The frightening season doesn’t finish on November 1st for horror aficionados. You may start getting ready to be spooked all year long by adding some of the fantastic horror books that are coming out in 2025 to your must-read list. These are some of the most anticipated horror books that will be available on your shelves starting in January, ranging from debut novels to new thrillers from your favorite authors! Here are 8 most anticipated horror of 2025.
Witchcraft for Wayward Girls
Grady Hendrix
They call them wayward girls. Loose girls. Girls who grew up too fast. And they’re sent to Wellwood House in St. Augustine, Florida, where unwed mothers are hidden by their families to have their babies in secret, to give them up for adoption, and most important of all, to forget any of it ever happened.
Fifteen-year-old Fern arrives at the home in the sweltering summer of 1970, pregnant, terrified and alone. Under the watchful eye of the stern Miss Wellwood, she meets a dozen other girls in the same predicament.
Release Date: January 14, 2025
The Staircase in the Woods
Chuck Wendig
A group of friends investigates the mystery of a strange staircase in the woods in this mesmerizing horror novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Accidents. Five high school friends are bonded by an oath to protect one another no matter what. Then, on a camping trip in the middle of the forest, they find something extraordinary: a mysterious staircase to nowhere. One friend walks up—and never comes back down. Then the staircase disappears. Twenty years later, the staircase has reappeared. Now the group returns to find the lost boy—and what lies beyond the staircase.
Release Date: April 29, 2025
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
Stephen Graham Jones
A chilling historical horror novel set in the American west in 1912 following a Lutheran priest who transcribes the life of a vampire who haunts the fields of the Blackfeet reservation looking for justice. A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor is discovered within a wall. What it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to 217 Blackfeet dead in the snow.
Told in transcribed interviews by a Blackfeet named Good Stab, who shares the narrative of his peculiar life over a series of confessional visits. This is an American Indian revenge story.
Release Date: March 18, 2025
At Dark, I Become Loathsome
Eric LaRocca
A single line of text, glowing in the darkness of the internet. Written by Ashley Lutin, who has often thought the same—and worse—in the years since his wife died and his young son disappeared. But the peace of the grave is not for him—it’s for those he can help. Ashley has constructed a peculiar ritual for those whose desire to die is at war with their yearning to live a better life.
Struggling to overcome his own endless grief, one night Ashley finds connection with Jinx—a potential candidate for Ashley’s next ritual—who spins a tale both revolting and fascinating.
Release Date: January 28, 2025
When the Wolf Comes Home
Nat Cassidy
One night, Jess, a struggling actress, finds a five-year-old runaway hiding in the bushes outside her apartment. After a violent, bloody encounter with the boy’s father, she and the boy find themselves running for their lives.
As they attempt to evade the boy’s increasingly desperate father, Jess slowly comes to a horrifying understanding of the butchery that follows them―the boy can turn his every fear into reality.
And when the wolf finally comes home, no one will be spared.
Release Date: April 22, 2025
The Haunting of Room 904
Erika T. Wurth
Olivia Becente was never supposed to have the gift. The ability to commune with the dead was the specialty of her sister, Naiche. But when Naiche dies unexpectedly and under strange circumstances, somehow Olivia suddenly can’t stop seeing and hearing from spirits.
A few years later, she’s the most in-demand paranormal investigator in Denver. She’s good at her job, but the loss of Naiche haunts her. That’s when she hears from the Brown Palace, a landmark Denver hotel. The owner can’t explain it, but every few years, a girl is found dead in room 904.
Release Date: March 18, 2025
Black Flame
Gretchen Felker-Martin
Ellen, a deeply closeted lesbian spends all her time in solitude, restoring films at a failing archive in 1980s New York City. When a group of German academics present her with a print of an infamous exploitation film believed to have been destroyed during the Holocaust, Ellen finds herself forced to confront her own repressed sexuality. And the more she works on the restoration, the more obsessed she becomes with its depictions of occult practices and queer debauchery.
She’s soon convinced that the depraved acts portrayed in the film are not fiction, but reality. And that they’re happening to her.
Release Date: August 5, 2025
Blood on Her Tongue
Johanna van Veen
The Netherlands, 1887. Lucy’s twin sister Sarah is unwell. She refuses to eat, mumbles nonsensically, and is increasingly obsessed with a centuries-old corpse recently discovered on her husband’s grand estate. The doctor has diagnosed her with temporary insanity caused by a fever of the brain. To protect her twin from a terrible fate in a lunatic asylum, Lucy must unravel the mystery surrounding her sister’s condition, but it’s clear her twin is hiding something. Then again, Lucy is harboring secrets of her own, too.
Then, the worst happens. Sarah’s behavior takes a turn for the strange. She becomes angry… and hungry.
Release Date: March 25, 2025