Chloe's Not Scared

I don’t know about you, but 2022 was weird af for me. I stepped away from the blog to have a carefree summer and I ended up breaking my arm so badly that I had to get surgery. Luckily, I had a lot of time to supplement the horrors of real life with some horror fiction. I read over 100 books this year, including a lot of new titles. I also spent many weekend afternoons dragging my friends to horror movies. Because of the sheer amount of terror I consumed this year, I decided to step it up and do a top ten list for each (you can find my movies post here)! Without further ado, here are my favorite horror books of 2022.

10. Nightmare Fuel: The Science of Horror Films

by Nina Nisseth

Goodreads link to Nightmare Fuel

Coming in hot at number 10 is one of my favorite nonfiction titles of the year, Nightmare Fuel. This book is an accessible yet still thoroughly researched text exploring why certain things scare us in horror movies, from the uncanny valley to fight or flight. It’s clear the author loves horror movies as much as we do.

9. The Book of the Most Precious Substance

by Sara Gran

Goodreads link to The Book of the Most Precious Substance

The Book of the Most Precious Substance is less of a horror title and more of a sexy thriller with supernatural elements, but I’m counting it anyways. Lily is married to a man with early onset dementia, so she starts selling their books to make money as a rare book dealer. When one of her clients asks for an occult sex manual, her and her hot book dealer friend set out to find it..

8. Jackal

by Erin E. Adams

Goodreads link to Jackal

Liz returns to her Rust Belt town to attend her best friends’ wedding. When the brides’ daughter Caroline goes missing, Liz begins to unearth a deadly pattern of mysterious disappearances in the woods, and all of the victims are Black girls. Named as one of Chicago Public Library’s Best of the Best titles, Jackal is an ultimate stay-out-of-the-woods book.

7. Old Country

by Matt Query and Harrison Query

Goodreads link to Old Country

Harry, a marine veteran, and his wife Sasha flee city life to buy a ranch in Teton Valley. Quickly, they realize that the land is haunted, requiring them to perform rituals in order to appease the spirit. The rituals themselves are truly imaginative, inventive, and really really scary. Apparently Old Country was based on a Reddit “sensation,” but I don’t remember ever reading about it. However, I was reading this book when I was visiting friends in Portland and brought up the plot at every dinner. It’s a great conversation starter! 

6. Other Terrors: An Inclusive Anthology

Edited by Rena Mason, Vince A. Liaguno

Goodreads link to Other Terrors

Other Terrors: An Inclusive Anthology takes stories from horror writers who are not the stereotypical cis straight white men, and lifts them up in this great tome. Put together by the Horror Writer’s Association, writers from underrepresented backgrounds, like Stephen Graham Jones, S.A. Cosby, and Tananarive Due, contribute to this collection. Usually in anthologies, I’m prepared to not like most of the stories, but I enjoyed myself in some way with every single one! My favorites were Jennifer McMahon’s “Idiot Girls” and Hailey Piper’s “The Turning.”

5. Woman, Eating

by Claire Kohda

Goodreads link to Woman, Eating

This literary horror novel absolutely blew me away. Lydia, a young mixed-race vampire, moves out of her mother’s house to an artist’s studio for an internship in London. As she tries to navigate feeding, creating, and living on her own, Lydia comes to realize much about her mom, her upbringing, and even herself. Every time I picked this book up to read, I felt more immersed than any other book I read this year. Lydia is a sympathetic sweet protagonist and you’re going to be rooting for her until the end.

4. The Devil Takes You Home

by Gabino Iglesias

Goodreads link to The Devil Takes You Home

The name of this blog is Chloe’s Not Scared. But you know what scared me? The Devils Takes You Home. This was, by far, the scariest book I’ve ever all year. Maybe the scariest book I’ve ever read. Mario, a young man who recently lost his daughter to cancer, is drowning in medical bills. Desperate for money, he takes a job for the cartel, quickly realizing that he is in over his head… perhaps, supernaturally? Iglesias writes multifaceted characters, from Mario’s friend Brian who is addicted to meth and loves his pregnant girlfriend, to Juanca, a middleman working for the cartel who needs to check in on his mother midway through the heist. Plus, the ending truly shocked me. Highly recommend for fans of urban fiction and crime horror, like From Dusk til Dawn.

3. Man Made Monsters

by Andrea L. Rogers

Goodreads link to Man Made Monsters

It’s unbelievable that this is Rogers’ debut. Man Made Monsters is a fantastic collection of short stories told from the different perspectives of generations of Cherokee families, from the distant past to the near future. Not quite magical realism, not quite horror or fantasy, Rogers toes the lines between playing into familiar genre tropes and inventing something completely new. I loved the title story “Man Made Monsters” and the story “Ghost Cat,” but all of the stories incorporate some sort of supernatural or mythical element. Note: this book is classified as YA. I am not a YA reader and I still enjoyed it enough to rank it highly on this list.

2. Devil House

by John Darnielle

Goodreads link to Devil House

Gage Chandler is writing a book about a crime that took place in his new house- Devil House- years before. Going back and forth between eras with little distinction, we follow the events of the crimes in small town California as Gage researches for his new bestseller. The plot definitely reminded me of fictional true-crime book Chasing the Boogeyman by Richard Chizmar (on my top books of 2021), but Darnielle makes it entirely his own. I read this book nearly a year ago and the Devil House, an adult video store / residential mansion, still stuck with me. I can picture every piece of graffiti on those walls so vividly. I’m not the biggest Mountain Goats fan, but Darnielle sure knows how to write.

1. The Liminal Zone

by Junji Ito

Goodreads link to The Liminal Zone

Y’all know that I love my man Junji Ito, and I must admit that this collection is his best collection since Shiver. During the pandemic, Ito began creating digital content for online publications, which offered freedom to publish the stories that he wanted to write without requirements. The Liminal Zone contains four of these new stories: “Weeping Woman Way,” “Madonna,” “The Spirit of Aokigahara,” and “Slumber.” Ghosts and hallucinations pop up in The Liminal Zone, but other horrors like grief and mental health are also prevalent. This spectacular set of stories follows a distraught law student, a Catholic schoolgirl, doomed hikers and more.

Honorable mentions: The Fervor, The Violence, Sundial

What were your favorite horror books of 2022? Let me know in the comments!