For the remaining months of 2023, horror fans may expect some big stars and major titles. These horror books, by authors like Jo Nesbo and Isabel Canas, will give you the chills and may even sink their teeth into you. Here are 10 hottest horror bookss coming out this year if you’re a horror enthusiast seeking to fill your TBR for the rest of the year.
The Salt Grows Heavy
Cassandra Khaw
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.
Release Date: May 2, 2023
Maeve Fly
CJ Leede
By day, Maeve Fly works at the happiest place in the world as every child’s favorite ice princess. By the neon night glow of the Sunset Strip, Maeve haunts the dive bars with a drink in one hand and a book in the other, imitating her misanthropic literary heroes.
But when Gideon Green – her best friend’s brother – moves to town, he awakens something dangerous within her, and the world she knows suddenly shifts beneath her feet. Untethered, Maeve ditches her discontented act and tries on a new persona. A bolder, bloodier one, inspired by the pages of American Psycho. Step aside Patrick Bateman.
Release Date: June 6, 2023
Everything the Darkness Eats
Eric LaRocca
After a recent string of disappearances in a small Connecticut town, a grieving widower with a grim secret is drawn into a dangerous ritual of dark magic by a powerful and mysterious older gentleman named Heart Crowley. Meanwhile, a member of local law enforcement tasked with uncovering the culprit responsible for the bizarre disappearances soon begins to learn of a current of unbridled hatred simmering beneath the guise of the town’s idyllic community—a hatred that will eventually burst and forever change the lives of those who once found peace in the quiet town of Henley’s Edge.
Release Date: June 6, 2023
Burn the Negative
Josh Winning
Arriving in L.A. to visit the set of a new streaming horror series, journalist Laura Warren witnesses a man jumping from a bridge, landing right behind her car. Here we go, she thinks. It’s started. Because the series she’s reporting on is a remake of a ’90s horror flick. A cursed ’90s horror flick, which she starred in as a child—and has been running from her whole life.
In The Guesthouse, Laura played the little girl with the terrifying gift to tell people how the Needle Man would kill them. When eight of the cast and crew died in ways that eerily mirrored the movie’s on-screen deaths, the film became a cult classic—and ruined her life.
Release Date: July 11, 2023
Silver Nitrate
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Montserrat has always been overlooked. She’s a talented sound editor, but she’s left out of the boys’ club running the film industry in ’90s Mexico City. And she’s all but invisible to her best friend, Tristán, a charming if faded soap opera star, though she’s been in love with him since childhood.
Then Tristán discovers his new neighbor is the cult horror director Abel Urueta, and the legendary auteur claims he can change their lives—even if his tale of a Nazi occultist imbuing magic into highly volatile silver nitrate stock sounds like sheer fantasy. The magic film was never finished, which is why, Urueta swears.
Release Date: July 18, 2023
Looking Glass Sound
Catriona Ward
In a cottage overlooking the windswept Maine coast, Wilder Harlow has begun the last book he will ever write. It is the story about the sun-drenched summer days of his youth in Whistler Bay, and the blood-stained path of the killer that stalked his small vacation town. About the terrible secret he and his companions, Nat and Harper, discovered entombed in the coves off the bay. And how the pact they swore that day echoed down the decades, forever shaping their lives.
But the more Wilder writes, the less he trusts himself and his memory. He starts to see things that can’t be real – notes hidden in his cupboards.
Release Date: August 8, 2023
The Handyman Method
Andrew F. Sullivan
A chilling domestic story of terror for fans of Black Mirror and The Amityville Horror. When a young family moves into an unfinished development community, cracks begin to emerge in both their new residence and their lives, as a mysterious online DIY instructor delivers dark subliminal suggestions about how to handle any problem around the house.
The trials of home improvement, destructive insecurities, and haunted house horror all collide in this thrilling story perfect for fans of Nick Cutter’s bestsellers The Troop and The Deep.
Release Date: August 8, 2023
Vampires of El Norte
Isabel Canas
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.
Something that once attacked Nena 9 years ago. Believing Nena dead, Néstor has been on the run from his grief ever since, moving from ranch to ranch working as a vaquero. But no amount of drink can dispel the night terrors of sharp teeth; no woman can erase his childhood sweetheart from his mind.
Release Date: August 29, 2023
The Night House
Jo Nesbo
In the wake of his parents’ tragic deaths in a house fire, fourteen-year-old Richard Elauved has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle in the remote, insular town of Ballantyne. Richard quickly earns a reputation as an outcast, and when a classmate named Tom goes missing, everyone suspects the new, angry boy is responsible for his disappearance. No one believes him when he says the telephone booth out by the edge of the woods sucked Tom into the receiver like something out of a horror movie. No one, that is, except Karen, a beguiling fellow outsider who encourages Richard to pursue clues the police refuse to investigate.
Release Date: October 3, 2023
Phantom
Helen Power
Regan “Roz” Osbourne is broke. Her ex-boyfriend won’t take no for an answer, and no one is taking her art work seriously. So when a mysterious stranger offers her a million dollars and safety from her unstable ex in exchange for her left hand, she can’t afford to refuse.
Immediately following the amputation, she’s racked with insufferable phantom limb pain. Desperate for relief, she enrolls in an experimental drug trial. But this drug has a peculiar side effect―she develops a psychic connection to her missing limb. She soon discovers that Chicago’s long-dormant Phantom Strangler is now wearing her hand and is using it . . . to kill.
Release Date: October 10, 2023