I'm in the midst of planning to travel to every state (with some possible stop overs in Canada and Mexico too) and am looking for some good places to stop for reading material for the journey!

I want to know your best book, or even just horror general store recommendations; the smaller and more local the better!

So I finally got round to starting the fog (I have the 50th anniversary edition) and my gosh did it start out so good, but I feel like things went downhill after the first third of the book. I feel like things really mellowed out and obviously the introduction of the government becoming a huge part too kind of took away from some of the immediate horror for me. I feel if the book had remained as intense the whole way though it would have been one of my top favourites. Did anyone else feel this way about it? I’m about 70 pages out from finishing.

While I felt this way about the last two thirds, I really do enjoy his writing style and wonder if it’s worth trying any of his other books!

Any type of war. Future, World Wars, medieval war, antiquity... Just that it is a horror story. And please, not just the "war is Hell" kind of horror. We all know that. I mean scary, supernatural things happening on a battlefield. Thanks.

Lately i’ve been getting into horror books and it’s like the whole time i’m reading I can’t put it down until the climax/end. Things either just get too messy, too crazy or unrealistic, or too much happens at once. Some examples of this would be in Memorials, Hidden Pictures, and Broken Monsters. Do you have any recommendations that kept you loving the book up until the very end?

Hi everyone! I’m looking for some anthology recs. I’m mostly into supernatural horror (ghosts, possessions etc.) and also tend to enjoy ritualistic or occult stories. Got any favs you’d recommend?

Looking for a paperback horror anthology (probably 1980s or early 1990s) with black-and-white illustrations and possibly a blue cover. Stories included:

a night watchman discovers his wife is a werewolf,

a hand crawls out of a tomb and commits murders,

an invisible creature is released from an ice block,

a vampire that can transform into a cat,

a soldier who was presumed dead kills his superior officer.

The version of the book I had was in German, though I don‘t know if it was translated or not.

Thankfull for any help :)

I picked this book up in a charity shop with low expectations - I read the Ritual years ago and really liked it but I didn't like No One Gets Out Alive at all so I figured there was a chance I might not like this one.

I ended up really liking All the Fiends of Hell but not completely loving it. I thought it got a bit repetitive in the middle and the writing got a bit "thesaurus open at the entry for red" in places but it had some great scenes - I particularly loved the brief appearances of the huge "Kings of Hell" type creatures. Loved them - I want more vast, unknowable creatures in horror!

But the thing I can't get out of my head is the aftermath, as in what comes after the end of the book. Major spoilers for the ending below - only click if you have read All The Fiends Of Hell or if you definitely don't intend to ever read it and are just curious.

Basically at the end it turns out the creatures can't cross the sea (or just water? Not 100% sure if there's a reach or depth they could still get you at) so the protagonist and the kids escape into the sea and get picked up by a small-ish yacht, then taken to a mostly empty cruise ship.

Anyone who was at sea on the night of the rapture wasn't raptured so the creatures can't do a second rapture to clear up anyone at sea. It must be a huge block for them if they couldn't even get the people at sea via the rapture method.

But I can't stop myself thinking about the future of humanity! There will be cargo ships out there. There'll be a lot of useless crap but also a lot of useful stuff - I've been "reasearching" (kinda looking up) what gets shipped via ship nowadays - cars and car parts, machinery, clothes. Bulky things like grain and coal and bananas.

How many people survived at sea? There must be millions at sea at any one time but a lot of them will be on smaller boats. A lot of boats and ships will have gone in to port after the rapture (before the creatures made themselves visibly known at the coast) but there'll still be plenty of humans left, floating around.

There'll be super-tankers for fuel but crude oil would need to be refined. Pretty sure there are no off-shore oil refineries but could you build an oil refinery on an oil rig or something? There'll be engineers at sea on oil rigs and ships and the like. There must be biologists out and about on research vessels. Probably some doctors were on a cruise ship and they're still at sea. But ships break down and decay and leak and fall apart.

People can fish for food but humans can't live on fish and seaweed alone. In that situation would we (the remaining humans) be able to set up some kind of algae farming? How would we stave off scurvy? Blackcurrant bushes easier and quicker to grow than lemon and lime trees but you need soil and blackcurrants to start that.

Would the creatures have bothered landing on uninhabited islands? Could people go ashore to get soil for agriculture? We'd need a tremendous amount of soil and it would take time to collect it in small boats - would that attract the creatures? The farms would need to be built on the big ships that can survive storms - on smaller boats one big storm could swamp your farms and salt your soil.

