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 8 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonAngel Sullivan is thirteen and has spent her life being taunted at school and ignored at home. When her father loses his job, the family moves to a house in the small town of Roundtree, Massachusetts, and it is cheap because of what happened in it: a previous owner killed his wife and child there, and nobody has wanted the place since.
Rating coming soonJaime Vegas is a medium who can genuinely speak to the dead, unlike most of the spiritualists she works alongside, and she has spent her career hiding the fact. She joins a television production in which three mediums are shut in a house to raise the ghost of Marilyn Monroe, and discovers something in the garden that will not leave her alone until it has been heard.
Rating coming soonIn 1940, with France defeated and an invasion of Britain expected, a British agent brings back intelligence showing that Hitler intends to support the invasion with occult means. The people who can answer that are the country's witches, and the officer who has to organise them is a practising occultist as well as an MI6 man.
Rating coming soonRachel is a graduate student writing about the ways women have traditionally worked magic into sewing, quilting and other cloth work, and she has been hired to help with a collection of vintage clothing. The antique quilts she is given to examine are extraordinary, and one of them is more than she bargained for, because something has travelled inside it.
Rating coming soonTwo young actors are murdered on a remote island film set, and their bodies are arranged in an imitation of a massacre that took place there in the nineteenth century. Two years later the survivor of that night, Vanessa Loren, is drawn back to the Bahamas by a documentary about the region's stories, and the man making it has some experience of ghosts.
Rating coming soonEdge is the last of a band of immortals who have been hunted and killed one by one by Frank Stiles, a man determined to extract their secrets. Edge intends to make him pay, and to do it he needs to find the young woman said to be the Golden Child, whose existence he has only heard described in rumours.
Rating coming soonSeven years ago a ship called the Atargatis sailed for the Mariana Trench to film a documentary about legendary sea creatures and was lost with everybody aboard. Footage recovered from the vessel appeared to show mermaids killing the crew, and the world decided it was a hoax. Now a second expedition is being assembled, and the scientists on it are not out to entertain anybody.
Rating coming soonChyna Shepherd is twenty-six and spending a weekend with the family of her best friend in the Napa Valley when a man lets himself into the house at midnight. He kills everyone in it, and Chyna, who has spent her life learning to survive people, escapes, and then learns the identity of the next person he means to kill.
Rating coming soonBobbi Anderson is a writer of westerns who lives outside the small town of Haven, Maine, and one afternoon while walking in the woods behind her house she trips over a piece of metal. It turns out to be part of something enormous buried under the ground, and once the object is uncovered the people of the town begin to change.
Rating coming soonIn a small Maine town, a Methodist minister arrives with his wife and son and makes himself loved, and a boy named Jamie Morton watches him use electricity to do something that should not have been possible. Years later, the two meet again, and the older man's interest in the current has become an obsession.
Rating coming soonOld Gregory has been the Spook for the county for years, clearing the villages of boggarts, ghosts and witches, and his time is coming to an end. Twenty-nine apprentices have tried and none has lasted; the last hope is a twelve-year-old farm boy who can see the things other people cannot.
Rating coming soonIn 1644 a young minister of the Church of Scotland arrives at a parish in the Scottish Borders and finds that the people he has come to lead are not all what they seem. The novel opens with a narrator looking at the ruin of the parish kirk and recalling the story of its last minister, who vanished.
Rating coming soonLewis Barnavelt, newly orphaned, goes to live with an uncle he has never met in a town in Michigan, and discovers that his uncle is a warlock and that the neighbour is a far more capable witch. The house used to belong to a couple who practised black magic, and something they left behind is still in the walls.
Rating coming soonFor centuries the Others and human beings have lived side by side in an uneasy peace, and when humankind oversteps its bounds the Others have to decide how much of humanity they are prepared to tolerate. Since they allied themselves with the blood prophets, the arrangement has changed. It is the delicate balance between the two peoples that this book is about.
Rating coming soonAfter a human uprising was put down by the Elders, the few cities still under human control are far apart and the land beyond them is feared. Lakeside Courtyard came through the fighting more or less intact, and its leaders have to work with the humans who remain. The peace is fragile, and the people keeping it are few.
Rating coming soonIn 1718 a headstrong fifteen-year-old girl in a parish near Newcastle begins an affair that ruins her, and when the man denies that they were ever joined she has to leave for London. There she takes a position in the household of an apothecary, hoping to salvage what she can of her reputation. What she finds in that house is not what she was promised.
