Interested in reading something different? Take a look at these great new horror books for 2026! Perfect for dark and windy nights as we head into Halloween.
This is just a taster of what’s available with your library card – browse our full horror collection on the library catalogue or visit your local library to find more!
Want more suggested books? Take a look at our recommendations find out more about the National Year of Reading.
Look What the Cat Dragged In
Jason Rekulak
In a spiral of grief after her own pet cat goes missing, cartoonist Penny Padgett wonders if pet-sitting the peculiar cat Godfrey could be just what she needs.
At first, Godfrey is charming and affectionate – but not long after Penny lets him into her home, strange things begin to happen.
A terrible insect infestation takes hold of the basement. Penny’s cute cartoon illustrations turn dark and surreal, as if influenced by an invisible hand. And her health starts failing, as if her mind and body are under attack by a sinister, malevolent force.
Penny may be a cat person – but Godfrey is no ordinary cat.
Bodies of Work
Clay McLeod Chapman
At sixty-six years old, Winston Kemper has always been a nonentity. No one notices him. His simple existence barely registers for those who come into contact with him. Some call him feeble-minded. He is a janitor at the local church, a groundskeeper by default, and that’s it. No friends, no family.
When he’s done with work, he returns home – a remote, single room apartment located above a garage – and that is where his true work begins.
Winston Kemper is a collector of voices, and his magnum opus – ‘The Butterfly Girls’ – is a sprawling epic of untapped imagination. It has no single canvas, no particular frame. It is everywhere – scribbled on the walls, the floor, and countless notebooks. Winston is creating a fantasia which exists in words, images and blood.
As part of his ‘art’ he has been murdering forgotten women. Poor souls who slip through the cracks of society, who no one’s looking for. Winston takes their lives, their voices.
The House That Eats the Dead
Max Doty
The new house is a fresh start for Claire and her family. It’s a move towards the quiet suburban life she has craved since her turbulent childhood; a step up the corporate ladder for her husband, Tom; and a safe haven for their two children.
Yet as they unpack their boxes, she senses something is wrong. Fresh flowers dry up, store-bought eggs are inexplicably hollow, and her daughter’s favourite toy disappears. Claire soon confronts a series of impossible truths: The house is hungry. It’s devouring anything that was once alive. And only Claire and Tom, the owners of the house, will remember that this ‘food’ ever existed.
When Claire exploits the house’s power in a moment of weakness, she and the house forge a fragile bond. But as its hunger intensifies and Claire loses control, she fears who else might be drawn to her home – and what sinister appetites they’ll bring.
Bat Eater
Kylie Lee Baker
Cora Zeng is a crime scene cleaner, washing away the remains of brutal murders and suicides in Chinatown. The bloody messes don’t bother her, not when she’s already witnessed the most horrific thing possible: her sister being pushed in front of a train. Before fleeing the scene, the murderer whispered two words: bat eater.
Months pass, the killer is never caught, and Cora can barely keep herself together. She pushes away all feelings, disregards the bite marks that appear on her coffee table, and won’t take her aunt’s advice to prepare for the Hungry Ghost Festival, when the gates of hell open. Cora tries to ignore the rising dread in her stomach, even when she and her co-workers begin finding bat carcasses at their crime scene clean-ups.
But Cora can’t ignore the fact that all their recent clean-ups have been the bodies of East Asian women. Soon Cora will learn, you can’t just ignore hungry ghosts.
Twisted Pike
David Barnett
The remote village of Withered Hill harbours dark secrets. Outsiders are not welcome, but a film crew descends. Their producer Rob claims they intend to make a low-budget horror movie: ‘Twisted Pike’.
In truth, the cameras are a front for something infinitely more sinister. They haven’t come to capture fictional nightmares. They have come to raze Withered Hill to the ground – and obliterate everyone who calls it home.
Will Rob succeed in wiping out the place that took so much from him? Are there forces at work beyond the reach of human vengeance? If Withered Hill falls, the ancient gods sleeping beneath the soil will finally awaken. And their wrath won’t stop at the village borders.
It’s Not a Cult
Joey Batey
Callum, Melusine and Al play in a band with no name, baffling audiences in pubs across the north-east of England with their ‘sound’. Their songs tell the stories of the Solkats: fictional northern gods of small things, of mishap and mayhem.
No one knows what they’re on about. But they believe in their music, and in each other. And they’re happy.
That is, until an act of violence at a pub gig goes viral, they catch the eye of an influencer and suddenly go from having a cult following to having a cult, following. All the Solkats want, Callum insists, is to have effect on the world. But as fans from LA to Australia flock to Northumberland, and each gig becomes larger and more lawless than the last, this effect starts to feel scarily – real.
Which poses the question: if the Solkats really do exist, which is it more dangerous to anger: a wayward group of elder gods, or your biggest fans?
Minihorror
Barbi Markovic and Jen Calleja
A guest at a New Year’s Eve rooftop party finds a parallel universe in the building next door. A woman discovers her boyfriend’s family are all made of cookie dough. A man bites into a bar of Alpine chocolate to realise it’s infested with maggots.
