With Horror Week at Capes and Tights rolling along we finally get to one of our favorite parts of this week, as some of our favorite horror authors give their recommendations. In what has become a tradition during Horror Week, we discussed with a few horror authors about their favorite horror books of recent times. This year we talked with Keith Rosson, Philip Fracassi, Clay McLeod Chapman, and Eric LaRocca.
Keith Rosson is the author of the novels The Devil by Name, Fever House, Smoke City, Road Seven, and The Mercy of the Tide as well as the Shirley Jackson Award–winning story collection Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons. His short fiction has appeared in Southwest Review, Nightmare, Cream City Review, PANK, Redivider, December, and more. Rosson’s latest novel, Coffin Moon, hit bookstores everywhere on September 9, 2025 from Random House.
Philip Fracassi is the author of the novels Don’t Let Them Get You Down, A Child Alone with Strangers, Gothic, Boys in the Valley and The Third Rule of Time Travel. As well as novellas including Sacculina, Shiloh, Commodore and D7. His latest novel The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre. hit bookstores everywhere on September 30, 2025 from Tor Nightfire. As a screenwriter, his feature films have been distributed by Disney Entertainment and Lifetime Television, with several projects in various stages of development.
Clay McLeod Chapman is the author of What Kind of Mother, Ghost Eaters, Whisper Down the Lane, The Remaking, Stay On The Line, Kill Your Darling, and more! His latest novel, Wake Up and Open Your Eyes, hit stores on January 7, 2025. He is the creator of the comic limited series Seance in the Asylum, Self Storage, and Lazaretto. Chapman is also the writer for the Marvel series Scream: Curse of Carnage, Absolute Carnage: Separation Anxiety, Iron Fist: Phantom Limb, Typhoid Fever, as well as for Edge of Spider-Verse and Venomverse, The Avengers, Amazing Spider-Man, Ultimate Spider-Man, American Vampire, Scream: King In Black, and ORIGINS among others.
Eric LaRocca is a two-time Bram Stoker Award finalist and Splatterpunk Award winner. Named by Esquire as one of the “Writers Shaping Horror’s Next Golden Age” and praised by Locus as “one of strongest and most unique voices in contemporary horror fiction,” LaRocca’s notable works include Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, Everything the Darkness Eats, The Trees Grew Because I Bled There: Collected Stories, and You’ve Lost a Lot of Blood. Their novel, At Dark, I Become Loathsome, hit shelves in January 2025 and already been optioned for film by The Walking Dead star Norman Reedus. LaRocca’s latest novel, We’re Always Tender with Our Dead his stores on September 9, 2025 from Titan.
Let’s check out this list by these acclaimed horror authors…
KEITH ROSSON RECOMMENDS…
Cathedral of the Drowned
by Nathan Ballingrud
There are two halves of Charlie Duchamp’s brain. One is in a jar stranded on Jupiter’s jungle moon, Io, who just wants to go home to the woman he loves. The other half is still locked in his body, hanging from a wall in Barrowfield Home on Earth’s own moon, host to the eggs of the Moon Spider and filled with a murderous rage.
On Io, deep in the flooded remains of a crashed Cathedral ship, lives a giant centipede called the Bishop, who has taken control of the drowned astronaut-clergy inside. Both Charlies converge here, stalking each other in the haunted ruins, while more Moon Spiders prepare to be born.
Keith says… A sequel – part two of a trilogy – that reads like a pulpy, goopy, horrifying spin on ’50s monster magazines and gangster flicks, with some sci-fi madness thrown in.
Girl in the Creek
by Wendy Wagner
Buried secrets only spread. Erin’s brother Bryan has been missing for five years.
It was as if he simply walked into the forests of the Pacific Northwest and vanished. Determined to uncover the truth, Erin heads to the foothills of Mt. Hood where Bryan was last seen alive. He isn’t the first hiker to go missing in this area, and their cases go unsolved.
