*Keep up with our ongoing end of the year coverage here*
This was a great year for horror in all forms, but if you like your horror on the page, it was an especially exhilarating 2025. Many of the best horror writers in the game produced amazing books this year, some of them outright masterpieces, while indie and debut authors delivered fantastic writing that pushes the genre’s boundaries with every page.
There were many, many great horror books this year, but for me, these rose to the top. In alphabetical order by author, here are the best new horror books I read in 2025.
Bat-Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng by Kylie Lee Baker
Bat-Eater is an absolute stunner. Part meditation on the anti-Asian racism of the COVID pandemic response, part serial killer drama, part ghost story, Kylie Lee Baker’s latest is funny, furious, and full of moments of raucous horror. There’s no other book like it on the shelves right now, and it cuts to the core of the unique horrors of 2020 in New York City.
When the Wolf Comes Home by Nat Cassidy
A struggling actor’s unexpected encounter with a boy on the run sets off one of the most unpredictable werewolf novels I’ve ever read, from the author of Mary: An Awakening of Terror and Nestlings. This book moves like a freight train, and just when you think you understand how the monster works, Cassidy swerves on you, delivering an emotional gut punch and a fascinating reveal all at once.
Wake Up and Open Your Eyes by Clay McLeod Chapman
A fast-moving, supernatural, incredibly dark force moves through American media, poisoning the minds of anyone in its path, while a few unharmed family members try to fight through the chaos. No, it’s not a nonfiction book about America in 2025, but Chapman could not have possibly known when he wrote this book just how hard it would hit when it landed in January. A true American horror story that’ll drop your jaw.
Black Flame by Gretchen Felker-Martin
A film archivist gets her hands on a holy grail of lost films, a phantasmagoric wonder long thought destroyed by the Nazi regime. Soon, her life spirals as the film’s secrets, sights, and apparent curses begin unspooling in her world, driving her to madness. Gretchen Felker-Martin’s latest is terrifying on a visceral level, yes, but it’s also terrifying on an existential one, as she confronts not just the idea of cursed art, but censorship as a cog in the machine of fascism.
The End of the World as We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand edited by Christopher Golden and Brian Keene
Some of the best minds in horror came together this year to create this phenomenal doorstopper of a book, unveiling new stories from across the timeline and universe of The Stand. It’s a massive, and massively ambitious tome, and against all odds, there is not a single weak link among the three dozen writers who contributed to this vast tapestry. The year’s best anthology in a walk.
Mother-Eating: A Documentary by Jess Hagemann
Sometimes a book’s concept strikes you right between the eyes and forces you to investigate further, and that’s exactly what happened with Jess Hagemann’s latest. The story of Marie Antoinette, if she’d grown up as a key figure in a religious sex cult in modern-day Austin, this book’s opening ante is one of the most disturbing things I read all year, and it only ups the stakes from there. This is a stunning book from a rising star.
Play Nice by Rachel Harrison
One of horror’s most reliably entertaining voices returns with this riff on The Amityville Horror, the story of a New York-based influencer who finally has to confront the supernatural story and publicity machine of her family’s past. Rachel Harrison’s great gift lies in sketching out distinct voices for each of her books, and then tapping into a universal sense of empathy while also delivering an absolute page-turner. Play Nice is another showcase of that gift, and a perfect jumping-on point if you haven’t dug into Harrison’s body of work yet.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones
If you asked me to pick a single book to put in the hands of every reader in America this year, it would be The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, and I wouldn’t even have to think about it. Part historical vampire tale, part reckoning with a tragedy that befell the Blackfeet people, all masterpiece, Stephen Graham Jones‘ novel will move, disgust, and thrill you, sometimes all at once.
We Are Always Tender with Our Dead by Eric LaRocca
Eric LaRocca has built a reputation among extreme horror fans as one of those writers who’ll never hold anything back, and that’s still true with his most ambitious book yet. The first in the still-in-progress Black Sparrow trilogy, We Are Always Tender with Our Dead takes us to a small New England town run by secretive elders, where corpses are left as permanent monuments, and the dead move the living in unexpected, terrifying ways.
Puppet’s Banquet by Valkyrie Loughcrewe
If you’re looking for an indie author to watch, Valkyrie Loughcrewe has the goods. They released two excellent books this year, including this descent into body horror madness as a woman discovers her partner’s been subjected to absolutely horrific experiments. Loughcrewe’s knack for jaw-dropping imagery is apparent on every page, but what really makes their work special is a sense of poetry in their prose, the ability to strip and reassemble language like a weapon.
Good Boy by Neil McRobert
The debut novella from the creator of the Talking Scared podcast, Good Boy, tells the story of a man and his loyal canine companion as they navigate encounters with a monster in the north of England. McRobert’s sense of place as he writes about his homeland is unparalleled, and Good Boy emerges as both a creepy folktale riff and one of the year’s most emotionally satisfying horror stories.
A Game in Yellow by Hailey Piper
Perhaps the gutsiest conceptual leap from a major horror writer this year, Hailey Piper’s latest novel is a riff on Robert W. Chambers’ revered collection The King in Yellow, a foundational weird fiction book that gets an unexpected expansion through A Game in Yellow. The book follows a lesbian couple in a BDSM relationship whose limits are tested when they read pages from a mysterious play that’s said to drive you mad, and even beyond the ties to cosmic horror history, it’s a phenomenal showcase in character study from one of the best horror writers working right now.
The Unkillable Frank Lightning by Josh Rountree
This book gets you in the door by asking the question “What if Frankenstein’s monster was in a Wild West show?” and then keeps you reading through lean, evocative prose, great characters, and a truly moving journey of love, regret, and redemption. I read this book in one sitting, not because I planned to but because I just couldn’t stop, and if you love horror mashed up with Westerns, you’ll probably end up doing the same.
Coffin Moon by Keith Rosson
The author of the Fever House duology returns with a ’70s road horror novel that reads like Salem’s Lot meets Near Dark and The Hitcher, with a whole lot of Elmore Leonard thrown in. Rosson’s writing blends the hardboiled and the horrifying in dizzying, engrossing ways, and his books just keep getting better.
The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling
A knight, a magician, and a ratcatcher, three women united by their existence in the same siege-starved castle, must question everything they thought they knew when a group of majestic Saints stroll through the castle gates, offering food in exchange for worship. A beautifully orchestrated, sapphic, horror-fantasy nightmare, The Starving Saints is one of those books I simply did not want to leave.
The post The Best Horror Books of 2025! appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.