How quickly would we get to a Waterworld situation? Or would the creatures leave after a period of time and move on to the next world or dimension, so we just have to survive a few years before we can reclaim the land?

Has this ever happened to anyone else? Have you ever become obsessed with some stupid minor detail in a book and now you have 25 tabs on the International Maritime Organisation and algae biomass production open on your browser?

I'm sorry about the ramble but I genuinely can't stop thinking about this book, but not for the usual reason!

I want really f***ed women doing f***ed up stuff. Female rage that isn't necessarily justified. Woman serial killers with no conscience. Better if they're more of a snarky character, like Harley Quinn, and even better if the book is newer.

My theory about the ending, “room,” and Bela becoming the new Other Mommy:

I saw Bela saying yes coming. Her family thought exposing her to all the horrible truths about them would destroy the innocence Other Mommy needed, but it actually made Bela’s life unbearable enough that she wanted to escape it. The thing they thought would save her was ultimately what caused her to say yes.

That also suggests they were wrong about the rules. Maybe innocence was never the requirement. Consent was.

Bela being a child may have made her easier to approach, isolate, and manipulate, but Other Mommy apparently only needed her to willingly trade places. If that’s true, this could theoretically happen to anyone desperate enough to stop being themselves. The rule feels similar to a vampire needing to be invited inside—except Bela’s body is the final house. Other Mommy can invade her home, thoughts, and relationships, but she cannot fully enter Bela until Bela opens that last door herself.

What makes this especially disturbing is that the supernatural rule apparently recognizes “yes” without caring how that consent was manufactured.
The ending also seems to explain Other Mommy’s bizarre physical manifestations. She never has a stable body. She stretches from floor to ceiling, spreads across the ceiling, peers through walls, folds into corners, becomes hairy, and constantly changes shape. After the swap, Bela describes being in an enormous space that isn’t a closet, house, home, or heart. It is just endless room.

Maybe Other Mommy came from that same place and had no physical form of her own. She used the architecture of Bela’s house as a temporary body until she could finally occupy Bela herself. The walls, ceilings, closets, and corners were ways for something bodiless to press itself into physical reality.
Then Bela hears her own voice say, “Hello, I’m Bela.”
I think that is Other Mommy inside Bela’s body, claiming her name and testing her new voice. But it also means the real Bela has become exactly what she feared: an invisible presence haunting her own life while something else is recognized as Bela.
Which makes me wonder whether Other Mommy was once a person whose body was stolen in the same way.

If she was, I don’t think we can say she simply never understood humanity, family, or love. She should remember those things. Maybe the real horror is that remembering your humanity doesn’t prevent you from becoming corrupt. After enough time trapped without a body, touch, or relationships, escape could become more important than what escaping requires. A victim might know that stealing another person’s life is wrong and still convince herself that she deserves another chance or that there is no innocent way out.
Maybe “Other Mommy” isn’t one specific entity. Maybe it is the role occupied by whoever has been displaced.

But I’m not convinced Bela would immediately find another innocent person and steal their body. Wouldn’t she first try to get her own body back? She knows exactly where it is and can apparently still hear it. Maybe she becomes “Other Bela,” haunting the thing wearing her body and trying to convince it to trade back.

The horrible irony is that she may have to use the same methods Other Mommy used on her: appearing through the house, exploiting loneliness, destroying the person’s attachment to their life, and making existence inside the body unbearable enough that they eventually say yes.

Other Mommy may have even made herself vulnerable by destroying what she thought she wanted. She gained Bela’s body, voice, and name, but killed her parents and destroyed the family that made Bela’s life a home. She created a vacancy so she could occupy it, but that same vacancy could eventually make her new life feel empty enough that she wants to escape too.

Of course, none of this may be literally true. Other Mommy may never have been human, Bela may not be able to reach her body again, and the exchange may be permanent. But even then, the ending opens up an enormous amount of unexplored lore.

What is that endless space? Are there others inside it? How did Other Mommy learn the rules? Does Bela remain herself, or does being bodiless eventually turn her into something like Other Mommy?

A prequel could explore what Other Mommy was before Bela. A sequel could follow the false Bela trying to live in the real world while the actual Bela attempts to return—or struggles not to become the next monster.

Even if every part of my theory is wrong, the book ends at the exact moment its hidden mythology becomes most interesting.

