Best Psychological Horror Books

Rank 1

The Drowning Girl

by Caitlin R. 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...

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Rank 2

Nos4a2

by Hill, Joe

In the tradition of Steven King, the spiritual father to Joe Hill's style of horror, NOS4A2 is a novel about the tricky space of growing up and the uncanny shit that happened to you as a child It's a novel about the u...

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Rank 3

The Between

by Tananarive Due

Hilton has been saved from death more than once, and now he is a successful man with a family, but a series of nightmares and threats make him doubt what is real. A psychological horror novel from Tananarive Due.

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Rank 4

House of Leaves

by Mark Z. Danielewski

A young family moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojourn...

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Rank 5

The Shining

by King, Stephen

Disclaimer: Avoid King books if you're sensitive to the overuse of adverbs. Second disclaimer: The movie and the book are quite different, but neither will ruin you for the other since they're both excellent.King has spo...

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Rank 6

Ghost Story

by Straub, Peter

In a seedy motel in Florida, a young man holds captive a little girl in a soiled pink dress. He is anxious, tormented, introspective. She is calm, passive, strangely detached. She says her name is Angie Maule.

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Rank 7

Come Closer

by Sara Gran

A recurrent, unidentifiable noise in her apartment. A memo to her boss that’s replaced by obscene insults. Amanda—a successful architect in a happy marriage—finds her life going off kilter by degrees. She starts smoking...

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Rank 8

The Grin of the Dark

by amsey Campbell

A film critic is asked to write about a forgotten silent comedian, Tubby Thackeray, and finds the old films, and the mystery of a missing child behind them, are far from funny. A disturbing story from Ramsey Campbell.

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Rank 9

American Psycho

by Bret Easton Ellis

American Psycho is a novel by Bret Easton Ellis, published in 1991. The story is told in the first person by Patrick Bateman, a serial killer and Manhattan investment banker. Alison Kelly of The Observer notes that while...

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Rank 10

Shutter Island

by Dennis Lehane

U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his partner, Chuck Aule, come to Shutter Island's Ashcliffe Hospital in search of an escaped mental patient, but uncover true wickedness as Ashcliffe's mysterious patient treatments propel...

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Rank 11

Houdini Heart

by Ki Longfellow

Written in first person directly to the reader, it's about a writer, a good, successful, but second-rate writer, whose life has come to such a pass (partly through her own doing) that she's on the run. It's a letter to...

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Rank 12

Psycho

by Robert Bloch

Norman Bates runs an old roadside motel when a beautiful woman running away from it all gets more than she bargained for when renting a room for the night.

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Rank 13

The Wasp Factory

by Iain Banks

Frank, no ordinary sixteen-year-old, lives with his father outsIde a remote Scottish village. Their life is, to say the least, unconventional. Frank's mother abandoned them years ago: his elder brother Eric is confined t...

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Rank 14

The Butcher Boy

by Patrick McCabe

Francie Brady, the "pig boy," is growing up in a poor small Irish town in the early sixties, fueled on an adolescent's comic books, Flash Bars, and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. He is determined to win the Francie Bra...

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Rank 15

Desert Places

by Blake Crouch

Andrew Z Thomas is a successful writer of suspense thrillers, living the dream at this lake house in the peidmont of North Carolina. One afternoon in late spring, he receives a bizarre letter that eventually threatens hi...

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Rank 16

The Trial

by Franz Kafka

Written in 1914 but not published until 1925, a year after Kafka's death, The Trial is the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against...

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Rank 17

Wildwood Road

by Christopher Golden

Michael and Jillian Dansky seemed to have it all--a happy marriage, two successful careers, a bright future. But late one October evening, all that changed. Driving home from a Halloween masquerade, Michael momentarily n...

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Rank 18

Blindsight

by Peter Watts

This novel has been hailed as one of the best hard sf stories written this century. It's an awesome novel, packed with invention and new ideas and challenges to the way we think. You have to keep your wits about you w...

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Rank 19

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...

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Rank 20

Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone

by Stefan Kiesbye

In a German village, a group of children grow up under the shadow of brutality, and their stories, told by the adults they became, slowly reveal how cruel a small, closed community can be. A cold, unsettling debut.

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Rank 21

Harbor

by John Ajvide Lindqvist

From the author of the international and New York Times bestseller Let the Right One In (Let Me In) comes this stunning and terrifying book which begins when a man's six-year-old daughter vanishes. One ordinary winter af...

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