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

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

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

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 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

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

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

Charleston, 1988. Abby and Gretchen have been best friends since fourth grade, bonded by E.T., roller rinks, and the small daily loyalties of teenage girlhood. Then one night of skinny-dipping and a hit of acid in the woods goes badly wrong, and afterwards Gretchen is different — withdrawn, cruel, and increasingly wrong in ways no one else seems to notice. As Gretchen's behaviour grows more disturbing and the people around them start getting hurt, Abby becomes convinced that whatever came back from the woods is not entirely her friend anymore. Grady Hendrix wraps a genuinely frightening story of demonic possession in a loving, hyper-detailed pastiche of the late 1980s, from mixtapes and mall culture to the era's satanic-panic anxieties. Beneath the period gags and mounting body horror, though, the novel is really about the ferocity of teenage friendship and how far one girl will go to save another. By turns funny, gross, and surprisingly moving, My Best Friend's Exorcism uses its horror premise to take adolescent loyalty completely seriously. It builds toward a climactic exorcism that is as much about love and stubbornness as it is about the supernatural.

• coming of age

Eight-year-old Bela loves her family—Mommy, Daddo, and Grandma Ruth—but there's someone else in the house: Other Mommy, who lives in the closet and keeps asking, gently at first, if she can go inside Bela's heart. Each time Bela says no, Other Mommy grows a little less patient, and the incidents around the house grow worse. Josh Malerman's terrifying haunting told entirely through the voice of a frightened child.

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

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

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.

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

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

Margaret loves her house—a grand, improbably cheap Victorian on Hawthorn Street—and she is not leaving it, no matter what it does. And every September, it does a great deal: the walls weep blood, the ghosts of former residents wander the halls, and all of them are terrified of whatever lives in the basement. Margaret has learned to cope. Her husband Hal could not, and one day he simply disappeared. When their estranged daughter Katherine arrives to search for her missing father—knowing nothing of the hauntings—the timing could not be worse: September has just begun, and every step toward finding Hal makes the house's horrors worse, because there are secrets it needs to keep. Carissa Orlando's The September House is a haunted-house novel with a darkly funny, deeply unsettling unreliable narrator, and a mystery about what really happened to Hal.

• unreliable narrator

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

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.

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

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

In 1979 Pennsylvania, a strange Buick 8 is abandoned at a gas station, and the state police take it in. This car is no ordinary vehicle; it has a life of its own and is linked to deaths. Years later, the son of one of the victims starts looking into the car's dark history, uncovering a terrifying truth.

• coming of age
• mystery box
• epistolary
• sacrifice

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.

Stephen Chbosky's epic return after The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a doorstop of psychological and supernatural horror. Kate Reese and her seven-year-old son Christopher flee to the small town of Mill Grove for a fresh start. Then a voice lures Christopher into the woods; he goes missing for six days and returns with a terrifying mission -- build a treehouse before Christmas, or the whole town will pay. A slow-building, King-flavored descent into small-town dread.

In the remote Alaskan town of Deadhart, a fifteen-year-old boy is found dead, his throat torn out and his body drained of blood. Suspicion falls immediately on the Colony — a reclusive group of vampires who have lived on the town's fringes for generations, and who were blamed for a nearly identical killing twenty-five years earlier. Detective Barbara Atkins arrives from the Forensic Vampyr Anthropology Department to determine whether the Colony is truly responsible or being scapegoated. In a world where vampire colonies are protected by law — and can only be culled if proven a threat to human life — the stakes of her verdict are enormous. Teaming up with Jenson Tucker, the town's disgraced former sheriff, Atkins works against mounting hostility, old grievances, and a rising body count. As a brutal storm threatens to cut Deadhart off from the outside world, the tension between the townspeople and the Colony edges toward violence. C.J. Tudor reworks vampire mythology into a taut, atmospheric murder mystery about prejudice, fear of the outsider, and who the real monsters are.

Catriona Ward's entry in The Shivers, a short, grief-soaked ghost story. Eight years after her husband and son died in Room 17, Stella books the same hotel room for one quiet night, hoping to feel close to them again. But as she tries to sleep, urgent, disturbing visions bleed through the wall between the living and the dead — and the other side has a message it is desperate for her to hear.

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.

Sent to settle a dead widow's estate at an isolated marsh house, solicitor Arthur Kipps encounters a vengeful ghost dressed all in black. Susan Hill's restrained, atmospheric modern gothic classic.

In this parallel universe novel to Stephen King's 'Desperation,' the town of Desperation is once again under siege, but this time by a different, more insidious force. Written under King's pseudonym Richard Bachman, 'The Regulators' plunges familiar characters into a nightmare where the fabric of reality itself begins to fray. It's a wild and terrifying ride that will keep you guessing.

• survival
• forced proximity
• morally grey