Historical Horror Fiction

1851, Angel Meadow Asylum. Dr. Rutherford, principal physician to the insane, is found dead, his head bashed in, his ears cut off, his lips and eyes stitched closed. The police direct their attention towards Angel Meadow's inmates, but to Jem Flockhart and Will Quartermain the crime is an act of calculated retribution, rather than of madness. To discover the truth Jem and Will must pursue the story through the darkest corners of the city.

In the old South, a haint was a ghost or evil spirit. George Haint, originally begun by Helen Diessner in 2012, takes us into the most unusual ghost story you will probably ever hear. It is not only a ghost story but a short story of murder most foul and takes place in the mid-1800s, in the Virginia City, Nevada, area during the gold- and silver-mining days. The story contains a lot of local history of the area.

In this wry take on the post-apocalyptic horror novel, a pandemic has devastated the planet. The plague has sorted humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead. Now the plague is receding, and Americans are busy rebuild­ing civilization under orders...

In 1886, a respectable young woman must acquire a husband. But Violet Pring does not want to marry. She longs to be a professional artist and live on her own terms. When her scheming mother secures a desirable marriage proposal from an eligible Brighton gentleman for her, Violet protests. Her family believes she is deranged and deluded, so she is locked away in Hillwood Grange Lunatic Asylum against her will. In her new cage, Violet faces an even greater challenge: she must escape the clutches of a sinister and formidable doctor and set herself free.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From the bestselling author of Mexican Gothic and Velvet Was the Night comes a lavish historical drama reimagining of The Island of Doctor Moreau set against the backdrop of nineteenth-century Mexico. “This is historical science fiction at its best: a dreamy...

Dark Adventure Radio Theatre presents Robert E. Howard's tale of horrors in Eastern Europe in a 1930s-style radio drama. Charlie Tower seeks refuge from the horrors of the Great War in Berlin's most notorious nightclubs. There a chain of events is set in motion that will lead him across Europe to investigate the mysterious Black Stone. Is it merely a creation of superstitious peasants, or is it a nexus for hideous gods of the ancient world to set foot into ours?

December 1703 finds Berry Grigsby living as Mary Lynn Nash in a small English village where she has fallen victim to Professor Fell's involuntary drug experiments. Her mind is quickly deteriorating under the drug’s influence, and the only way to save her is a potion book that was stolen in an attack on the village orchestrated by a mysterious madman going by the name Cardinal Black. Matthew Corbett has volunteered to travel with Julian Devane, a self-proclaimed "fool and bad man" in the employ of Professor Fell, to hunt down the potion book.

The story opens with our newly married protagonists, Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam Darcy, defending their village from an army of flesh-eating unmentionables. But the honeymoon has barely begun when poor Mr. Darcy is nipped by a rampaging dreadful. Elizabeth knows the proper course of action is to promptly behead her husband (and then burn the corpse, just to be safe). But when she learns of a miracle antidote under development in London, she realizes there may be one last chance to save her true love.

Shirley Jackson's chilling second novel, based on her own experiences and an actual mysterious disappearance Seventeen-year-old Natalie Waite longs to escape home for college. Her father is a domineering and egotistical writer who keeps a tight rein on Natalie and her long-suffering mother. When...

It started the night journalist Briar Thorne’s mother died in their rambling old mansion on Chicago’s South Side. The nightmares of a woman in white pleading to come home, music switched on in locked rooms, and the panicked fear of being swallowed by the dark…Bri has almost convinced herself that these stirrings of dread are simply manifestations of grief and not the beyond-world of ghostly impossibilities her mother believed in. And more tangible terrors still lurk outside the decaying Victorian greystone.

Aged Mother Jilo is wise in the ways of magic...but once upon a time, she was just a girl. 1950s Georgia: King Cotton has fallen. Savannah is known as the "beautiful woman with a dirty face," its stately elegance faded by neglect, its soul withering from racial injustice and political corruption. Young Jilo - fiercely independent, intelligent, and ambitious, but thwarted by Savannah's maddeningly genteel version of bigotry - finds herself forced to embrace a dark power that has pursued her family for generations, an ancient magic that may prove her salvation.

