Our Bestselling Books for Readers Who Love a Good Scare

For more than eight years, a serial killer has stalked the country, leaving behind pairs of victims, their bodies broken and twisted, in towns with biblical names. When two corpses matching the killer’s pattern turn up in rural Texas, a deputy sheriff launches a rogue cross-country manhunt, uncovering a chilling web of myth, vengeance, and buried secrets. Stephen Graham Jones delivers an eerie, psychologically charged crime novel that gives the serial-killer genre a dark, unsettling spin.

Fox Hollow Farm, the infamous Indiana property where Herb Baumeister allegedly murdered at least eleven men, has left behind a horrific legacy that extends beyond the crimes themselves.

Robert Graves and Richard Estep revisit the chilling true-crime case, drawing on original investigative details and an account from a man who survived Baumeister’s attempt on his life. 

But the farm’s dark history is only part of the story: reports of disembodied hands, mysterious voices, and other paranormal activity suggest something sinister may still linger on the estate.

Smuggler Dodd Raines is one job away from giving his young daughter a better life, until a delivery of dangerously radioactive moon rocks leaves him dead. Or almost dead. 

Reanimated as an undead, rabbit-eared monster, Raines sets out on a bloody path of vengeance that leads straight to his orphaned daughter. Stephen Graham Jones delivers a wild, genre-bending noir packed with border-crossing danger, supernatural horror, and a father’s desperate love.

Nearly a decade after a plague turned humanity into the undead, former biology teacher Jory Gray is stuck manufacturing genetically modified creatures that control zombies. 

When he loses his job, he’s sent to burn the infected, caught between a ruthless military and the rising Church of Z. As society crumbles and the living become increasingly monstrous, Gray must fight to hold on to his humanity in an apocalypse where the real horrors are the people still in power.

A hidden story, a mysterious pen pal, and a family secret that refuses to stay buried. Librarian Gerard Freeman becomes obsessed with a chilling tale written by his great-grandmother, convinced it holds the key to his mother’s dark past and the disappearance of his elusive pen pal, Alice. 

But when he returns to his ancestral home in England, the boundaries between fiction and reality begin to dissolve, drawing him into a labyrinth of Victorian Gothic intrigue, sinister secrets, and creeping dread.

A chilling collection of original horror and dark fantasy from some of the genre’s biggest names, including Stephen King, John Ajvide Lindqvist, Ramsey Campbell, and Elizabeth Hand. 

Blending established masters with rising talents, this eclectic anthology brings together unsettling tales from around the world, reviving the tradition of classic horror anthologies with a fresh lineup of nightmare-inducing horror fiction.

When Audrey Lucus finds an unexpectedly affordable apartment in Manhattan’s historic Breviary, it seems too good to be true. 

The building has a gruesome past, but Audrey is convinced she’s found the home she’s always wanted. Soon, disturbing visions, strange neighbors, and unsettling gaps in her memory begin to unravel her reality. 

As she uncovers the building’s dark secrets and their connection to her own past, Audrey must confront a sinister force determined to shape her into something else entirely.

When a man discovers an abandoned baby in the woods, he and his wife raise her in secret. 

Years later, their son Jerry brings the girl to Stockholm and enters her in a televised singing competition, setting off a chain of events that will bring two isolated young women together with terrifying consequences. 

A modern-day Carrie for the age of internet bullying and reality TV, John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Little Star channels Stephen King’s knack for turning adolescent alienation into deeply unsettling horror.

Route 66 may be the iconic symbol of American road-trip nostalgia, but the Mother Road has a darker, stranger side. 

From notorious criminal hideouts linked to Bonnie and Clyde and Al Capone to unsolved mysteries, paranormal phenomena, and bizarre roadside attractions, Michael Witzel uncovers the stories hiding behind the highway’s all-American image. 

Packed with modern and archival photography, this illustrated journey through Route 66’s weirdest history reveals a side of the legendary road few travelers ever see.

Local legends and ghost stories have a way of lingering long after they’re dismissed as superstition. 

Featuring twenty stories, this Bram Stoker Award–winning anthology brings haunting tales to life, from the fox spirits of Vietnam and vampires of Rhode Island to a ghostly amusement park in the Pacific Northwest and a specter haunting Russia’s past. 

Acclaimed horror and dark fantasy writers, including Ramsey Campbell, Caitlín R. Kiernan, and Laird Barron, explore the chilling folklore that follows us across cultures and generations.

In the struggling mill town of Bedford, Maine, everyone is having the same nightmares about Susan Marley, a young woman both pitied and feared by her neighbors. 

When Susan mysteriously dies during a weeklong rainstorm, those shared dreams begin turning into waking horrors. As the town’s buried guilt rises to the surface, the few people who once loved Susan must uncover the truth before the nightmares consume them all. 

Sarah Langan’s Bram Stoker Award–winning novel blends small-town decay, psychological dread, and supernatural horror.

In 1849, London dock worker Patrick O’Connor disappeared after being seen with Maria Manning and her husband, Frederick. When police discovered his remains buried beneath their kitchen floor, the couple fled, sparking an international manhunt that captivated Victorian England. 

Drawing on primary sources and original court documents, Angela Buckley, who holds a PhD in detective history, reconstructs the infamous Bermondsey Murder, exploring the suspects’ criminal pasts, the victim’s life, and the case’s lasting impact on Scotland Yard. 

The shocking crime even haunted Charles Dickens, inspiring characters in Bleak House.

On Good Friday 1980, a nun was found murdered in a hospital chapel in Toledo, Ohio, but the prime suspect, Father Gerald Robinson, was released and the investigation went cold. 

More than two decades later, new developments prompted investigators to exhume Sister Margaret Ann’s remains, uncovering evidence that would reignite the case. 

In this disturbing true-crime account, Fred Rosen examines a shocking murder, alleged satanic ritual abuse, and the questions surrounding a decades-long failure to bring a killer to justice.

In 1987, undercover officer George Raffield was investigating a high school drug ring in Midlothian, Texas, when his cover was blown. Soon, a small circle of teenagers decided he had to die. 

Lured to an isolated field, Raffield was executed by a teenage killer who stole just eighteen dollars from his wallet. 

Drawing on chilling details of the case, award-winning true-crime author Carlton Stowers explores the drug abuse, occult influences, and simmering rage behind a murder that shattered a seemingly quiet town’s innocence.

Harvard-educated biology professor Amy Bishop seemed to have a successful career and family, until being denied tenure preceded a deadly shooting at a University of Alabama–Huntsville faculty meeting in 2010. Three colleagues were killed, and the investigation soon uncovered a disturbing chapter in Bishop’s past: the fatal shooting of her teenage brother, Seth, decades earlier, which had been ruled an accident. 

Michele R. McPhee unravels the shocking case, examining the unanswered questions surrounding two tragedies and the secrets that came to light.

After twenty years of marriage, Matt and Marie head into the mountains for a romantic hiking getaway, hoping to rekindle their relationship. They explore scenic trails, cozy cabins, and breathtaking peaks, but only one of them makes it home alive. 

Now, with a marriage full of secrets and a husband whose grief may conceal something darker, the truth behind their trip comes into question. JoAnn Chaney’s twist-filled domestic thriller explores the fine line between love and hate, devotion and deception, and marriage and murder.