All the New Horror Books Coming in January 2024

January’s new horror books include deadly rock-climbing trips, mysterious voices, creepy puppets, sinister taxidermy, mossy books, cyberpunk body-swapping, a new home too good to be true, and much, much more.

These monthly lists are derived from my annual masterlist, but I’ve gotten a good amount of feedback saying the smaller lists are helpful reminders and easier to digest–they can all be found here. And as always, you can view the full 2024 list right here. Want an email every time I publish one of these lists? Subscribe here!

January 2024’s new horror books:

• The Curse of Eelgrass Bog, Mary Averling (Jan 2, Razorbill): Dark secrets and unnatural magic abound when a twelve-year-old girl ventures into a bog full of monsters to break a mysterious curse.
• Eye of a Little God, A. J. Steiger (Jan 2, Severn House): After losing his delivery job – the last thing binding him to an empty life – Eddie Luther, veteran and drifter, drives into the snowy woods with a bottle of sleeping pills. But instead of eternal silence, Eddie hears a whisper inside his damaged ear: Help me. He follows the call and finds a cryptic journal filled with loneliness and longing, a journal whose words seem written for him alone. Guided by the clues in its pages, he embarks on a journey into a shadowy world beneath the small town of Devil’s Fork, Nebraska – a world where girls become cats, televisions whisper prophecies, and only those cast out of society can see and use magic . . . Or maybe Eddie’s sanity is slipping. All he knows for sure is that he’s falling in love with someone he’s never seen, someone who may be more than human – and who will change everything he thinks he knows about the world and his place in it.
• Rabbit Hole, Kate Brody (Jan 2, Soho Crime): A twisty, sexy debut exploring the dark side of true crime fandom and the blurry lines of female friendship, perfect for fans of Gillian Flynn, My Favorite Murder, and Fleabag.
• Cold, Drew Hayden Taylor (Jan 9, McClelland & Stewart): A tragic plane crash that leaves two women stranded and fighting for their lives kicks off this sweeping and hilarious novel from award-winning writer Drew Hayden Taylor that blends thriller, murder mystery, and horror with humor and spectacle.
• The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years, Shubnum Khan (Jan 9, Viking): Rebecca meets Fatima Farheen Mirza in this sweeping, gorgeously atmospheric novel about a ruined mansion by the sea, the djinn that haunts it, and a curious girl who unearths the tragedy that happened there a hundred years prior. Sublime, heart-wrenching, and lyrically stunning, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years is a haunting, a love story, and a mystery, all twined beautifully into one young girl’s search for belonging.
• Star Shapes, Ivy Grimes (Jan 9, Spooky House Press): Kidnapped from downtown Birmingham, Alabama, and taken to the country, our protagonist is pretty irked. Rather than ask for a ransom, her captors make her feed animals and read dusty books. She is unnerved by the growing realization that something weirder is afoot, and it all ties back to a book of strange constellations known simply as Star Shapes. People look to the stars to read the future, but sometimes the stars conceal stories from the past.
• Stone Gods, Adam Golaski (Jan 9, NO Press): This new collection of strange stories marks Adam’s long-awaited return to horror, following the now cult-classic Worse Than Myself (Raw Dog Screaming, 2008). Stone Gods features 15 stories of lives and places set askew.
• 12 Hours, L. Marie Wood (Jan 11, Raw Dog Screaming): The cabbie only remembers taking a break, pulling over in an alley to catch both his breath and the sunrise. His windshield shatters, and two people dash away. He tries to scream, to move, but his neck won’t turn. He can only stare at the cab’s dirty ceiling. Finally, a deliveryman calls the cops. Surely, they’ll arrive soon, but we’re pinned in place right along with him as he tries to puzzle it all out. In this second installment of the CSAP novella series, award-winning author L. Marie Wood uses her descriptive powers to bring us fully into one incident in a person’s life, and hold us there, transfixed, until we see it all, crystal clear.
• Master of Rods and Strings, Jason Marc Harris (Jan 12, Crystal Lake): Jealous of the attention lavished upon the puppetry talents of his dear sister—and tormented by visions of her torture at the hands of the mysterious Uncle Pavan who recruited her for his arcane school—Elias is determined to learn the true nature of occult puppetry, no matter the hideous costs, in order to exact vengeance.
