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.

Beast by Richard van Camp

Endling by Maria Reva

I Can Fix Her by Rae Wilde

Kill Creatures by Rory Power

Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove

Strange Houses by Uketsu, trans. Jim Rion

The Nut House by Patrick Barb

Awakened by Laura Elliott

The Bachelorette Party by Camilla Sten

Enter the Peerless by Kyle Winkler

Foreclosure Gothic by Harris Lahti

A Girl Walks into the Forest by Madeleine Roux

Of Flesh and Blood by N. L. Lavin & Hunter Burke

This Is Not a Ghost Story by Amerie

With a Vengeance by Riley Sager

Black Cat Tales: An Anthology of Black Cats, ed. Mark Causey and Francesca Maria

The Restless Few by James M. Watjen

CodeSkull by Chloe Spencer

Ecstasy by Ivy Pochoda

The Farmhouse by Chelsea Conradt

I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness by Irene Solà

If We Survive This by Racquel Marie

You’ve Awoken Her by Ann Dávila Cardinal

Brave New Weird: The Best New Weird Literature, Volume Three, ed. Alex Woodroe & Matt Blairstone

Dark Circuitry by Kirk Bueckert

Glass Girls by Danie Shokoohi

The No-End House by Jeremy Bates

The Skin We Feel Most Comfortable In: Stories, Craig Wallwork

The Rewilding, Robert Evans

Smile for the Cameras, Miranda Smith

Struggle for Existence, Geoff Jone

Ten Sleep, Nicholas Belardes

The Off-Season, Jodie Robins

The Skin We Feel Most Comfortable In: Stories, Craig Wallwork

I came across a BookRiot article recently that reduced my favorite genre to "a mood," (para. 2) and it bothered me enough that I immediately wanted to set the record straight. All one had to do was search weird fiction and skim the Wikipedia article to see that it is very much not just a mood.

(Also the article says "Good weird horror is something that you cannot look away from, no matter how hard you try to." This is just... any good book. It doesn't have to be weird. If you can't look away from a book of any genre, it's just a good book.)

Defining the Weird

It is, admittedly, well known that the weird genre is hard to pin down with a clear definition. Some writers even call it a "mode" or "something that slips between genres. While undoubtedly most closely related with horror, it also engages with the numinous...also...a lack of narrative closure is one of its frequent identifiers" (Neuharth para. 3).

Personally, I often think of Lovecraft's opening line from his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, (which is a pretty good read and introduction to the beginnings of the Weird):

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

When we've stepped into unknown territory, especially if it's something the human mind struggles to comprehend (like cosmic horror), that's when things start to get weird.

The Origins of the Weird

This next part needs to be in bold, because it was my main issue with the article, where they claim "Weird horror has grown in popularity over the last half decade or so, thanks in no large part to the larger growth in horror, period" (para. 1).

Weird horror is NOT new, modern, or just now growing in popularity. It has roots in a literary movement dating back to the late 19th century.

Let's break it down. In Duke University's journal Genre (2016), Benjamin Noys and Timothy Murphy propose:

... a three-stage periodization for the development of weird fiction, the unstable hybrid of horror, science fiction, and fantasy most often associated with H. P. Lovecraft: Old Weird (1880–1940), which is centered on Lovecraft's literary and critical work and the pulp magazine Weird Tales that gave the genre its name; Weird Transition (1940–80), a period marked by the apparent decline of the genre but that actually sees the migration of weird elements into a broad range of genre and media practices; and New Weird (1980–present), which critiques the Old Weird's reactionary politics by adopting a radically affirmative perspective on the body and the alien. During the New Weird period, philosophy and critical theory are also infected with weird elements of nihilism and radical antihumanism, as in the speculative realist school. This historical perspective reveals the weird to be a form of “pulp modernism” that is irreducible to high modernism or postmodernism.

(emphasis in bold is mine)

Roots in the Gothic Supernatual

You could say weird fiction emerged as an offshoot of the growing supernatural, Gothic, and Dark Romanticism genres. Generally, gothic fiction is unsettling, uncanny, and weird in the sense that something feels off, but you can't put your finger on it. An underlying sense of dread. This shows up in authors like Bram Stoker with Dracula, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, and pretty much anything by Edgar Allan Poe.

Then H.P. Lovecraft came along. His "reading of the tradition allowed him to tease out the elements that constituted weird fiction and to distinguish it from the gothic, with its 'secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule'" (Noys and Murphy, p. 120).