When she discovers the corpse of a local woman in a creek, Erin unknowingly puts herself in the crosshairs of very powerful forces―from this world and beyond―hell-bent on keeping their secrets buried.
Keith says… Unflinchingly weird, twisting eco-horror with a beating heart and a deep love for the forests of the PNW.
When the Wolf Comes Home
by Nat Cassidy
One night, Jess, a struggling actress, finds a five-year-old runaway hiding in the bushes outside her apartment. After a violent, bloody encounter with the boy’s father, she and the boy find themselves running for their lives.
As they attempt to evade the boy’s increasingly desperate father, Jess slowly comes to a horrifying understanding of the butchery that follows them―the boy can turn his every fear into reality.
And when the wolf finally comes home, no one will be spared.
Keith says… If anyone truly gets the malevolent glee of those ’80s horror paperbacks so many of us devoured, it’s Nat. You think you know where this book is going, but you don’t.
Scribe
by Alyson Hagy
A brutal civil war has ravaged the country, and contagious fevers have decimated the population. Abandoned farmhouses litter the isolated mountain valleys and shady hollows. The economy has been reduced to barter and trade.
In this craggy, unwelcoming world, the central character of Scribe ekes out a lonely living on the family farmstead where she was raised and where her sister met an untimely end. She lets a migrant group known as the Uninvited set up temporary camps on her land, and maintains an uneasy peace with her cagey neighbors and the local enforcer. She has learned how to make paper and ink, and she has become known for her letter-writing skills, which she exchanges for tobacco, firewood, and other scarce resources. An unusual request for a letter from a man with hidden motivations unleashes the ghosts of her troubled past and sets off a series of increasingly calamitous events that culminate in a harrowing journey to a crossroads.
Drawing on traditional folktales and the history and culture of Appalachia, Alyson Hagy has crafted a gripping, swiftly plotted novel that touches on pressing issues of our time―migration, pandemic disease, the rise of authoritarianism―and makes a compelling case for the power of stories to both show us the world and transform it.
Keith says… Rural post-apocalyptic fiction written by a poet. Absolutely gorgeous writing, even as it details a bleak and ruinous world.
PHILIP FRACASSI RECOMMENDS…
Daytide
by Chris Panatier
Death comes to those who live.
The Longing is here: a ruthless psychological pandemic that only ever ends one way. Most find relief in a bullet or a blade. Kaya Sinh chose fire.
With Kaya gone, her friend Adam has only the support group they’d attended to keep him going. He’s at his lowest when a priest named Hayle Carnoth appears at group one night, claiming to have discovered a cure for the Longing. Thinking it a crude effort by the priest to seek members for his dwindling congregation, Adam drives him off.
But he keeps coming back.
With the Longing closing in, Adam agrees to let Father Carnoth share what he’s discovered. They visit a nearby cathedral, where something has appeared inside the steeple.
When the Wolf Comes Home
by Nat Cassidy
One night, Jess, a struggling actress, finds a five-year-old runaway hiding in the bushes outside her apartment. After a violent, bloody encounter with the boy’s father, she and the boy find themselves running for their lives.
As they attempt to evade the boy’s increasingly desperate father, Jess slowly comes to a horrifying understanding of the butchery that follows them―the boy can turn his every fear into reality.
And when the wolf finally comes home, no one will be spared.
The Reformatory
by Tananarive Due
Gracetown, Florida. June 1950.
Twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens Jr. is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory, for kicking the son of the largest landowner in town in defense of his older sister, Gloria. So begins Robbie’s journey further into the terrors of the Jim Crow South and the very real horror of the school they call The Reformatory.
Robbie has a talent for seeing ghosts, or haints. But what was once a comfort to him after the loss of his mother has become a window to the truth of what happens at the reformatory. Boys forced to work to remediate their so-called crimes have gone missing, but the haints Robbie sees hint at worse things. Through his friends Redbone and Blue, Robbie is learning not just the rules, but how to survive. Meanwhile, Gloria is rallying every family member and connection in Florida to find a way to get Robbie out before it’s too late.