Rating coming soonTen years ago a girl was orphaned when an Earth Master had her parents killed by the werewolves he had made, and she was saved by a Fire Master of the Woodsman's Lodge. Now another pack is ravaging Exmoor, and she has come to London to help deal with it. Both hunts lead to the same place.
Rating coming soonDru Anderson has lost her parents, her best friend is a werewolf, and she has just learned that the blood in her veins is not entirely human. Now she is at a school for teenagers like her, and she is the only girl in the place. The school has its own rules and its own dangers.
Rating coming soonConor is thirteen and his mother is dying of cancer, and at night a monster comes to the house and tells him stories. What the monster wants is the truth that Conor will not say out loud, and it is not interested in being a comfort. Conor has been dealing with all of it on his own.
Rating coming soonSomething malevolent has been hiding in a park in a town in Illinois for years, and a man named John Ross is drawn there by nightmares that warn him a great evil is about to be released. A teenager with powers she does not understand is caught up in it, and the two of them have to work together.
Rating coming soonEvery night the corelings rise out of the ground and take on form: sand demons, wood demons, wind demons, flame demons. The only thing that keeps people alive is the ancient and half-forgotten system of wards, and the time has come to stand against the night. The first of the five books is where the story begins.
Rating coming soonThe sun is going down on humanity and the night belongs to the demons, and the population that is left has to hide behind symbols of power it no longer entirely understands. This is the second book of the series in which that situation is being changed. The demons come up as the sun goes down.
Rating coming soonElizabeth has just moved into a large apartment building in a town where almost everyone else lives in a house, and she has made no friends at all by the time she meets Jennifer on the way back to school on Halloween. Jennifer, dressed as a Pilgrim, says she is a real witch, and after one Saturday meeting she takes Elizabeth on as her apprentice.
Rating coming soonA demon sorcerer called Smada Rezhyk asks the sorceress Delivev Ormoru of Castle Spinweb to marry him and is refused, and he convinces himself that she is plotting to bring him down. He sends his most loyal demon servant, Gildrum, to Spinweb in the shape of a wounded knight, with orders to father a child on her.
Rating coming soonIn 2079 an attempt to mine a nearby asteroid sends it towards the Earth instead, and the disasters are already under way when two people walk into a bar in Reno, Nevada. The demon they meet there tells them the Earth is one of thousands of universes, and that he can save it if they gather six pieces of a magic item for him.
Rating coming soonMoscow has survived a fire and a siege and lies under fresh snow, and Father Konstantin, the priest who has hated Vasya for years, turns the grief of the city into a mob by accusing her of burning it with witchcraft. She tries to slip out of the city to draw them away from her family and loses her horse to his knife on the way. What is left of her is dragged off, and the winter king who has been part of her life all along is waiting at the far end of it.
Rating coming soonGeorgina Kincaid is a succubus who draws her power from other men's pleasure, and she is dating a mortal writer, Seth Mortensen. If she so much as kisses him she will drain his life out of him, which makes the relationship difficult to sustain. On top of that, a colleague at the bookshop where she works has started behaving strangely.
Rating coming soonGenie Lo is an overachiever in a sleepy Bay Area suburb, working at volleyball, at her grades and at the question of how to get into Harvard. Then her home town comes under attack from demons straight out of Chinese folklore, and her priorities are rearranged. A new boy in her class, Quentin Sun, appoints himself her guide to fighting them.
Rating coming soonKingdom Come is a decaying swamp town that draws in the lost and the damned, and Thomas has stayed there since his mother's disappearance and his father's suicide, caring for his three brothers, who are conjoined triplets with separate bodies and one shared brain. He also runs the Mill, the town's only industry. What he learns is that the carnival is coming.
Rating coming soonGolgotha is a cattle town in Nevada in 1869, out beyond the Forty-Mile Desert, and it keeps more than its share of unnatural secrets: a sheriff who bears the mark of the noose, a half-human deputy, a mayor guarding mythical treasures and a banker's wife in a secret order of assassins. Now something far older than the town is stirring in the silver mine above it.
Rating coming soonGrave forces are converging to seize control of the Book of Thoth, an artifact whose pages hold the key to creating or unmaking the threads of existence itself. Max McDaniels and David Menlo are sent to protect it from the demon Astaroth, who has been imprisoned for centuries and is now free. Beyond the gates of their school, the world has already turned hostile.
