Gothic castles and suburban houses, vampires and possessions, cosmic dread and quiet dread, from the novels that set the rules to this decade. 381 books so far, across 82 series, plus 235 titles with no series listed. This is page 3 of the shelf.
Search by title or author, filter with the subgenre chips, the primary-genre chips or the tag chips, or sort the list. Filtering happens in your browser and nothing about the visit is stored.
Showing 48 of 381 books
No books match those filters. Try a shorter name, or pick another subgenre.
Results below cover the whole catalogue, not just this page. Use the page links to browse everything in order.
Rating coming soonThe novelist Paul Sheldon intends to move from writing historical romances about a heroine called Misery Chastain to publishing literary fiction. After a car accident he is rescued by Annie Wilkes, who describes herself as his number one fan and is a former nurse. When she discovers that he has killed Misery off in his latest book, she becomes furious and keeps him prisoner in her isolated farmhouse until he writes a book that brings her back.
Rating coming soonA mysterious signal broadcast over the global mobile phone network turns the majority of the people who hear it into mindless and vicious animals. The novel follows a New England artist who is in Boston when it happens and who has to make his way north to find his young son, through a country that is coming apart around him.
Rating coming soonOutnumbered, outsmarted and desperate, the hunters are on the run, pursued by the vampaneze, the police and an angry mob. With their enemies calling for blood, the vampires prepare for a battle they may not survive, and the question is whether this is the end for Darren and his allies. The chase is fought on three fronts at once, which is what makes the position hopeless.
Rating coming soonChicago, 1954. When his father Montrose goes missing, the twenty-two-year-old army veteran Atticus Turner sets off for New England with his uncle George, who publishes a travel guide for Black motorists, and his childhood friend Letitia. At the manor of a Mr Braithwhite they encounter the ordinary terrors of white America and malevolent spirits that seem to come straight out of the weird tales George reads.
Rating coming soonLeigh VanVoreen has to escape from Farthinggale Manor in Boston, where the foul secret she carries has darkened her life. Her mother Jillian will not believe her, and her stepfather Tony Tatterton has betrayed her. The devotion of Luke Casteel seems to offer hope and respect, and she prays that her dreams will finally save her from tragedy.
Rating coming soonDarren faces a final confrontation with his archenemy Steve Leopard, and he looks for a way to trick destiny and avoid the requirement that one of them must die and the other become the Lord of the Shadows, fated to destroy the world. The oath that binds them is the problem rather than the fight.
Rating coming soonTarquin Blackwood, heir to a powerful old family in New Orleans, has been haunted all his life by a spirit called Goblin. Made a vampire in his youth, he seeks out Lestat de Lioncourt for help in ridding himself of Goblin, who has become steadily more malevolent, and the account he gives of his family and his transformation is how Lestat comes to understand the spirit's reach.
Rating coming soonMiri thinks she has her wife back when Leah finally returns after a deep-sea mission that ended in catastrophe, but it becomes clear that Leah may have come back wrong. Whatever happened in the vessel, and whatever the crew were meant to be studying before they were stranded on the ocean floor, Leah has carried part of it with her, onto land and into their home.
Rating coming soonRoland Deschain, the last gunslinger, has been chasing his adversary, the man in black, for years. The novel follows his trek through a vast desert and beyond in pursuit of him, and the people he meets on the way, including a boy named Jake Chambers who travels with him for part of the journey. It fuses western fiction with fantasy, science fiction and horror.
Rating coming soonOne man escapes from a biological weapons facility after an accident, carrying with him a rapidly mutating influenza strain that kills most of the world's population within weeks. In the aftermath the survivors divide between those who follow an elderly woman to Boulder and those who follow Randall Flagg, who has established himself in Las Vegas, and the two factions prepare for a confrontation.
Rating coming soonSusannah, now pregnant, has another personality taking control of her. The demon-mother Mia uses her and Black Thirteen to travel to New York City in 1999, and Jake, Oy and Pere Callahan have to rescue her while Eddie and Roland travel to Maine in 1977. A vacant lot in New York becomes the object that has to be saved.
Rating coming soonA shipwrecked gentleman named Edward Prendick is stranded on a Pacific island presided over by the notorious Dr Moreau, and he confronts dark secrets, strange creatures and a reason to run for his life. The novel is an early work by H. G. Wells in which the possibilities of science are shown as a source of terror rather than of wonder.
Rating coming soonHeaven Casteel returns to the West Virginia hills and begins to live out her childhood dreams: she becomes a respected schoolteacher at the local school and marries her sweetheart, Logan Stonewall. After their wedding trip to Farthinggale Manor, Tony Tatterton persuades the two of them to stay in Boston, but old ghosts rise up around her fragile happiness and threaten her marriage with scandal and jealousy.
Rating coming soonAfter a frightening adventure the year before, Gabe is uneasy about returning to Egypt, to the ancient pyramids and to the place where he saw the mummies. Then he learns about an Egyptian superstition and a secret chant said to bring mummies to life. His uncle dismisses it as a hoax, and then something begins to move in the tomb.