• Ambrosia, Hamelin Bird (Jan 16, Piper House): When Travis Barnes returns home following the unexpected death of his mother, leaving his career with the Seventh Naval Fleet, he hopes to begin a new chapter in life. Unbeknownst to him, a series of impossible coincidences soon draws the attention of the Bureau, a fringe government agency formed from the rubble of Projects Monarch and Stargate. But when Lola Agnew, the Bureau’s genetically-altered ringleader-along with her erudite headhunter, Drexl Samson-confront him with a clandestine force with powers beyond this world, Travis must face a forgotten secret from his past. His partner Tara Fitzgerald, meanwhile, has secrets of her own, and when the couple are pushed to their limits, they must join together to overcome the darkness… In the tradition of the classic speculative fiction of Richard Matheson, Ira Levin, and Ray Bradbury, Hamelin Bird’s Ambrosia is a genre-defying deep dive into the mysterious and uncanny.
• The Best Horror of the Year Volume 15, ed. Ellen Datlow (Jan 16, Nightshade): From Ellen Datlow—“the venerable queen of horror anthologies” per the New York Times—comes a new entry in the series that has brought you thrilling stories from Stephen King and Neil Gaiman, the best horror stories available.
• A Drop of Venom, Sajni Patel (Jan 16, Rick Riordan Presents): Circe goes YA in this unapologetically feminist retelling of the Medusa myth steeped in Indian mythology, a YA epic fantasy addition to the Rick Riordan Presents imprint.
• Greyhowler, Sarah Day (Jan 16, Underland Press): Rhia is a Courier, a transient messenger who freely travels the land without calling any town or port home. The job suits her, for in a land ruled by the Temple, it is difficult to find your own way, especially when you have a Talent. Rhia’s is water, and when she arrives in distant Cerretour to deliver a message, she finds a village wracked with suffering. The well is dry. It hasn’t rained. The only person who can save these villagers is missing. At night, a strange creature prowls the prairie. The villagers have a name for it: greyhowler.
• A Place for Vanishing, Ann Fraistat (Jan 16, Delacorte): A teen girl and her family return to her mother’s childhood home, only to discover that the house’s strange beauty may disguise a sinister past, in this contemporary gothic horror from the author of What We Harvest.
• This Wretched Valley, Jenny Kiefer (Jan 16, Quirk): This trip is going to be Dylan’s big break. Her geologist friend Clay has discovered an untouched cliff face in the Kentucky wilderness, and she is going to be the first person to climb it. Together with Clay, his research assistant Sylvia, and Dylan’s boyfriend Luke, Dylan is going to document her achievement on Instagram and finally cement her place as the next rising star in rock climbing. Seven months later, three bodies are discovered in the trees just off the highway. All are in various states of decay: one a stark, white skeleton; the second emptied of its organs; and the third a mutilated corpse with the tongue, eyes, ears, and fingers removed. But Dylan is still missing—and no trace of her, dead or alive, has been discovered. Were the climbers murdered? Did they succumb to cannibalism? Or are their impossible bodies the work of an even more sinister force? This dread-inducing debut builds to a bloodcurdling climax, and will leave you shocked by the final twist.
• Unbound, Christy Healy (Jan 16, Blackstone): For fans of Hannah Whitten and Rebecca Ross, Unbound is a gender-bent reimagining of the classic tale of a monstrous beast and the beauty determined to tame it, set against the lush backdrop of Irish mythology and folklore.
• Where You End, Abbott Kahler (Jan 16, Henry Holt): From bestselling nonfiction author Abbott Kahler comes a spellbinding fiction debut inspired by true events: an unusual form of amnesia upends the lives of identical twins, forcing them to face the indelible, dangerous shadow of the past.
• An Affinity for Formaldehyde, Chloe Spencer (Jan 19, Grindhouse Press): Lou, a queer woman, returns to her hometown to stop her grandmother from marrying Lou’s childhood best friend. She hasn’t visited in several years, and she and her best friend have yet to make peace with the death of his sister. When Lou discovers her grandmother’s obsession with taxidermy, she attempts to leave, but her grandmother has a sinister plan in store for Lou. She won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.
