October is upon us; it’s spooky season! One of the best ways to enjoy Halloween is to immerse yourself in an enthralling story, and this collection of thrillers and horror books offers you recommendations to do just that. From historical horror to dystopian, science-fiction thrillers, these books will have unease crawling up your spine.
Content warnings are given along with each book, and they are listed from most severe to least.
The Terror by Dan Simmons
British naval officer Sir John Franklin is determined to find the Northwest Passage, a route from the Atlantic to the Pacific through Arctic waterways, and his crews of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror are willing to follow him into the ice. But when their leader is killed, Captain Francis Crozier must take command of the remaining crew and try desperately to lead them south to survival. Soon, however, they learn that winter and starvation are not the only things that hunt them throughout their journey, and something far more terrible stalks their path.
Based on the true story of Franklin’s failed expedition, this book will haunt you with a story from over a century ago and is available in both audiobook and physical form at Georgetown Public Library. Content warnings include cannibalism, death, gore, torture, homophobia, sexual content, pregnancy, racial slurs, and vomit.
Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice
In a small Anishinaabe community isolated from its neighbors, the power goes out. Cut off from the outside, watching for winter snows, and seeing their food supply diminishing, paranoia begins to spread–especially as southern outsiders begin to appear, fleeing their fracturing society. Mistrusting mounting and the death toll rising over the months, a group of young adults and their families decide to return to their Anishinaabe traditions to survive. Led by Evan Whitesky, they attempt to restore order but are faced with a serious decision.
The first in a duology, Moon of the Crusted Snow is available as an eBook and physical copy at Georgetown Public Library. Content warnings include death, gun violence, murder, cannibalism, suicide, racism, alcoholism, colonization, and alcohol.
Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby:
Ike Randolph has gone straight from his criminal past for fifteen years, but when a cop arrives at his door to inform him that his gay son Isiah has been murdered, alongside Isiah’s white husband Derek, Ike is unwilling to leave the matter in the hands of the police. Neither is Derek’s father Buddy Lee, another ex-con still with contacts in the criminal underworld. They couldn’t accept their sons when they were still alive, but the pair of them loved their boys, and they wouldn’t stand for anyone to get away with hurting them. On their quest for vengeance, they’ll confront their prejudices: about their sons and each other.
A story about revenge but also redemption, Razorblade Tears is available at Georgetown Public Library as an audiobook, eBook, and physical copy. Content warnings include violence, homophobia, gun violence, transphobia, racism, racial slurs, deadnaming, cancer, and kidnapping.
What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher:
Retired soldier Alex Easton travels to the countryside of Ruritania when they receive word that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying. The house there pulses with fungi and wildlife, beside a lake that thrums like a heartbeat. Madeline speaks in voices not her own while asleep, and her brother Roderick has fallen mysteriously ill. Accompanied by a British scientist and American doctor, Alex must discover the secrets of the ancestral Usher home before it devours them.
A queer retelling of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”, What Moves the Dead is available as an audiobook and eBook at Georgetown Public Library. Content warnings include body horror, animal death, death, war, suicide, murder, fire/fire injury, transphobia, and vomit.
The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers:
First published in 1895, this anthology is named after its in-world and forbidden play The King in Yellow: a play which appears in four short stories, each exploring how those who read it are driven mad.
A classic anthology of fantastical and horrifying short stories, The King in Yellow is available as an eBook at Smith Library Center. Content warnings include death, war, mental illness, suicide, animal cruelty, racial slurs, antisemitism, grief, and racism.
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado:
While humanity succumbs to a plague, a woman talks about her sexual history. A mall sales clerk finds horror in the seams of their prom dresses. Weight-loss surgery leads to a houseguest. And in the novella, “Especially Heinous”, every episode of Law & Order: SVU is rewritten as a haunted procedural with imposters and ghosts.
An anthology of short stories that transcend genre to explore violence against women, Her Body and Other Parties is available as a physical copy at Georgetown Public Library. Content warnings include sexual content, body horror, eating disorders, rape, sexual assault, sexual violence, animal death, mental illness, and homophobia.
The Bone Orchard by Sara A. Mueller:
Charm is many things: last of a lineage of conquered necromancers, prisoner of the Orchard House’s yard full of bone trees, madam for sex workers who aren’t real, and favored concubine of the emperor himself. She is a prisoner and a witch who tends to the bone trees’ fruit: Shame, Justice, Desire, Pride, and Pain. But when the emperor lies on his deathbed, he charges her to become yet something more: solver of his own murder, discoverer of which of his sons has killed him and which, therefore, is worthy to succeed him. To fulfill this duty is to win her freedom at last, but also to betray the memory of her people. The paths of justice or revenge lay at her feet, and Charm must choose which she will tread.
A Whodunit set in a world of gothic fantasy, The Bone Orchard is available as an audiobook at Georgetown Public Library. Content warnings include suicide, physical abuse, sexual violence, pedophilia, rape, violence, child death, war, and sexual assault.
House of Hunger by Alexis Henderson:
Marion Shaw is a girl from the slums, desperate to escape but without a chance to–until she sees a strange advertisement for a “bloodmaid of exceptional taste”. Marion knows little of the nobles of the far north, who drink the blood of their servants, but she applies to the position anyway and finds herself a bloodmaid of the infamous House of Hunger. And then there is Countess Lisavet, presider of this debauched court, who takes interest in Marion, and whom Marion is desperate to please. But when the other bloodmaids begin to go missing in the dead of the night, she knows she’ll need to learn the rules of the House of Hunger–or die to it.
A queer gothic novel where the luxuries of the upper class become true horrors, House of Hunger is available in physical form at Georgetown Public Library. Content warnings include blood, gore, violence, sexual content, drug use, toxic relationships, death of a parent, incest, and animal death.
Hell Followed with Us by Andrew Joseph White:
Benji is sixteen, trans, infected with a bioweapon, and on the run from the fundamentalist cult that both raised him and caused the end of the world. He runs without the hope of refuge, but he finds one anyway when he intervenes to save the members of the ALC, Acheson LGBTQ+ Center, from a monster. Now their leader, Nick, an autistic and lethal gunman, will allow Benji to stay if he promises to use the bioweapon slowly mutating him to protect the ALC. He is eager to agree, but Nick has secrets of his own.
Wrathful and fierce, Hell Followed with Us explores identity and resistance and is available at Georgetown Public Library as a physical and eBook copy. Content warnings include body horror, transphobia, gore, deadnaming, dysphoria, death of a parent, sexual content, and alcohol.
Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon:
Vern is seven months pregnant with twins when she seeks the woods over the religious compound where she was raised. It is there that she gives birth to her children and tries to keep them safe, even as they are hunted by the community that refuses to release her. To stop them, she wrecks brutality beyond what should be possible, aided by the changes to her body. To understand her ongoing metamorphosis, she must confront both the past and the future, to discover the secrets of her childhood community but also what produced it.A debut queer Gothic novel, Sorrowland is available in physical form at Georgetown Public Library. Content warnings include body horror, violence, racism, homophobia, adult/minor relationship, animal death, alcoholism, suicide, and sexual assault.