Most read Paranormal Horror books

Jack Torrance takes a job as winter caretaker at the isolated Overlook Hotel, hoping the solitude will help him finish his writing and hold together a family strained by his history of drinking and a violent temper. He brings his wife Wendy and their five-year-old son Danny, who possesses a psychic gift the hotel's cook calls "the shining" — and who senses, before anyone else, that the Overlook is not empty at all. Snowed in for the winter with no way out, the family is cut off just as the hotel's malevolent influence begins to close in on Jack, working on his insecurities, his temper, and his thirst for a drink he's tried to give up. As the Overlook's ghosts grow bolder and Jack's grip on himself slips, Danny's shining may be the only thing standing between his family and whatever wants them to stay forever. Stephen King's breakthrough novel is a claustrophobic haunted-house story that is as much about addiction and the violence passed from father to son as it is about supernatural horror, and it remains one of the most influential haunted-hotel stories ever written.

Eve Palmer and her girlfriend Charlie are house flippers who have just bought a fixer-upper in the Pacific Northwest. Then, one evening, a family of five appears on the doorstep. The father, Thomas Faust, warm and insistent, explains that he grew up in this house — and asks whether he might show his wife and children around, just for a few minutes. Against her better judgment, and fighting her own anxiety, Eve lets them in. The visit does not end. As the strangers settle deeper into the house, small wrongnesses accumulate: a child goes missing, a presence stirs in the basement, doors and rooms stop behaving the way they should. Charlie disappears, Eve's sense of what is real begins to fray, and the line between her anxiety disorder and genuine dread dissolves. Interleaved with Eve's account are documents exploring the "Old House" — a conspiracy theory that certain houses are portals linking alternate realities, and that visitors can become permanently trapped inside. Marcus Kliewer's debut is a claustrophobic, reality-bending horror novel about intrusion, gaslighting, and the terror of not being believed.

• unreliable narrator

The Creed family's new Maine home sits near an ancient burial ground that returns the dead — changed. When tragedy strikes, Louis Creed faces a temptation no one should. King's most devastating horror novel.

A writer returns to his childhood hometown seeking peace, only to find it plagued by a sinister evil. As his neighbors succumb to a vampiric curse, he must gather a small group of survivors to confront the encroaching darkness. Can they save the town before it's too late?

• reluctant hero
• survival
• epistolary
• found family

When their parents are killed in a car accident, Louise Joyner and her estranged brother Mark return to Charleston to clear out the family home — and find it packed with their late mother's handmade puppets and dolls. One of them, a clown named Pupkin, has plans of its own for the family. Grady Hendrix's horror novel about grief, sibling rivalry and inherited trauma, told in five parts named for the five stages of grief.

In pandemic-era New York, Cora Zeng watches her half-sister shoved in front of a train by a man spitting the slur "bat eater." Months on, working as a crime-scene cleaner, she finds East Asian women being murdered across the city, each scene marked with a bat, as hungry ghosts blur the line between trauma and the supernatural. A gory, furious horror debut.

• unreliable narrator
• mystery box

Eight-year-old Bela lives with Mommy, Daddo and Grandma Ruth, and with Other Mommy, who comes out of the closet and keeps asking to enter her heart. Bela keeps saying no, but the asking is wearing thin.

• unreliable narrator
• betrayal

A massive, soft-spoken man with a supernatural gift for healing and sensing the truth of people's pasts is sentenced to death alongside three other men. Told by a fellow guard over the course of their final days, the story builds toward a devastating reckoning with justice, innocence, and the power Coffey holds.

• multiple povs

An architect with a happy marriage hears tapping in her walls, dreams of a woman with teeth, and starts doing cruel things she cannot remember. A misdelivered book on possession offers one explanation. Either she is haunted or she is losing her mind.

• unreliable narrator

Three women, murdered by the same man who hunted them through dating apps, find each other in the afterlife and set out to stop him before he kills again.

