Here’s the thing about reading horror all day, every day: it takes a lot to actually scare me anymore.

I've built up a tolerance. The jump scares don't get me like they use to, the haunted houses feel like comfortable places, and the average creepy read just makes me nod approvingly and turn the page.

So when I tell you a book genuinely scared me, that it had me sleeping with the lights on like a kid again, I need you to understand the weight of that statement. These are the ones that got through my defenses. And now I’m recommending them to you!

But first, I had Luke Dumas on the podcast this week.

Luke is the author of A History of Fear, The Paleontologist, and his most recent release, Nothing Tastes as Good. He has quickly built a reputation for writing books that dig beneath the horror, exploring obsession, grief, identity, and belief, and the unsettling ways our minds can turn against us. His novels live in that uncomfortable space between what's real and what might be imagined, and the result is horror that feels both deeply scary and surprisingly human. In this episode, we go all the way back to the beginning, from his childhood obsession with Jurassic Park and the inappropriately adult horror movies his dad rented on weekends, to the five books and years of rejection that came before his debut finally sold in a single sleepless night. Luke opens up about writing religious trauma into A History of Fear as a gay man and an atheist, drawing on the eerie shadow of a walk through Edinburgh at night, and about the two competing voices behind Nothing Tastes as Good, a body-image horror that refuses easy answers about self-acceptance. He also gives us a first look at his upcoming action thriller We Don't Call Them Cages, a bloody, fast-paced day at the zoo he describes as his boyhood love of Jurassic Park rewritten for adults. It's a conversation about craft, discipline, and why he keeps coming back to the darker, edgier side of storytelling. I absolutely LOVED this conversation, and I hope you do too.

Watch the full episode here→

Listen on Spotify →

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Now for the scary book recommendations. Read at your own risk, and maybe not right before bed.

It's the little children. Okay? It is always the little children. I don't especially love kids in real life, and I love them even less when they're creepy and doing whatever they're doing in this book. Ahlborn writes a specific kind of slow, dawning dread that absolutely wrecked me. Terrifying.

Lots of creepy, crawly things and a real claustrophobic feeling that had me literally sweating. It lingers, is the thing, long after you've put it down. I highly, highly recommend it, but do go in knowing it is scary. (And if you love it, then go check up this episode of my podcast where I ask him why he would do this to me?)

I made a video recently about how this one traumatized me, and the number of people in my comments going "it isn't scary, it's funny" was genuinely alarming. So this is my formal follow-up question to those people: what, then, is scary to you? Asking so I know exactly which books to avoid for the rest of my life. A classic for a reason.

Chock full of scary, terrifying, haunted scenes that will live with me forever. That is my official, professional review. A haunted lighthouse, a bunch of adults who should have known better, and a creeping sense of doom. I loved every minute of being frightened by this book.

Everyone talks about Incidents Around the House when they talk about Malerman, and it's great, but I think Daphne is scarier. If you have anxiety or intrusive thoughts and a hard time wrangling your own brain (hi, it’s me), this book is genuinely horrific in the way it gets under your skin. It understood something about the inside of my head that I was not expecting.

Can we all just agree that if Nick Roberts writes it… IT’S GOING TO BE SCARY! I’m sure he’s a lovely person, but man can he write a novel filled with terror from beginning to end. I mean look at the cover. And it’s scarier inside the pages, I promise.

What's a book that actually scared you? And I mean actually, lights-on, check-the-closet scared. Reply and tell me, so I can add it to the pile and lose more sleep. It's what I do.

Host of Talking Horror Podcast