14 Horror Books about Books, Bookstores, and Libraries
There’s something satisfying about reading books about books, bookstores, and libraries.
But, there’s something even more satisfying, captivatingly creepy you might say, about reading horror stories about books, bookstores and libraries.
In these books, read about cursed novels, lost memoirs, cryptic manuscripts, a pop-up book, or a choose-your-own-adventure book, but you might like to keep the light on.
Or maybe you’d like to illustrate a strange book of monsters that you didn’t even know your famous novelist father had written, or read a story that begins to unfold in real life, or receive your very own, personal horror story just for you.
What if you worked in a bookstore that had to be cleaned up every morning even though it’s always spick and span when you leave at night? Would you work back if your boss told you to?
While you read, try not to get imprisoned in a library or eat the strange moss you see on your library books.
We hope you enjoy these horror books about books, bookstores, and libraries just as much as we do.
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Table of Contents
Mister B. Gone – Clive Barker
Supernatural horror
“Burn this book!”
So warns Jakerbok, the spellbinding narrator of this fabulously original “memoir,” a tale of good and evil deliberately “lost” for nearly six hundred years. Jakerbok is no ordinary soul; he is a minion of hell with a terrifying plan to cast the world into darkness and despair – a plan thwarted by a young apprentice of Johannes Gutenberg who buried the one and only copy of this damnable manuscript that his master printed in 1438.
Compelling and direct, Jakerbok shares the secrets of his life, going back centuries to recall the events that shaped his childhood, including the traumas he suffered at the hands of his parents, super demons themselves. He explains how he rose from “minor” to “major” demon status, and gleefully reveals his nefarious plot to “invade” the minds and hearts of unwitting humans everywhere thanks to the ingenious Gutenberg and his invention.
“Burn this book!” he advises throughout, a taunt, a warning, and a command that will actually unleash the evil with which he has hidden in every word and every page, infusing the very ink and paper upon which they are printed.
“Burn this book. Go on. Quickly, while there’s still time.”
Ghostwritten – Ronald Malfi
Supernatural horror collection
A cursed novel drives people to their deaths.
A delivery job turns deadly.
A lonely child has dangerous control over an unusual pop-up book.
A choose-your-own adventure game spirals into an uncanny reality.
“Books can be deadly.”
The Red Tree – Caitlin R. Kiernan
Psychological horror
Sarah Crowe left Atlanta, and the remnants of a tumultuous relationship, to live in an old house in rural Rhode Island. Within its walls she discovers an unfinished manuscript written by the house’s former tenant, an anthropologist obsessed with the ancient oak growing on a desolate corner of the property.
Tied to local legends of supernatural magic, as well as documented accidents and murders, the gnarled tree takes root in Sarah’s imagination, prompting her to write her own account of its unsavory history.
As the oak continues to possess her dreams and nearly almost all her waking thoughts, Sarah risks her health and her sanity to unearth a revelation planted centuries ago.
“Yes, of course, the dream was a nightmare. They are all nightmares now.”
The Nightmare Man – J.H. Markert
Psychological horror
Blackwood mansion looms, surrounded by nightmare pines, atop the hill over the small town of Crooked Tree.
Ben Bookman, bestselling novelist and heir to the Blackwood estate, spent a weekend at the ancestral home to finish writing his latest horror novel, The Scarecrow. Now, on the eve of the book’s release, the terrible story within begins to unfold in real life.
Detective Mills arrives at the scene of a gruesome murder: a family butchered and bundled inside cocoons stitched from corn husks, and hung from the rafters of a barn, eerily mirroring the opening of Bookman’s latest novel.
When another family is killed in a similar manner, Mills, along with his daughter, rookie detective Samantha Blue, is determined to find the link to the book – and the killer – before the story reaches its chilling climax.
“The dust jacket showed a scarecrow in the middle of a high school football field.”
Malice House – Megan Shepherd
Psychological horror
Of all the things aspiring artist Haven Marbury expected to find while clearing out her late father’s remote seaside house, Bedtime Stories for Monsters was not on the list.
