Midnight in the Marble Orchard: 8 of the Best Horror Books Set in Cemeteries

No list of creepy cemetery-set fiction would be complete without this seminal 1983 novel.

When Louis Creed loses his son Gage in a freak accident, he resurrects the boy with the help of an ancient burial ground with the power to restore life to the dead. Unfortunately, what returns isn’t quite Gage, and the Creed family learns the hard way that, in the words of their elderly neighbor, “Sometimes dead is better.”

King himself has said that he considers this to be the scariest of his novels—a ringing endorsement if ever there was one.

Highgate Cemetery in London is renowned as one of the most beautiful in the world, with its crumbling Victorian-era headstones covered with clutching tendrils of green ivy, winding pathways, shadow-shrouded catacombs, and famous residents ranging from Karl Marx to Malcolm McLaren. 

So it’s a bit of a morbid dream come true when sheltered American twins Julia and Valentina inherit their aunt Elspeth’s Highgate-adjacent flat in London. There’s just one catch: The flat is haunted by Elspeth’s temperamental ghost—who wants to do something abominable.

For anyone who’s ever fantasized about spending a cozy night or two in a cemetery, Neil Gaiman (author of American Gods and The Sandman series) has you covered with this YA novel about a young boy called Nobody (“Bod” for short) who is adopted by sympathetic ghosts and raised in a graveyard after his family is murdered.

According to Gaiman himself, think “The Jungle Book…set in a graveyard.”

If you’re in the mood for something that skews a little less toward horror while retaining the eerie cemetery setting, this 1960 fantasy novel from the author of cult favorite The Last Unicorn should fit the bill. In it, am unhoused man named Jonathan lives amongst the spirits and a talking, sandwich-supplying raven in a fictional cemetery called Yorkchester.

And that title? It refers to a poetic description of a grave.

In this Old West-flavored take on Sleeping Beauty,  a woman named Carol Evers has a medical condition that causes her to periodically lapse into—and emerge from—deathlike comas. This condition proves extra hazardous for Carol, since she also has a conniving husband plotting to bury her alive so he can abscond with her considerable fortune.

Will Carol escape in time, or has the grave finally claimed her for good?

 This 1986 novel from popular Japanese author Koike weaves a tale of a couple who moves into a brand new apartment building bordering a cemetery with their young daughter. As the terrors mount, their neighbors flee one by one, until the three of them are left all alone on the cursed property.

Well…not all alone; there’s also whatever is lurking in the basement.

If you like your cemetery horror served with a side of Rear Window-esque romantic obsession and a healthy dollop of Oedipal tension, this one’s for you.

Kurt Morgan still lives with his mother at her house in upstate New York, where he’s helping her write her memoir—that is, when he’s not gazing at the graveyard across the street through his telescope, watching as a mysterious redheaded woman visits the same grave day after day.

Who is she? Whose grave is she visiting? And what will happen when Kurt, his mother, and the enigmatic stranger inevitably collide?

What could be more fun than a little innocent playtime in the graveyard?

When teenager Bella and her friends meet up at a cemetery in the woods to play a creepy game that’s been the stuff of urban legends in their small town for decades, they get more than they bargained for when a strange new friend persuades them to venture into an underground crypt.

It may be up to Bella’s mother—who nearly lost her own life playing the game as a girl—to save them from the cemetery’s sinister secrets.