Mini and Miki live in Vienna. They are not from here, but they try their best to fit in and carve themselves the perfect middle class routine. Nevertheless – and perhaps because of it – there’s something not quite right about the place. Danger seems to lurk in every corner: a family breakfast, an office cubicle, a well-deserved holiday.
Minihorror is a surreal, delightful and terrifying collection about the agents of fear in our society from the most original and imaginative of a new generation of European writers – to read it is to feel at once caught-out and understood. Barbi Markovic dares to ask: could the real horror story be life itself?
The Midnight Timetable
Po-Ra Chong and Anton Hur
In a labyrinthine research facility where those who open the wrong door might find it’s disappeared behind them, or that the echoing footsteps they’re running from are their own, an unnamed protagonist begins their night shift under the watchful eye of the building’s enigmatic senior guard.
Each evening, as the fluorescent lights hum and the silence grows heavier, the guard shares another story – of cursed objects hidden behind security glass, of lives unspooled by vengeance, sorrow or revelation.
These tales are not mere ghost stories. They’re warnings. Lessons. Or perhaps confessions. As the nights stretch on and reality frays, the protagonist starts to suspect that the building itself is alive with malevolent intent – that the objects aren’t just cursed, but waiting.
Everything Happened at Once
Chin-Yong Ch’Oe
What is the date today? Here, time doesn’t pass in days. I wouldn’t be surprised if spring slid straight into summer, if I looked at a clear lake and saw an old woman in my reflection.
A mutant virus has swept half of the world’s population overnight. The known world has collapsed. The new world is a lawless place where children’s livers are believed to provide immunity.
In one apartment block, an unlikely pack break out of quarantine in a stolen lorry and brave an achingly empty world once teeming with colour. The desolate reaches of Eurasia are signposted with fellow defectors and found family. A wandering travel agent. A mixed-race divorcee embracing her sacred desire. A deaf girl traversing the frozen continent barefoot.
How do you find a way forward in a world turned upside down?
Barb Jacobs Just Won’t Die!
Tanya Pell
Barbra ‘Barbie’ Jacobs may be the wrong side of forty, but she’s still beloved by her fans.
Typecast as a Scream Queen from her very first horror flick, Barb’s always wanted to prove to herself that she’s more than a ‘final girl’ – the prettiest one who somehow manages not to get chopped into tiny little pieces at the end of the movie. But now her wish might be coming true.
In the bathroom at this horror convention Barb finds a cheerleader in the stalls covered in blood. How cliché. But this time, it’s not from the props department – her throat’s been ripped out. As the body count rises, Barb knows she has to play the part one last time if she’s going to escape the deranged psycho serial killer who’s murdering everyone around her.
Netherwood
Jake Arnott
Exhausted by the pressures of life in London, Justine and Adam move to Hastings. With Adam’s failed career as an artist and a recent miscarriage causing rifts in their marriage, Justine wants this to be a fresh start for them.
As they try to settle into their new seaside home, they find a bolted door in their basement, behind which is a cave. Adam feels a strange but enchanting pull to the cave while apprehension begins to claw at Justine. Inside the cave, they find a witch bottle and with this discovery, the couple begin to uncover disturbing rumours about the home’s previous owner, John Malachy.
A sinister figure, Malachy was known for his obsession with chaos magic, and association with Sacred Disease – a band that rose to fame in the 80s that supposedly experimented with blood magic and occult forces and was made a scapegoat in the media due to their association with Satanism.
We Turn Gruesome at Night
Eric LaRocca
Ten years after the devastating massacre that occurred on Christmas morning in 2003 and the community of Burnt Sparrow, NH struggles to move forward. Meanwhile, Rupert Cromwell and Gladys Esherwood find themselves trapped in End House and suffering unbearable monotony day in and day out.
When a town courier named Pierce arrives at End House and introduces Rupert to a secret organization known as The Perdido Society, Rupert discovers a deeply intricate and intensely sinister web of secrets spreading through the town. It isn’t long before more blood is spilled, shameful transgressions are revealed, and temptations are finally satisfied.
Captivating and profoundly unnerving, this is the story of two lost souls who are sent on an odyssey into the depths of depravity only for them to discover that it’s quite easy to turn monstrous, to become the thing you once despised.
A Box Full of Darkness
Simone ST. James
1960s: Three siblings are all haunted in three very different ways. Violet wakes to a strange and cold woman looming over her bed, Dodie wakes in a constant state of drowning and Vale wakes to beaming light and probing figures. But the one thing that haunts them the most is the disappearance of their little brother, Ben, who went missing during a game of hide and seek.
1980s: Violet is notified that Ben’s spirit is seen wondering their haunted childhood home calling for them to return and the three siblings do just that. But secrets become un-earthed, their past traumas seem more connected that they thought and all siblings are faced with a very angry spirit who wants revenge.
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