Stages, Museums, Retreats: 5 Horror Novels Set in the Art World

By nature, any artistic pursuit has passion poured into it, whether it’s performing on a stage under spotlights or writing locked behind a door under the cover of night. And that much passion has a dark side: competition, intense devotion, and the question of what you’ll do for your craft—and what it will do to you.

When you pour blood, sweat, and tears into your art, it becomes a natural vehicle for horror, and that was the angle I took when writing my debut novel. In The Finalist, Eden is one of seven dancers competing for the role of a lifetime in the secluded Deveraux Manor. Legendary ex-prima ballerina Leanora Karagianni is choreographing a new show, which will revitalize her career—cut short after a devastating freak accident—and bring stardom to whoever survives her auditions.

Eden is obsessed with winning, but so are the other six. As Eden pushes her chronically ill body to its limits and fights a dangerous attraction to Leanora, the competition soon turns lethal and it becomes clear that the dancers are battling more than each other.

The obsession that comes with the pursuit of artistic passion is enough to fuel any horror story. So with that, here are five chilling novels set in the world of the arts, from theatre to isolated artistic retreats.

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De Elizabeth, She Haunts Me Still

Mallory Webb is at Shore College, her deceased mother’s alma mater, for a fresh start with the lead role in their production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet—but she ends up digging into the sanitarium-turned-liberal arts university’s bloody history when the demon that haunted her past and caused her mother’s death returns. Ezra, the director of the play, and Saskia, Mallory’s understudy, are drawn into her investigation—and a tragic love triangle—as Mallory races to find out what really happened to her mother, before the same fate befalls her.

Set in 1999 New England, She Haunts Me Still draws on the real-life horror of the vampire panic in this dark academia horror, and the cursed production of Romeo and Juliet unfolds with homages to The Phantom of The Opera, creating an eerie, gothic atmosphere rife with tension

Ling Ling Huang, Immaculate Conception

From the past to the cutting-edge future of art, Ling Ling Huang’s Immaculate Conception follows two women in art school, caught in an obsessive, toxic friendship, as the public release of a tool that generates AI art instantly throws the scene into chaos. Mathilde is marked as a prodigy while Enka is struggling to keep up with her. In a drastic move, Enka throws herself into a new technology that allows the user to inhabit another person’s mind and absorb their emotions and memories, kicking off a twisted, addictive downward spiral between Enka and Mathilde.

Psychological and speculative, Immaculate Conception covers everything from trauma, the intersections of technology, capitalism, and art, to the way generative AI erodes creativity and community. It’s a sci-fi dystopian horror that’s only becoming more timely.

Mona Awad, All’s Well

All’s Well is a surreal fever dream of psychological horror. Miranda Fitch is spiraling, walking the balance of excruciating chronic back pain and a reliance on painkillers, and now her job is at risk. She’s a theatre professor—the accident that left her with the back pain took her career as a performer too—planning on putting on All’s Well That Ends Well this semester, but her students mutiny in favour of Macbeth. Miranda’s pain has been dismissed by infuriating doctors and colleagues alike, but when she comes across three strangers in a bar, they seem to have the magic cure to reverse her fortunes.

All’s Well is laced with bitter, wry humour with nods to Shakespeare’s Macbeth and, of course, All’s Well That Ends Well. Awad’s Bunny, set in the world of creative writing MFA students, could fit this list equally well, but I have a soft spot for Miranda, as a chronically ill creative.

Kosoko Jackson, The Macabre

Lewis Dixon, reeling from the death of his mother, is pulled into the British Museum’s strangest artist-in-residence program: tracking down paintings around the world and destroying them, before the cursed pieces, painted by his own distant ancestor, fall into the wrong hands. Working for the British Museum and partnered with alluring agent Noah, Lewis is sent on a dangerous, exciting treasure hunt into the art world—abstractly and physically, as he steps into the paintings themselves to reckon with his ancestor’s deadly legacy.

Across an international scale of settings, The Macabre weaves together horror, mystery, fantasy. Through a lens of intersectionality and classism, with tongue-in-cheek critiques of the British Museum, The Macabre is a dark yet fun story about grief, privilege, and art.

Delilah S. Dawson, It Will Only Hurt for a Moment

Sarah Carpenter is an artist trying to reconnect with her art, pottery, as she leaves behind her terrible ex-boyfriend and even worse mother. Fleeing to a secluded mountain retreat in a renovated hotel, this feels like the perfect fresh start for her among other like-minded artists.

That is, until Sarah finds a dead body. Her fellow artists start to lash out and fall into eerie trances, inexplicable accidents and artistic sabotage leave another resident dead, and she’s plagued by haunting dreams that leave her wondering if she’s losing her mind—or if someone really is out to get her.

Weaving through the 1800s and present-day, It Will Only Hurt for a Moment is a tragically haunting gothic ghost story.

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