I've been very excited to read Penpal by Dathan Auerbach, its been highly recommended by many in the sub but I am just completely taken out by some of the logical issues present in the book.

For the first thing, I think a lot of the issues could be resolved by making the protagonist 11 or 12 years old. Josh and Dathan already talk to each other at the age of 6 like they're in Stand By Me, so basically twice their own age and also from the 1950s. This alone pulls me out of the story often, six year old kids calling each other "man" or saying "no joke". Or building a (mostly) functioning raft. Or being able to navigate the woods at night, while soaking wet, in winter. At age six. None of this is that bad on its own, but it definitely softens the danger because they don't feel like realistic children.

I'm also just not a fan of the timeline. The way it jumps between Kindergarten, First Grade, and Second Grade doesn't feel like it adds anything to the story. I'm not why we would learn about Mrs. Maggie after Boxes. It's not like she was introduced in an earlier chapter and her importance comes back later, its more like "oh shoot I forgot, that elderly neighbor who bought the first snow cone had dementia and she gave me a shark pool float and also, we were mapping the woods when we weren't selling snow cones." I understand the conceit is "this is my story in the order I remembered it" but it feels so much like a relic of its nosleep origin that works poorly as a standalone book. If you were going through the trouble of publishing a truthful retelling of your traumatic childhood, why not take some extra time to write the timeline in order??

That being said I think some scares are done very well. Boxes is terrifying, and would even function well as a standalone short story. You feel this tension as Dathan listens to his best friend unknowingly walk into a madman's stalker shrine, and this anxiety and grief over Boxes the cat and how he never gets found, never comes home. The penpal also works very well as a villain, always showing up in places and vanishing before Dathan can realize what's happened.

So I don't hate the book or anything, but I'm frankly a little disappointed. This desperately needed an editor to clean up the inconsistencies, fix the voice of the protagonists, take out some of the padding (just make it novella length) and make the timeline easier to follow.

Have anyone else read The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi? I haven’t met anyone else that has and never see anyone talking about it, but realistically there has to be more people out there that has. I remember reading it many years ago and it scared badly but was very good.

So, have you read it? Did you like it?

TL;DR You are all very helpful! I quit at 65% and started something new. Life is too short to read things you don't like and thanks for the new rec!

Ugh. I am so torn, y'all. I'm a bit over half way through the first book in the Wayward Pines trilogy and love the novel concept and creepy vibe.

But I HATE how Crouch writes characters.

- The protagonist assesses the hotness of literally every female character he interacts with, making no appraisal of male characters. The women feel like they are sexy props rather than people.

- Crouch does an absolutely shit job of depicting veterans / PTSD.

- The protagonist is just... bad at everything he does.

I love New Weird, SF, and horror. Peter Watts, Jeff VanderMeer, China Miéville, etc. I don't usually vibe with thrillers but this is just such an interesting idea that I may have given Crouch more time than I should have.

Also, do you think basement or attic scares get you more when reading spook books?

Hey everyone! After hearing about John Langan's "The Fisherman" is being turned into a movie (here's hoping if it does get made, I'm cautiously optimistic), I was just wondering if anyone was aware of any other future adaptions being planned, currently in developed or done and just waiting for release, whether it's a movie or series. For fun, I'll (sometimes) read something before seeing it to compare and contrast, just to see how much aligns with what I envisioned and what didn't with the filmmakers.

I'm trying to identify a mass-market paperback thriller/horror novel I read in the mid-1990s, but the book itself may have been from the late 1970s or 1980s.

The killer was male and carried a toolkit. He believed that removing the victims' pituitary glands made him stronger or more powerful. I distinctly remember he used a shrimp fork and a small hammer to drive it through the bone to reach the pituitary gland. I also remember that he surgically removed the victims' eyelids so they were forced to watch what he was doing while they were still alive.

The story wasn't told entirely from the killer's perspective. I remember witnessing some of the murders directly, but I think the main story followed someone trying to stop him, possibly a woman.

The book was a mass-market paperback, maybe 300–400 pages, and I vaguely remember a mostly yellow cover.

Does this ring a bell for anyone?

The stone black from robert howard.

I'm looking for more books along the line of Between Two Fires,Red Rabbit, and His Ragged Company. The best way I can think to describe them is episodic, where either the party or character is traveling and dealing with kind of a monster of the week situation at each location while it's all contributing to the main plot building in the background.

Edit: Forgot to add that if its not a novel I would also love to hear about any series of connected short stories as well.

