Recs if you like Lone Women...

horror books with a queer focus, including queer stories and central characters

are you sick of being recommended stephen king when you ask for a horror novel? have you picked up a book expected to be scared, but the scariest thing about it was a woman being needlessly tormented and gaslit? have you read 4627473 books about a man in a haunted house and need something different?

if so, this list is for you :)

a masterlist of horror by anyone who isn't a straight cis white man, started in 2022 and brought to pb in 2026.

in progress

Basically, a huge list of every book I ever heard features sapphic characters.

I have not read all of these, so I cannot be sure of the amount of the time on page of the sapphic characters or of the quality of the books.

Some of these I do not plan to read at all, since they are not my style. If you feel like a book doesn't belong here, let me know.

For my favs / read, check out my other lists & shelves.

Open to suggestions for more titles.

Don't shoot the messenger.

horror fiction from Black authors featuring Black characters

Westerns mixed with horror, sci-fi, and/or fantasy

Historical horror fantasy because I like to be self-indulgent :) Feel free to recommend some!

Here's every book so far from BOTM's monthly shortlist since February 2015 for anyone who wants to read them all like I do!

If we are going to do Qwordy's the Hardest Reading Challenge You'll Ever Do 3.0 - we should probably get some Pagebound badges along the way! I'm specifically going to be adding books from Quests and readalongs that I think matches at least one of these cover prompts: craft, food, motion, biomes/landscapes, animals, weather.

Everything under the high sun, from monsters and mayhem to hauntings and sorrow set across the hot, dry plains of the West. This collection spans from pure horror to the horror-adjacent found in both new printings and older classics.

aka most of the horror I read. Titles on this list are low on gore, body horror, or anything else you'd consider "scary" in the traditional sense. Instead, they focus on atmosphere and eerie vibes to create a horror experience that doesn't need to be shocking to be effective.

Books to read if you enjoyed the movie "Sinners", and would like more culturally rich black and poc stories full of (white) things going bump in the night, to the tune of the saxophones growing ever louder.

Love casts a spell; the real monster is oppression. Modern magical realism, urban fantasy, and fabulism: books that use supernatural elements to explore themes of family, desire, history, and society.

Westerns with a fantastical spin to them- whether it be monsters, magic or supernatural elements. If you have any suggestions, leave them in the comments!

one of my favorite themes across genres - you have to believe in the worst of humanity in order to also believe in it's best

Created from the list on Goodreads by Cybil and Sadie Hartmann (September 29, 2025)

It’s always nice to feel like a normal person by reading about those more unhinged than you 😌 These are all women focused books. Some I’ve read and some I’m going to read. Apologies in advance if it gets long. Recommendations are absolutely welcome!! So please feel free.

I know a couple are written by men which might be taboo for some but I’ve included because I thought they were appropriate or the author has a track record of writing women well.

A blend of traditional frontier tales with horror, fantasy, and/or science fiction elements