Science Fiction Trouble Feature: 10 of the Best Sci-Fi Horror Books

These are three things that are upsetting: 1. Being dead. 2. Finding a body. 3. Not remembering anything. Now imagine they’re all occurring at once. That’s what happens to Magpie. She finds a dead body by the river, and it’s her. How is that possible? She doesn’t know, because she can’t remember what has happened or how she got there. She also doesn’t realize she’s being monitored as part of an experiment.

This is one of the best sci-fi space horror books to come along recently. It’s a little like Event Horizon meets Avenue Five. The crew of Claire Kovalik’s salvage ship are about to complete their last mission when they hit paydirt: they find the Aurora. The Aurora was a luxury space cruise liner that went missing two decades ago. Now it’s floating on the outer rim of explored space. Claire decides to check the ship out, because the money they can get from a famous ship could solve their problems. But even though the ship has been missing for 20 years, the horrors that occurred on board are still present.

So this is one of those books that the less you know, the better. It’s Gothic horror, but it’s also labeled as science fiction. What? Yep. But to explain why that is would spoil the story. So let’s just say it’s a horror novel set in a desolate chateau, involving doctors, a medical institute, and a very unusual narrator. Oh, and it’s weird and gross AF, and you should read it right now.

Koepp’s last book, Cold Storage, was a horror novel about a biohazard with a body count, featuring a lethal alien species that escapes a military facility. This time, he’s using reality to frighten us. A giant solar flare could destroy our access to technology and electricity on the plane, and that’s just what happens in Aurora. In the world that follows such an incident, Aubrey Wheeler must guard her neighborhood against the very real violence that will follow in the new dystopian reality. All while trying to keep her ex-husband and criminals from her home.

Like many of the best science fiction novels, this one starts out with space exploration. The Deucalion has set out from Earth to investigate a possible habitable planet. Dr. Grace Park is the alternate psychologist aboard the ship. She’s mostly there to observe, since there’s already a doctor dealing with the crew. But then things start to go very, very wrong. Grace is left to try and manage the sessions of an increasingly erratic crew. Meanwhile the ships AI are also getting weirder, and Grace discovers there might be something hidden in the bowels of the ship that is causing all the problems.

This is one of two sequels I want to highlight on this list, because the whole series is so freaking good. So as not to spoil the first two books, I will give you a brief overview of the Beneath the Rising series. While trying to invent technology that will help the planet, humans instead create a device that awakens the Ancient Ones, who are not happy about being disturbed. At all. Now the human race must figure out a way to survive a whole new thing they didn’t know existed. It all concludes spectacularly in The Void Ascendant!

First, I want to say how much I love this title. There’s the expression “The mind is a terrible thing to waste.” And the Ministry album The Mind Is a Terrible Thing To Taste. (Omg I am so old.) But this nails it: minds are terrible. Good grief, are brains trouble sometimes. And in this spacecraft horror novel, they’re going to cause people a lot of problems, when aliens figure out how to hack them like computers and turn people into their puppets.