New, Thought-Provoking Horror to Read With Your Book Club

Graham Jones stays doing the damn thing when it comes to horror that centers Indigenous stories. In his latest, it’s 1989 in the small, oil and cotton-driven town of Lamesa, Texas, and Tolly is a senior in high school who is about to “be cursed to kill for revenge.”

Jones’ empathetic writing has us rooting for a killer, y’all.

Noemi Broussard is all set for a change when her boyfriend dies by suicide, and whatever progress she made gets upended. But there’s something about the details of Roddy’s death that just doesn’t make sense. Then, her Uncle Louie returns to the reservation, and with him comes some key clues to figuring out what really happened to Roddy. But there’s something else he brings, too — a horror that Noemi may regret knowing.

The characters of this Lagos-set short story collection seek freedom from the shackles of the past. In 12 deliciously eerie stories, a woman bears an uncanny resemblance to a wicked but deceased grandmother, an architect comes across a house set on vengeance, and a girl gets kidnapped by the local market’s tomato seller.

This has also just been named as a finalist for the National Book Awards prize for fiction.

If you’re unfamiliar, Chuck Tingle has a few queer niche erotica books with…interesting titles. With Camp Damascus and Bury Your Gays, Tingle seems to be in his mainstream era. We live. In this latest horror novel, Misha is finally getting his moment as a scriptwriter. He’s been nominated for an Oscar, but now his producers want him to kill off the gay characters in the season finale. His refusal means he becomes a target, but that’s not even the worst thing — the monsters from his horror movies are after him and his friends.

This is only relatively new, as it is the oldest book on the list, and came out on Halloween last year. I felt compelled to include it in this list because the ladies in one of my book clubs highly recommend it.

In it, Due writes of the horrors of the Jim Crow South. It’s 1950 in Florida when 12-year-old Robbie is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown reformatory for kicking a wealthy white boy in defense of his sister. He can see ghosts, and the ones at the reformatory are something else — they tell of the horrors that have befallen Gracetown boys and warn him of worse things to come. Robbie makes friends who teach him how to survive, but if his sister can’t find a way to get him out of the reformatory in time, it may not be enough.

In this YA novel, Cade Webster has conflicting realities. On the one hand, he’s a star football player for a nice school; on the other, he lives in a “bad” neighborhood, and is too big, ambitious, and Black for everyone’s comfort. One night, while trying to avoid a dangerous run-in with the cops, he goes into a pawn shop. He tells the shopkeeper he wishes people would stop being so scared around him, and this wish somehow comes true. At first, it feels nice, but Cade quickly realizes that people aren’t scared of anything at all, which leads to increased violence. Cade will have to put a stop to whatever sinister thing is at play, but it will cost him.