Read Harder Task #19: Read a Horror Novel by a BIPOC Author

Speaking of unforgettable reads, Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians is one that I’ll never be able to get out of my mind, and one I can’t stop recommending to people, which is why it’s #1 on a list that’s otherwise in no particular order. When four Blackfoot Indian men go hunting, they end up doing something that will haunt them forever. Quite literally. Now there’s a supernatural entity that’s hunting them, hellbent on revenge.

If you love YA horror, please do yourself a favor and read White Smoke. When teenager Marigold moves with her family from California to the Midwestern city of Cedarville, everyone thinks it’s a chance for them to start over. But in horror language, we know what moving to a new house for a chance to start over means. It means the house is haunted, right? As soon as Marigold and her family move in, things seem off. The neighborhood is practically deserted, and they keep hearing weird sounds (and smelling weird smells) throughout the house. Is it just Marigold’s mind playing tricks on her, or does the house really want them out?

Sorrowland is horror meets sci-fi meets Afrofuturism meets wilderness survival tale. Vern is seven months pregnant when she escapes from the strict religious compound where she was raised. Now she finds herself alone in the wilderness, caring for her twin children, unable to trust anything in the world around her. But the religious compound she fled from isn’t willing to let her go that easily. And she feels herself going through unsettling changes.

The Year of the Witching is a dark fantasy/horror novel set in the puritanic lands of Bethel where Immanuelle Moore’s very existence is blasphemy because she is proof of her mother’s tryst with an outsider of another race. But her mother was hiding even more secrets than Immanuelle could have imagined, and something is calling her out to the woods surrounding Bethel.

Empire of Wild is inspired by the traditional Métis story of the Rogarou, a legendary werewolf-like creature. Joan’s husband Victor has been missing for over a year, but Joan refused to give up hope and keeps searching for him. Then one day in a Walmart parking lot, there he is. At first she’s relieved to see him, but he insists he is not her husband and that he does not recognize her at all. He says he is the Reverend Wolff and that he only wants to bring people to Jesus. But of course, it turns out that’s not his only mission.

Looking for more haunted house-y type stories? Okay, you’ve got it. Here’s White is for Witching, a story about the Silver family, who moves to a mysterious house on the cliffs near Dover in the hopes of starting up a bed-and-breakfast. The matriarch of the family has gone missing, and the daughter, Miranda, feels the spirits within the strange house and the women who haunt the walls. And they are quickly pulling her in.

What would a horror novel list be without at least one vampire story? Although I guess calling Fledgling a vampire story is oversimplifying things… by a lot. Shori is 53 years old, but on the outside, she looks like a young girl. When we first meet her, she has no memory of who she is and she’s exhausted and hungry. But when she’s picked up by a man named Wright, together the two begin to uncover the secrets of her past and a world of vampire-like creatures that are unlike anything you’ve ever read about before.

Beloved is the most haunting ghost story you will ever read. This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is the story of Sethe, who was born into slavery but escaped to Ohio. Still, eighteen years later, living with her daughter Amy, Sethe still does not feel free. She’s haunted by the memories of her past and the horrifying things she had to endure to find freedom. Then a teenaged girl who calls herself Beloved shows up at her doorstep, and all of Sethe’s horrors of the past come to meet her in her present.