Rating coming soonNastasya has started her life over more times than she can count, and nothing ever really ends when you are immortal. Tired of the party-girl existence she has been living, she goes to River's Edge, a refuge for immortals who have lost their way, where the clothes are plain, the drink is tea, and a man she finds uncomfortably familiar is waiting.
Rating coming soonGwen Frazier is a psychic counsellor, and the death of her friend and mentor, Evelyn Ballinger, brings her back to the small town of Wilby, Oregon, and to memories she would rather not revisit. Two years earlier a killer stalked the members of one of Ballinger's research studies, and Gwen survived it when two others did not. She is certain the two deaths are connected.
Rating coming soonEverworld is a place that should not exist and does, and the creatures living in it should not exist either; it is a land where dreams and nightmares are real and frequently lethal. April, David, Christopher and Jalil have come to the end of the line, because Senna, the only passage they had back to the real world, is gone and is not coming back.
Rating coming soonBeowulf is an Old English heroic poem of just over three thousand alliterative lines, preserved in a single manuscript copied somewhere between the tenth and the eleventh centuries. Its hero, a Geat, sails to Denmark to help King Hrothgar, whose great hall has been terrorised for twelve years by a monster called Grendel. Seamus Heaney's verse translation was published in 2000.
Rating coming soonLetters on Demonology and Witchcraft, published in 1830, was the work of Sir Walter Scott, who had been collecting folklore and stories of the supernatural since childhood. It is built out of ten letters that Scott addressed to J. G. Lockhart, who had married his daughter, and it works through what people had believed about demons, witches, ghosts and second sight from biblical times down to Scott's own day.
Rating coming soonUsually translated as the Hammer of Witches, the Malleus Maleficarum is the most famous of the many treatises written against witchcraft. The German clergyman Heinrich Kramer wrote it, the first printing appeared at Speyer in 1486, and it set out to prove that sorcery was heresy, to explain how witches might be found and convicted, and to tell the courts what should be done with them.
Rating coming soonMystery Walk is a horror novel by Robert McCammon, first published in 1983. Its central figure is Billy Creekmore, a boy who can see the dead and help troubled spirits move on, and the book follows him as he learns what his gift is for. Billy grows up in rural Alabama with a mother who shares the gift and a devoutly Christian father who cannot bear it.
Rating coming soonTerry Brooks closed his Word and Void sequence with Angel Fire East, the third of its three books, in 1999. Its Christmas-season story is set in 2012, a decade on from A Knight of the Word, and the action comes back to Hopewell, Illinois, where Nest Freemark and John Ross are trying to unlock a magic that could change the world they live in.
Rating coming soonJoe Hill's first book was 20th Century Ghosts, a collection of short stories, several of them ghost stories, that began as a limited edition from a small British press and reached the general public two years later. It has taken awards both as a collection and for the individual stories inside it, and in 2021 it was reissued under a new title.
Rating coming soonFlight or Fright is an anthology of horror stories about flying that Stephen King and Bev Vincent put together, published in 2018. Every story in it has to do with the fears and disasters of air travel, and the idea for the book came out of a conversation between King and some friends about how much he dislikes flying.
Rating coming soonThe Bazaar of Bad Dreams is a collection of short fiction by Stephen King, published in November 2015. It was his sixth collection of short stories, and it brought him awards both for the book as a whole and for one of the individual stories inside it, with a later paperback adding one more.
Rating coming soonThe Nightmare Reader is an anthology of horror stories edited by Peter Haining, published in 1973. Its stories are arranged in pairs of a kind, each one illustrating a different disturbance of the mind, and it draws on authors from the early nineteenth century to the twentieth for its examples.
Rating coming soonI, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem is a novel by the Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé, published in 1986 and winner of that year's Grand Prix Littéraire de la Femme. It takes the historical figure of the West Indian slave accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, and gives her the life the records never bothered to hold.
Rating coming soonAmerican Gothic is an anthology edited by Charles L. Crow, published in 1999, which gathers Gothic writing from nineteenth-century America. It sets stories, novellas and poems by a wide range of authors into conversation with one another, and it takes the fears of that society as its subject, along with the arguments that those fears provoked among the writers who lived through them.
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