This secret handwritten manuscript is disturbingly different from his Pulitzer-winning works: the interweaving short stories crawl with horrific monsters and enigmatic humans that exist somewhere between this world and the next. The stories unsettle but also entice Haven, practically compelling her to illustrate them while she stays in the house that her father warned her was haunted.
Reeling from a failed marriage, Haven hopes an illustrated Bedtime Stories can be the lucrative posthumous father-daughter collaboration she desperately needs to jump-start her art career. However, everyone in the nearby vacation town wants a piece of the manuscript: her father’s obsessive literary salon members, the Ink Drinkers; her mysterious yet charming neighbor, who has a tendency toward three a.m. bonfires; a young barista with a literary forgery business; and of course, whoever keeps trying to break into her house.
But when a monstrous creature appears under Haven’s bed right as grisly deaths are reported in the nearby woods, she must race to uncover dark, otherworldly family secrets, completely rewriting everything she ever knew about herself in the process.
“I never meant to find the manuscript, but maybe it meant to find me.”
Stoker’s Manuscript – Royce Prouty
Vampire horror
Joseph Barkeley has a gift. Without the aid of chemical testing, he can accurately determine the authenticity and age of any document, seeing details within the fibers the way a composer picks out the individual notes of a symphony. But rarely does Joseph get a job this delicate and well-paying. A mystery buyer has hired him to authenticate the original draft of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
When he travels to Transylvania to personally deliver the manuscript to the legendary Bran Castle, Barkeley, who is a Romanian orphan himself, soon realizes that his employer is the son of the infamous Vlad Dracula. Imprisoned in the castle and forced to serve “the Master,” Barkeley must quickly decipher cryptic messages hidden within Stoker’s masterpiece to find the Master’s long-lost bride or risk wearing out his welcome.
But as he digs into the history of Dracula and his own lineage, Barkeley discovers that his selection for this job was based on more than his talent with rare books. Now, he has a perilous decision to make: save his life with a coward’s flight, or wage a deadly battle with an ancient foe.
“No copies are to be made of your work, not a single page, and no pages are to be removed for chemical testing.”
That Which Should Not Be – Brett J. Talley
Supernatural horror
Miskatonic University has a long-whispered reputation of being strongly connected to all things occult and supernatural. From the faculty to the students, the fascination with other-worldly legends and objects runs rampant. So, when Carter Weston’s professor Dr. Thayerson asks him to search a nearby village for a book that is believed to control the inhuman forces that rule the Earth, Incendium Maleficarum, The Inferno of the Witch, the student doesn’t hesitate to begin the quest.
Weston’s journey takes an unexpected turn, however, when he ventures into a tavern in the small town of Anchorhead. Rather than passing the evening as a solitary patron, Weston joins four men who regale him with stories of their personal experiences with forces both preternatural and damned. Two stories hit close to home as they tie the tellers directly to Weston’s current mission.
His unanticipated role as passive listener proves fortuitous, and Weston fulfills his goal. Bringing the book back to Miskatonic, though, proves to be a grave mistake. Quickly, Weston realizes he has played a role in potentially opening the gate between the netherworld and the world of Man. Reversing the course of events means forgetting all he thought he knew about Miskatonic and his professor and embracing an unknown beyond his wildest imagination.
“The day has come, that day I always knew would, and my time is short. But I must protect the Book.”
The Book of Lost Things – John Connolly
YA fantasy horror
High in his attic bedroom, twelve-year-old David mourns the death of his mother, with only the books on his shelf for company. But those books have begun to whisper to him in the darkness.
Angry and alone, he takes refuge in his imagination and soon finds that reality and fantasy have begun to meld.
While his family falls apart around him, David is violently propelled into a world that is a strange reflection of his own, populated by heroes and monsters and ruled by a faded king who keeps his secrets in a mysterious book, The Book of Lost Things.
“Once upon a time – for that is how all stories should begin – there was a boy who lost his mother.”
The Bookshop from Hell – David Haynes
Supernatural horror
Dan Law enjoys horror.
