Best Horror Books of 2024

So this newsletter has focused on horror more than any other publishing genre, and this year we focused on books that were specifically released in 2024. This resulted in the biggest of all the "best of" lists with a range of books that came out this year as genre publishing continued to grow in mainstream appeal. I kept off an "best of" collections, despite Ellen Datlow's two volumes of "Best Horror of the Year" were worthy entries as well. While this is not the best year of the past decade for horror publishing, there has been a push towards more diverse voices and past the Anglosphere and into more translation, all of which has meant that there is more great work available than ever before.

Next year we'll focus on more political horror and comics and start to parse out some of the best work in recent translation.

Midnight on Beacon Street - Emily Ruth Verona

Emily Ruth Verona’s debut novel may be the most readable book so far this year: a fun (however, eventually bloody) story about a teen babysitter, her horror movies, and her panic disorder. The book is set in an indistinct early 90s suburb, where a young mother entrusts her kids to a teenage babysitter (and her boyfriend) while she, once again, tries to have a normal dating life. The events have some escalating intruders, cast against the stories the kids tell about a poltergeist causing mild mayhem around the home. The characters are lovable and familiar, the plot is perfectly paced and concise in its prose, and it even injects a fair bit of cultural Judaism into the family home (Jewish horror books are few and far between). Highly recommended for those who plan on reading on the beach this summer. (I would also note that this is a steal at $1.99 on Kindle)

Through the Night Like a Snake: Latin American Horror Stories - Ed. Sarah Coolidge

When looking at some of the recent anthologies attempting to diversify the horror world, you usually find they maintain a distinctly American style of storytelling. This seems like exactly what Sarah Coolidge’s anthology tries to break by translating fiction that not only had a different social, political, and geographic origin point, but feels completely alien from even the most cursory genre tropes. Instead, what you end up with is a collection of fantastic stories that do feel wholly different than what readers are used to, often employing a dreamlike tone or shifting in between genres signifiers. With one story we watch an alien that fills the hole in an aging mother’s life, while another is largely in the minds of two serial killer obsessed goths. These short stories (and they lean into the shorter side) maintain their subtlety, even holding a mythological quality, while always remaining grounded in relatable characters, which is truly a feat for abstract prose. This is a great introduction to a few new authors and I hope this will be one of the new volumes that helps to popularize translation in the horror world, which is still not as common as it should be.

We Used to Live Here - Marcus Kliewer

The best horror begins with the same premise: something feels a little off, and it’s about to get weirder. A young couple is flipping a rural home when a family stops by. The father claims to have grown up here and wants to show his family. What follows becomes increasingly strange as the family, for some reason, will not leave, and the house and the memories we hold of it start to shift. What Marcus Kliewer achieves with this premise is an almost perfect balance between clarity of storytelling and hiding the mechanics of the universe, even past the final page. This would have been one of the best horror novels of the past several years, complete with wonderful “documents” that launch each section, but the final chapter of the book feels tacked on by order of the publisher. It over explains some pieces of the story (but mercifully leaves others to our imagination), and couldn’t help but remind me of the final scene of Psycho where a police detective narrates everything that has just happened in an effort to talk down to the audience. Regardless, this book is nearly impossible to put down with magnificent characterization and with a keen eye to just how frightening feeling untethered from reality, even with regards to the mundane, can truly become.

Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil - Ananda Lima

While Craft has been portrayed primarily as a horror collection, and it certainly is, it is best to approach the book as an expressionist discourse on alienation and migration in America. The stories do sit somewhat independently, but the book is best read start to finish, with little vignettes often feeling related and with interludes between each chapter that bind together its devilish theme. The subtlety of the fear is easy to miss on a quick reading, which is why approaching the text slowly, with a bit of vulnerability, helps it to stand out as one of the most emotive and striking experiences I’ve had all year.

Bury Your Gays - Chuck Tingle

My own preconceptions keep me away from Chuck Tingle’s incredibly popular queer-Hollywood horror novel despite receiving as much acclaim as any book published this year. Tingle is best known for his comedy-erotica, self-published on Amazon and usually involving ass entry, and since I tend to like my horror, well, scary, it took a while for me to pick it up. But Bury Your Gays is one of the most adeptly written horror stories of the year, diving deep into the contrivancies and contradictions of the genre and the way that, despite becoming as queer as it has become in the last twenty years, still rarely allows for joy amongst its characters. Self-referential, brilliantly constructive, irreverent cosmic horror, and amongst the most addictive books I've read in years, Tingle is now one of the most important horror authors to follow.

