Top 25 Horror Books with Female Protagonists

My Soul to Keep

by Tananarive Due

When Jessica marries David, he is everything she wants in a family man: brilliant, attentive, ever youthful. Yet she still feels something about him is just out of reach. Soon, as people close to Jessica begin to meet vi...

Rebecca

by Daphne duMaurier

A young bride arrives at Manderley, her new husband's grand Cornish estate, and finds herself living in the shadow of Rebecca, his first wife, whose memory is kept alive by the sinister housekeeper Mrs Danvers. A classic...

A Matrix of Angels

by Christopher Conlon

The Exorcist

by William Peter Blatty

The Exorcist is a 1971 horror novel by American writer William Peter Blatty. The book details the demonic possession of eleven-year-old Regan MacNeil, the daughter of a famous actress, and the two priests who attempt to...

The Silence of the Lambs

by Thomas Harris

The Silence of the Lambs is a psychological horror novel by Thomas Harris. First published in 1988, it is the sequel to Harris's 1981 novel Red Dragon. Both novels feature the cannibalistic serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lec...

The Witching Hour

by Rice, Anne

The first in the Mayfair Witches series, The Witching Hour introduces the fictional Mayfair family of New Orleans, generations of male and female witches. This tight-knit and deeply connected family, where a death of one...

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

by Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson's beloved gothic tale of a peculiar girl named Merricat and her family's dark secret Taking readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling n...

The Yellow Wallpaper

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

A woman is confined to a room in a country house for a rest cure and becomes more and more obsessed with its yellow wallpaper. A short, claustrophobic classic about madness and control.

Rosemary's Baby

by Ira Levin

The genre-defining classic that ushered in the era of modern horror One of the best-selling books of all time, Rosemary’s Baby is a foundational work of suspense and psychological horror which remains as powerful and chi...

The Castle of Los Angeles

by Lisa Morton

Theatre director Beth Ortiz is the newest resident of The Castle, an exclusive Los Angeles artists’ community. Anxious actors aren’t all Beth has to worry about in her new space, however, for The Castle has a secret hist...

The Haunting of Hill House

by Shirley Jackson

First published in 1959, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House has been hailed as a perfect work of unnerving terror. It is the story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House:...

Carrie

by King, Stephen

The story of misfit high-school girl, Carrie White, who gradually discovers that she has telekinetic powers. Repressed by a domineering, ultra-religious mother and tormented by her peers at school, her efforts to fit in...

Feed

by Mira Grant

In 2040, years after the zombie virus changed the world, two bloggers are chosen to follow a presidential candidate on the campaign trail and find that a conspiracy lies behind the infection. A political thriller as much...

Sunshine

by Mckinley, Robin

"There are places in the world where darkness rules, where it's unwise to walk. Sunshine knew that. But there hadn't been any trouble out at the lake for years, and she needed a place to be alone for a while. Unfortunate...

The Girl on the Train

by Paula Hawkins

A debut psychological thriller that will forever change the way you look at other people's lives. Rachel takes the same commuter train every morning. Every day she rattles down the track, flashes past a stretch of cozy s...

Carmilla

by J. Sheridan LeFanu

A young woman living in a remote Styrian castle befriends the beautiful Carmilla, who is left in her family's care, while illness spreads through the neighbourhood. A vampire novella that came out a quarter of a century...

The Drowning Girl

by Caitlin Kiernan

Imp, a struggling schizophrenic, fights to determine whether or not the strange mythological creatures she meets are due to her condition or are from something else entirely. India Morgan Phelps—Imp to her friends—is try...

The Stepford Wives

by Ira Levin

The Stepford Wives is a 1972 satirical novel by Ira Levin. The story concerns Joanna Eberhart, a photographer and young mother who suspects the submissive housewives in her new idyllic Connecticut neighborhood may be rob...

Bleeding Violet

by Dia Reeves

A mentally ill sixteen-year-old girl reunites with her estranged mother in an East Texas town that is haunted with doors to dimensions of the dead and protected by demon hunters called Mortmaine.

Little Star

by John Ajvide Lindqvist

A couple find a baby girl abandoned in the woods and raise her in secrecy alongside their son. As she grows, her gift for singing draws the attention of a talent show, and something dark in her nature emerges. By the aut...

Annihilation

by Vandermeer, Jeff

Annihilation won the 2015 Nebula Award for Best Novel. It beat out the following nominees to win:The Goblin Emperor Trial by Fire Ancillary Sword The Three-Body Problem Coming Home