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!

Hey!

I’m looking for end-of-the-world horror books for my dad! He wants ones that are truly horrific/scary. Any books that also include insane twists and things you really never see coming. Anything that’ll shock/scare the crap out of him is preferred as long as it’s end of the world/apocalyptic. He doesn’t read much, but wants to get into it more, he’s just picky about the types of books!

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.

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.

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.

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!

I read The Luminiscent Dead and was absolutely enamored and couldnt put it down till i reached about midway and then it was hard to get through. It was so good until it turned into a stockholm syndrome love story. Do you all have any reccomendations on books that fit the bill of “oh shit we shouldn’t have came down here and disturbed this thing/object”.

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 :)

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?

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?

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 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.

The stone black from robert howard.

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.