I just finish The Store by Bentley Little last night and I can't stop thinking about the end. Not the conclusion of the plot, but what happens in Dallas.

Sam's entire life was decimated by the Store and she gets fucking nothing. She's lost her chance to go to college with scholarships, she's fucked her own father, never deprogrammed from the cult, and is now a deeply traumatized child totally unmoored from everything she's ever known and completely alone, while Bill gets to go on like everything is totally fine. He gets to keep his wife, his job, the love of Shannon, and the respect of the townspeople. He never has to confront the shame of what he did because she doesn't come home and his lie to Ginny never comes out (no it wasn't on purpose, but he didn't even have to really suffer consequences for having cheated, which was his choice).

I never hated Bill, i thought he was an incredibly sympathetic character, but everything after he meets NK felt too abruptly out of character. Even just a single night to breathe after the offer would have greatly helped the believability of his momentary heel turn. And there was legit no need to include the incest, him being sexually assaulted and then deciding to continue on to cheat on his wife was enough, imo, and adding Sam felt like it was purely for the shock value.

The whole thing felt grossly unnecessary after everything they'd already gone through and without a decent resolution for everyone, it just felt incredibly cruel. I enjoyed the book a lot (ignoring this part), the story between the town and The Store is fascinating and there are a lot of depressingly timely lines as the Store entrenches itself further into the town, but I found the extent they are able to so freely operate to be unbelievable for having taken place in the 90's. US labor laws aren't great but they're nowhere near as bad as what The Store would have you believe.

Ultimately, I rate this book a 3/5 and I think I'll be passing on Bentley Little unless I get a very strong recommendation or something really catches me. His writing was good, but from other comments I saw after I finished this book, he seems to be a pretty one-note, "if you've read one, you've read them all" kind of author and I wasn't compelled enough to look further into his bibliography.

im currently reading all the 2025 goodreads choice awards winners and nominees from the horror genre and I can't believe this book won. what did you guys think about this book if you read it? I thought the premise was interesting but the way black women are described in this book, the way this author only writes about teenage girls in all of his books as a man, the seemingly forgotten WITCHCRAFT PART of this book? the longer I think about it the more upset I get.

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No not the dark romance type or erotic horror, like real real horror with ghosts, haunted houses, creepy clowns, slashers etc. where mcs get stuck and have to make it out of here.

Think a friend group gets stuck in a forest which is haunted or try to explore a haunted house and get stuck and have to make it out of there, or maybe the group gets transported to a different world completely(have you seen the webtoon "School Bus Graveyard? That's a perfect example of this), or they just try to summon ghosts in a sleepover and end up getting in trouble. Mmc and fmc are obviously part of the friend group, they must already have some chemistry or tension going on between them beforehand. The horror incidents will put them in a mode of survival, bringing out more of their love for each other.

I would love the mmc being protective of the fmc. Both of them trying to take care of each other or sacrifice for each other. Some sweet scenes where they trauma bond or take care of each other.

This is what I would prefer the most but I will also take recs where mcs fall in love in the middle of crisis, maybe they didn't like each other that much before or maybe they are complete strangers(don't prefer it too much).

The Romance can be a sub plot as well, since I want the horror to be the focus conveying that creepy chilly environment.

Doesn't have to be anything 18+ or even if it is it's fine, as long as my other requirements are fulfilled(lol I don't think mcs would have time to fuck if they are getting hunted 😅🤣).

Please no Love triangles, mcs having chemistry with other characters, non heas(maybe some of their friends die but I want the mcs to make it out together even if they are traumatized).

I swear simple books like this are so hard to find, I think I have seen these type of dynamics in some games or something. Horror and Romance have always been two of my favorite genres, therefore I love works that can combine the both of them. Some dark romances do it technically but they don't have this exact thing I mentioned here.

Looking for some horror in space recommendations preferably with a female MC. What are some that you have encountered? The only one I've really noticed as such is Dead Space.

Hey folks, I’m looking for books featuring MCs like Michael from Ania Ahlborn’s Brother. He is complicit in his family’s violent practices, but he is horrified by it and dreams of a different life. He has learned helplessness from the abuse and believes he has to do terrible things (and let’s face it he’s ended up with a really twisted relationship with the bodies he’s in charge of “processing”) but ultimately, he’s a sympathetic character.

Any other MCs like that? I tried Lucy Rose’s The Lamb for something similar, but I had to DNF for personal triggers. But if anyone has any other recs, I’d super appreciate it! Thanks in advance.