very gay Dracula was ever conceived, there was the much gayer Carmilla—a queer-coded novella of female desire and insatiable hunger. Kat Dunn has taken that original inspiration and made it much stranger (and hotter), as we follow the journey of an unhappy aristocratic wife slowly coming to embrace her unholy appetites, under the guidance of an extremely sexy vampire/chaos queen. *fans self*
Nick Newman, The Garden
(Putnam)
If Emily Bronte had written On the Beach, it might have read something like this. Two aging sisters, safe behind a high wall and forgotten by the disintegrating world, find their small kingdom upended by the arrival of a young boy. Will they accept him into the fold, or will he lead them out of the garden? Or will a darker series of events come to pass? I found myself haunted by this dark fable and impressed with the balance between archetype and story.
Virginia Feito, Victorian Psycho
(Liveright)
Victorian Psycho is buckets of macabre fun, the story of a young governess stuck in the home of a twisted, wealthy family—and how she attempts to keep her violent fantasies of revenge, retribution, and good, old-fashioned cruelty at bay. That is, of course, until Christmas, when she’ll finally be able to give her employers the gifts that they so dearly deserve. It’s a real… “sleigh ride.” I’m so sorry. But not for telling you to go read it. –OR
Neena Viel, Listen to Your Sister
(St. Martin’s Griffin)
Neena Viel’s well-titled debut takes us into a loving but dysfunctional group of siblings at moment of crisis, then turns the tension up to the max. Mid-twenties Calla Williams is burdened by her role as her youngest brother’s guardian, and resentful of the middle child for his ability to get out of care-giving, but she’s also so terrified of losing her closest family that she’s tortured each night by visions of her siblings dying. When her teenage charge gets in trouble for actions at a protest, she takes the three of them on the road to a rented cabin to let the air clear—bringing along her nightmares, and the potential to destroy not only the tight-knit family, but reality itself.
Lucy Rose, The Lamb
(Harper)
The Lamb is a dark fairy tale in which a young girl tries to help satisfy her mother’s insatiable craving for human flesh, culled from those they call “strays”—most hikers and homeless people lost in the dense forest surrounding their little home. When a new arrival ingratiates herself to the family and romances the girl’s mother, she threatens to disrupt the family’s careful balance, and spurs Rose’s child narrator to drastic efforts in restoring their lives to a semblance of normality. Sapphic cannibals for the win! Also, I gave my copy of this book to my favorite restaurant server and I think this is what we should all do with cannibal books.
March
Erika T. Wurth, The Haunting of Room 904
(Flatiron)
Erika T. Wurth, who wrote 2022’s splendid White Horse, is back with a wonderful, wholly inventive new horror novel, about a young woman who (following the death of her clairvoyant sister), finds herself able to commune with spirits—and is called to investigate a phenomenon in a Denver Hotel, where, every few years, a girl is found dead in the same hotel room, no matter what room she checked into. (I love this premise.) What follows is a simmering, sinister, and transportive journey through a kaleidoscopic, metaphysical and memorial world. –OR
Alex Gonzalez, rekt
(Erewhon)
Alex Gonzalez has perfectly captured the horrors of the dark web in this disturbing exploration of grief, trauma, and violence. After Sammy loses his girlfriend of almost a decade to a shocking car accident, he finds himself drawn to the worst possible content online, trying to numb himself to personal misery through dedicated consumption of public tragedies. When he finds himself on a site that appears to show not just how someone died, but all the ways they could have died, he can’t look away. Who are the people responsible for such a sick exercise in creativity? And does he want to stop them, or join them?
Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
(S&S/Saga Press)
Sit up, everyone: Stephen Graham Jones has a new novel! It’s about the discovery of a diary written by a white Lutheran pastor in 1912—a diary which chronicles, over several visits, an interview with a Blackfeet vampire named Good Stab in which he explains his lifelong quest for revenge. –OR
April
Jenni Howell, Boys with Sharp Teeth
(Roaring Brook Press)
In this dark academic mystery, a working-class girl tricks her way into attending an elite private school after her beloved cousin, a security guard, is found dead there. She blames the undisputed rulers of the class for colluding in her cousin’s demise, but finds herself drawn to their amoral magnetism and otherworldly beauty despite her suspicions.
Jane Flett, Freakslaw
(Zando)
THIS BOOK IS EVERYTHING. In an ode to Tod Browning’s Freaks, Kathryn Dunn’s Geek Love, and Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, a carnival with sinister intentions arrives in a town with a terrible past, ready to unleash chaos on the conforming while liberating the weird. Grotesque, creepy, and celebratory, Freakslaw is sure to be one biggest books of the year (and possibly, one of the defining novels of the century).
