This is the book I cannot stop recommending or talking about. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Cora’s sister was pushed in front of a train. Cora continues to clean up gruesome murders in Chinatown while Delilah’s assailant’s last words, “Bat Eater,” ring in her ears. The mutilated bats at every scene only heighten Cora’s suspicions that the attack on Delilah wasn’t random. Cora struggles with compulsions and her grief only grows as she begins to notice signs of Delilah everywhere. She turns to her remaining family and her coworkers for help to free Delilah from becoming a hungry ghost forever. Somewhere between horror and murder mystery, Bat Eater is a ghost story for 2025. —Courtney Rodgers

On the third day of reading Jones’ latest horror novel, I had a nightmare, but it might not be why you think. The monsters here are supernatural and all-consuming, but the true horror is the very real story that’s told of the Marias Massacre, where around 200 Blackfeet were murdered in the dead of winter. The story is told through a journal found in 2012, which was written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor. The pastor records his time with a Blackfeet man named Good Stab, a man with peculiar eating habits and seemingly superhuman abilities… and revenge on his mind. —Erica Ezeifedi

In 1990s Massachusetts, Mexican grad student Minerva is researching an obscure horror writer who attended the same university decades prior, and the unexplained disappearance of that writer’s roommate. The more she learns about both, the more parallels she sees with the unsettling stories her great-grandmother Alba told her about her life in 1900s Mexico, stories of witchcraft and an insidious evil that might now be lurking in the halls of this New England college. SMG stays spinning the genre roulette and going, “Yeah, I can do that.” And y’all, she did that, in deliciously creepy form. —Vanessa Diaz

The Unworthy is the highly anticipated new novel from the author of Tender is the Flesh, and it did not disappoint. It’s a mix of genres: eco-horror, dystopian fiction, cult horror, literary fiction… In other words, this one is going to please a lot of readers across many genres. It follows an unnamed woman who writes the story of her life in secret while hidden away in a convent among a violent religious order called the Sacred Sisterhood. But as terrifying as life inside the convent might be, the chaos of the outside world is even worse. Then a stranger joins the lowest ranks of the Sisterhood, deemed the “unworthy,” alongside our narrator, and the two women team up to uncover the secrets of the religion to which they have sworn their lives. I read this book in one sitting, and I did cry my eyes out.

This sapphic horror story asks the question all of us vampire horror lovers have always wondered: what if Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s class vampire story Carmilla was even more unapologetically queer? Lenore is in a loveless marriage with steel magnate Henry. Lenore married Henry for his money, and Henry married Lenore for her social status. Henry’s ambitions to climb the social ladder lead the couple to Nethershaw Manor, where Henry hopes to host a hunt with the most esteemed members of high society. But on their carriage ride through the countryside, Henry and Lenore come upon something unexpected: an ailing young woman. Unsure of where she came from and what to do with her, Henry and Lenore take Carmilla into their home. Immediately, everything about Carmilla seems off. She can barely walk during the day but wanders the halls at night. People in the nearby village start getting sick, and Carmilla’s presence awakens strange desires in Lenore.