The horror books to read during Winter 2023–24

Vignetted image of a bloody kitchen knife on a book

The dead of winter — with its bleak, endless nights, hushed landscapes and frigid isolation — lends itself to the macabre and the gloomy

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By David Faris

published 16 December 2023

Most people associate horror films and novels with October and the run-up to Halloween. But the dead of winter — with its bleak, endless nights, hushed landscapes and frigid isolation — lends itself best to the macabre and the gloomy. Here are five upcoming novels that will keep you huddled under your weighted blankets until spring:

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Cushing's novella about Kaye, an episcopalian priest in nowheresville, Indiana, is that rare horror novel that chills without overt mayhem and gore. Married to a pagan, Kaye's increasing crisis of faith is accelerated when she meets an unhoused man in the park, Janus, who purports to be a god. From there, things get wild, as we try to figure out exactly what is happening to Kaye and whether she is losing her mind, her religion or possibly both. Order here.

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Khan, making her literary-horror debut, spins a haunted-house narrative around the under-utilized concept of the djinn, a spirit drawn from Arab and Muslim folklore. In the book, Sana finds the century-old diary of a girl named Meena. She then tries to find out what happened to her at the dilapidated Akbar Manzil mansion, now a boarding house for the down-on-their-luck, on the South African coast. But as Sana works to unravel Meena's mysteries, she is stalked by a djinn through the sprawling house, which is almost its own character. Preorder here.

If you only read genre fiction, you might never be inclined to explore the great outdoors. Whether hunted by murderous locals, devoured by beasts real and imagined or hopelessly lost, characters in these novels tend not to enjoy their jaunts into the wilderness. Dylan, an aspiring rock climber and influencer, and her boyfriend, Luke, latch onto an outing with her friend, Clay, a geologist, and his assistant, Sylvia, to survey a previously undiscovered Kentucky cliff face. That’s the last anyone hears from them for seven months, until three corpses are found with Dylan still missing. Kiefer, a native Kentuckian and rock climber, packs her debut with punch and haunting imagery. Preorder here.

Golden's 2022 novel "Road of Bones" was a road-trip-disaster masterpiece, as a down-on-his-luck documentarian found himself chased by murderous ghosts along the infamous Soviet highway in Siberia. In "The House of Last Resort," he takes his horror show overseas again to Italy, where the government is selling houses in abandoned rural towns like Becchina for one Euro. Enter the remote-working American couple Tommy and Kate, who see these houses as an irresistible rehab opportunity and a chance to connect with Tommy's family, which hails from the town. But their new house has an annex and a secret chapel, and before long, the couple wishes they had just returned to the office. Preorder here.

The world of post-apocalyptic fiction has given us all manner of bizarre world-ending triggers and manifestations, like the pathogen that causes people to fall asleep and never wake up in Karen Thompson Walker's "The Dreamers." But there’s never been anything quite like the problem in Sunny Moraine's "Your Shadow Half Remains," in which eye contact with another human being causes violent breakdowns. When Riley, who lives alone in her grandparents' lake house, dispenses with caution to befriend her new neighbor, Ellis, she begins to lose what remains of her grasp on reality. Preorder here.

When she was a child, Talitha Velkwood survived a still-unexplained occurrence in her hometown that turned everyone, including her mother and sister, into ghosts. With her property now known as the Velkwood Vicinity, she agrees to return decades later at the behest of an independent researcher looking for answers. Kiste puts a twist on the well-worn haunted house novel in that Velkwood and the other two survivors are the only ones who can actually enter the house, surrounded by a "veil" reminiscent of the Shimmer from Jeff Van Der Meer's "Annihilation." Preorder here.

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David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. He is a frequent contributor to Informed Comment, and his work has appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and Indy Week.