Lone Women
by Victor LaValle
Adelaide Henry carries an enormous steamer trunk with her wherever she goes. It’s locked at all times. Because when the trunk opens, people around Adelaide start to disappear.
The year is 1915, and Adelaide is in trouble. Her secret sin killed her parents, forcing her to flee California in a hellfire rush and make her way to Montana as a homesteader. Dragging the trunk with her at every stop, she will become one of the “lone women” taking advantage of the government’s offer of free land for those who can tame it—except that Adelaide isn’t alone. And the secret she’s tried so desperately to lock away might be the only thing that will help her survive the harsh territory.
Crafted by a modern master of magical suspense, Lone Women blends shimmering prose, an unforgettable cast of adventurers who find horror and sisterhood in a brutal landscape, and a portrait of early-twentieth-century America like you’ve never seen. And at its heart is the gripping story of a woman desperate to bury her past—or redeem it.
CLAY McLEOD CHAPMAN RECOMMENDS…
You Weren’t Meant to be Human
by Andrew Joseph White
Festering masses of worms and flies have taken root in dark corners across Appalachia. In exchange for unwavering loyalty and fresh corpses, these hives offer a few struggling humans salvation. A fresh start. It’s an offer that none refuse.
Crane is grateful. Among his hive’s followers, Crane has found a chance to transition, to never speak again, to live a life that won’t destroy him. He even met Levi: a handsome ex-Marine and brutal killer who treats him like a real man, mostly. But when Levi gets Crane pregnant—and the hive demands the child’s birth, no matter the cost—Crane’s desperation to make it stop will drive the community that saved him into a devastating spiral that can only end in blood.
Clay says… This book is hardcore. Not for the faint of heart… or stomach.
Eat the Ones You Love
by Sarah Maria Griffin
After losing her job and her fiancé and moving back from the city to live with her parents, Shell Pine needs some help. And according to the sign in the window, the florist shop in the mall does too. Shell gets the gig, and the flowers she works with there are just the thing she needs to cheer up. Or maybe it’s Neve, the beautiful shop manager, who is making her days so rosy?
But you have to get your hands dirty if you want your garden to grow―and Neve’s secrets are as dark and dangerous as they come. In the back room of the flower shop, a young sentient orchid actually runs the show, and he is hungry . . . and he has a plan for them all.
When the choices are to either bury yourself in the warmth of someone else’s fertile soil, or face the cold and disappointing world outside―which would you choose? And what if putting down roots came at a cost far higher than just your freedom?
Clay says… The reboot of Little Shop of Horrors I never knew I needed, but absolutely love.
Angel Down
by Daniel Kraus
Private Cyril Bagger has managed to survive the unspeakable horrors of the Great War through his wits and deception, swindling fellow soldiers at every opportunity. But his survival instincts are put to the ultimate test when he and four other grunts are given a deadly mission: venture into the perilous No Man’s Land to euthanize a wounded comrade.
What they find amid the ruined battlefield, however, is not a man in need of mercy but a fallen angel, seemingly struck down by artillery fire. This celestial being may hold the key to ending the brutal conflict, but only if the soldiers can suppress their individual desires and work together. As jealousy, greed, and paranoia take hold, the group is torn apart by their inner demons, threatening to turn their angelic encounter into a descent into hell.
Angel Down plunges you into the heart of World War I and weaves a polyphonic tale of survival, supernatural wonder, and moral conflict.
Clay says… I think this book may be a masterpiece?
Old Soul
by Susan Barker
In Osaka, two strangers, Jake and Mariko, miss a flight, and over dinner, discover they’ve both brutally lost loved ones whose paths crossed with the same beguiling woman no one has seen since.
