Subreddit

Top books from r/horrorlit

r/horrorlit is Reddit's main subreddit for discussing and recommending horror literature - novels, novellas, and short fiction, as distinct from horror film.

Updated August 2026 — rankings refresh with each new pull of comment data.

148

Books ranked

32,590

Published mentions

sum of exact per-book subreddit rows

608k

Members

Years tracked

About this ranking

Blood Meridian (93 mentions) and House of Leaves (85) lead here, and neither tops any other fiction sub on the site: r/printSF crowns Hyperion, r/Fantasy Gardens of the Moon, r/suggestmeabook Project Hail Mary. Below them the shelf is unmistakably genre - Pet Sematary (76), The Troop (55), A Head Full of Ghosts (53), The Fisherman (48), then 'Salem's Lot and The Terror at 45 apiece. This is a readership that files Cormac McCarthy and Mark Z. Danielewski under horror, and that votes King's mid-list up - Pet Sematary and 'Salem's Lot over The Shining, which lands at 25 - rather than his blockbusters. The taste runs bleak, bodily, and slow-dread literary over jump-scare paperback. One caveat on the numbers: these counts come from a partial sample of 2024-2025 threads (the most recent ~120 pages per year, min score 2), so they reflect current r/horrorlit consensus rather than a full multi-year tally.

By year

2025 2024

Most-mentioned in r/horrorlit

Ordered by tracked mention count across all published years. Sentiment is shown as context and does not change the order. The Upvotes toggle re-sorts by comment-score weight — display only, the canonical order stays mention-count.

Sort by upvotes = sum of comment scores on recognized mentions

Pet Sematary

Stephen King

A father buries his toddler in an ancient burial ground that brings the dead back wrong, then digs him up anyway.

2,392 in this sub positive

House of Leaves

Mark Z. Danielewski

A found manuscript describes a house whose hallway is bigger inside than the house itself, and its footnotes start unraveling the man reading them.

2,308 in this sub mixed

The Haunting of Hill House

Shirley Jackson

Four strangers spend the summer in a house built wrong on purpose, and one of them stops being sure which noises are real.

1,769 in this sub positive

The Only Good Indians

Stephen Graham Jones

Four Blackfeet men who broke a hunting taboo a decade ago get hunted back, one at a time, on the reservation and off it.

1,471 in this sub mixed

Between Two Fires

Christopher Buehlman

A disgraced knight and a mute girl walk across a France gutted by plague and demons, looking for one town God hasn't given up on yet.

1,470 in this sub positive

'Salem's Lot

Stephen King

A vampire methodically empties a small Maine town house by house, and Stephen King spends four hundred pages making sure you know every one of its residents first.

1,413 in this sub positive

A Head Full of Ghosts

Paul Tremblay

A family invites reality-TV cameras into their home to film their teenage daughter's possession, and nobody agrees on what those cameras actually caught.

1,393 in this sub positive

The Troop

Nick Cutter

Four Boy Scouts and their troop leader get stranded on an island with a starving stranger carrying an engineered parasite.

1,317 in this sub positive

Books of Blood

Clive Barker

Clive Barker opens with 'the dead have highways' and spends six volumes proving horror prose can be gorgeous and grotesque in the same sentence.

1,230 in this sub positive

#10

The Fisherman

John Langan

Two grieving widowers go fishing at a spot locals call Dutchman's Creek, and find out exactly why nobody else fishes there.

1,073 in this sub positive

#11

The Exorcist

William Peter Blatty

A washed-up priest and an aging exorcist face down whatever has taken over a twelve-year-old girl in a Georgetown townhouse.

1,042 in this sub positive

#12

Blood Meridian

Cormac McCarthy

A teenage drifter joins a scalp-hunting militia across the Texas-Mexico borderlands, led by a hairless giant who may not be entirely human.

1,033 in this sub positive

#13

Heart-Shaped Box

Joe Hill

An aging rock star buys a dead man's suit off the internet as a joke, and the ghost sewn into it comes to collect.

878 in this sub positive

#14

The Terror

Dan Simmons

Franklin's crew abandons two ice-locked ships in the Arctic while something unseen in the dark hunts them one by one.

825 in this sub positive

#15

The Shining

Stephen King

A recovering alcoholic takes his family to caretake an empty hotel for the winter, and the hotel starts caretaking him back.

822 in this sub positive

#16

The Ruins

Scott Smith

Four tourists follow a map to a Mayan ruin looking for a missing friend and find a hill covered in vines that can imitate a ringing phone.

807 in this sub positive

#17

Mexican Gothic

Silvia Moreno-Garcia

A young socialite travels to a remote Mexican mansion to check on her newly married cousin and finds the walls, and the family living inside them, aren't done growing.

796 in this sub mixed