13 ‘Family Secrets’ Horror Book Recommendations
Everybody’s family is a little weird.
But some families are weirder than most.
You think you know your family until one day you discover that the bond that binds you together may be forged in blood. Do you leave it alone or do you dig a little deeper?
Here are 13 horror books where there’s no turning back from some horrifying family secrets.
“I am better able to imagine hell than heaven; it is my inheritance, I suppose.”
— Elinor Wylie
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Table of Contents
Home is Where the Bodies Are - Jeneva Rose
Psychological horror
After their mother passes, three estranged siblings reunite to sort out her estate. Beth, the oldest, never left home. She stayed with her mom, caring for her until the very end. Nicole, the middle child, has been kept at arm’s length due to her ongoing battle with a serious drug addiction. Michael, the youngest, lives out of state and hasn’t been back to their small Wisconsin town since their father ran out on them seven years before.
While going through their parents’ belongings, the siblings stumble upon a collection of home videos and decide to revisit those happier memories. However, the nostalgia is cut short when one of the VHS tapes reveals a night back in 1999 that none of them have any recollection of. On screen, their father appears covered in blood. What follows is a dead body and a pact between their parents to get rid of it, before the video abruptly ends.
Beth, Nicole, and Michael must now decide whether to leave the past in the past or uncover the dark secret their mother took to her grave.
“The rain falls differently today, not soft, not hard, not sideways, just different.”
Wildefell – H.B. Diaz
Gothic horror
Ex-pagan and reluctantly clairvoyant reporter, Sara Wilde, thinks she escaped the curse of Wildefell Manor by planting shallow roots in Savannah. But Wildefell, her family’s historic estate in idyllic Beaufort, South Carolina, still harbors a lurid secret.
When the brutal murders of her sister and grandmother send Sara back up the groaning steps of Wildefell, she discovers their bodies arranged in a manner reminiscent of Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue. As corpses turn up all across the city, all mirroring victims in Gothic-era stories, and Sara begins to receive cryptic messages from the murderer, she realizes the curse blighting her family tree is branching out.
Plagued by premotions of the murders and the grotesque spirits of long-dead ancestors, Sara fears the only place she belongs is with the husk of her grief-stricken mother, in the asylum.
To break a story centuries in the making and stop a vicious killer, Sara must exhume the secrets of Wildefell Manor, or she’ll risk losing both her family’s legacy and her own mind.
“One hundred years of night slept comfortably here, undisturbed.”
Still, Dark Places - Christina Graves
Psychological horror
The Seven Sisters of Still Water. Missing but not forgotten. Memorialized in graveyard stone…
Nora Gray, true crime podcast host, is being called back to her hometown over a decade later by a desperate mother. Another daughter, gone. And Nora knows more than anyone realizes, more than even she remembers.
They call it Skull House, this home back in the woods, rundown, abandoned. And for as long as Nora can recall, the local kids have dared each other to climb the stairs to the top, to brave the ghost of Helaena Barker, who they say waits in the attic behind the door…
But Skull House hides more than tales of ghosts, and it clings tightly to its secrets. Nora is convinced it also holds the missing clues to the Seven Sisters’ disappearances and why Nora herself woke up in a field near the house, covered in blood, all those years ago.
“Even on the blackest night, there should be something…She is simply gone.”
The Elementals - Michael McDowell
Haunted house horror
After a bizarre and disturbing incident at the funeral of matriarch Marian Savage, the McCray and Savage families look forward to a restful and relaxing summer at Beldame, on Alabama’s Gulf Coast, where three Victorian houses loom over the shimmering beach.
Two of the houses are habitable, while the third is slowly and mysteriously being buried beneath an enormous dune of blindingly white sand.
But though long uninhabited, the third house is not empty. Inside, something deadly lies in wait. Something that has terrified Dauphin Savage and Luker McCray since they were boys and which still haunts their nightmares.
Something horrific that may be responsible for several terrible and unexplained deaths years earlier, and is now ready to kill again.
The Silent Companions - Laura Purcell
Gothic horror
When Elsie married handsome young heir Rupert Bainbridge, she believed she was destined for a life of luxury.
But pregnant and widowed just weeks after their wedding, with her new servants resentful and the local villagers actively hostile, Elsie has only her late husband’s awkward cousin for company. Or so she thinks.
Inside her new home lies a locked door, beyond which is a painted wooden figure – a silent companion – that bears a striking resemblance to Elsie herself.
The residents of the estate are terrified of the figure, but Elsie tries to shrug this off as simple superstition, until she notices the figure’s eyes following her.
“Some doors are locked for a reason.”
When Ghosts Call Us Home - Katya de Becerra
Found footage horror
When Sophia Galich was twelve, she starred in her older sister Layla’s amateur horror movie Vermillion, which recorded raw footage of her very real reactions to scenes her sister concocted in their old Californian house on the coast, Cashore House.
In the years after the film’s release, Sophia’s relationship with her sister became more strained, while her memories of the now-infamous house fueled her nightmares. Vermillion amassed an army of fanatical fans who speculated about the film’s hidden messages, and it was rumored that Layla made a pact with the devil: her soul in exchange for fame and arcane knowledge. Sophia dismissed this as gossip, until Layla disappeared.