Lovecraft's weird legacy lives on in the ever-evolving Cthulhu mythos, and the various literary references to it. Think of how many times the Necronomicon shows up in TV shows or films. It's likely that even if you know nothing about weird fiction, you've seen the Necronomicon show up somewhere.

So, yeah, most of the first weird writings centered around the supernatural or paranormal, best done with a mix of psychological horror, just as its proto-genre gothic fiction did. (Again, see Lovecraft's Supernatural essay). These writers' blend of the uncanny was new and different from the norm. Weird. The article is right when it says "weird horror breaks the mold."

This is where "non-European storytelling styles" and "'cross-cultural' authors that pull from a wide array of experiences" (para. 5) comes in. Many of these authors were incorporating previously unseen or unheard of foreign practices, pulling from the popularity of studying the occult and ancient pre-Christian spiritual practices. Sometimes they were treated as the antagonist or enemy force, like in The Beetle by Richard Marsh, The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen, and most of Lovecraft's racist works.

Some authors from this period of weirdness whose works I've loved:

• Clark Ashton Smith - The Star-Treader and Other Poems
• William Hope Hodgson - The House on the Borderland
• Algernon Blackwood - The Willows
• Franz Kafka - In the Penal Colony; The Metamorphosis; The Trial; A Hunger Artist; A Report to an Academy
• Robert W. Chambers - The King in Yellow

Weird Transition

The 1940s - 80s saw a new era of weird writers. Like the ones who came before them in the 1890s - 1930s, these authors often brought in elements of the supernatural and paranormal, again leaning heavy on psychology and the breaking down of the mind. And again sometimes with explorations of occult cults and dark arts.

This is also when we start to see some magical realism, surrealism, and the blurring between reality and dream, or between the real world and some other more ethereal realm.

We also get some more women writers than the era before, like Shirley Jackson.

Authors from this period I've enjoyed include:

• Jean Ray - Malpertius
• Theodore Sturgeon - Some of Your Blood
• Fritz Leiber - Our Lady of Darkness
• Jorge Luis Borges - Ficciones
• Ray Bradbury - Something Wicked This Way Comes
• Charles Beaumont - Perchance to Dream
• Richard Matheson - I Am Legend

The New Weird

The 1990s and early 2000s brought about the latest wave of weird writers. Prominent authors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer and China Miéville have appropriately dubbed this wave the New Weird.

According to Noys and Murphy again:

The New Weird can be characterized as a new sensibility of welcoming the alien and the monstrous as sites of affirmation and becoming. In contradiction to Love- craft’s horror at the alien, influenced by his racism, the New Weird adopts a more radical politics that treats the alien, the hybrid, and the chaotic as subversions of the various normalizations of power and subjectivity ... another reversal of the weird, interrogating the new racisms, misogynies, and class violence that characterize the time of the “war on terror,” global finan- cial crisis, and anthropogenic climate change. (125-126)

My favorite works here:

• Laird Barron - The Croning
• Charles Burns - Last Look Trilogy
• Thomas Ligotti - Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe
• China Miéville - Perdido Street Station
• Kathe Koje - The Cipher (I liked Skin more, but it's not as weird)
• Neil Gaiman - Fragile Things
• Junji Ito - Uzumaki
• Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore
• Jeff VanderMeer - Borne
• John Langan - The Fisherman
• Mark Z. Danielewski - House of Leaves

Defining Popularity

Weird fiction is popular for its unpredictability, its sense of something larger, and its subversion (Salao). It may be true that the average readers of this decade are just discovering what passes for weird horror on BookTok or BookTube or wherever they find out about new stuff, and it's weird for them. But is the weird fiction genre just now growing in popularity? And how does one define popularity? By number of books sold, appearances in the New York Times, or by "the most read books on Goodreads?"

This leaves out the very active underground online community of weird readers: "... the New Weird ... continues the form of small magazine publication and now, with the Internet, various e-zines and forums that replicate something of the Lovecraftian milieu of exchanges of letters, pulp magazines, and small-circulation fanzines" (Noys and Murphy 127). It's not always easy to find these niche online circles, but they are there and have been there a while.

Here is probably as good a point as any to remark on how female-centric a lot of book news sites are. YA teen girl coming of age stories, female relationship dynamics, gossipy thrillers, and the inescapable romantasy. There's also this trend of "trauma and grief," usually set in some sort of multi-generational saga.

