There's nothing like an audiobook for creating pure terror. Something about the intimacy of horror in your earbuds always leaves us squirming. We're thrilled to share the scares with the best horror audiobooks available on Apple Books.
Apple Books is the brand-new, improved iteration of iBooks. With a seemingly unending supply of chilling books in both audio and e-formats, we've found ourselves overcome with possibilities. Tune in to the terror with these horror audiobooks.
NOS4A2
Hill, son of Stephen King, twists vampiric legend to create something new. Charles Talent Manx loves to use his gorgeous Rolls-Royce (bearing a NOS4A2 license plate) to give kids around town a lift. But once they get in, they're taken to a land that Manx claims will keep them safe. Naturally, "Christmasland" is not a land of joy. Vic, who managed to escape Manx in her youth, encounters him once again as an adult, and this time he's after her family.
The Elementals
One of the greatest haunted house horror books, The Elementals is the perfect tale to dive into when you're home alone at night. With its big scares, evocative language, and Southern Gothic style, McDowell's eerie tale is frightening even before you take into account R.C. Bray's masterful narration.
Geek Love
Don't be put off by the title–Dunn's book is far scarier than you'd expect. The story focuses on a couple who purposefully expose their children, still in the womb, to mutation-causing toxins to create the freak show their carnival needs to get by. Geek Love is dark, horrifying, and heartbreaking.
Related: The Best Free and Discount Horror Books to Download Tonight from Apple Books
The Girl Next Door
Ketchum's utterly brutal story was based on a real crime: the torture and murder of Sylvia Likens. This tale is not for the weak of stomach: The abuse, torture, and murder detailed within are gruesome and disturbing. Ketchum also narrates his audiobook of the horrors that humans inflict on one another.
The Good House
Due's crack at the haunted house trope results in a suspenseful ride through the past and its attendant ghosts. Narrator Robin Miles perfectly matches the growing tension as protagonist Angela Toussaint discovers the truth about the deaths of her son and grandmother–and the curse laid on their town.
Harvest Home
This New England/folk/religious horror is one of the most terrifying books we've ever read. And we're not the only ones who love it: Stephen King raved about it in a NYT column, saying that "in forty years... there will still be a routine rebinding once a year of the library copies of Harvest Home".
Related: 7 Enduring Cult Horror Books
Thin Air
If you loved the combination of supernatural horror and the perils of the outdoors in The Terror, Thin Air is for you. Stephen Pearce joins a group of five men attempting to scale Kangchenjunga, one of the world's highest mountains, which previously took the lives of five members of the 1907 Lyell Expedition. The higher the group gets, the eerier their surroundings become...
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Travel back into classic horror with Shirley Jackson's iconic tale of the Blackwood family. Given new life and new meaning by narrator Bernadette Dunn, this creepy story never fails to unnerve.
Song of Kali
Unlike his many other books, Dan Simmons's Song of Kali is not a 600+ page tome. It is, however, a slim, effective horror novel. Set in the streets of Calcutta, Song of Kali opens with mysterious news of a purportedly dead poet whose work has resurfaced. An American writer, Robert Luczak, is sent to Calcutta to verify the writing. Instead, he finds a horrifying cult, whose existence is somehow linked to the poet's resurgence.
Related: The Scariest Books You’ve Ever Read