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 4 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonFour novellas in one volume, each labelled with a season. One concerns a man serving a long sentence for a crime he did not commit; one a schoolboy who finds out what the old man living near him did during the war; one follows four boys into the woods looking for a body; and one is a story told in a club.
Rating coming soonRuby has been a Dumas for a year and still cannot quite believe the New Orleans mansion she lives in or the father she has only recently met. Her stepmother despises where she came from, her twin sister answers every attempt at friendship with hostility, and boarding school turns out not to be the escape she hoped for.
Rating coming soonAdam has just moved to a small town he thinks is called Springville, until a girl named Sally tells him that its real name is Spooksville and that the stories about it are true. She and a boy called Watch take him looking for the Secret Path, which leads to other versions of the town.
Rating coming soonKate Welles wants the leading part in her school's Christmas play and has to work alongside Courtney, who keeps getting in the way, because otherwise neither of them will be allowed to take part. Their teacher then decides that rehearsals need a special location, and picks a house with a history. Kate would normally avoid a building of that kind.
Rating coming soonCharlie McGee is a child with the ability to start fires with her mind, and a secret government agency wants her badly enough to hunt her across the country. Her father Andy has a milder version of the same gift and has spent years keeping her hidden, but a laboratory called The Shop knows the family exists and is prepared to take the girl by force.
Rating coming soonArthur Gordon Pym stows away on a whaling ship leaving Nantucket with a friend's help, and finds himself trapped below deck with almost no water and no way of getting out. What follows is a voyage of mutiny, shipwreck and hunger, a rescue by another vessel, and a journey further south than any ship had gone before, towards ice and a coast that the account breaks off before reaching.
Rating coming soonAzriel is a spirit summoned out of the ancient world and bound to serve whoever holds him, and in present-day New York he watches a young woman be murdered. He decides to act for himself rather than for a master, and to explain what he has become he tells the story of the life he was taken from, beginning with his family in Babylon and the bargain that turned a merchant's son into a servant of the bones.
Rating coming soonIntruders break into a house on a quiet street in suburban Minneapolis in the middle of the night and murder Luke Ellis's parents, and the whole operation takes less than two minutes. Luke wakes up in a room that looks like his own except that it has no window, in a building full of other children who were taken the same way and who have telepathy or telekinesis.
Rating coming soonNona lives with her family, works at a local school, and loves the beach and other people's dogs, and her city is under siege while the dead come back and a monstrous blue sphere hangs above the horizon waiting to tear the planet apart. Six months ago she woke up in somebody else's body, and she is afraid she may have to give it back.
Rating coming soonDavie and his friend Geordie are altar boys in a Catholic parish, full of mischief and not much else, until a boy named Stephen Rose arrives in town. Stephen can model figures out of clay, and he and Davie discover that what they make between them can be brought to life, which is exciting until they understand what they have made.
Rating coming soonA film producer with money and nerve pays a young filmmaker to make a documentary about a cult that ended in bloodshed decades ago. The crew travel to the house where it happened and to the other places the cult used, and the record they are making starts to include things none of them can explain and none of them can leave out of the final cut.
Rating coming soonRuby has been driven out of the Dumas mansion and is back in the bayou with her baby daughter Pearl, determined to make a decent home for the child. The family she left behind has other claims on her, and the secrets that shaped her mother's life and her own are still being kept by everyone who knows them.
Rating coming soonApryl is an American who arrives in London to take possession of a flat she has inherited from her aunt, in a grand old building off the Edgware Road. The neighbours do not want her there, the caretaker does not want her there, and the aunt's effects suggest she was spending her last years watching something in the building rather than living in it.
Rating coming soonMaren has never been able to accept affection: whenever anyone gets close enough, she is overwhelmed by the urge to eat them. Abandoned by her mother the day after her sixteenth birthday, she sets out across the country to find the father she has never met and whoever else may live the way she does, with no money and nobody to vouch for her.
Rating coming soonIn 1868 a twenty-one-year-old Bram Stoker waits in a deserted tower with crucifixes, holy water and a rifle, and prays to survive the night. He has already decided that if he lives, he will write down everything that led him there, and the novel is the record he produces, assembled from his own diaries and the letters of the people who were caught up in the same events.
Rating coming soonCharles Hillenbrand is a Cambridge academic looking back on his marriage and on the daughter he lost, when he took four-year-old Naomi to London on Christmas Eve and she disappeared in a shop. He spent the years afterwards continuing the search, through the police, the press and his own household, and what he eventually found was not what he had been looking for.