Horror Movie - Paul Tremblay

Tremblay remains a master of horror storytelling and this is on display in his effort to create such a quiet subtlety that we are able to fill his gaps in description with the most astounding horrors imaginable. This is exactly the silence that makes Horror Movie such a profound experience: we can begin to understand exactly how we can become monsters, in how we can perform violence and terror, without ever acknowledging what is taking place and what we are actually participating in. Ostensibly the book is about an independent horror film being made and the consequences of its horrible mistakes decades later, but the plotting allows us to follow both timelines seamlessly while adapting to the increasing dread that comes with each page. I will also say that it is a perfectly paced movie horror, dripping with the world of online film fandom, and hits almost every note you want from a popular horror novel.

The Queen - Nick Cutter (Gallery Books)

The Queen is amongst the most fun I’ve had all year, but also is a pitch perfect narrative thrill ride that balances an economy of words with an interesting series of narrative devices and an underlying metaphorical framework that, despite itself, carries readers perfectly well until the end. Think of a delightfully cynical teen mix of body horror, mad scientists, and near cosmic insectoid panic and you might catch up to the frenetic appeal of Cutter's prose. Cutter is simply the more popular pseudonym for Craig Davidson, and whose book The Troop is about to be on Netflix. This is one of the best horror books of the year since it so fluidly hits all genre marks while introducing us to relatable characters that tackles issues of class, gender, and alienation without passe manipulations or cliches. This is one book I look forward to seeing adapted for some skin crawling midnight film screening.

The Night Guest - Hildur Knútsdóttir, Translated by Mary Robinette Kowel

The story of the Night Guest caught my eye as the perfect narrative allegory for the kind of exhausting chronic illnesses we are talking about more and more in the era of long COVID. A woman notices that when she wakes up in the morning she feels like she has spent the entire night out walking. The thing is, when she accidentally falls asleep with her pedometer on, she finds out she has been. This evolves into a story about familial trauma and the way it spins out onto everyone around us, especially those we try to love, in distinctly frightening ways. Short enough to read in an evening, The Night Guest is both a fabulous piece of new feminist horror and a good introduction to the small but mighty world of Icelandic genre fiction.

Cuckoo - Gretchen Felker-Martin

Gretchen Felker-Martin’s follow-up to her celebrated provocation, Man-Hunt, is a visceral, violent, and often upsetting title about queer kids dropped into the desert for a type of torturous conversion therapy. The book picks up on the 1990s-2000s phenomenon of prison camps and reform institutions where kids were “scared straight,” where they were usually subjected to brutal abuse, confinement, and life-altering trauma. Martin’s book takes the real horrors of these experiences and accelerates them, highlighting the fact that many of those who took a leadership role in these camps seem almost as though they were possessed by a malignant force, one that is then passed on to the campers as they re-enter their communities. Martin’s prose rests on a barrage of graphic imagery and confused, panicked reactions by our ensemble cast, and at all times it remains both engaging and empathetic as we move into a quickly and intricately built Lovecraftian story that pushes the boundaries of what we expect from the genre. While there are moments that feel overwrought and almost punitive in Martin’s over-reliance on gut wrenching brutality, it also feels at though Martin’s use of such language is in accordance with how horror can recast our experiences of harm: the monsters and antagonists become bigger than life, just as our horrors were to us when we experienced them. I would be shocked if Cuckoo wasn’t made into a miniseries in the next several years with its perfect pacing, relatable characters, and well constructed action sequences.

