Here are 7 books that Good Night, Sleep Tight fans have personally recommended if you like
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Not a Speck of Light is the fifth collection of short stories by Laird Barron and contains tales in his Old Leech mythos as well as in his Antiquity universe. Simply put, he's the preeminent horror short fiction author of our times. This collection is stunning in its dark imagery and oozes horror from its pores. I generally enjoy psychological horror more than gore and Barron excels at the gentle dance between the two. If you enjoy shorter reads with eldritch gods, entities from the ichor of nightmares, and characters who are at battle with themselves, you'll want a copy of Not a Speck of Light.
One of Paste Magazine's "Most Anticipated Horror Books of 2024"
It’s about to get very dark.
Bram Stoker Award-winning author Laird Barron returns to the dark and dreadful with his fifth horror collection, which weaves sixteen weird tales into a mosaic of the bloody and the macabre.
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
*Love Is a Crematorium* by Mercedes Yardley is a haunting and lyrical exploration of love, loss, and the human soul’s resilience in the face of devastation. In this darkly beautiful novella, Yardley masterfully weaves a tale where love is not just a source of warmth, but also a force of destruction—burning as fiercely as it heals. The story follows characters navigating a world of broken hearts and fractured realities, where the boundaries between life and death blur, and emotions run as deep as the grave.
Yardley’s prose is sharp and poetic, cutting to the core of human experience while immersing readers in a dreamlike atmosphere that is as unsettling as it is enchanting. Themes of grief, desire, and redemption simmer throughout, making the book not only a dark fantasy but also a raw meditation on the fragility of life and the transformative power of love.
A woman builds her lover from carefully scavenged pieces and parts. A young girl is groomed for madness by one who loves her most. A neurodivergent boy organizes his life, and loss, by the ticking of a clock. And love can be the most splendid and destructive force in the entire world. Love is a Crematorium and Other Tales is a collection of seventeen stories that are both bleak and beautiful, devastating and sweet. Enter the crematorium to experience grief, starlit nights, and gorgeous tragedy that make our souls burn from the inside out.
A classic collection of stories - all told on the skin of a man - from the author of Fahrenheit 451.
If El Greco had painted miniatures in his prime, no bigger than your hand, infinitely detailed, with his sulphurous colour and exquisite human anatomy, perhaps he might have used this man's body for his art...
Yet the Illustrated Man has tried to burn the illustrations off. He's tried sandpaper, acid, and a knife. Because, as the sun sets, the pictures glow like charcoals, like scattered gems. They quiver and come to life. Tiny pink hands gesture, tiny mouths flicker…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
Whether it’s campfire tales told with the moon high or bedtime fables told to get children to stay in their beds after lights out, I believe horror fiction is at its purest, most effective form as short prose. These collections of horror, fantasy, sci-fi, and Western tales are all touched by the weird and terrifying. The twin sensations of being unsettled by something you’ve read and of being unable to resist reading on are guiding lights in my own writerly pursuits. These collections and many more played a defining role in shaping my own debut dark fiction collection Pre-Approved for Haunting and Other Stories.
While trending more toward the fantasy side, then the previous picks on the list here, Link still manages to pull out some of the most unsettling moments in a short story that I’ve ever read.
When I finished her story “Some Zombie Contingency Plans,” I found myself immediately flipping back to the beginning of the story and reading it fresh. Link is masterful when it comes to weaving together narrative threads, playing literary sleight of hand. While the collection and one of the stories within are called “Magic for Beginners,” she’s very much an expert.
The cross-genre blending is very much following in the footsteps of Bradbury, giving a more fantasy-style focus where his work trends toward science fiction.
Best of the Decade: Salon, The A.V. Club "If I had to pick the most powerfully original voice in fantasy today, it would be Kelly Link. Her stories begin in a world very much like our own, but then, following some mysterious alien geometry, they twist themselves into something fantastic and, frequently, horrific. You won't come out the same person you went in."-Lev Grossman, The Week "Highly original."-Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Dazzling."-Entertainment Weekly (grade: A, Editor's Choice) "Darkly playful."-Michael Chabon Best of the Year: Time Magazine, Salon, Boldtype, PopMatters. Kelly Link's engaging and funny stories riff on haunted convenience stores,…
Whether it’s campfire tales told with the moon high or bedtime fables told to get children to stay in their beds after lights out, I believe horror fiction is at its purest, most effective form as short prose. These collections of horror, fantasy, sci-fi, and Western tales are all touched by the weird and terrifying. The twin sensations of being unsettled by something you’ve read and of being unable to resist reading on are guiding lights in my own writerly pursuits. These collections and many more played a defining role in shaping my own debut dark fiction collection Pre-Approved for Haunting and Other Stories.