• Flesh Communion and Other Stories, Holly Rae Garcia (Jan 19, Easton Falls Publishing): In these stories, a cult’s demise reveals previously hidden atrocities; nightmares have someone questioning their reality; a woman clings to memories when her partner has dementia; a deadly virus renders all animals off limits for human consumption; an alien abduction brings pain to some and sadism to others; three wise men follow a star, hoping to end an apocalypse; a portrait photographer reaches her breaking point; a rougarou attacks two girls in a swamp; a werewolf defies the odds and finds love until the inevitable happens; an innocent tea party turns sinister; and more…
• Grasshands, Kyle Winkler (Jan 19, JournalStone): Everything wrong with the world is wrong with books. When overworked assistant Sylvia Hix finds a strange moss smothering the library books, there’s little to worry about. But when patrons start eating it, gaining direct knowledge of the books, then losing their minds—Sylvia has deep problems. Sylvia is haunted by the moss, because it’s somehow connected to a horrific creature from her childhood. A creature she once named Grasshands and has since forgotten. Stopping Grasshands from decaying the town’s mind, the library’s books, and the slow rot of time is the only job now available to her, whether she wants it or not. A novel of biblio-horror, body horror, and melancholic friendship, Grasshands is ready for check-out. Get your library card ready.
• One Must Go, Alex Reid (Jan 19, Wicked House): Every year a new group is chosen. Every year there must be a sacrifice. A laughing, drunken god picks three middle school children for his deadly ritual. Two may live as long as they pick one in their group to be given to the dead. Sam an angry child who feels abandoned, along with his best friend Benjamin who fears Sam more than anything else, meet Maggie who is no stranger to death. Sam sees an opportunity in the horror to get back at those who have wronged him, he grows cruel and violent. Someone must be picked. Whether it is through bargaining, treachery, or bloodshed. One must go.
• The Last Immortal, Natalie Gibson (Jan 23, BHC Press): Lady Ramillia Winmoore has suffered gaps in her memory her entire life. This darkness has proven to be a blessing until the day she awakens strapped to an examination table at the West Freeman Asylum for Lunatics. Imprisoned for the gruesome murder of her parents, she is forced to endure years of torture until salvation arrives in the form of a benefactor named Sir Julian Lawrence. Betrothed to her through an arranged marriage, Julian helps her gain freedom. In this chilling gaslight-era Gothic horror novel where paranormal powers are bred and collected, friends and foes are not always what they seem when immortality is at stake.
• Scissor Sisters, ed. April Yates & Rae Knowles (Jan 23, Brigids Gate Press): 21 tales of sapphic villains. Featuring the work of Hatteras Mange, Anastasia Dziekan, Ariel Marken Jack, Maerwynn Blackwood, Avra Margariti, Grace R. Reynolds, Evelyn Freeling, Hailey Piper, T.O. King, M.S. Dean, Chloe Spencer, Mae Murray, L. R. Stuart, Alex Luceli Jiménez, Cheyanne Brabo, Luc Diamant, Alyssa Lennander, Anya Leigh Josephs, Lindz McLeod, Caitlin Marceau, and Shelly Lavigne.
• Womb City, Tlotlo Tsamaase (Jan 23, Erewhon): This genre-bending Africanfuturist horror novel blends The Handmaid’s Tale with Get Out in an adrenaline-packed, cyberpunk body-hopping ghost story exploring motherhood, memory, and a woman’s right to her own body.
• Cryptopolis & Other Stories, Robert Guffey (Jan 24, Lethe Press): Last week, did you tell your best friend why the King of Cryptopolis has gone insane and why he ordered his guards to behead him? Do you know the secret of the black magician Aleister Crowley—how he wrote of the moonchild, an ethereal spirit to be placed in a barren womb? Have you ever heard of Arson Hoover and the Worldwide Church of Appliantology? If you answered no to any of these, you’re clearly misinformed about the newest collection of dark and fantastical stories by Robert Guffey. How would you even survive Casual Day at work? When the tattoos begin to pile up on your flesh like unlucky cars drawn to an accident on the freeway, don’t come crying to me—I am just the back cover of a book, after all—but look for the answers inside me, inside Guffey’s head, which I have chopped off and bound in paper.
• Hunted Highways (Dark Tide #12), Rowland Bercy Jr., Carver Pike, & Lewis Mangum (Jan 26, Crystal Lake): Embark on a journey into terror, where every mile is marked by suspense and horror. These three horror novellas transform travel into a treacherous adventure where the next stop could be your last.