He loves to read horror novels as a way to escape from his teaching job, from his loneliness, from the everyday dullness of life in Silver Lake. That’s what Dan lives for.
When a new bookstore opens in town, every visitor receives a free book of their own. A book that tells their own personal story, a story they have to follow to the brutal end.
As Silver Lake’s population descends into violent savagery, Dan finds he is no longer living for horror novels … he’s living inside one.
“He’d changed things, brought literature to life for them, educated them in the joys of a damned good book.”
The Overnight – Ramsey Campbell
Psychological horror
The bookstore’s shelves are put in order every night, but every morning, books are found lying all over the floor, many damp and damaged beyond repair. The store’s computers keep acting up, and even when the machines are off, they seem to glow with a spectral gray light.
Things soon go from bad to worse. A salesclerk abruptly loses his ability to read. One employee accuses another of making sexual advances. A hit-and-run in the parking lot claims a life. The security monitors display half-seen things crawling between the stacks.
Desperate to pass a company inspection, the manager musters his staff for an overnight inventory. When the last customers reluctantly depart, leaving almost-visible trails of slime shining behind them, the doors are locked, sealing the staff inside for a final orgy of shelving.
The damp, grey, silent things that have been lurking in the basement and hiding in the fog may move slowly, but they are inexorable. This bookstore is the doorway to a hell unlike any other.
The Strange Library – Haruki Murakami
Psychological horror novella
On his way home from school, the young narrator finds himself wondering how taxes were collected in the Ottoman Empire. He pops into the local library to see if it has a book on the subject. This is his first mistake.
Led to a special ‘reading room’ in a maze under the library by a strange old man, he finds himself imprisoned with a sheep man, who makes excellent donuts, and a girl, who can talk with her hands. His mother will be worrying why he hasn’t returned in time for dinner and the old man seems to have an appetite for eating small boy’s brains. How will he escape?
“All I did was go to the library to borrow some books.”
The Library of the Dead – Michael Bailey (editor)
Horror anthology
An anthology of literary fiction inspired by Chapel of the Chimes, a crematory and columbarium founded in 1909 in Oakland, California, and one of the area’s most beautiful historic buildings.
Thousands are entombed in golden books (urns) shelved from floor to ceiling in a glowing labyrinth of nearly countless rooms.
The stories within The Library of the Dead represent a few of those golden books, and when opened, reveal the stories of those inside.
Grasshands – Kyle Winkler
Dark fantasy horror
When overworked assistant Sylvia Hix finds a strange moss smothering the library books, there’s little to worry about. But when patrons start eating it, gaining direct knowledge of the books, then losing their minds, Sylvia has deep problems.
Moreover, her supervisor is a glue addict, her best friend Albert is growing into a giant, and Clara Gamelin, the Library Board Director, is shaping her to be the next ball busting head librarian. It is a job she does not want.
Sylvia is haunted by the moss, because it’s somehow connected to a horrific creature from her childhood. A creature she once named Grasshands and since forgotten. Stopping Grasshands from decaying the town’s mind, the library’s books, and the slow rot of time is the only job now available to her, whether she wants it or not.
“From the corner of her left eye, between her and the moss carpet, a large dark humanoid-shape shambled into view.”
The King in Yellow – Robert W. Chambers
Cosmic horror
The King in Yellow is a classic masterpiece of weird fiction.
This series of vaguely connected stories is linked by the presence of a monstrous and suppressed book which brings fright, madness and spectral tragedy to all those who read it.
An air of futility and doom pervade these pages like a sweet insidious poison. Dare you read it?
This collection has been called the most important book in American supernatural fiction between Poe and the moderns. H. P. Lovecraft, creator of the famed Cthulu mythos, whose own fiction was greatly influenced by this book stated that The King in Yellow achieves notable heights of cosmic fear.
“…I snatched the thing out of the coals and crept shaking to my bedroom, where I read it and reread it, and wept and laughed and trembled with a horror which at times assails me yet.”
Published: 17 April 2024
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