In the spring of 1912, American writer Arthur Pearce is reeling from the wounds inflicted by a disastrous marriage. But his plans to travel abroad, write a new novel, and forget about his ex-wife are interrupted by a young woman he encounters on a London-bound train. Her name is Sarah Coyle, and the tale she tells him chills his blood. Sarah’s younger sister has been entranced by Count Richard Dunning, who is rumored to dabble in bizarre religious rites and experimental medicine. Arthur agrees to help, but he has no idea of what awaits him at Altarbook, Sarah’s ancestral mansion

In the wake of their Aunt Amity's suicide, Scott and Madeline Madden are summoned to Caveat, the eerie, decaying mansion in the Hollywood hills in which they were raised. But their decadent and reclusive cousins, the malicious wheelchair-bound Claimayne and his sister, Ariel, do not welcome Scott and Madeline's return to the childhood home they once shared. While Scott desperately wants to go back to their shabby South-of-Sunset lives, he cannot pry his sister away from this haunted "House of Usher in the Hollywood Hills" that is a conduit for the supernatural.

Anna Fort wants to be a supportive wife, even if that means accompanying her husband for the winter of 1918 to a remote, frozen island estate so he can finish his book as the guest of an eccentric millionaire. When she learns three girls are missing from a school run by their host, Anna realizes finding them is up to her—even if that means risking her husband’s career, and possibly her life.

A Kirkus Editor’s Pick A Most Anticipated Book of 2025: Cowboys & Indians | Brit + Co | Debutiful Most Anticipated Book of 2025 “With amazing dexterity, Aaron John Curtis’s moving debut novel, Old School Indian, combines raucous humor with respect for ancestral traditions.”...

Phee St. Margaret is a daughter of the Reconstruction, born to a family of free Black business owners in New Charleston. Coddled to within an inch of her life by a mother who refuses to let her daughter live a life other than the one she dictates, Phee yearns to demonstrate she's capable of more than simply marrying well. When word arrives that her Aunt Cleo, long estranged from the family, has passed away, Phee risks her mother's wrath to step up and accept the role of pomp—the highly honored duty of planning the funeral service.

1903. A darkness has descended on London. A series of grisly murders are uncovered, trophies taken, bodies arranged and soon there are whispers of Jack the Ripper’s return. A new client arrives at Baker Street seeking Sherlock Holmes’s help: Dr. Jekyll claims his friend has been wrongfully accused of the hideous crimes, a friend called Mr. Edward Hyde, whose very existence relies on a potion administered by the doctor himself. But the case becomes more complicated, more unsettling than simply proving Mr. Hyde’s innocence.

Winter 1862, London. Adelaide McKee, a former prostitute, arrives on the doorstep of veterinarian John Crawford, a man she met once seven years earlier. Their brief meeting produced a child who, until now, had been presumed dead. McKee has learned that the girl lives - but that her life and soul are in mortal peril from a vampiric ghost. But this is no ordinary spirit; the bloodthirsty wraith is none other than John Polidori, the onetime physician to the mad, bad, and dangerous Romantic poet Lord Byron.

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER A Washington Post Best Book of the Year A luxurious African safari turns deadly for a Hollywood starlet and her entourage in this riveting historical thriller from the New York Times bestselling author of The Flight Attendant. "The best possible combination of...

The fourth of Joan Grant's Far Memory novels, Lord of the Horizon, the sequel to Eyes of Horus, is set in Egypt at the close of the dark XIth dynasty and is a profound commentary on the power of fear and the unlimited ability of light to shatter it. Lord of the Horizon is the story of Ra-ab Hotep, heir to the Nomarch of the Oryx. Ra-ab is 21 as the story begins. The dawn for which Ra-ab and the Watchers of the Horizon fought in Eyes of Horus has come, but to "Send Fear into Exile", as the Watchers' password promised, proves difficult.