8 Genre-Defying Horror Books

Horror + romance, horror + fantasy, horror + social commentary — we’ve heard of a lot of these before. But what about horror + humor? Or horror + Ikea? The campy side of horror is too often undervalued, but it’s what Hendrix utilizes in this mystery novel that takes place on the floor of a haunted Ikea. This book (which, by the way, is formatted to look like an Ikea catalog) is fun, suspenseful, and full of satisfying satire of both Ikea and the retail world at large, delivering humor right beside horror.

How can Juan save his son from the extremely rich scions of the cult he serves? Haunted by his rapidly failing heart and his grief for his wife, Juan has to keep the cult from realizing that Gaspar has magical powers that could put him at their mercy. The story of wealthy, powerful families is braided into Argentina’s history and an era of disappearances, surveillance, oppression, and silence. Enríquez is the queen of the newly blooming Latin American social horror genre, and she’s at her best here.

Young Mieczyslaw comes to this health resort in what is now western Poland to recover from the lung issues he’s struggled with for far too long. His days are full of getting to know the strange residents of the guesthouse and being exposed to their philosophical and political debates. But as all these questions of gender, humanity, and money circulate, Mieczyslaw begins to wonder if something is profoundly wrong with the town and their surroundings — and if there’s actually a chance of getting better here. This greenery/herbology-filled, historical fiction/mystery/thought-provoking novel mixes all sorts of things together and comes out fascinating thanks to Tokarczuk’s Nobel Prize-winning writing.

This fantastic novella drips with poetic prose and fairytale-inspired lore. A mermaid queen rules over a destroyed kingdom, her daughters devouring its citizens. She decides to return to the ocean she came from, but on the way, runs into a plague doctor, and in turn, they stumble on a terror of a society of seemingly ageless children. This mix of romance, lush fantasy, and work of definite eldritch horror is brilliantly done, and it all combines to perfect blood-dripping effect.

Evenson’s short stories are wild and sometimes even nonsensical, pulling on the abstract and strange to unseat readers. Unsettling at every turn, these stories (which won a 2020 World Fantasy Award and a 2019 Shirley Jackson Award) feature worlds drawn from science fiction as well as film. A director desperately wants the right kind of silence for his film and will do what it takes to get it; a newborn is missing a face; minds unravel and delusions and madness thrive in this strange collection.

Solomon is known for their vivid gothics that incorporate social commentary and the politics of race, body, and gender. In this new novel, the Maxwells are the only Black family in the neighborhood, and they’re certain that their house is cursed. When the three siblings, all grown up, find out that their parents have died, they all head home to figure out what happened to them and why. This take on a haunted house story has it all — queerness, trauma, mental illness, and race — while delivering the eerie as well.