Pretty much anyone who meets Tomie Kawakami will tell you she’s the most beautiful woman they’ve ever seen. Too bad for them, because Tomie leverages her sex appeal to bring out the worst in others. Men kill to be with her. Some of them ruin their lives by killing Tomie herself. But while they rot in prison, Tomie comes back, again and again — a cursed force of nature, nearly impossible to get rid of for good.

The French call it “l’appel du vide”: the call of the void. It’s what draws us to the edge of the cliff and tells us to throw ourselves in. It’s what told Nicholas’ girlfriend, Nakota, to check out the Funhole in their apartment building’s storage room. After that, Nakota wanted to be near it, stare into it, even sacrifice things to it. And then Nicholas put his hand down the Funhole…and everything changed.

The basis for the video game franchise of the same name, Hideaki Sena’s Parasite Eve is part medical thriller, part sci-fi horror. The novel imagines that all human mitochondria form a sentient hivemind. This collective, known as Eve, can telepathically push individuals into doing its bidding, all with one singular goal in mind: to usher in the next stage of human evolution.

Among the handful of nonfiction books on this list, Richard Preston’s 1994 microhistory of viral hemorrhagic fevers — many of which spread quickly, are overwhelmingly fatal, and are nigh incurable — may be the most infamous. The Hot Zone resurged in popularity during the West African Ebola outbreak in 2014, and again as COVID-19 kicked into high-gear in 2020.

Nominated for the Stoker Award, Deadrush centers on Jason, a teenage boy who dies after he’s bitten by venomous snakes in a charismatic church service. When he comes back to life with the ability to raise others from the dead, he’s hailed as a miracle-worker. But as Jason flexes his new abilities around Chicago’s back alleys, he leaves behind a string of newly resurrected people who must reckon with a new, insatiable hunger.

Andrew and Jay had every intention of killing one another when they met. Instead, these two cannibalistic serial killers fell into a perverse Bonnie-and-Clyde relationship of murder and mayhem. As they prey upon victims in New Orleans’ seedy underbelly, Andrew and Jay set their sights on Tran: a teenager Jay wants to love and Andrew wants to kill. Little do these two murderers know that another man is looking for their new target…a man with nothing left to lose.

For nearly 40 years, the tragedy of Chernobyl has kept onlookers scrabbling for answers. How did so much go so wrong, so quickly? How did anyone manage to survive? And when will people be able to safely return to the exclusion zone that now surrounds the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant? Although we may never know the full extent of the disaster, Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich offers readers the chance to learn about it — and all its myriad horrors — directly from those whom it affected most, in Voices from Chernobyl.

n 1937, the Imperial Japanese Army invaded Nanjing, then the capital of the Republic of China and known as Nanking. Modern-day scholars estimate that hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers and civilians — including women, children, and the elderly — died over a period of six weeks, and that tens of thousands were raped during the same period. Published 60 years after the massacre and offering an unflinching account of the atrocities, The Rape of Nanking remains a definitive history of this horrific episode in World War II.

* Note: It’s worth mentioning here that Iris Chang’s research into this deeply disturbing subject matter is rumored to have contributed to her tragic death by suicide in 2004. I don’t often put warning labels of this kind on the books I recommend, but please proceed with caution, especially if you are not in a good headspace.

The basis for the 1999 Takashi Miike film of the same name, Ryū Murakami’s Audition follows Aoyama, a widowed filmmaker who holds a series of fake auditions to find his next wife. There, he meets Yamasaki, a ballerina half his age. Aoyama’s infatuated, and Yamasaki seems like the perfect woman to make his life complete again. But the widower’s new girlfriend has a dark side, and she’s never quite outrun the ghosts of her past…

This is one of the most polarizing horror novels I’ve ever come across. Readers either love or hate its experimental structure, which leaves the reader several degrees removed from the central story: that of a strange documentary about one family’s creepy experience mapping out the boundaries of their new home’s impossible architecture. For those who enjoy it, however, House of Leaves proves to be a book that never quite stops hovering, shadowy, in your periphery.

A disturbing story set in late-20th-century Lebanon, Elias Khoury’s Yalo follows its eponymous protagonist as his violent escapades around war-torn Beirut catch up with him. Yalo cannot remember committing the crimes he’s accused of. The police will draw a confession from him by any means necessary, but will it be the truth? And, perhaps more importantly, can Yalo ever hope to separate fact from fiction in the story of his traumatic life?

Amanda is losing control of her life — bit by bit, day by day. Her personal and professional relationships are beginning to sour. A sharp-toothed woman invades all her dreams. And she’s losing time. So, so much time. A folk-medicine practitioner warned Amanda about demonic possession, but people don’t really become possessed…do they?