by Steven Slavick, Adult Services Specialist December 2022
While we’ve always owned horror books, we’ve added a new collection to our shelves: horror novels, which you can find in between the Crime and Romance collections on the second floor! As a big fan of horror novels, I’d like to get you started with some of the rising stars in horror fiction over the past 5+ years with these author recommendations.
With titles like HorrorStor, a novel set in a haunted Ikea-type store, and My Best Friend’s Exorcism, which is like Beaches meets The Exorcist, Grady Hendrix writes fast-paced horror sprinkled with plenty of humor.
Paul Tremblay always shakes up the status quo, whether it be with A Headful of Ghosts, which had “scared the living hell” out of Stephen King, or the upcoming M. Night Shyamalan adaptation of his novel, The Cabin at the End of the World.
A prolific Australian writer, Darcy Coates, writes gripping haunted houses reads, such as The Haunting of Ashburn House, but she has also penned an underwater creature feature From Below and an apocalyptic quadrilogy.
Our shelves are stacked with even more horror authors with only one or two horror novels in their bibliography, such as:
- Mexican Gothic by Silvio Moreno Garcia
- The Hacienda by Isabel Canas
- Hidden Pictures by Jason Rekulak
- When the Reckoning Comes by LaTanya McQueen
- The Children on the Hill by Jennifer McMahon
- Lakewood by Megan Giddings
- Ring Shout by P. Djeli Clark
- The Bright Lands by John Fram
- The Year of the Witching by Alexis Henderson
- Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth
If you’re ever in the mood for a horror novel but don’t know which book would be the right fit, feel free to send me an email with the types of scares you’re looking for (or even horror movies you enjoy), and I’ll be happy to provide some good recommendations. You can reach me at slavick@addisonlibrary.org. Happy reading!