Now, Sophia must study the trail of clues Layla has left behind, returning to the very place where it all began. As she gets closer and closer to Cashore House’s haunted heart, she must once again confront the ghosts of her childhood. But the house won’t reveal its secrets without a fight.
“Ghosts are memories; we carry them in our blood.”
Her Little Flowers – Shannon Morgan
Ghost horror
Francine Thwaite has lived all her fifty-five years in her family’s ancestral home, a rambling Elizabethan manor in England’s Lake District. No other living soul resides there, but Francine isn’t alone. There are ghosts in Thwaite Manor, harmless and familiar. Most beloved is Bree, the mischievous ghost girl who has been Francine’s companion since childhood.
When Francine’s estranged sister, Madeleine, returns to the manor after years away, she brings with her a story that threatens everything Francine has always believed. It is a tale of cruelty and desperation, of terror and unbearable heartache.
And as Francine learns more about the darkness in her family’s past, and the role she may have played in it, she realizes that confronting the truth may mean losing what she holds most dear.
“Thick, black tea … The perfect sort for reading the leaves.”
Gallant – V.E. Schwab
Gothic horror
Olivia Prior has grown up in Merilance School for Girls, and all she has of her past is her mother’s journal, which seems to unravel into madness. Then, a letter invites Olivia to come home to Gallant.
Yet when Olivia arrives, no one is expecting her. But Olivia is not about to leave the first place that feels like home; it doesn’t matter if her cousin Matthew is hostile, or if she sees half-formed ghouls haunting the hallways.
Olivia knows that Gallant is hiding secrets, and she is determined to uncover them. When she crosses a ruined wall at just the right moment, Olivia finds herself in a place that is Gallant, but not. The manor is crumbling, the ghouls are solid, and a mysterious figure rules over all. Now Olivia sees what has unraveled generations of her family, and where her father may have come from.
Olivia has always wanted to belong somewhere, but will she take her place as a Prior, protecting our world against the Master of the House? Or will she take her place beside him?
“But Olivia knows. It is the dead thing in the corner.”
The House of a Hundred Whispers - Graham Masterton
Haunted house horror
All Hallows Hall is a rambling Tudor mansion on the edge of the bleak and misty Dartmoor. It is not a place many would choose to live. Yet the former Governer of Dartmoor Prison did just that. Now he’s dead, and his children, long estranged, are set to inherit his estate.
But when the dead man’s family come to stay, the atmosphere of the moors seems to drift into every room. Floorboards creak, secret passageways echo, and wind whistles in the house’s famous priest hole. And then, on the same morning the family decide to leave All Hallows Hall and never come back, their young son Timmy disappears from inside the house.
“He hadn’t intended to come back into the house, not after dark.”
The Lost Ones - Ania Frank
Haunted house horror
England, 1917. Reeling from the death of her fiancé, Stella Marcham welcomes the opportunity to stay with her pregnant sister, Madeleine, at her imposing country mansion, Greyswick. But she arrives to discover a house of unease and her sister gripped by fear and suspicion.
Before long, strange incidents begin to trouble Stella – sobbing in the night, little footsteps on the stairs – and as events escalate, she finds herself drawn to the tragic history of the house.
Aided by a wounded war veteran, Stella sets about uncovering Greyswick’s dark and terrible secrets – secrets the dead whisper from the other side.
“Some houses are never at peace.”
The Little Stranger - Sarah Waters
Ghost horror
One postwar summer, in his home in rural Warwickshire, Dr. Faraday is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall.
Home to the Ayres family for more than two centuries, the Georgian house, once impressive and handsome, is now in decline. Its owners – mother, son, and daughter – are struggling to keep pace with a changing society.
But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life?
“They must have made a very handsome family, but my memory of them is vague.”
The Broken Places - Blaine Daigle
Psychological horror
When Ryne Burdette inherits his family’s old hunting cabin deep in the Yukon wilderness, he wants to say no.
Nothing much is left in that place except for unpleasant memories and the smoke of old burns. But after a tragic year, he sees a weekend trip to the cabin with his best friends as a way to recuperate and begin again.
But there is something strange about these woods. As a winter storm moves in, the animals begin acting strangely, and the natural laws of the wilderness seem to fall apart.
Then, the soft voices start whispering through the trees. Something is watching them.
As the storm gets worse and the woods get darker, the three friends must dive into the darkest waters of the Burdette family lineage.
Because the horrible truth is deep, resting in the shadowed places no one wants to look.
“Ryne’s eyes opened to the creaking of a door downstairs.”
The Ghost Woods – C.J. Cooke
Gothic horror
In the middle of the woods stands a house called Lichen Hall.
This place is shrouded in folklore – old stories of ghosts, of witches, of a child who is not quite a child.
Now the woods are creeping closer, and something has been unleashed.
Pearl Gorham arrives in 1965, one of a string of young women sent to Lichen Hall to give birth. And she soon suspects the proprietors are hiding something.
Then she meets the mysterious mother and young boy who live in the grounds – and together they begin to unpick the secrets of this place.
As the truth comes to the surface and the darkness moves in, Pearl must rethink everything she knew – and risk what she holds most dear.
“I have a ghost in my knee. There’s a small pocket just behind the kneecap and she’s hiding in there, all tucked up in the soft mattress of cartilage.”
Published: 15 November 2024
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