Supernatural Horror

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The Exorcist

By William Peter Blatty

William Peter Blatty's 1971 novel follows a movie actress living in a rented house in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. She watches her young daughter change from a bright child into someone terrifyingly unrecognizable. Doctors and psychiatrists run out of explanations, and the family eventually turns to the Catholic Church. The Church sends a Jesuit priest who is also a psychiatrist and is struggling with his own faith. Blatty draws on a reported 1949 exorcism case to ask what happens when medicine, skepticism and belief all fail to account for suffering. The book became a huge bestseller and one of the best-known books made into movies, yet it works as a serious, disturbing story about doubt, evil and love as well as a horror landmark.

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Carrie

By Stephen King

Carrie is Stephen King's first published novel, a short, fast-moving horror story about Carrie White, a sixteen-year-old in Chamberlain, Maine. Bullied at school and dominated at home by a mother whose faith has curdled into cruelty, Carrie discovers she can move objects with her mind. A moment of apparent kindness and a humiliating prank on prom night turn that ability into catastrophe. King tells the story through a mosaic of narration, news reports, book excerpts and survivors' recollections, so the reader knows the outcome is disastrous long before it arrives. The result is as much a study of cruelty, shame and adolescence as a supernatural thriller, and it remains one of the most influential debut novels in modern horror.

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Salem's Lot

By Stephen King

'Salem's Lot is Stephen King's second published novel, a vampire story set in the fictional Maine town of Jerusalem's Lot. Writer Ben Mears returns to the hometown he left as a boy, hoping to finish a book about the decaying Marsten House that frightened him in childhood. He finds a place of gossip, quiet resentments and ordinary routines, then slowly realizes that something is feeding on it. King sets Bram Stoker's Dracula inside a believable American community, and the horror grows from how a town fails to notice its own destruction. It has also become one of the Stephen King books made into movies and television miniseries. It remains a foundational title for modern horror and for King's Maine fiction.

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The Stand

By Stephen King

After a lethal, laboratory-created influenza escapes military containment, the United States collapses with terrifying speed. The scattered survivors must first endure bereavement, isolation, and the hazards of an abandoned country; then shared dreams begin drawing them toward rival communities. In Boulder, Mother Abagail inspires an uncertain experiment in cooperation. In Las Vegas, Randall Flagg builds an authoritarian order based on fear and force. Following characters such as Stu Redman, Frannie Goldsmith, Larry Underwood, Nick Andros, and Harold Lauder, Stephen King combines plague narrative, road novel, social reconstruction, and supernatural conflict. The result is an expansive examination of what remains when institutions disappear—and how ordinary choices can become moral commitments.

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The Shining

By Stephen King

Jack Torrance takes a winter caretaking job at the isolated Overlook Hotel, hoping the quiet will help him rebuild his career and repair his damaged family. His wife, Wendy, wants to believe in that recovery, while their young son, Danny, senses what the adults cannot: the hotel retains the psychic traces of its violent past. Danny’s extraordinary gift—the “shining”—makes him especially valuable to the forces gathering around the family. As snow seals the hotel off from the outside world, the Overlook exploits Jack’s alcoholism, resentment, and fear of failure. King combines a haunted-building story with an intimate examination of addiction, domestic abuse, inherited trauma, and a child’s divided love for a dangerous parent.

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Ghostroots

Stories

By ’Pemi Aguda

Ghostroots is ’Pemi Aguda’s debut collection: twelve stories set in a Lagos where the supernatural presses against ordinary domestic and working life. Among recent short story collections, it stands out for treating haunting as inheritance. A woman may see a dead relative’s cruelty surface in her daughter, a new mother’s body may seem to answer to old family wounds, a whole street may lose its youngest sons, and an architect may meet a house with a will of its own. Aguda moves between outright horror and quieter realism with an uncanny edge, changing voice and form from story to story. The book was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction, and it keeps asking how far a person can separate herself from the family, tradition and history that made her.

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Something Wicked This Way Comes

By Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury's 1962 dark fantasy follows two thirteen-year-old neighbors, Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, in the small Illinois town of Green Town. In late October a traveling show, Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show, arrives out of season and begins offering townspeople what they secretly crave, at a terrible price. As the boys uncover what the carnival really feeds on, Will's father, a quiet, aging library custodian, must decide how to stand against it. Among coming of age books, it stands out for treating childhood's edge as a place of real moral danger, and for its lyrical, autumn-soaked prose. It is a short, atmospheric story about fear, regret, friendship and the ways desire can be turned into a weapon.

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Dracula

By Bram Stoker , Maurice Hindle , Christopher Frayling

Dracula is Bram Stoker's 1897 Gothic horror novel, and one of the classic novels to read for anyone curious about where the modern vampire story began. Told through diaries, letters, telegrams and newspaper clippings, it follows the solicitor Jonathan Harker's disturbing stay in a Transylvanian castle and the Count's later arrival in England. There a small circle of friends, a physician and a Dutch professor of unusual learning try to understand and stop him. Beneath the chase, the book stages late-Victorian anxieties about invasion, sexuality, disease, science and belief. This Penguin Classics edition adds a preface by Christopher Frayling and an introduction and notes by Maurice Hindle, which help modern readers place the novel in its time.