• revenge
• multiple povs

Margaret refuses to leave her cheap Victorian, even though its walls bleed every September and something lurks in the basement. When her estranged daughter arrives looking for her missing father, the house fights to keep its secrets.

• unreliable narrator

Dan Torrance is haunted by the ghosts of his past, particularly the terrifying Overlook Hotel. Now a middle-aged man struggling with alcoholism, he uses his psychic gift to bring peace to the dying. But when he meets a young girl with an even more powerful gift, Dan is pulled into a deadly conflict with a group of psychic vampires who feed on children.

• reluctant hero
• mentor figure
• redemption arc
• sacrifice

Set in 1988, this story follows high school sophomores Abby and Gretchen, whose lifelong friendship is tested after a night of skinny-dipping goes horribly wrong. Gretchen begins acting like a different person, leading Abby to suspect that her best friend might actually be possessed by a demon. It is a nostalgic blend of teen angst and supernatural horror that explores whether the bond of friendship is strong enough to beat the devil.

• coming of age

Anna Pace, her family's designated black sheep, joins the clan for a holiday at a rented villa in Tuscany—where the locals flinch at the house's name, a tower is never to be opened, and something in the walls has taken an interest in her. Jennifer Marie Thorne's Diavola is a gothic haunted-house novel that doubles as a razor-sharp satire of the toxic family vacation.

In 1950s Florida, twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens Jr. is sent to a brutal segregated reform school after defending his sister from a wealthy white boy. Robbie soon discovers the school is haunted by the ghosts of former students, whose restless spirits reveal the dark truth of what happens behind the gates. While Robbie struggles to survive the school's harsh reality, his sister Gloria fights a desperate legal battle to bring him home.

• survival
• coming of age
• found family
• multiple povs

Stylist and influencer Clio Barnes has a picture-perfect life and a secret: she grew up in a house her mother swore was possessed by a demon. When the house passes to Clio and her sisters after their mother's death, Clio turns its renovation into content — and begins uncovering evidence that her mother's claims weren't just illness, as something in the house stirs. Rachel Harrison's clever haunted-house novel filters supernatural dread through inherited family trauma.

• unreliable narrator
• dual timeline

Every faded small town has a place like the Sun Down Motel, and in Fell, New York, it is a low-slung roadside stop where travelers pass through and locals go to hide. In 1982, Viv Delaney takes the night-clerk shift to save money for a move to the city — and slowly realizes that the motel is haunted, both by something that walks its corridors after dark and by the unsolved deaths of several women in and around Fell. Then Viv vanishes without a trace. Thirty-five years later, Viv's niece Carly Kirk, who grew up hearing about the aunt who disappeared, drops out of college and drives to Fell to find out what happened. She takes a room, takes the same graveyard shift at the same unchanged motel, and begins retracing Viv's steps — the guest ledger, the flickering lights, the doors that open on their own — until she is pulled toward the same secret, and the same danger, that swallowed her aunt. Told across the two women's alternating timelines, Simone St. James's novel braids a genuine ghost story with a serial-killer mystery into an atmospheric, propulsive thriller about the women a town would rather forget.

• dual timeline

A decade after four Blackfeet men broke a hunting taboo on the reservation, a vengeful presence begins hunting them, one by one. Stephen Graham Jones's modern horror landmark braids relentless dread with tender writing about friendship, tradition, guilt, and Native identity—a revenge story with claws and a heart.

• revenge
• survival

On the brink of fifty, an invisible, overlooked woman starts hearing violent voices and seeing ghosts of decaying women—right as killings echoing a notorious murderer begin anew. Nat Cassidy's gory horror novel is also a sharp reckoning with how society discards older women.

• unreliable narrator

A struggling actress takes in a runaway boy whose fears turn into violent reality, and finds herself hunted by something that isn't quite his father anymore.

• survival

Arnie Cunningham thought he'd found the perfect car: a cherry-red 1958 Plymouth Fury he nicknamed Christine. But this isn't just any car; it's a possessive, vengeful entity with a dark obsession for Arnie. As Christine's malevolent influence takes hold, Arnie's life descends into a terrifying spiral, and his friends must confront the monstrous force controlling him.

