5 Horror Books by Black Authors We Can’t Wait to Read in 2025
Horror fiction novels by Black authors are a rare find these days. So much so that I was only able to find five new horror releases coming out this year written by Black authors. According to a report done by Publishing Perspectives, only about 5.3% of books are written by Black authors, even less are by Black women. It is our goal to not only read horror written by Black authors, but amplify their voices and build a community around them. [Be sure to check out our book club, Due Butler Do Better on Fable!] It’s also good for readers to experience our stories and see more from our perspectives.
Now, let’s get into the list of horror books we can’t wait to read this year!
Honeysuckle and Bone by Trisha Tobias
On the run from her own dark secrets, a teen girl becomes the nanny for a prestigious family on their Jamaican estate, where she quickly discovers even paradise may be haunted.
The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories, ed. by andré m. carrington
A cutting-edge collection of the best short stories in contemporary Afrofuturist fiction–from Hugo, Nebula, and Stoker award-winning Black authors. Including Afrofuturist science fiction, weird and fantastic tales, horror and the paranormal, apocalyptic lyricism, time travel, superheroes, and more, here are twenty mindblowing, horror-strewn, weird, woke, nerdy, terrifying, liberating, fantastic, utopian, surreal, genre-defying and empowering short stories, all of them worth reading and rereading now and far into futurity.
Junie by Erin Crosby Eckstine
A young girl must face a life-altering decision after awakening her sister’s ghost, navigating truths about love, friendship, and power as the Civil War looms in this moving debut.
Listen to Your Sister by Neena Viel
For fans of Jordan Peele’s films, Stranger Things, and The Other Black Girl, Listen To Your Sister is a laugh-out-loud, deeply terrifying, and big-hearted speculative horror novel from electrifying debut talent Neena Viel.
Sick Houses: Haunted Homes and the Architecture of Dread by Leila Taylor
From family homes in Amityville to Gothic mansions in Los Angeles and the Unabomber’s cabin, houses often capture and contain the horror that has happened within them. Sick Houses crosses the threshold of these eerie spaces to explore how different types of architecture become vessels for terror and how these spaces, meant to shelter us, instead become the source of our deepest fears. Using film, television, and literature to explain why we are drawn to haunted and haunting places, Sick Houses is a must read for anyone who has ever looked at a house and sensed there might be something unsettling going on inside.