Rating coming soonAn airliner comes down near a town and everyone aboard is killed except one man, and he is left with the question of why he lived when the others did not. As he starts looking for an answer, through the inquiry and the newspapers, a man who claims to be able to speak with the dead becomes interested in him and in what happened on board.
Rating coming soonCynda is sixteen and unhappy about being left at the inn her father and stepmother run on the coast of Maine, where the season is over and there is nobody her age for miles. Then a guest arrives in the dead of winter, pale and charming and interested only in her, and Cynda is flattered enough not to ask what he is doing there.
Rating coming soonA disease has killed or changed everyone over the age of fourteen, and the children left behind are trying to stay alive in a London where the grown-ups they knew have become something else. A group travelling across the city towards a promised shelter has to work out who to trust among the survivors they meet on the way.
Rating coming soonLittle Nettlebed is a village where the uncanny is part of ordinary life: strange creatures wash up on the riverbed and ravens settle on the roofs of people who are about to die. Then the villagers begin to hear barking at night, and one of them claims that he has watched the Mansfield sisters change shape in front of him in the lane outside his own house.
Rating coming soonLondon is in the middle of an outbreak of supernatural Visitors that Scotland Yard cannot handle and that has brought people onto the streets in protest. Lockwood and Co. keep doing the work the larger agencies will not take on, and the arrangement between the three young agents who run it is about to change.
Rating coming soonIn Connecticut in 1666 an ancient spirit wakes in the woods, and the settlers who live near it have a name for him and a use for it. To Abitha, a young widow who is being squeezed out of the land her husband left her, he is the one thing in the colony that is not pretending to be respectable.
Rating coming soonMalcolm Ross, a young barrister, is called out in the middle of the night to the house of the Egyptologist Abel Trelawny, whose daughter has found her father unconscious and bleeding on the floor of a room full of Egyptian relics. The instructions Trelawny left behind require that his body stay where it is, watched, until he wakes. At the centre of the house, and of the archaeologist's work, is the mummy of an Egyptian queen.
Rating coming soonIn New Orleans in 1891, the Morningstar children, each of them named by their father after a disease, are growing up in a city of voodoo, race and class, and of a music that is only just being invented. Something older and angrier than any of them is loose in their lives, and the family will have to reckon with it.
Rating coming soonToby Jugg is a decorated fighter pilot who was shot in the back during a raid on Cologne and is now paralysed below the waist. Sent to convalesce in a house in Wales, he finds himself tormented at night by a shadowy many-legged presence, and the man in charge of the house turns out to belong to a Satanist brotherhood.
Rating coming soonIt is 1968, and Rick Desmond has been sent to Brookline Asylum because his parents have decided that his temper is a disease. The staff talk about a Patient Zero, the first person to be tested on, and as Rick learns his way around the building he begins to understand that nobody is being cured here.
Rating coming soonSmall Sam and the Kid have reached the Tower of London, where Jordan Hordern's crew offers food, walls and friendship, and Sam cannot settle. All he wants is his sister Ella, and despite everyone's objections he sets out west through the no-go zone with the Kid beside him, while a hunter called Shadowman tracks a man building an army.
Rating coming soonThe sickness took the adults of London, rotting their minds first and their bodies afterwards, and what is left of them now hunts the streets of the city. The Holloway crew have fought their way across town to the Natural History Museum, and their next trip out for medical supplies asks them whether humans are a greater danger than the creatures.
Rating coming soonCharles Dickens is at the height of his fame in 1865 when a train he is travelling in runs off the rails at Staplehurst, and the disaster lays the ground for the last five years of his life. The man telling the story is his friend and fellow novelist Wilkie Collins, whose account of Dickens cannot be trusted.
Rating coming soonConstanta is dying when a stranger saves her, and the life he offers her turns out to be one of obedience inside his household. Over the centuries that follow she comes to understand what her rescuer is, and she begins to ask whether she and his other consorts have any way out of the house he has made.
Rating coming soonAshley is ten, still furious about her father's death, and she and her mother have moved into the upper floor of a boarding house whose owner dislikes children. The overgrown garden is forbidden to her, and it is where she meets a younger neighbour, hears crying coming from the hedges, and digs up an antique doll buried in a box with a note of apology inside it.
Rating coming soonChloe Saunders is fifteen, wants to be a film director, and has just learned what it feels like to be looked at by a ghost. After the incident at her art school she is labelled schizophrenic and sent to Lyle House, a group home for troubled teenagers where the other residents are not what their files say either.