• coming of age
• morally grey

Mara Dyer is haunted by an accident that killed her friends, an event she can't remember. After relocating to Florida and falling for the enigmatic Noah, she finds herself entangled in a new string of mysterious deaths. Mara must confront her fractured past to protect her loved ones and understand her own unsettling reality.

• coming of age
• mystery box
• unreliable narrator

When Felix and his fiancée Faye travel to her family's remote cabin on Pale Peak to celebrate their engagement, a sudden storm strands them in the woods. That first night, strange sounds bleed out of the trees — animal screams, children crying, a chorus of mournful voices — and a dark figure watches them from beyond the window. Soon Faye begins to sleepwalk and whisper to something outside, and it becomes clear that whatever lives on the mountain has fixed its attention on her. Even after they flee, the presence follows them home, mimicking the voices of the people they trust to draw them close. To understand what is hunting Faye, Felix must uncover the mountain's buried history and the ancient entity that dwells there. Originally a contest-winning serial on Reddit's NoSleep community, Felix Blackwell's Stolen Tongues is a tense, atmospheric supernatural horror novel about love, dread, and a thing that steals voices.

• survival

A struggling ghost-hunting show stakes its thirteenth episode on a night inside Foundation House, a derelict Virginia mansion. The hosts, a believer and his skeptic wife, go in with cameras running. Only the footage comes out.

• epistolary

In the turbulent aftermath of the Mexican War of Independence, Beatriz has lost everything: her father executed, her home destroyed, her mother's family unwilling to take her in. So when the wealthy Don Rodolfo Solórzano proposes marriage, she accepts, choosing security over caution and ignoring the whispers about how his first wife died. But Hacienda San Isidro, Rodolfo's remote country estate, is no refuge. The moment her husband returns to the capital, the house turns against Beatriz — cold spots, voices, red eyes in the dark, and dreams that leave marks. Isolated and disbelieved, she turns to Padre Andrés, a young local priest who carries a dangerous secret of his own: an inherited gift for witchcraft that the Church would see him burn for. Together they must confront whatever malevolence has taken root in San Isidro before it consumes them. Isabel Cañas's atmospheric debut braids gothic horror, slow-burning romance, and the real violence of colonial-era Mexico into a haunted-house story told in two voices, as unsettling as it is romantic.

• multiple povs
• forbidden love
• slow burn

Sloane Parker, dreading her birthday and numb in a marriage to a serial cheater, lets her glamorous best friend Naomi whisk her away for a weekend getaway. But a wild night out with magnetic strangers ends with the two friends changed forever — with eternal, bloody consequences. Rachel Harrison's So Thirsty is a seductive, darkly funny vampire novel about friendship, dissatisfaction, and hunger of every kind.

Four old university friends hike into the Arctic Circle forests of Sweden to repair their bond. A shortcut through ancient woodland leaves them lost, short of food, and surrounded by signs of sacrifice and something watching from the trees.

• survival
• forced proximity
• sacrifice
• reluctant hero

In the summer of 1995, newlyweds April and Eddie take a wrong turn onto a dark country road and stop to help an injured hitchhiker—who dies before they reach help. Soon they're prime suspects in a string of killings stretching back two decades along Atticus Line, a stretch of road haunted by a murdered 'Lost Girl.' Simone St. James's atmospheric blend of cold-case mystery and ghost story.

In 1765, as plague spreads through Zacatecas, Alba Díaz flees to her betrothed's family silver mine, where something ancient wakes and fixes on her. A colonial-Mexican gothic of possession, forbidden attraction and an exorcism that may destroy her.

• forbidden love

After a driver abandons a Buick Roadmaster in 1979, Pennsylvania state troopers lock it in a shed and keep its strange nature secret for decades. When a trooper dies in 2001, his son Ned finally hears the story.

• mystery box
• multiple povs
• coming of age