Rating coming soonKat is reluctant to visit her uncle Vic Frankenstein because of the rumours about him, but she finds that he is a quiet and gentle man living in a dark, castle-like mansion and working as a scientist who builds robots with artificial intelligence. She also loves his small, fluffy white dog, Poochie. Then an accident in the laboratory sets off a series of strange events.
Rating coming soonDawn has reached a music school in New York and is close to the singing career she has wanted, but she keeps thinking about Jimmy and the secrets they share. When a celebrated singer joins the faculty and takes an interest in her, she is drawn into a relationship that ends with his disappearance and leaves her exposed to her grandmother's schemes again.
Rating coming soonSusie Salmon is fourteen when she is raped and murdered near her home, and the novel is narrated by her afterwards, from a personal heaven. From there she watches her family and friends try to carry on and to work out what happened, while she comes to terms with what her death has done to the people she loves.
Rating coming soonFour years after his wife's death the novelist Mike Noonan cannot write, and he begins spending time at the lake house in Maine they used to share. There he becomes involved with a young widow and her daughter in a dispute with the child's grandfather, and finds that the house has a history of its own.
Rating coming soonTwo years after her husband's death, Lisey Landon begins clearing out the office of the bestselling novelist Scott Landon. Going through his papers brings back the violence of her own past and the private place he retreated into, and forces her to deal with the collectors who want what he left unpublished.
Rating coming soonDavid Talbot meets Pandora in a Paris cafe and is given the account of her two thousand years of life. Born in the Roman Republic, she was made a vampire by Marius, the ancient who becomes the centre of her existence, and her story is one of love, betrayal and the long survival of the Children of the Millennia.
Rating coming soonIn 1915, after The Birth of a Nation casts its spell over the country, the Ku Klux Klan grows in number and something else comes with it: the Klansmen are not entirely human. Maryse Boudreaux hunts them with a sword, and she and her companions follow the trail back to the source of the power.
Rating coming soonBilly Halleck, a lawyer who is far overweight, is driving carelessly when he kills an old Romani woman, and the case against him is dismissed. Afterwards a man he meets at the courthouse touches his cheek and says one word, and Billy begins to lose weight no matter how much he eats.
Rating coming soonA doctor performs an operation on a young woman that opens her mind to what he calls the great god Pan, and the experiment leaves her ruined. Years later her son, and everyone who comes into contact with him, are changed by whatever entered the world through that operation, and the trail is followed by a man who was present at it.
Rating coming soonTwo thirteen-year-old friends, Jim Nightshade and Will Halloway, see a carnival arrive in their town in October, run by a man named Dark and offering a carousel that can make its riders older or younger. The boys are drawn to it, and the attraction turns out to trade in the one thing everyone wants and nobody should have.
Rating coming soonManfred, the lord of the castle of Otranto, is preparing his son for marriage when a gigantic helmet falls out of the sky and kills the groom. Determined to keep the castle in his own line, he sets out to marry the intended bride himself, and the household is overtaken by omens, apparitions and the return of the rightful heir.
Rating coming soonJoanna Eberhart moves with her husband and children from New York to the town of Stepford, where the wives are devoted, cheerful and entirely occupied with their houses. Joanna, a photographer used to having a career and opinions, finds the difference hard to explain, and the explanation is worse than she imagines.
Rating coming soonLestat has risen from the earth and become a rock star, and his songs wake Akasha, the first vampire and queen of the damned. Her plans for the world involve the destruction of most of the men in it, and the older vampires have to decide whether to act against the being they came from.
Rating coming soonMelanie is ten and lives in a cell, collected each morning for lessons with a teacher she likes. She is one of a group of children studied by scientists at a military base, and the reason for the arrangement, and what Melanie actually is, becomes the novel's central question and changes what the reader thinks of everyone on the base.
Rating coming soonCal Thompson is nineteen and has been infected by a parasite that turns its carriers into cannibals and makes them sickened by everything they once loved. He is one of the rare people who stays himself, and he spends the novel tracking down the women he infected before he knew what he was carrying.
Rating coming soonJulia Lofting leaves her husband after the death of their daughter and buys a house in London where she hopes to start again. The house has a history, she begins to see a girl who is not there, and she sets out to find out what happened to the child who used to live in it.
Rating coming soonThese stories take place in schools, in sleepy seaside towns and in cities that have stopped behaving normally, and the bodies of the people in them keep changing shape. Teenagers develop appetites that will not be satisfied, a city loses the ability to sleep, and parts of one body are used to build a better one.
Rating coming soonCory Brooks cannot stop thinking about Anna Corwin, the new girl at Shadyside High, who is pale, blond and beautiful and seems to want him as much as he wants her. He loses sleep and drops his friends. Then Anna disappears without explanation, and the only way to find her is to go to her house on Fear Street.
Rating coming soonEmily wants to like the stepsister who has just moved into her house, and it is not easy: Jessie takes over her room, borrows her clothes without asking and lies about all of it. Then Emily reads Jessie's diary and finds something worse than rudeness in it, and when she tries to warn her parents nobody believes her.