Weird readers are generally not "BookTok girlies" showing off colorful book covers of the newest titles giving shallow analyses in a quick vertical video that you''ll scroll past and forget. Weird fiction is (usually) dense and deserving of deeper analysis.

Conclusion

It seems more to me like more and more authors are doing more subversive, unpredictable things with their writing, which comes off as weird to the average reader. Because I'm also into music, an analogy that comes to mind is the genre "alternative." It's like a catch-all genre that can include anything from like garage/surf rock to indie pop. It feels like this is what the average reader is doing to the weird fiction genre. Just popping anything outside the norm into the "weird" bin.

References and Further Reading

• Jensen, Kelly. “Strangely Unsettling: Weird Horror You Can’t Look Away From.” BookRiot, 19 May 2025, https://bookriot.com/weird-horror-books/.
• “So You Want to Read Weird Fiction: Here’s Where to Start.” Penguin Random House, https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/the-read-down/want-read-weird-fiction-heres-start/. Accessed 22 May 2025.
• Neuharth, Jared. “Weird Fiction.” Ransom Center Magazine, 1 Apr. 2019, https://sites.utexas.edu/ransomcentermagazine/2019/04/01/weird-fiction/.
• Noys, Benjamin, and Timothy S. Murphy. “Introduction: Old and New Weird.” Genre, vol. 49, no. 2, July 2016, pp. 117–34, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1215/00166928-3512285.
• Salao, Cole. “Weird Fiction: Stories of the Uncanny and the Indescribable.” TCK Publishing, 29 July 2021, https://www.tckpublishing.com/weird-fiction/.

Today is day 3 of our Dracula read-through & book club, reading the book in real-time as its characters experienced it, one day at a time.

Come over to [email protected] to join us!

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

Jace Venable lives a quiet life in the house his father left him. He dreams of fixing up the barn out back so that he doesn’t have to return to the city he’s only too happy to leave behind. He likes to be left alone, thank you very much. And then, one night, he finds a runaway in his barn. A boy with a horrifying story that’s about to upend Jace’s quiet life permanently.

https://rebecca-crunden.itch.io/

Review: https://fanfiaddict.com/review-someone-elses-horror-story-by-rebecca-crunden/

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.

in the article:

• The Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig
• Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng by Kylie Lee Baker
• When the Wolf Comes Home by Nat Cassidy
• Freakslaw by Jane Flett
• The Cut by C.J. Dotson
• Eat the Ones You Love by Sarah Maria Griffin
• Their Monstrous Hearts by Yiğit Turhan
• Polybius by Collin Armstrong
• Direct Descendant by Tanya Huff

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.

A Halloween haunted house becomes a conduit to something ancient and uncanny.

The effigy of a movie monster becomes instrumental in a young man''s defence against a bully.

A family diminishes while visiting a seaside town, leaving only one to remember what changed.

Lured in by fate, a father explores a mysterious tower, and the monster imprisoned within.

Mourning his death, a young man travels to his father''s hometown, seeking closure, but finds himself beset by dreams of mythic bargains and a primaeval, corpse-eating titan.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/213796568-corpsemouth-and-other-autobiographies

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/22007593

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.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13129925-horrorst-r

https://pbfcomics.com/

(...)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? (...)

titles mentioned:

• 1408

• It

• Cujo

• Duma Key

• Needful Things

• The Stand

• Carrie

• Pet Sematary

• The Shining

• Gerald’s Game

• Revival

• Misery

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?

Buckle up: March is taking us on a wild horror ride.(...)

Titles from the article:

They Bloom at Night
The Unworthy
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
The Haunting of Room 904
My Sister's Shadow
Blood on Her Tongue
Gothictown
Nowhere

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

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Shroud” plunges readers into the lightless depths of an alien moon where human hubris collides with genuinely alien intelligence. As a master of creating truly non-human perspectives in science fiction, Tchaikovsky once again delivers a tale that challenges our anthropocentric view of the universe while spinning a taut survival narrative that keeps the pages turning. But unlike his previous works, “Shroud” takes a sharper, more claustrophobic approach, combining cosmic horror elements with searing critique of corporate exploitation.

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.

