r/horrorlit · 2025

Most-mentioned books in r/horrorlit during 2025

This page ranks books by exact tracked mentions in r/horrorlit within the published source unit for 2025. Counts come from the reconciled subreddit-by-month matrix; a source unit may be a bounded sample.

144

Books ranked

15,751

Tracked mentions in 2025

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.

1,181 in 2025

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.

1,128 in 2025

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.

883 in 2025

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.

775 in 2025

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.

748 in 2025

The Troop

Nick Cutter

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

659 in 2025

'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.

620 in 2025

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.

607 in 2025

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.

564 in 2025

#10

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.

543 in 2025

#11

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.

509 in 2025

#12

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.

444 in 2025

#13

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.

422 in 2025

#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.

408 in 2025

#15

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.

403 in 2025

#16

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.

391 in 2025

#17

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Shirley Jackson

Two sisters and their uncle live alone in a big house because the rest of the family died from arsenic in the sugar bowl.

375 in 2025

#18

Flowers for Algernon

Daniel Keyes

Charlie Gordon's IQ triples after experimental brain surgery, then the same surgery begins failing, and he narrates his own decline in real time.

372 in 2025

#19

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.

368 in 2025

#20

NOS4A2

Joe Hill

A woman with a bike that finds lost things rides straight into a man who steals children to a place called Christmasland.

366 in 2025

#21

The Hellbound Heart

Clive Barker

A man opens a puzzle box looking for pleasure beyond imagining and summons the Cenobites instead, who are happy to oblige.

343 in 2025

#22

Let the Right One In

John Ajvide Lindqvist

A bullied twelve-year-old in a frozen Stockholm suburb befriends the strange new kid next door, who needs blood, not friendship.

334 in 2025

#23

Rosemary's Baby

Ira Levin

A pregnant woman in a Manhattan apartment building slowly realizes her neighbors, and possibly her husband, have plans for the baby.

303 in 2025

#24

Ghost Story

Peter Straub

Four old men in a small town swap ghost stories at a private club, not knowing one of them is about to come true.

293 in 2025

#25

11/22/63

Stephen King

A substitute teacher steps through a diner's storeroom into 1958 with one job: stop Lee Harvey Oswald before Dallas.

215 in 2025