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.

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.

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.

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

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

After their mother's sudden death, estranged siblings Louise and Mark return to their Charleston childhood home to clear it out — only to find it packed with their mother's eerie handmade puppets, and one favorite clown puppet that does not want the family to move on. Grady Hendrix's horror novel about grief, sibling rivalry, and inherited trauma. (Catalog entry uses the Spanish edition title.)

Charleston, 1988: best friends Abby and Gretchen are inseparable — until a night of skinny-dipping and acid in the woods goes wrong, and Gretchen comes back changed. As her behaviour turns cruel and disturbing and people around them start getting hurt, Abby becomes convinced something evil has taken her friend. Grady Hendrix wraps genuine terror and body horror in an affectionate 1980s pastiche, in a novel that takes the ferocity of teenage friendship completely seriously.

• coming of age

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.

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

When a teenage boy is found drained of blood in the isolated Alaskan town of Deadhart, suspicion falls on the Colony — a protected group of vampires blamed for a similar killing decades ago. Detective Barbara Atkins must decide whether they're guilty before a storm seals the town off and long-simmering hatred erupts. An atmospheric horror-mystery.

• mystery box

On Jeckle Island, peace with the unnatural things in the shadows depends on one rule: ignore them. When Rachel's son breaks it, their perfect summer world begins to shatter. A chilling short story from horror author Grady Hendrix's Shivers collection.

Felix and his fiancée Faye are stranded at her family's remote cabin on Pale Peak, where the woods erupt with mimicked voices and a dark figure watches from the dark. When Faye begins whispering to something outside, Felix must uncover the ancient entity hunting her. A tense supernatural horror novel born on Reddit's NoSleep.

Broke and out of options, Silas and his girlfriend Rose return to the isolated childhood home ruled by his cruel Aunt Bunny. As addiction pulls Silas back under and unnerving events multiply, an ancient presence in the woods reveals it has been waiting for him. S.E. Tolsen's award-winning horror binds family dysfunction, addiction, and supernatural dread.

Reeling from a breakup, Annie moves to a small town and is taken under the wing of Sophie — magnetic, generous, and unmistakably a witch — whose devoted friendship offers power and belonging at a price.

Marcus grew up under a single, unbreakable rule: never get out of bed in the dark without turning on the light first. His father drilled it into him after his mother died — taken, he swore, by the Ankle Snatcher, the thing that waits beneath the bed for anyone careless enough to set a bare foot on the floor at night. Years later, Marcus has built a careful, cautious adult life, the childhood terror pushed down but never quite gone. Then his new girlfriend starts staying over, and the old dread comes creeping back. Is there really something under the bed — or did Marcus's mother die at the hands of a very human monster, and is that same darkness now surfacing in him? Part of Grady Hendrix's Creature Feature collection of horror shorts, Ankle Snatcher is a sharp, unsettling story that plays childhood fears against the far more frightening question of what we inherit from our parents.

The crew of the hit ghost-hunting reality show Fade to Black thinks they have found the ultimate location: the Paranormal Research Foundation, a derelict mansion once home to bizarre 1970s experiments. Armed with high-tech gear, the team hopes to finally gather scientific proof of the afterlife. But as the house begins to manifest its secrets, the investigation spirals into a living nightmare. Told through a collection of recovered tapes, journals, and correspondence, this is the record of how their final episode went horribly wrong.

• epistolary
• multiple povs
• unreliable narrator
• locked room