If your looking for horror books to enjoy Ive read a lot of them over the last few weeks and have a few to recommend.
The Only Good Indians truly chilled me to the bone and made it hard to keep reading for fear of what would happen next. As much as I enjoy horror this is the first book in a long time that gripped me like that. I wasn't scared for the characters, I wasn't scared imagining myself in the scenario, I was scared to turn the page.
Content Warning: for some pretty extreme levels of gore some involving
fetuses but none of the violance is sexual in nature.
Ararat by comparison is a fun romp. There's a few plot contrivences and
Hollywood style concepts but the setting is compelling and the horror that reveals itself is bone chilling in a different way. This Golden fella should keep at it he'll make a name for himself one day (joke).
This might be more of a summertime horror or existential sort of horror book but I really liked it. Yes it is the book that inspired M. Night Shyamalan's movie Knock at the Cabin and no I haven't seen the movie(but Bautista was a great casting choice based on the character's description in the book). It's really good, better than the movie by all reports and heartbreaking.
Content Warning:
child death and description of a hate crime.
Shirley Jackson is a master of horror, I read The Haunting of Hill House, and could easily recommend that as well, or one of her short story collections but We Have Always Lived in the Castle is something exceptional and should not be slept on. If you grew up with siblings you'll find it an emotional, heartbreaking and creepy. I mean, it might do that for people who were an only child, but one of y'all will have to read it and report back.
It may seem a bit odd, unscary and meandering at first but stick with it, because it all culminates by the back third. I love it.
I can't entirely recommend Bram Stoker's Dracula without caveat, but this version on Audible featuring Tim Curry is worth it to hear his performances as Johnathan Harker and Dr. Van Helsing.
If you want the horrific lecherous depiction of the wealthy that Dracula later became, check out Ole Oscar Windey's novella. Just a stark depiction of the lordly class and how their wealth places them outside of humanity, and how our fetishization of youth as a culture, then and now, is a curse, not a virtue.
