APLD’s Favorite Horror Novels for Adults

Read If You Dare APLD’s Favorite Horror Novels for Adults October 2023 CAMP DAMASCUS

CHILDREN OF CHICAGO

Chuck Tingle Welcome to Neverton, Montana: a God-fearing community with a heart of gold, and home to Camp Damascus, the self-proclaimed “most effective” gay conversion camp in the country. But the secret behind that success is anything but holy. And they'll scare you straight to hell.

Cynthia Pelayo When Detective Lauren Medina sees the calling card at a murder scene in Chicago's Humboldt Park neighborhood, she knows the Pied Piper has returned. When another teenager is brutally murdered at the same lagoon where her sister's body was found floating years before, she is certain that the Pied Piper is not just back, he's looking for payment he's owed from her. Lauren's torn between protecting the city she has sworn to keep safe, and keeping a promise she made long ago with her sister's murderer. She may have to ruin her life by exposing her secrets and lies to stop the Pied Piper before he collects.

VAMPIRES OF EL NORTE Isabel Cañas As the daughter of a rancher in 1840s Mexico, Nena knows a thing or two about monsters--her home has long been threatened by tensions with Anglo settlers from the north. But something more sinister lurks near the ranch at night, something that drains men of their blood and leaves them for dead.

HIDDEN PICTURES

THE SEPTEMBER HOUSE

Jason Rekulak Mallory loves babysitting for 5year-old Teddy, whose drawings suddenly become increasingly sinister. Are these glimpses of a long-unsolved murder relayed by a supernatural force? Can Mallory save Teddy before it’s too late?

Carissa Orlando When Margaret and her husband Hal bought the large Victorian house, they couldn’t believe they finally had a home of their own. Then they discovered the hauntings. Every September, the walls drip blood. The ghosts of former inhabitants appear, and all of them are terrified of something that lurks in the basement.

Most people would flee. Margaret is not most people.

Margaret is staying. It’s her house.

THE BOOK EATERS Sunyi Dean

Devon is from The Family, a secret line of people for whom books are food, and who retain all of a book's content after eating it. But real life doesn't always come with happy endings, as Devon learns when her son is born with a rare and darker kind of hunger—not for books, but for human minds.

THE BUTCHER AND THE WREN

THE SALT GROWS HEAVY

Alaina Urquhart

Cassandra Khaw

Something dark is lurking in the Louisiana bayou: a serial killer with a penchant for medical experimentation is hard at work completing his most harrowing crime yet, taunting the authorities who desperately try to catch up. But forensic pathologist Dr. Wren Muller is the best there is.

You may think you know how the fairy tale goes: a mermaid comes to shore and weds the prince. But what the fables forget is that mermaids have teeth. And now, her daughters have devoured the kingdom and burned it to ashes. On the run, the mermaid is joined by a mysterious plague doctor with a darkness of their own. Deep in the eerie, snow-crusted forest, the pair stumble upon a village of ageless children who thirst for blood, and the three “saints” who control them. The mermaid and her doctor must embrace the cruelest parts of their true nature if they hope to survive.

ORDINARY MONSTERS J.M. Miro

In Victorian London, two children with mysterious powers are hunted by a figure of darkness—a man made of smoke. What follows is a story of wonder and betrayal, from the gaslit streets of London, and the wooden theatres of Meiji-era Tokyo, to an eerie estate outside Edinburgh where other children with gifts—the Talents—have been gathered.

OUR SHARE OF NIGHT Mariana Enriquez A young father and son set out on a road trip, devastated by the death of the wife and mother they both loved.

United in grief, the pair travel to her ancestral home, where they must confront the terrifying legacy she has bequeathed: a family called the Order that commits unspeakable acts in search of immortality.

DEVIL HOUSE John Darnielle True crime writer Gage Chandler is offered the break of a lifetime: move into the house where a pair of briefly notorious murders occurred, apparently the work of disaffected teens during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. But soon the story leads him into a puzzle he never expected―back into his own work and what it means, back to the very core of what he does and who he is.

WHAT MOVES THE DEAD T. Kingfisher Alex Easton races to the ancestral home of the Ushers in the remote countryside of Ruritania. What they find there is a nightmare of fungal growths and possessed wildlife, and Alex must unravel the secret of the House of Usher before it consumes them all.

THE LAST HOUSE ON NEEDLESS STREET Catriona Ward In a boarded-up house on a deadend street at the edge of the wild Washington woods lives a family of three. A teenage girl who isn’t allowed outside, not after last time. A man who drinks alone in front of his TV, trying to ignore the gaps in his memory. And a house cat who loves napping and reading the Bible. An unspeakable secret binds them together, but when a new neighbor moves in next door, what is buried out among the birch trees may come back to haunt them all.

LONE WOMEN Victor Lavalle Adelaide Henry carries an enormous steamer trunk with her wherever she goes. It’s locked at all times. Because when the trunk opens, people around Adelaide start to disappear. But Adelaide is in trouble. Her secret sin killed her parents, forcing her to flee California in a hellfire rush and make her way to Montana as a homesteader. She will become one of the “lone women” taking advantage of the government’s offer of free land for those who can tame it—except that Adelaide isn’t alone. And the secret she’s tried so desperately to lock away might be the only thing that will help her survive the harsh territory.