Horror

Jeneva Rose made her name with twisty domestic thrillers such as The Perfect Marriage, and in Sometimes I Scare Myself she moves confidently into horror with three stories that suit long autumn nights. Each one is self-contained, but they share a fascination with guilt and with the moment ordinary people realise they have crossed a line.

In the opening story, a thirtieth-birthday celebration featuring a hired medium goes badly wrong, and the guests make a choice that will follow them. The second, and perhaps the strongest, takes the Dalton family into a house with a dreadful history, told largely through the perspective of a new mother already wrestling with sleeplessness and self-doubt; Rose uses that fragile state of mind to keep the reader unsure what is real. The final story visits a roadside shop where every item comes with a curse, then strands its characters in a cabin during a storm.

Rose keeps the thriller writer's instinct for pace. The prose is lean, the hooks arrive early, and each story builds toward a satisfying sting rather than relying on gore. The horror is mostly psychological and social, rooted in secrets and the fear that the people closest to you cannot be trusted. That makes the collection a good gateway for readers who enjoy suspense and want to try something spookier without committing to a doorstop. Five weeks on the hardcover fiction bestseller list suggest plenty of her existing fans have already followed her into the dark.

Sarah Langan, author of Good Neighbors and A Better World, has a talent for finding the dread lurking inside the lives people curate for public view, and Trad Wife may be her most timely novel yet. Jenny Kaplan is a journalist whose reputation has taken a damaging public knock. Hoping for a comeback, she secures a profile of Mia Wright, a hugely popular trad-wife influencer who shares a picture-perfect life of baking, homeschooling and devotion to her seven children on a Pennsylvania farm.

Once Jenny arrives, the idyll begins to fray. The children recite strange nursery rhymes, Jenny starts losing chunks of time, and she senses that the farm runs on rules no one will explain. As her investigation deepens, the line between a story about online performance and something genuinely uncanny grows thinner, and Jenny has to ask whether she is still the one doing the reporting.

Langan balances social satire with real chills. She is interested in why so many people find the trad-wife aesthetic comforting, and she resists turning Mia into a simple villain, which makes the unease far more effective. The novel also has a lot to say about ambition, motherhood and the bargains women are pressured to make, but it never forgets to be a page-turner. It sits comfortably beside classics such as Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives while feeling rooted in the present feed-scrolling moment. A smart, unsettling pick for book clubs looking for something that will start an argument.

Jane Schoenbrun, the filmmaker behind the cult hit I Saw the TV Glow, makes a striking debut as a novelist with Public Access Afterworld, a sprawling and eerie book about the stories that reach us through screens and the people who disappear into them.

The novel unfolds across several decades. In late-1980s Dallas, a local weatherman encounters something he cannot explain. In 2009, as American television switches from analogue to digital broadcasting, two teenagers, David and Erin, become fixated on a signal that should not exist. Years later, Bethany Peters, a trans content moderator at a vast tech company in Austin, finds herself drawn into the same mystery. Linking them all is a pirate channel that appears to transmit from somewhere beyond the static.

This is horror built on atmosphere, memory and identity rather than jump scares. Schoenbrun is fascinated by how media shapes our sense of self, and by the outsiders who find a kind of belonging in late-night broadcasts and online rabbit holes. The book also deals with heavy emotional territory, handled with care, and readers should expect some difficult moments. The structure is ambitious, shifting voices and formats, and at over six hundred pages it asks for patience. Those willing to settle in will be rewarded with hypnotic prose and a mood that lingers long after the last page. Admirers of the film will recognise its preoccupations, and readers who love David Lynch, House of Leaves or internet folklore will find plenty to obsess over.

Marcus Kliewer's debut has quietly become one of the most dependable horror sellers of recent years, and it is still sitting in the US top dozen this autumn. Its premise is beautifully simple. Charlie and her partner Eve have bought a rambling fixer-upper, hoping it will give them a fresh start. One day a family appears on the doorstep: they used to live in the house, they say, and would love a quick look around for old times' sake.

Agreeing seems like the decent thing to do. What follows is best discovered without any warning, so we will only say that the visit does not go as planned and that Charlie soon struggles to understand what is happening in her own home. Kliewer is excellent at building dread out of tiny details: a conversation that lasts a beat too long, a door that is not where it should be, a guest who seems far too comfortable.

The short chapters and puzzle-like structure make the book hard to put down, and Kliewer plays cleverly with Charlie's uncertainty so that the reader is never quite sure who or what to trust. Underneath the scares lie real questions about relationships, boundaries and the vulnerability of opening your door to strangers. It is not a gory novel; its power comes from tension and disorientation. For anyone who enjoyed the slow-burn chills of Shirley Jackson or the modern unease of Riley Sager, this is a tight, unsettling read best saved for a dark evening.

C. J. Tudor has built a strong following with The Chalk Man, The Burning Girls and The Drift, novels that sit somewhere between crime and horror. Serenity Falls, published by Michael Joseph in September and reviewed by Lisa Tuttle in The Guardian's round-up of recent horror, is one of her most enjoyable books yet, swapping English villages for the manicured lawns of Florida.

The premise is classic. Dan, a widower, and his daughter Sadie move from the UK to Serenity Falls, a carefully planned community that boasts of having no crime. It seems the perfect place to start again. Almost immediately, though, a body is discovered in their pool, and as Dan starts asking questions he learns that the town has a long record of fatal accidents stretching back over its fifty years. As the community prepares to celebrate its anniversary, more odd discoveries pile up, from empty houses to unexplained activity at night.

Tudor's great skill is in making the ordinary sinister. Neighbourly kindness feels like surveillance, and rules that seem quaint gradually look like something worse. She balances suspense with warmth, particularly in the relationship between Dan and Sadie, and with the wry humour that runs through her work.

The book is long, and the middle section occasionally lingers, but the payoff is worth the wait. It will appeal to fans of Stephen King's small-town horror, Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives and anyone who has ever suspected that a town seemed too good to be true.