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.

Vera hasn't been back to Crowder House in twelve years, but her mother Daphne is dying, and so she reluctantly agrees to come home and settle her mother's affairs and prepare the family home for sale. But when she steps foot in the front door, Vera is assaulted by memories from the past.

A terrifying Gothic thriller about grief and death and the depths of a father's love, Johnny Compton's The Spite House is a stunning debut by a horror master in the making―The Babadook meets A Head Full of Ghosts in Texas Hill Country. Eric Ross is on the run from a mysterious past with his two daughters in tow.

White Is for Witching frames histories of racism as supernatural, casting protagonist Miranda Silver's struggles with eating and loneliness as the results of ghostly forces. These forces target a house her parents inherit in Dover, situated on the edge of England.

The story follows the two dad's, Andrew and Eric and their adopted daughter Wen. They've rented a cabin in the middle of nowhere to unwind and decompress. That is, until one day, four strangers show up and tell them, a decision must be made to prevent the world from ending.

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."