14 Reality Show Horror Book Recommendations
What would you do, how far would you go, for a big payday?
This selection of reality show horror books includes serial killers, hauntings, monsters, apocalypses, dystopian futures, and survival shows that, it turns out, are not all fun and games.
In these shows, elimination means more than just being removed from the competition.
All in the name of entertainment. All for the pleasure of the viewing public.
How strong is your survival instinct?
“In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes.”
– Andy Warhol
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Table of Contents
Slashtag - Jon Cohn
Haunted hotel reality show horror
Welcome to Slashtag, the most immersive horror reality competition series in history! Tag along as seven of America’s favorite celebrities step into the infamous Propitius Hotel, home to one of the most prolific serial killers in history – Arthur Wilson.
Arthur built and operated the Propitius Hotel from 1905 until 1928 when dozens of bodies were found in his hotel, along with countless hidden torture rooms throughout the hotel. Arthur disappeared, seemingly never to be caught. He then returned, nearly 40 years later, under the guise of a priest leading a congregation of 100 people back to his hotel, where he once again committed mass murder.
Tawny Howlett is a top-tier lifestyle influencer who is in the midst of the crappiest week of her life. Her brand new health drink turned out to be tainted, and now thousands of her followers want nothing more than to see her social media empire crumble. In order to rehabilitate her image, she’s agreed to take part in “Slashtag: The Ultimate Horror Experience”.
It’s all fun and games, until the team of seven celebs discover that the ghost is very real, and out for blood. To survive the three-day live-streamed event, the contestants must band together to try and send the spirit of Arthur Wilson straight to hell.
While Tawny has her hands full trying to survive a weekend at the Propitius Hotel, her younger sister is working from the outside to try and find a way to save her sister, and uncover the dark truth behind the TV network that continues to air the deaths of some of America’s top talent.
Together these seven doomed souls must solve the puzzles hidden within the hotel in order to vanquish the spirit of Arthur Wilson.
“Two hundred cameras. Seven celebrities. One haunted hotel.”
Hide - Kiersten White
Cosmic reality show horror
The challenge: Spend a week hiding in an abandoned amusement park and don’t get caught.
The prize: enough money to change everything.
Even though everyone is desperate to win – to seize a dream future or escape a haunted past – Mack is sure she can beat her competitors. All she has to do is hide, and she’s an expert at that.
It’s the reason she’s alive and her family isn’t.
But as the people around her begin disappearing one by one, Mack realizes that this competition is even more sinister than she imagined, and that together might be the only way to survive.
Fourteen competitors. Seven days. Everywhere to hide but nowhere to run.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
Battle Royale - Koushun Takami
Dystopian reality show horror
In a dystopian future Japan, forty-two junior high school students are outfitted with weapons and bid to kill one another until there is only one left standing.
A class of junior high school students is taken to a deserted island where, as part of a ruthless authoritarian program, they are provided arms and forced to kill until only one survivor is left standing.
“Loving someone always requires you to not love others.”
The Last One - Alexandra Oliva
Apocalypse reality show horror
It begins with a reality TV show.
Twelve contestants are sent into the woods to face challenges that will test the limits of their endurance. While they are out there, something terrible happens, but how widespread is the destruction, and has it occurred naturally or is it man-made?
Cut off from society, the contestants know nothing of it. When one of them, a young woman the show’s producers call Zoo, stumbles across the devastation, she can imagine only that it is part of the game.
Alone and disoriented, Zoo is heavy with doubt regarding the life, and husband, she left behind, but she refuses to quit. Staggering countless miles across unfamiliar territory, Zoo must summon all her survival skills and learn new ones as she goes.
But as her emotional and physical reserves dwindle, she grasps that the real world might have been altered in terrifying ways, and her ability to parse the charade will be either her triumph or her undoing.
“The first one on the production team to die will be the editor.”
Castaways - Brian Keene
Monster reality show horror
They came to the deserted island to compete on a popular reality television show. Each one hoped to be the last to leave. Now they’re just hoping to stay alive, because the island isn’t deserted after all.