Rating coming soonGary Soneji, the killer Alex Cross put away, is out of prison, dying and determined to take his revenge before he goes. At the same time a second man is at work: Thomas Augustine Pierce has been hunting a killer he calls Mr Smith since his fiancee was murdered, and when Cross is attacked in his own home the two hunts begin to meet.
Rating coming soonShari Cooper wakes up dead. The last thing she remembers is falling from a balcony at a party her friends were giving, and her death has been recorded as a suicide, though Shari knows she did not jump. From where she is now she sets out to find out which of the people closest to her was responsible.
Rating coming soonThis edition collects twenty of Edith Nesbit's dark stories. They turn on love, on terror and on people enduring something by themselves, and among them are a man whose devotion to his dead wife is tangled up with something he cannot see properly, and a country superstition that turns out to be true.
Rating coming soonOkiku has been dead for centuries and spends her time hunting the living who murder the innocent and freeing the ghosts of their victims. Then she meets Tark, a quiet teenager covered in intricate tattoos, and instead of a killer she finds somebody who is being haunted by something that has attached itself to him.
Rating coming soonA disease called Wanderer's Folly has been spreading for two years, filling people's heads with delusions until the world begins to come apart. David Arlen thinks the worst has passed, and within the same day his wife is dead and he is driving a stolen car with his eight-year-old daughter Ellie.
Rating coming soonBilly and Sheena spend their summers with their uncle, Dr Deep, on his boat, and they have learned to expect adventure every time. This trip turns into a treasure hunt, and what they find at the end of it is a sea captain who died two hundred years ago and has not stayed dead. Then the trail leads to HorrorLand.
Rating coming soonHeaven Leigh Casteel comes to live in her grandmother's house in Boston, where she expects friends, good schools, beautiful clothes and love, and a chance to make the family name respectable and to find her brothers and sisters. What she meets in that world instead is a set of secrets nobody wants remembered.
Rating coming soonBianca is taken from her home town and enrolled at Evernight Academy, a Gothic boarding school where the other students are sleek, clever and somehow too perfect for her to feel at home among them. Then she meets Lucas, who does not fit in either and who warns her to keep her distance.
Rating coming soonThe fourth Dollanganger novel follows Cathy from the age of fifty-two to her death a few years later. Fifteen years after the previous book, she and Chris travel to the home of their son Bart, which has been built as an exact copy of the family's old house, and there they meet a man who turns out to be one of their own.
Rating coming soonThis book gathers ten short horror stories for younger readers, published in 2001 by Parachute Press and Collins. Among them are a babysitter who enjoys playing cruel tricks, a boy who decides to lie down inside an ancient mummy case, and two friends who want to have the most frightening Halloween that anyone has ever managed.
Rating coming soonSeven friends did something terrible one night in the California desert, and somebody knows what it was. A chain letter signed by a figure calling themselves Your Caretaker reaches Alison first and then each of the others in turn, and what it asks for is not a favour: do as you are told, or pay for what you did.
Rating coming soonThis collection holds thirteen scary stories for younger readers, illustrated throughout. They include ghost stories, jump tales told for the shock at the end, dark fantasy and science fiction, and several of them draw on legends, folklore and cultural traditions while being set in places the reader will recognise.
Rating coming soonJack Harmon is already being picked on at school when he finds a mobile phone on the bus home. There is a voice on the other end of the line, and the voice wants Jack to do things for it. Jack does as he is told, and the people around him begin to think that he has lost his mind.
Rating coming soonThis collection holds twenty-two pieces: eighteen short stories, two novellas and two poems. Among them is The Mist, in which a supermarket becomes the last place available to the people trapped inside it when something from outside the world comes through, and the volume is framed by the author's own introduction and closing notes.
Rating coming soonLondon is in the middle of an outbreak of ghosts that appear at night and attack anybody who touches them, and the only people who can see them are children. Lucy Carlyle joins a small agency run by a teenager, and the firm's next case involves a house with a staircase that screams.
The horror shelf runs from the eighteenth and nineteenth-century gothic novels that invented the furniture - the castle, the diary, the thing that will not stay buried - through the twentieth-century paperbacks and film-era classics to books published this decade. Ghost stories and haunted houses sit beside vampire and possession novels, cosmic and weird fiction, folk horror, body horror and quiet psychological dread.
A book lands here when it is built to unsettle: a haunting, a monster, a curse, an appetite, or a wrongness the characters cannot name. Crime and horror overlap at the edges, and a thriller that stays on the crime side of the line sits on the mystery shelf instead. Cross-over titles that genuinely belong on both shelves reuse one page and are listed on each.
The love story is the plot: fantasy courts, dragon academies and modern cities all count.
676 booksPrimary genreEpic quests, grimdark cities, retold myths and a few very stubborn rabbits.
685 booksPrimary genreGeneration ships, dying empires, robots with opinions and one very unlucky astronaut.
536 booksPrimary genreDetectives, spies, locked rooms and the people who lie to the police.
599 booksPrimary genreCathedrals, courts, trenches and revolutions, all of it set in a past that is doing the work.
580 booksPrimary genreNovels where the prose carries the book: families, cities, memory and the modern self.
575 booksPrimary genreShipwrecks, expeditions, chases, frontiers and people who should have turned back.
324 books