Following traces this mysterious person left behind, Jake travels from country to country gathering chilling testimonies from others who encountered her across the decades—a trail of shattered souls that eventually leads him to Theo, a dying sculptor in rural New Mexico, who knows the woman better than anyone—and might just hold the key to who, or what, she is.
Part horror, part western, part thriller, Old Soul is a fearlessly bold and genre-defying tale about predation, morality and free will, and one man’s quest to bring a centuries-long chain of human devastation to an end.
Clay says… I’m going to recommend this one relentlessly. This might just be my favorite book I’ve read this year.
ERIC LaROCCA RECOMMENDS…
Oddbody
by Rose Keating
In her debut collection, Rose Keating takes you on a bold journey through the intricacies of sex, shame, and womanhood. With ten enchanting short stories, she crafts an emotional masterpiece that challenges us to reflect on the movement and needs of our bodies. Strange yet utterly mesmerizing, Oddbody is a provocative exploration that feels both surprising and sincerely authentic.
In “Oddbody,” a woman finds herself navigating a codependent relationship with a ghost, while “Squirm” portrays a daughter tending to her father as he devours himself from the inside out. “Pineapple” introduces us to a woman who opts to have feather wings surgically attached to her back. In “Eggshells,” a waitress gives birth to an egg during her breakfast shift. Each narrative in this collection is immersive, bizarre, and deeply empathetic, shining a light on women who dare to defy societal norms and invite you to question the conventions and milestones that determine success.
Eric says… A visceral, profoundly unpleasant short story collection with an emphasis on womanhood and the disintegration of self.
Where I End
by Sophie White
Aoileann is cursed. She has no friends, never gone to school. She has never left this windswept craggy isle off the coast of Ireland.
Her mother is cursed: a silent wreck Aoileann calls the “bed-thing.” Alongside her grandmother, Aoileann’s days are an endless monotony of feeding, changing, and caring for the bed-thing.
Their island seems cursed, whispering secrets only Aoileann hears. Then Rachel, a vivacious artist from the mainland, arrives with her colicky newborn. Rachel arouses yearnings Aoileann cannot fully comprehend. Soon, the unfolding of her mother’s secret tragedy and Aoileann’s pursuit of her own dark desires are both destined to unleash a maelstrom upon all three of their lives.
Eric says… A stomach churning and remarkably ambitious meditation on family, trauma, and obsession.
A Game in Yellow
by Hailey Piper
A kink-fixated couple, Carmen and Blanca, have been in a rut. That is until Blanca discovers the enigmatic Smoke in an under-street drug den, who holds pages to a strange play, The King in Yellow. Read too much, and you’ll fall into madness. But read just a little and pull back, and it gives you the adrenaline rush of survivor’s euphoria, leading Carmen to fall into a game of lust at a nightmare’s edge.
As the line blurs between the world Carmen knows and the one that she visits after reading from the play, she begins to desire more time in this other world no matter what horrors she brings back with her.
Eric says… A nightmarish and deeply unsettling exploration of fetish, obsession, and mythology.
Futility
by Nuzo Onoh
Betrayed by the men in their lives, two women seethe with rage and bitterness. When a trickster spirit offers them the gift of revenge, they cannot resist.
Chia runs one of the best restaurants in Abuja, Nigeria, and is renowned among the male clientele for her captivating beauty and delicious hot pepper soup. But her hot pepper soup has a secret ingredient, and her beauty is not what it seems.
Claire is a 50 year-old British woman living in Abuja with her young Nigerian boyfriend and his beautiful cousin, Shadé. Consumed by jealousy and resentment, Claire’s carefully organised life spirals into chaos after a night out at Chia’s infamous restaurant.
Eric says… Unpredictable and merrily demented. This novel both shocked and enthralled me with Nuzo’s singular literary voice.
Be sure to check out what previous horror authors recommended in 2023 featuring Daniel Kraus, Adam Cesare & Stephen Graham Jones and in 2024 featuring CJ Leede, Josh Winning, Liz Kerin, and Brian McAuley.