Contestants are disappearing, but they aren’t being eliminated by the game. They’re being taken by the monstrous, half-human creatures that live deep in the jungle. The men will be slaughtered. The women will be kept alive as captives.
Night is falling, the creatures are coming, and rescue is so far away.
“Watching it on TV every week was very different than actually competing in the show.”
A Head Full of Ghosts - Paul Tremblay
Psychological reality show horror
The lives of the Barretts, a normal suburban New England family, are torn apart when fourteen-year-old Marjorie begins to display signs of acute schizophrenia.
To her parents’ despair, the doctors are unable to stop Marjorie’s descent into madness. As their stable home devolves into a house of horrors, they reluctantly turn to a local Catholic priest for help.
Father Wanderly suggests an exorcism; he believes the vulnerable teenager is the victim of demonic possession. He also contacts a production company that is eager to document the Barretts’ plight.
With John, Marjorie’s father, out of work for more than a year and the medical bills looming, the family agrees to be filmed, and soon find themselves the unwitting stars of The Possession, a hit reality television show. When events in the Barrett household explode in tragedy, the show and the shocking incidents it captures become the stuff of urban legend.
Fifteen years later, a bestselling writer interviews Marjorie’s younger sister, Merry. As she recalls those long ago events that took place when she was just eight years old, secrets and painful memories that clash with what was broadcast on television begin to surface.
“Has that much time really passed since we lived here?”
The Running Man - Stephen King
Dystopian reality show horror
Ben Richards is a desperate man.
With no job, no money, no way out, and a young daughter in need of proper medical attention, he must turn to the only possibility of striking it rich in this near-future dystopian America: participating in the ultraviolent TV programming of the government-sanctioned Games Network.
Ben soon finds himself selected as a contestant on the biggest and the best that the Games Network has to offer: The Running Man, a no-holds-barred thirty-day struggle to stay alive as public enemy number one, relentlessly hunted by an elite strike force bent on killing him as quickly as possible in front of an audience all too eager to see that happen. It means a billion dollars in prize money if he can live for the next month.
No one has ever survived longer than eight days. But desperation can push a person do things they never thought possible. And Ben Richards is willing to go the distance in this ultimate game of life and death.
“Tomorrow at noon, the hunt begins. Remember his face!”
The Island - Michael Bray
Creature reality show horror
The island is the largest man-made structure ever constructed.
Within its two-hundred-foot-high steel walls are savage dinosaurs created for one purpose. To hunt man. In addition, of those who are chosen to enter the island, only one can leave and claim the prize.
As television screens around the world tune in to watch, the six contestants form an uneasy alliance as they battle nightmarish beasts beyond comprehension.
When a secret is uncovered which could bring down the entire Lomar Corporation, the contestants find that some men are worse than monsters, and some corporations will stop at nothing to protect that which they tried so desperately to hide.
“Some things are worth killing for.”
Sole Survivor - Zachary Ashford
Survival reality show horror
An uninhabited island… Several hundred hidden cameras… Ten contestants who think they’re stranded… One man employed to thin their numbers… One predatory species determined to feed…
For the contestants of television’s latest prime-time reality show, the plane crash is a mere inconvenience on their way to fame and fortune.
Unfortunately, there’s no rescue coming. Instead, the producers have other ideas, like watching them find the island’s killer creatures for themselves… like watching them die.
Tune in and discover who will be the Sole Survivor!
“Outplay. Outlast. Outrun.”
Small Game - Blair Braverman
Survival reality show horror
Four strangers and six weeks: this is all that separates Mara from one life-changing payday. She was surprised when reality TV producers came knocking at Primal Instinct – the survival school where she teaches rich clients not to die during a night outdoors – and even more shocked to be cast in their new show, Civilization. Now she just has to live off the land with her fellow survivors for long enough to get the prize money.
Whisked by helicopter to an undisclosed location, Mara meets her teammates: The grizzled outdoorsman. The Eagle Scout. The white-collar professional. And Ashley, the beautiful but inexperienced one who just wants to be famous. Mara’s unusual, rugged childhood has prepared her for the discomforts and hard work ahead. But trusting her fellow survivors? Not part of Mara’s skill set.
