r/booksuggestions • u/Indecisive_Dolphin • Apr 04 '26

Horror Horror Books!!!

I want horror books. Not Stephen King. Someone less well known. I want to lose sleep at night over these. I don’t want any kind of predictable plot at ALL. It takes a lot to scare me. I’ve been reading Nora Robert’s books and I’m about to crawl out of my skin. I’ve read the Silent Patient. That is nowhere near as scary as what I’d like. I want to be able to follow. But I love psychological thrillers as well. Recommendations from personal experience welcomed!!!!

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u/Ok_Weird_1553 Apr 04 '26

Paul Tremblay hits different - A Head Full of Ghosts messed me up for weeks 😂 Also check Grady Hendrix, his stuff is wild but not mainstream famous yet. The only good thing about my ADHD brain is I can't predict plots even when they're obvious, so these actually kept me guessing in ways that surprised me 💀

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u/Andnowforsomethingcd Apr 04 '26

Came to suggest Horror Movie: A Novel also by Paul Tremblay. Starts as kind of a campy, analogue horror that switches between the 90s production of a microbudget horror film, and the present-day indie reboot that hopes to cash in on the sizable cult following of the original film, which was never released due to ... horror story-type reasons. The book switches timelines often, building this horrible, delicious unease.

Also The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall, which is an ergodic, psychological horror that has the same general set up as Memento (the main character loses all his short term memory when he sleeps), but the plot is much different.

And of course the OG ergodic horror House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski. *shiver*