No one writing horror fiction today is better at punching the reader in the guts (or ripping those guts out and showing them to you) like Stephen Graham Jones. While he’s been touted more recently for his novel-length works, I first came to know SGJ’s writing via short stories. This collection is one of several stand-outs from his catalog.
When it comes to horror and weird fiction writing, SGJ’s versatility knows no bounds. Whether it’s the literary strangeness of “Father, Son, Holy Rabbit,” or the freaky folk horror of “Raphael” (elements of which SGJ has revisited in his Indian Lake novel trilogy), there are all kinds of scares in this collection. He even pulls off a shocking jump-scare fright in “Crawlspace” that has to be experienced first-hand.
These thirteen stories are our own lives, inside out. A boy's summer
romance doesn't end in that good kind of heartbreak, but in blood. A girl
on a fishing trip makes a friend in the woods who's exactly what she
needs, except then that friend follows her back to the city. A father hears a
voice through his baby monitor that shouldn't be possible, but now he
can't stop listening. A woman finds out that the shipwreck wasn't
the disaster, but who she's shipwrecked with. A big brother learns just
what he will, and won't, trade for one night of…
Whether it’s campfire tales told with the moon high or bedtime fables told to get children to stay in their beds after lights out, I believe horror fiction is at its purest, most effective form as short prose. These collections of horror, fantasy, sci-fi, and Western tales are all touched by the weird and terrifying. The twin sensations of being unsettled by something you’ve read and of being unable to resist reading on are guiding lights in my own writerly pursuits. These collections and many more played a defining role in shaping my own debut dark fiction collection Pre-Approved for Haunting and Other Stories.
While his stories might be some of the shortest word-count-wise from the tales featured in these listed collections, Brian Evenson’s prose does not lack for the weird and terrifying.
With many pieces going no further than the flash fiction of 1000 or so words, Evenson’s writing has taught me that it’s not about how many words you use, but how you use them.
In this collection, he adds Westerns to the mix of genres where horror and the weird can take seed and bloom into something mind-bendingly unsettling. “Black Bark” is one such story. At first, it seems to be a tale of two Wild West bandits on the run but as the nightmarish end arrives, readers will find they’ve been reading a very different tale all along.
A stuffed bear's heart beats with the rhythm of a dead baby, Reno keeps receding to the east no matter how far you drive, and in a mine on another planet, the dust won't stop seeping in. In these stories, Evenson unsettles us with the everyday and the extraordinary the terror of living with the knowledge of all we cannot know.
Praise for Brian Evenson:
"Brian Evenson is one of the treasures of American story writing, a true successor both to the generation of Coover, Barthelme, Hawkes and Co., but also to Edgar Allan Poe." Jonathan Lethem
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I have loved horror since my early teens, when I first discovered The Rats and Lair and other horror stories by James Herbert. The thing I like about horror, in particular, is that there are no holds barred, no censorship, as to what can be written. I grew up on movies like The Exorcist, Friday the 13th, Jaws, Alien, The Thing, etc., but horror writing takes you deeper and gives a more visceral experience than anything any film can do.
I discovered Clive Barker's collection of short stories which gave me an introduction to one of the world's best horror writers and film directors. There are so many varied stories within the Books of Blood that it's difficult to highlight some over others.
The Midnight Meat Train was astounding in its detail of visceral butchery, whilst In the Hills, the Cities is fantastic in its imagery of something impossible, which Barker relates with such skill to make you believe the events within are entirely feasible. The Hellbound Heart lets you into a world of new villains and was made into one of my favorite horror films, Hellraiser. I was also lucky to meet and interview Clive, who inspired me to continue writing, saying, "Keep going; you will get better."