When the cast wakes one morning to find something has gone horribly wrong, fear ripples through the group. Are the producers giving them an extra challenge? Or are they wrapped up in something more dangerous? Soon Mara and the others face terrifying decisions as “survival” becomes more than a game.
“The show was called Civilization. Their clothes were fast-fashion prehistoric, canvas tunics and matching shorts, all dyed a dusty brown.”
24/7 - Jim Brown
Survival reality show horror
On a small Caribbean island, a woman joins the newest reality TV show: 24/7.
For Dana Kirsten, winning the $2 million prize could mean saving her child’s life. But while the country watches her every move, Dana is entering a fight for her own life – and a conflict that will shake the world.
Vassa Island has been rigged with remote control cameras, a surveillance satellite system, and the most powerful television transmitter ever created. And that’s not all.
For a small fee, anyone with a computer can access any of the 638 cameras live twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week – and vote as twelve carefully chosen contestants struggle with each other and the island.
Only fifteen minutes into the first live broadcast, the show’s host and crew die a ghastly death. The shell-shocked contestants hear a voice echoing from hidden speakers: “I am Control, and this has just become the ultimate reality show.”
Suddenly the voice is hurtling the contestants through a maze of traps and macabre, individually designed puzzles. And when the world-wide audience votes one person off the island, it isn’t just a loss, it’s death.
With every day unveiling a new terror, and as one man from the outside races to crack the Vassa mystery, the only real way to win 24/7 is to find Control. And stop him. But Control has plans beyond the desert island, spinning a dark plot that could hold the entire world hostage in a grip of death.
“A contestant had dropped out because of illness. Dana was the new contestant, number twelve.”
How Much To..? – Matt Shaw
Extreme reality show horror – Book 1 of The Game
The Game is simple.
Each of the contestants are asked a question: how much to complete a certain task? They then have two minutes to name a price but if they go too high and their fellow contestants are cheaper, they have just priced themselves out of the game.
The trick is to go high enough to win a good amount of money but low enough to ensure you are the winner.
By the end of the bidding war, the person who is the cheapest contestant has to then go through, one by one, completing the tasks. No backing out allowed now…
But who is running this game? And more to the point – why?
“The subjects waiting for us… They don’t get a reprieve. If they win the bid, they have to do everything. Understand?”
Slashvivor! - Stephen Kozeniewski and Stevie Kopas
Dystopian slasher reality show horror
North America’s number one reality television show returns with instant fan favorite Dawn Churchill, a plucky, hometown girl from the irradiated ruins of the former United States. Will she survive the night in the electrified, booby-trapped arena or will one of the serial killers pitted against her come out on top?
Returning slashers include evil animatronic Abraham Lincoln, eight-year-old “Daughter of the Devil” Abadonna, and all-time undefeated champion Denney the Killer Clown. Plus surprise appearances by mad surgeon Doctor Feelbad, silver-tongued “Charming” Charlie Whitmore, and steel-clawed firebrand Razortooth.
A night of chills, thrills, and endless buckets of blood. A must-see for Dawn’s innovative use of a shotgun alone. Fun for the whole family!
“From the ruins of Vancouver to the Cuban Keys, from the Allied Texas Republic to the Irradiated Plains, welcome back, ladies and gents, to the most popular show on the continent.”
Serial Publication - Andrew Adams
Serial killer reality show horror
Serial killer and media darling Charles Proctor becomes the subject of his own reality show alongside unwilling homicide detective Erin Underwood.
Designed as a pay-per-view event for Charles to detail his every murder and give the locations of missing bodies, he begins to take control of the spotlight and reveal the locations of new victims live on air.
The police department is sent scrambling to stop the latest string of deaths as the public and viewing audience devours Charles’ every word.
Welcome to 2031, where the need for constant entertainment outweighs the implications of watching innocents die.
“A shocking amount of her job is performed at home on this humongous screen in the living room, something much of the general population already adopted in some form or another throughout the last decade.”
Published: 13 July 2024
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