• The World He Once Knew, Micah Castle (Jan 26, Fedowar Press): Jay has been uploaded into a new body to investigate why the transporter ship Candlemass went dark fourteen days ago. After the ship’s owner gives him the rundown of the assignment, he’s quickly ushered on board. In the halls of the derelict vessel, Jay discovers black sludge coating the inner hull, leading him to a container in the Cargo Bay. If only he could have stopped there. As Jay digs further, he’s thrown into a psychological maelstrom of the ship’s and, more importantly, his own history and what led him to be uploaded in the first place.
• The Visitor: A Horror Short, Rebecca Henely-Weiss (Jan 27): Like many who live in the woods, recent widow and new mother Mrs. Grob prepares a meal, waiting for a visitor that she hopes never comes. Then she hears a knock at the door…
• Bone Pendant Girls, Terry S. Friedman (Jan 30, CamCat): Andi Wyndham has been able to communicate with spirits since she was a kid. When a bone pendant carved into the likeness of a girl’s face calls to her at a gem show in Pennsylvania, she can’t resist buying it and a sister piece. When she discovers the girls are missing runaways and the pendants made of human bone, Andi is drawn into a mystery that will force her to confront her gifts, her guilt, and the ghosts haunting her.
• The Bone Chime Song and Other Stories, Joanne Anderton (Jan 30, Brain Jar Press): In The Bone Chime Song & Other Stories, Joanne Anderton explores the darkness and the beauty of humans caught on the fringes and pushed to the very edge of the abyss. Enter worlds where terrible secrets are hidden in a wind chime’s song, where crippled witches forge magic from scrap, and the beautiful dead dance for eternity. With deities built from circuits and wires, sacrificial drought-ridden towns, and artists who dabble in bone and decay, every story plots a course from the gothic to the fantastic and winds its way back again.
• The Book of Denial, Ricardo Chávez Castañeda & Alejandro Magallanes, trans. Lawrence Schimel (Jan 30, Enchanted Lion): From award-winning Mexican author Ricardo Chávez Castañeda and the visionary Mexican designer Alejandro Magallanes comes a horror story and ghost story that is both daringly and beautifully told in word and image. There are stories so terrible that we tremble to hear even a whisper of them. Even more terrible, some of them are true. This is one such story, a story of our deepest inhumanity—one that confronts the history of violence against children, and through its young narrator attempts to find a way out. A horror story and ghost story told as much through art as through text, The Book of Denial is an antidote to our collective silence. By uplifting storytelling as a means of understanding the past and shaping the future, it is also—improbably—a beacon of hope.
• The Doomsday Archives: The Wandering Hour, Zack Loran Clark & Nick Eliopulos (Jan 30, Zando): The first in a spine-tingling middle-grade adventure series that’s Goosebumps meets Stranger Things following three friends who discover that the eerie urban legends they’ve been obsessively collecting may not be just make-believe . . .
• The House of Last Resort, Christopher Golden (Jan 30, St. Martin’s Press): When American couple Tommy and Kate Puglisi buy a home in the nearly-abandoned Italian town of Becchina, it feels like a romantic adventure, an opportunity the young couple would be crazy not to seize. But from the moment they move in, they both feel a shadow has fallen on them. There are rooms in an annex at the back of the house that they didn’t know were there. The place makes strange noises at night, locked doors are suddenly open, and when they go to a family gathering, they’re certain people are whispering about them, and about their house, which one neighbor refers to as The House of Last Resort. Soon, they learn that the home was owned for generations by the Church, but the real secret, and the true dread, is unlocked when they finally learn what the priests were doing in this house for all those long years… and how many people died in the strange chapel inside. While down in the catacombs beneath Becchina… something stirs.
• Midnight on Beacon Street, Emily Ruth Verona (Jan 30, Harper Perennial): A suspenseful and entertaining debut thriller—and love letter to vintage horror movies—in which a teenager must overcome her own anxiety to protect the two children she’s babysitting when strangers come knocking at the door.
• What Hides in the Cupboards, Cassondra Windwalker (Jan 30, Unnerving Books): Following a traumatic accident, ceramic artist Hesper Dunn trades life in Chicago for the enchanted deserts of New Mexico. But not all is quaint, and it’s far from what it seems. There’s a mystery buried deep in the heart of her new home. Love, guilt, and grief demand that Hesper remain within the haunted pueblo. To free herself, she must free the trapped spirits…but the creatures lurking in the shadows are not what they appear. Hesper dares to wade through the murky fog of tragedy to uncover the truth. A truth that will be harder to handle than she ever dared imagine.

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