Not a Speck of Light - Laird Barron

Laird Barron returns with another of his characteristically compelling cosmic horror collections with Not a Speck of Light, bringing together work from the past eight years. The book follows a similar model to his last collection, Swift to Chase, which roughly structures the stories to follow an interlocking, though non-linear, narrative. This allows each of the stories to be broken down into four larger sections, with each section reading like a possible novella. The plan for this type of book likely came years before the book’s completion given that each of these stories (except one) were published in magazines and anthology books without the overarching project in full view. This is a testament to the way that Barron works, creating his own mythos, common characters, and familiar landscapes ranging from upstate New York to Alaska to Olympia, Washington. There are not a tremendous number of surprises in Not a Speck of Light, other than to say that there are more good stories than bad and Barron’s tendency towards prolix character narration has been scaled back to a more manageable, and justifiable, format. Barron’s prose is easy to get lost in, with his narrators speaking in constant hyperbole and metaphor, stacking on slang that feels ill placed. But this book is well balanced, and even his more outlandish stories maintain a kind of relatable weirdness rather than becoming a self-parody. The best stories include the opener, “In a Cavern, In a Canyon” (avoid finding out where it was originally published, it’ll ruin the plot), “The Blood in My Mouth,” and “Tip Toe.” Barron seems to be the kind of writer who knows who he is and has kept a steady pace, just below the level of mainstream appeal and just controversial enough to remain a “writer’s writer” in the world of weird fiction.

No One is Safe! -  Philip Fracassi

With all honesty, few books have been as engaging, frightening, or delightful as Philip Fracassi’s recent collection, No One is Safe. While the book is branded around a “pulp horror” aesthetic, it really follows a similar model to his earlier collections of well plotted genre storytelling that depends on at least a degree of subtlety and dread-building. While not as purely Lovecraftian as earlier books, such as Beneath the Pale Sky (2021) or Behold the Void (2017), this book retains every quality that makes Fracassi such a dependable voice in the world of literary horror. While there is little that is qualitatively new about No One is Safe, there is something enticing about watching a master create pitch-perfect short fiction, and this would remain at the top of my recommendation list for 2024’s best horror. The best stories included are… “Over 1,000,000,000 Copies in Print,” “Autumn Sugar,” “The Wish,” and “Row.”

This Skin Was Once Mine and Other Disturbances - Eric LaRocca

Eric LaRocca has made it onto my “best of” list for the past three years partially because his unrelenting output never ceases to break every expectation, and moral taboo, you could hold for it. The Skin Was Once Mine is another one of his collections, which always feel as one consistent volume that was meant to be read start to finish despite being composed of different organs each seeded in different places at different moments. It is horrifying, yes, and queer in the dangerous way we used to whisper that word, but it also exists with its whole heart in a fashion that honors the sacrifice readers make to jump into this level of literary self-immolation. There is also a profound simplicity to his writing, an economy of words that never allows the reader to feel disrespected for even a moment, not one syllable is more than necessary. This is a deeply uncomfortable book (it warns you at the start), and yet there is not one story I could have done without. LaRocca’s next novel comes out in the first quarter of 2025 and I recommend pre-ordering it just as a vote of confidence.

Pay the Piper - George A. Romero and Daniel Kraus

This is the second of Romero’s books that novelist Daniel Kraus found when curating Romero’s archive, except this strayed far enough from the world of zombies that it stood out as a completely unique work that paralleled nothing else in Romero’s career. In what Kraus expertly finishes, we get an incredibly involved look at cajun life in the South Bajou of Louisiana, a crumbling of rural community as oil companies decimate the land, which itself is just an echo of its pirate past. What underskirts this is a cosmic horror story about monsters in the swamp, though this is only a background pretext for the haunting memories, mistakes, and failed relationships of those who inhabit the shanties in one of the poorest parts of the country. This is a brilliant portrait of daily life, compassionate and delicate while also containing some of the most ferocious characters I’ve encountered in modern horror. 

Fervour - Toby Lloyd

What is so astounding about Toby Lloyd’s novel Fervour is not just how it intermixes Jewish religious and secular ideas, or how it overlaps narratives both invented and timeless, or even how it melds genre writing with deeply personal familial strife, but that he does it in such a structurally brilliant way that it’s hard to believe this is his first effort. This is not only my favorite book of the year, it may be the best book I’ve read so far this decade, and it’s hard for me to consider any moment of this book a misstep or anything other than pitch perfect Jewish storytelling. Narrating the life of an Orthodox British family in various states of undress, while simultaneously allowing material and mythic strands of explanation for their dissolving relationships, Lloyd creates an uncommon kind of unity, between the spiritual and the historical, that is necessary for Jewish literature. Instead of a divide between the secular and religious we end up with a decidedly Jewish narrative, one that rejects the bifurcation so universalized in the Western canon and often projected onto Jewish authors. Instead, Lloyd plums a type of Yiddish consciousness in his work, one where the entire history of Jewish storytelling and debate hangs over every page, and where astute readers may just realize that there has been someone watching their journey since the first page. It’s just unclear who that someone is.