Whether you’re a fan of supernatural thrillers, Appalachian folklore, or gothic tales that send shivers down your spine, this year’s lineup promises to be a terrifying treat for every horror enthusiast. (...)

titles mentioned in the article:

Witchcraft for Wayward Girls
The Lamb
Victorian Psycho
Listen to Your Sister
Hungerstone
Something in the Walls
The Unworthy
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
The Haunting of Room 904
Nowhere
Blood on Her Tongue
Ashes of August Manor
Sour Cherry
When the Wolf Comes Home
Eat the Ones You Love
Polybius
Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng
The Staircase in the Woods
The Butcher's Daughter
The Manor of Dreams
Immaculate Conception
We Live Here Now
The Starving Saints
Never Flinch
Freakslaw
The Bewitching
The Library at Hellebore
The Hounding
13 Months Haunted
Lucky Day
The Possession of Alba Díaz
Play Nice
Nowhere Burning
The Graceview Patient
King Sorrow

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.

Tremblay took the time to talk with us about his writing influences, experiences in the horror writing world, and his involvement with ETCH’s docuseries, First Word on Horror.

The series was released exclusively via Substack on February 7, 2025.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSxbk3EsWqg

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

(...) February's horror books cover a wide range, encompassing everything from feminist tales of revenge and vampirism to hauntings and humanoid spiders. It's great to see the genre thriving with creative new ideas on the heels of 2024's best horror books. Hopefully, it's a sign of more great releases to come, though readers will already have their hands full digging into all of February's new books. (...)

books mentioned:

• Listen To Your Sister by Neena Viel (February 4, 2025)
• Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito (February 4, 2025)
• The Lamb by Lucy Rose (February 4, 2025)
• These Vengeful Wishes by Vanessa Montalban (February 4, 2025)
• Beta Vulgaris by Margie Sarsfield (February 11, 2025)
• The Poorly Made And Other Things by Sam Rebelein (February 11, 2025)
• Hungerstone by Kat Dunn (February 18, 2025)
• The Vengeful Dead by Darcy Coates (February 18, 2025)
• But Not Too Bold by Hache Pueyo (February 18, 2025)
• Something In The Walls by Daisy Pearce (February 25, 2025)

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.

It's a fun take on a haunted house, with a mix of Gothic elements and weird fiction vibes.

It's published by Tenebrous Press, currently my favourite small press. They focus on 'New Weird Horror,' valuing new approaches and experimentation within the genre.

https://store.tenebrouspress.com/products/posthaste-manor-ebook

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/24173962

(...)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. (...)

books:

• The Brotherhood of the Wheel by R.S. Belcher
• Agents of Dreamland by Caitlín R. Kiernan
• The Twenty Days of Turin by Giorgio De Maria
• Beneath by Kristi DeMeester
• Blindsight by Peter Watts
• Dead in the Water by Nancy Holder
• The Croning by Laird Barron

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

2025 is shaping up to be a great year for horror readers, with a number of exciting new releases hitting shelves over the next year. There are enough of them to keep the scares coming all 12 months, and they span a wide range of story types and tropes. There's truly a horror novel for every type of reader, with a good mix of debut authors and big names adding to the lineup. (...)

Books mentioned in the article:

• Witchcraft For Wayward Girls
• At Dark, I Become Loathsome
• Listen To Your Sister
• They Bloom At Night
• The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
• Blood On Her Tongue
• Senseless
• When The Wolf Comes Home
• The Staircase In The Woods
• Never Flinch
• The Bewitching
• Lucky Day
• 8114
• Nowhere Burning
• King Sorrow

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://www.goodreads.com/book/show/217339057-heavy-oceans

https://fanfiaddict.com/review-heavy-oceans-by-tyler-jones/

https://bsky.app/profile/tjoneswriter.bsky.social

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

Here are all the new horror books coming in 2025, featuring an array of slashers, ghosts, vampires, cults, monsters both human and otherwise, and all manner of nebulous eldritch terrors.

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.

Despite the width of this spectrum, what unites all lovers of horror is the thrill that horror novels inspire within us: that universal sensation of your heart thumping out of your chest, as cold sweat breaks on your forehead when you turn the page.

To create this list, we went to the darkest, most ghostly corners of the literary world. Without further ado, here are the 100 best horror novels of all time — it's safe to say that we hope they'll keep you up at night. Happy reading!

https://books2read.com/Unfathomable

Step into the unknown with Songs of the Unfathomable, a haunting collection of cosmic horror stories that explore the fragile border between human understanding and the vast, merciless forces of the universe. Through five chilling tales, author Callum Matthews masterfully conjures realms where time and space unravel, and humanity's place in the cosmos is stripped bare. From the depths of alien...

https://bsky.app/profile/talesofdespair.com

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.