The Best Horror Novels: The 2025 Bram Stoker Awards

The Horror Writers Association use the Bram Stoker Awards shortlists to highlight the best new publications in lots of different categories—including short stories, anthologies, screenwriting and criticism—but here at Five Books we specifically like to feature the books shortlisted for ‘superior achievement in a novel.’ The five finalists in 2025 are:

House of Bone and Rain by Gabino Iglesias

Gabino Iglesias—who scooped the 2022 prize for best novel with his reluctant hitman tale The Devil Takes You Home—returns with this supernatural revenge fantasy set in Puerto Rico during 2017’s devastating Hurricane Maria. “The book captures, in stunningly visceral detail, not only the havoc of a hurricane that left thousands dead, but also the everyday life of a vulnerable community before and after Maria’s arrival, troubled by a crumbling infrastructure and by decades of governmental neglect,” explained Christopher Bollen in a New York Times review. This social context provides the backdrop to the extreme violence meted out by the book’s protagonists, amid haunting magical realism. “If there is a novel that reads more like living through a hurricane, I’m not sure I have the survival skills to read it.”

I Was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones

This fictional confession set in smalltown Texas, 1989, presents as a stream-of-consciousness thriller through the eyes of a teen serial killer. Tolly Driver is a good kid—or at least he was. Now, with the help of his best friend Amber, a film buff with enough knowledge to guide him through the gore, he might just have a chance of getting away with it. It is, the author told Publishers Weekly, full of“slashers and hair metal, oil and cotton, trucks and tractors, dirt and sun—it’s where and when I grew up. And, yeah, there’s blood and screaming in this one, regret and longing, but more important, there’s a friendship that’s deeper than it has any right to be—that’s stronger than blades and death and time.”

The Haunting of Velkwood by Gwendolyn Kiste

Gwendolyn Kiste—a three time winner at the Bram Stoker Awards—has written a proper ghost story set in suburban America full of strange happenings and psychological suspense. It has a great concept: three young girls escape a mysterious event that otherwise traps their neighbourhood behind a ghostly veil. Why? Now an adult, one of them is tempted back to the scene of the happening to get to the bottom of it once and for all. More of a supernatural mystery than a true horror—but if you prefer creepy, atmospheric, character-driven stories as opposed t0 bloody gore-fests, then this is the book for you.

Incidents Around the House by Josh Malerman

This chilling domestic horror, told from the perspective of an eight-year-old girl who finds herself in conversation with a malevolent ‘Other Mommy’ who wants to gain access to her mind—or her family will pay. It comes with a rave review from Neil McRobert in Esquire which called it deeply discomfiting, imaginatively ripe, yet ruthlessly efficient” and asserts: “Simply put—and I do not say this lightly—Incidents Around the House is the most purely effective horror novel I have ever read.”

Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay

This play on the ‘cursed movie’ trope by the author of The Cabin at the End of the World and A Head Full of Ghosts sees the only surviving cast member from a 1990s arthouse slasher movie sign on to guide a remake of the film, which became a cult classic. But the project soon turns out to be more complicated than imagined, and the actor less reliable. Intricately plotted, featuring both a dual timeline and a screenplay-within-a-novel, this is a clever, fun read full of twists that, like I Was a Teenage Slasher, will appeal to the horror film buff with an intimate knowledge of the genre.