The Best Horror Novels: The 2024 Bram Stoker Awards

When it comes to horror books, we find that the Bram Stoker Awards shortlists are the best way to keep up to date with new books in the genre. The awards recognise short story collections, novella- and novel-length fiction, screenplays, criticism and YA fiction. We’ve chosen to focus specifically on the best novel category, but you can find the full list of shortlists here.

Winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel:

The Reformatory by Tananarive Due

This eerie novel about a haunted boys’ prison in Jim Crow-era Florida was inspired by the troubled life and premature death of the author’s uncle, who died at the real-life Dozier School for Boys in 1937. “I was so struck by the sadness of this institution’s reign of terror that I knew I had to write about it—but not as nonfiction,” Due told Black Fiction Addiction. “I decided to fictionalize Robert Stephens and his experience to represent many nameless, faceless young people who suffered and lost their lives at the Dozier School. I made him 12 instead of 15 and changed the year to 1950, since I knew that era better from my mother’s stories. I also used ghosts to try to make the violence at the institution a bit more removed from my protagonist.” A creepy story of survival that is, quite literally, haunting—and has also won the Shirley Jackson Award and a LA Times Book Prize.

The five other books that made the shortlist:

How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix

When Louisa’s parents are killed in a car crash, she returns to her hometown of Charleston, South Carolina, to deal with their affairs. But when it comes to selling the beloved family home, it’s not just sibling rivalry that she has to worry about. A spooky story about complicated families in the American South from the author of The Final Girl Support Group, described by The New York Times as a “gripping, wildly entertaining exploration of childhood horrors.”

Don’t Fear the Reaper by Stephen Graham Jones

Horror superstar Stephen Graham Jones returns with Don’t Fear the Reaper, a terrifying (and very gory) homage to slasher flicks. In the second book in the Indian Lake Trilogy, Jade Daniels—freshly released following her wrongful imprisonment—returns home, just as the revenge-seeking serial killer Dark Mill South makes his own, illicit escape. Locus Online said it was “bloody and violent and utterly riveting”. We recommend reading the whole trilogy in order: start with My Heart is a Chainsaw, followed by Don’t Fear the Reaper, then finally The Angel of Indian Lake.

Lone Women by Victor LaValle

In this gothic novel, which fuses historical fiction with horror, we follow an African American woman living as a fugitive in the American West of 1915. Expect “a prevailing atmosphere of menace, a dramatic landscape, characters isolated from society, an imperilled heroine,” says Rumaan Ali in The New York Review of Books. Lone Women has been a national bestseller and was shortlisted for several other major awards.

Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle

Cult internet icon (and high-concept erotica author) Chuck Tingle’s heartfelt horror debut is set in a demonic LGBT+ conversion camp in the remote Montana wilderness—where they plan to scare the gay away. In a starred review, Library Journal called it “highly entertaining, cinematic, and filled with monsters, both human and supernatural, all of which will lure horror fans to its pages, but what holds it all together is the immense love at the heart of the novel.”

Black River Orchard by Chuck Wendig

In this unsettling, parable-like novel, a community’s obsession with a mysterious new fruit grown from only seven trees soon turns sour—and forces them to face up to their hometown’s dark history. It is, promises the Los Angeles Review of Books, “at once a commentary on contemporary culture and a timeless and wholly American horror novel that will appeal to longtime genre aficionados and newcomers alike.”

Browse all our year-end lists highlighting the best books of 2024 here