HORROR & THRILLER AUTHORS WHO'LL ALWAYS HAVE A SPOT ON MY FALL READING LIST (WITH RECS!)
- Brittanee Black
- 4 days ago
- 4 min read
There’s a chill in the air and its got nothing to do with weather. September creeps in with shorter days and longer shadows, and the feminine urge to clutch a book by candlelight. And suddenly we’re all craving the delicious dread of being spooked.
Horror in the fall is basically a seasonal ritual. And while the genre’s old guard still looms large, some of the most inventive, unsettling, and downright fun horror and thriller writing today is coming from authors who are reshaping what it means to be haunted.
These writers don’t simply deliver jump scares; they dig into generational trauma, colonial legacies, cultural mythologies, and the kind of social anxieties that feel sharper once the leaves start dying.
Whether you prefer witches, ghosts, vampires, or the quiet dread of a house that ain't quite right, here are the authors to line your shelves with this season.
The grande dame of Black horror, Tananarive Due blends good ol' supernatural terror with history and family drama. The Good House, for example, is her take on the haunted-house novel, equal parts domestic suspense and ancestral curse. While The Between explores madness and mortality through a family under siege by forces both human and supernatural. Her short fiction collection, Ghost Summer, shows her mastery of the eerie and intimate, with tales that feel like folklore whispered down through generations. Due writes hauntings that feel lived in, as though you’ve inherited them alongside your grandmother’s recipes.
Starter Read: The Good House—the definitive haunted house novel.
Victor LaValle’s horror is steeped in the uncanny, often beginning with the everyday before spiraling into myth and nightmare. The Changeling reimagines fairytale horror through the lens of parenthood in New York City, while The Devil in Silver turns a psychiatric ward into a battleground with a monstrous inhabitant. Even when he strays into cosmic territory, like with The Ballad of Black Tom—a sharp, unsettling Lovecraftian retelling—he grounds his terror in race, class, and the anxieties of the city. LaValle’s monsters may be otherworldly, but the chill they leave is entirely familiar.
Starter Read: The Changeling—a modern fairytale with teeth.
Stephen Graham Jones is one of horror’s most prolific voices, and his books are unapologetically bloody, brainy, and deeply personal. The Only Good Indians is a modern classic, merging Indigenous identity with slasher revenge, while his Indian Lake Trilogy (My Heart Is a Chainsaw, Don’t Fear the Reaper, The Angel of Indian Lake) is a love letter to horror movies and final girls. He also brings his macabre sensibility to short fiction and experimental works like Night of the Mannequins, which turns a high-school prank into a nightmare. Jones proves that horror isn’t just about survival—it’s about who gets to be the hero when the credits roll.
Starter Read: The Only Good Indians—his breakout, bloody and brilliant.
With Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia gave us one of the defining horror novels of the decade, where colonialism and parasitic fungi infect every page. But she refuses to be boxed into one mode. In Certain Dark Things, she conjures a neon-lit Mexico City stalked by vampire cartels, while Velvet Was the Night dives into noir with sinister undertones. Even her fantasy and romance work carries a Gothic sensibility, lush and a little dangerous. She’s the rare writer who can make you shiver whether she’s writing about haunted houses, bloodsuckers, or the quiet corruption of power.
Starter Read: Mexican Gothic—decadent, creepy, and impossible to put down.
Mona Awad specializes in horror’s most intimate terrors: the kind you can’t quite name because they live inside you. Bunny skewers academia with a sugar-coated nightmare of cultish friendship and feminine performance, while Rouge turns skincare obsession into a surreal gothic fable. Even her earlier work, like All’s Well, finds horror in the absurdity of theater. Awad’s gift is exposing the grotesque lurking beneath the glossy surface—perfect for a season that celebrates masks and masquerades.
Starter Read: Bunny—the cult campus horror you didn’t know you needed.
If autumn has a literary spokesperson, it might be Alexis Henderson. Her debut novel, The Year of the Witching, drags us into a Puritanical nightmare, where witches aren’t folklore but resistance embodied. While her follow-up, House of Hunger, trades witch trials for blood-sucking aristocrats in a lush, twisted gothic romance. Henderson writes women who push back against systems designed to consume them—sometimes literally—and her worlds are always drenched in both dread and desire.
Starter Read: The Year of the Witching—witchy vengeance at its finest.
Rivers Solomon’s work defies genre boundaries but carries horror in its bones. An Unkindness of Ghosts takes the structure of a slave narrative and sets it on a spaceship, while Sorrowland is part gothic thriller, part body horror, and wholly uncompromising. Their protagonists—queer, Black, haunted by history—are forced to transform, often in ways that are both terrifying and liberating. Solomon’s novels leave you shaken not just by the monsters but by the mirror they hold up.
Starter Read: Sorrowland—body horror as political allegory.
Nalo Hopkinson is a pioneer of Afro-Caribbean speculative fiction, pulling from folklore and mythology to craft stories that feel at once ancient and futuristic. Brown Girl in the Ring layers a dystopian Toronto with Caribbean spirituality, while Midnight Robber imagines a parallel universe shaped by oral storytelling traditions. Her short story collections, like Skin Folk, reveal her range—from playful to terrifying, often in the same breath. Hopkinson’s horror doesn’t lurk in the shadows of Europe’s castles; it dances in firelight, speaking in rhythms and cadences that linger like a song.
Starter Read: Brown Girl in the Ring—folkloric horror with bite.
Together, these authors prove that horror isn’t just about fear—it’s about possibility.
So as September settles in and the nights stretch longer, there’s no better ritual than sinking into a story that knows how to haunt. These writers offer more than frights—they offer companionship against the gathering chill. Stack their books by your bedside, strike a match, and let the season of shadows keep you company.