Yigit Turhan, Their Monstrous Hearts
(MIRA)
Butterfly horror!! In the English-language debut from Turkish-Italian writer Yigit Turhan, a young novelist beset by mounting bills and stymied by writer’s block heads to Milan, where he has inherited his grandmother’s luxurious estate. When he finds a notebook hidden in the walls purporting to tell his grandmother’s life story, he begins to understand the weirder implications of her meteoric rise, and strange demise. A well-crafted and rather moving parable about dark bargains and cruel sacrifices. And butterflies.
Sarah Maria Griffin, Eat the Ones You Love
(Tor)
What’s even scarier than butterflies? Plants! In this sapphic ode to the Little Shop of Horrors, a graphic designer laid off from her well-paying job gets a new gig at a plant shop, hidden in the corner of a decaying Irish mall and run by the fey woman of her dreams. Unfortunately, she’s not the only one obsessing over Hot Plant Lady—the greenery itself has its own plans for the shop’s beloved pruner.
Nat Cassidy, When the Wolf Comes Home
(Tor Nightfire)
When FDR said “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he could never have imagined someone would take that thought to so logical—and extreme—a conclusion as this, and yet Cassidy’s latest works well on every level. Cassidy’s protagonist is a struggling improv comedian working graveyard shifts at the local diner and wondering how she’ll make rent. Within the first few pages, she’s transformed into the protector of a lost little boy with terrifying enemies & even more terrifying powers. The conclusion feels shattering, inevitable, and completely of our time—by which I mean, very bleak indeed.
Collin Armstrong, Polybius
(Gallery)
Video game horror! For those who loved 28 Days Later, here’s a new horror novel featuring a rage-inducing arcade game that’s infected an entire town. As the residents give in to their furious anger, bubbling resentment, and a growing enthusiasm for brutality, the few remaining level-headed locals try to stop their community from imploding, and the contagion from spreading.
May and Beyond
David Demchuk and Corinne Leigh Clark, The Butcher’s Daughter
(Hell’s Hundred)
While 2025 is simply flooded with cannibals in fiction,there’s only one featuring the maker of meat pies herself: Mrs. Lovett. How ever did the mysterious matron of Sweeney Todd get her gruesome start in the world? Perhaps it began with her happy childhood in a butcher shop, a happiness ending abruptly upon the death of her father and the newly dangerous circumstances of her life—first as a maid to a dangerous master, and later as a prisoner in a convent determined to tell her sorry tale to any and all sympathetic listeners.
Matt Serafini, Feeders
(Gallery)
One of several books out this year that interrogates how far people are willing to go in the name of social media views, but by far the most graphically disturbing (yes, the dog does die). When a wannabe influencer gains access to an exclusive new social media site, she soon discovers that to go viral with viewers, she needs to go extreme with her content. Truly vicious and not for the faint of heart—just like the social media metrics that inspired it.
Caitlin Starling, The Starving Saints
(Harper Voyager)
A castle under siege and about to run out of food is the setting for Starling’s latest. When mysterious strangers arrive promising victory and sustenance, the defenders let them in, but at what cost? And what bargains must be struck to be rid of them? This book was messed up (in the best way).
Silvia Moreno-Garcia, The Bewitching
(Del Rey)
In Moreno-Garcia’s chilling new novel, a graduate student researching a horror novelist delves into a life-altering mystery and the strange forces surrounding a certain manuscript that ties it all together. Witchcraft and the power of narrative intersect to yield this evocative, powerful tale. –DM
Joshua Hull, 8114
(Clash)
After receiving a bout of well-deserved public criticism, a podcaster turns inward for his next subject: his cursed childhood home, and the many strange occurrences therein. Terrifying scenes of horror are interspersed with a knowing, cynical take on the ever-growing podcast industry, resulting in a rather snarky and highly enjoyable gorefest.
Hailey Piper, A Game in Yellow
(Saga)
The King in Yellow, but make it kinky! So I guess…the kink in yellow? Anyhoo, Hailey Piper is a freaking badass and I can’t wait for her bizarre take on the horror masterpiece, in which a couple looking to spice things up gets ahold of a disturbing text that can amp up their sex life in small doses, or drive them mad if they consume too much. A perfect follow-up to Michael Seidlinger’s disturbingly on the nose disease horror, The Body Harvest.
Catherine Deng, What Hunger
(Simon & Schuster)
Most of us will do—and eat—whatever is necessary for survival. But what if you develop a taste for that which was once consumed without choice? Yes, this book is about cannibalism…but what kind? And how disturbing (and salivating) will the descriptions get?