Rating coming soonChloe Saunders and her friends Tori, Simon and Derek are on the run from the corporation that altered them, hiding in a safe house belonging to a former employee of the Edison Group. They have powers that keep outgrowing the adults around them, and one of the people sheltering them may be working for the people they are running from.
Rating coming soonCas Lowood is seventeen and has spent three years finishing the work his father began: finding the murderous dead, working out what they are and sending them on. He travels with his mother, who practises kitchen witchcraft, and a cat that can smell a ghost, and in one particular house he meets an apparition unlike anything he has faced.
Rating coming soonThe narrator of this story makes her living by reading auras at a shop called Spiritual Palms, a fraud she has refined over the years to something close to a small science. Then Susan Burke comes in, a rich and unhappy woman with a stepson and a house that frightens her, and the woman who does not believe in ghosts is invited to spend time in one.
Rating coming soonCharles Dexter Ward is a young man from a prominent Rhode Island family who has become obsessed with an ancestor called Joseph Curwen, a merchant of unpleasant reputation and, it is said, a wizard who knew things a man should not. Ward vanishes from the asylum where he had been held, and his family doctor sets out to establish what has been done to him.
Rating coming soonThe Spook and his apprentice, Thomas Ward, are the people a county calls when it needs a witch, a ghost or a boggart dealt with. Their work takes them to the cathedral town of Priestown, where something the Spook has never been able to defeat is waiting in the catacombs, and where the arrival of a witch-hunting Quisitor gives them a second enemy.
Rating coming soonMolly's mother and stepfather move the family into a converted church in rural Maryland, and Molly and her brother Michael are given the job of looking after their seven-year-old stepsister Heather. Heather lies about them, wanders off on her own, and has begun talking to a girl called Helen whose grave sits in the old cemetery next door.
Rating coming soonThe Imperial prison barge Purge is carrying five hundred of the galaxy's most dangerous convicts when its engines fail somewhere remote and empty. The only hope for the people aboard is a Star Destroyer found drifting nearby and apparently abandoned, and the boarding party sent across to strip it for parts comes back with fewer than half its people.
Rating coming soonHarry Dresden is Chicago's only professional wizard, and the work is mostly ghosts, vampires and werewolves, in no particular order. This time he is hunting a bewildered and dangerous spirit through a hospital with a Knight of the Cross beside him, and the invitation he has just been handed is to a party held by the vampire court, which is not the kind of invitation a sensible man accepts.
Rating coming soonIn the summer of 1973 a university student called Devin Jones takes a job at a small amusement park in North Carolina, where the work involves maintenance, a mascot costume and keeping the children entertained. The park also has a history: a crime was committed there, and the young man who learns about it finds the story harder to leave than the job.
Rating coming soonYadriel is queer, trans and Latino, and in his family the boys become brujos who summon and release the spirits of the dead while the girls become brujas who heal. His relatives have not accepted him as a man and expect the healing powers they think he should have, so he sets out to prove otherwise by summoning a ghost on his own.
Rating coming soonVictorian London has a murderer the newspapers have christened Jack the Ripper, and the police have nothing to show for their investigation. A well-off young woman, more interested in dead bodies and forensic work than in the marriage her family has in mind for her, decides that she is going to work out who he is, using the parts of London society that the police cannot enter.
Rating coming soonRandolph Carter dreams three times of a marvellous city at the edge of the sunset, and then cannot find it again. He sets out through the dreamlands to reach it, and the route runs through places that the gods of that world keep guarded, past creatures that have no interest in whether he arrives, and through cities of the dead that answer questions only in their own way.
Rating coming soonJamie Conklin is the son of a single mother in New York, and he has a talent his mother has told him to keep quiet about: he can see and speak to the dead. The dead have to answer his questions honestly, which makes him useful to people who want the truth, and the arrangement is not safe for anyone involved.
Rating coming soonLucy Carlyle has left Lockwood & Co., and Anthony Lockwood has to ask her to come back when a crime forces his hand. The two of them, and the agency's small team, follow the case into the upper reaches of London society, where the people who employ them have reasons of their own for wanting the truth kept quiet.
Rating coming soonJules and her family have moved into an abandoned house while her father restores it, and she is lonely enough to start thinking about the girl who lived there a century earlier. The two of them begin to communicate, and the story the girl tells about her own life comes out slowly.
Rating coming soonArthur Kipps is a solicitor sent to settle the affairs of a woman who lived alone in a house on the edge of the marshes, and the work is not as straightforward as his firm assumed. Years later, asked for a ghost story at Christmas by his stepchildren, he writes out what happened to him when he was young rather than inventing anything, and the account is the book.
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