Readers' Advisory: Horror & Gothic

In this fast-paced thriller novel, a horrific serial killer known as the Bayou Butcher has a hankering for hunting and dismembering his victims. And he's terrorizing the city of New Orleans. Forensic pathologist Dr. Wren Muller and her team are set to take him down once and for all.

In Lagos, Nigeria, Korede is a nurse with a close relationship with her younger sister, Ayoola. Ayoola is the more beautiful, favored sister, and possibly sociopathic. For the third time in a row, Ayoola has stabbed her boyfriend to death, supposedly in self-defense.

For David Ransom, it begins as an open-and-shut case. Malpractice. As attorney for a grieving family, he's determined to hang a negligent doctor. Then Dr. Kate Chesne storms into his office, daring him to seek out the truth -- that she's being framed.

A haunting novel about a black woman who returns to her hometown for a plantation wedding and the horror that ensues as she reconnects with the blood-soaked history of the land and the best friends she left behind.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is a non-fiction novel by John Berendt. The book, Berendt's first, was published in 1994 and follows the story of an antiques dealer on trial for the murder of a male prostitute.

It tells the story of the Bigtree family; alligator wrestles who live on an island near Florida and run the theme park, Swamplandia! Thirteen-year-old Ava Bigtree narrates most of the story, about the disasters her family faces and the ways people can grow apart and back together.

The book follows Beatriz, a mestiza woman, and her fight to survive the haunted hacienda she has recently been charged with. In it, Cañas delivers a chilling and compelling story that melds a childhood fear of the dark with the impacts of colonialism and Catholicism in Mexico after the War of Independence.

A young woman moves to 17th century Amsterdam and hires a mysterious local miniaturist to furnish the dollhouse she received from her merchant husband as a present, but the lifelike miniatures somehow start eerily foreshadowing her fate.

The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling is a gothic horror novel about a marriage between a logical accountant and a charming young doctor, set in his crumbling and creaky manor with its ghosts in the walls.

Mexican Gothic is a 2020 gothic horror novel by Mexican Canadian author Silvia Moreno-Garcia. It centers on a young woman investigating her cousin's claims that her husband is trying to murder her.

A mystery about a woman working as a nanny for a young boy with strange and disturbing secrets. Fresh out of rehab, Mallory Quinn takes a job in the affluent suburb of Spring Brook, New Jersey as a babysitter for Ted and Caroline Maxwell. She is to look after their five-year-old son, Teddy.

The book follows Beatriz, a mestiza woman, and her fight to survive the haunted hacienda she has recently been charged with. In it, Cañas delivers a chilling and compelling story that melds a childhood fear of the dark with the impacts of colonialism and Catholicism in Mexico after the War of Independence.

Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in strange voices at night, and her brother Roderick is consumed with a mysterious malady of the nerves. Aided by a redoubtable British mycologist and a baffled American doctor, Alex must unravel the secret of the House of Usher before it consumes them all.

In Gwendy's Final Task, master storytellers Stephen King and Richard Chizmar take us on a journey from Castle Rock to another famous cursed Maine city to the MF-1 space station, where Gwendy must execute a secret mission to save the world. And, maybe, all worlds.

From highly acclaimed bestselling author Ava Reid comes a gothic horror retelling of The Juniper Tree, set in another time and place within the world of The Wolf and the Woodsman, where a young witch seeks to discover her identity and escape the domination of her wizard father.

A woman struggles to make sense of her partner's decline. Those who lose loved ones to a gradual and progressive mental disorder endure a distinctive grieving process.

Lizzy Shelley, the host of the popular podcast Monsters Among Us, is traveling to Vermont, where a young girl has been abducted, and a monster sighting has the town in an uproar. She's determined to hunt it down, because Lizzy knows better than anyone that monsters are real—and one of them is her very own sister.

Lisavet is magnetic, and Marion is eager to please her new mistress. But when she discovers that the ancient walls of the House of Hunger hide even older secrets, Marion is thrust into a vicious game of cat and mouse.

Chelsea Martin has been a prisoner in her own home for too long. Her controlling husband has manipulated her for years, cutting her off from all support. Her narcissistic mother is no help, and her teen daughter is realizing she might be falling into the same trap when her once adoring boyfriend shows a dark side.

For the past two decades, Maeve has worked hard to build a normal life in New York City, where she keeps everything―and everyone―at a safe distance. When Andrea suddenly reappears, Maeve regains the only true friend she's ever had.

Lynnette Tarkington is a real-life final girl who survived a massacre. For more than a decade, she's been meeting with five other final girls and their therapist in a support group for those who survived the unthinkable, working to put their lives back together.

When Lauren’s father dies, she makes a shocking discovery. The man she knew as John Reardon was once a completely different person, with a different name. Now, she’s determined to find out who he really was, even though her only clues are an old photograph, some letters, and the name of a town—Gideon.

Former guitarist Kris Pulaski works as the night manager of a Best Western - she's tired, broke, and unhappy. Everything changes when she discovers a shocking secret from her heavy metal past: Turns out that Terry's meteoric rise to success may have come at the price of Kris's very soul.

On the surface, it is a story of murder in small town America. But just beneath the surface lies biting social satire on Indigenous displacement and gentrification, as well as a heartbreaking portrait of a young girl who escapes the trauma of her life through slasher films.

The Vegetarian tells the story of Yeong-hye, a home-maker who, one day, suddenly decides to stop eating meat after a series of dreams involving images of animal slaughter. This abstention leads her to become distanced from her family and from society.

The story of four young Americans caught in a deadly situation on a trip to Mayan ruins in Mexico, it builds a tension that Serling excelled at, created from knowing that a situation is spinning out of control in ways beyond the characters' comprehension."