Welcome to The Backlist, where The A.V. Club dives into recent older book releases that deserve their moment in the sun.
One of the key lessons of horror fiction is often that there’s nothing scarier than real life. Even in stories that feature grotesque creatures, malevolent spirits, and final girls, the monstrousness of the human heart is often home to the most frightening darkness of all. And nowhere is that more prevalent than in historical horror stories, which often mine real-life tragedies for dark inspiration, adding supernatural elements that most frequently illuminate the flaws of the humans involved.
This edition of The Backlist delves into some of the best recent examples of well-done historical horror, stories that not only reimagine the causes of particularly grisly or mysterious events we’re all still struggling to understand but use the specificity of their settings to amp up the dread and tension to almost unbearable levels.
The Hunger by Alma Katsu (2018)
Let’s face it, the real-life history of the Donner Party is grisly enough to be considered a horror story in its own right, long before any potentially supernatural elements enter the mix. But after reading The Hunger, you’ll probably wonder why no one had written a similar reimagining before it. Katsu takes the facts we know from the historical record and deftly fills in the gaps with both human failings and unseen dark threats. There are many kinds of monsters in this story, from the travelers guarding uncomfortable secrets and running from dark problems to the sinister force that seems to lurk on the edges of the caravan. Mutilated corpses, rumors of demons, and a potentially supernatural illness all add tension to the book’s steadily growing sense of dread as the group moves ever closer to the location that will one day be known as the Donner Pass.
Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman (2012/2026)
Originally published in 2012, Christopher Buehlman’s Between Two Fires is having a moment thanks to the success of his fantasy series The Blacktongue Thief. (It also got a fancy deluxe reissue, which certainly helped.) But it’s also because the story is outstanding: Grim, atmospheric, and uncomfortably realistic, it blends real-life history with medieval religious horror and a dash of dark fantasy for good measure.
Set in 14th-century France at the height of the Black Death, it follows Thomas, a disgraced, excommunicated knight, and Delphine, a young orphan girl who experiences prophetic visions and hears the voices of angels. Convinced that an all-out cosmic battle between Heaven and Hell is brewing, Delphine convinces Thomas to shepherd her to the Pope in Avignon across a desolate landscape full of nightmarish creatures and desperate people who have either shut themselves away from the world or turned on one another to survive. Buehlman vividly recreates the bleak landscape of post-plague Europe and wrestles with complicated questions of faith, doubt, and moral decay.
Andersonville by Edward M. Erdelac (2015)
The largest Confederate military prison during the Civil War, the real Andersonville was notorious for its poor conditions, rampant disease, and overcrowding, which led to many deaths. Erdelac’s novel takes these already nightmarish horrors and adds a disturbing supernatural layer, which includes everything from secret societies, demons, and dark magic to an ancient evil fed by the suffering of those within the camp’s walls.
Andersonville centers on Barclay Lourdes, a Black man posing as a Union soldier who arrives at the prison on a secret mission to document the war crimes being committed by the Confederates. What he finds there is, of course, nightmarish, and that’s before he realizes that sinister forces are almost certainly responsible for the camp’s elevated body count. As the truth slowly unravels, Erdelac deftly balances increasing scope of the story’s supernatural threat without minimizing or devaluing the real-life misery and violence suffered by those held prisoner at the site.
The Terror by Dan Simmons (2007)
Humans are as monstrous as anything supernatural in this reimagining of the story of Britain’s lost Franklin expedition, in which the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror become trapped in Arctic pack ice during a search for the Northwest Passage in 1845. All 129 crew members died, most likely from some combination of starvation, exposure, scurvy, exposure, and lead poisoning.
Simmons adds a more monstrous twist as the crew is relentlessly stalked by a murderous fictional creature called the Tuunbaq. Resembling a massive polar bear and modeled on Inuit mythology, the monster is still not the scariest thing in this story, which primarily focuses on the breakdown of civilization among the men, who turn to violence, mutiny, and even cannibalism to survive. Clocking in at over 800 pages, this immersive slow-burn delves into the minutiae of maritime life and Arctic exploration even as dread about the group’s situation slowly mounts.
Thin Air by Michelle Paver (2016)
Lots of historical horror is really about adding some pointedly uncomfortable and possibly supernatural dread to an already tense and frightening situation. And Michelle Paver’s Thin Air has all of those things in spades. A ghost story that wrestles with class divides and the ever-present evil in men’s hearts, it’s a tale bursting with atmosphere and truly impressive descriptions of its settings’ cold and brutal physical conditions.
Set in 1935, the story focuses on a group of men attempting to summit Kangchenjunga, the world’s third-highest mountain and one of its deadliest. Following in the footsteps of a group whose climb went badly awry some thirty years prior, things are uneasy from the start when the men are warned off the journey by the previous expedition’s lone survivor. As the trek continues and high-altitude sickness, exhaustion, and the intense isolation of the experience weigh on everyone, it becomes apparent that something more sinister is going on and a secret that has been long buried under the ice isn’t as hidden as it once was.
Dread Nation by Justina Ireland (2018)
Historical horror with a heavy dose of speculative fiction thrown in, Dread Nation is set in a version of the United States where the Civil War was abruptly derailed when the dead started to rise and walk after the Battle Of Gettysburg. A fragile truce is forged in the face of this new threat, but what follows is a very different kind of Reconstruction, where Black and Indigenous youth are sent to specialized combat schools to learn to fight the undead and protect the well-to-do. The story follows Jane, a student at Miss Preston’s School of Combat in Baltimore, who longs to return home to her native Kentucky, but finds herself sent West after a run-in with the city’s corrupt mayor. Sinister secrets and a deft exploration of racial oppression unfold in this alternate-history America.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones (2025)
A historical horror novel that wrestles with some of America’s bloodiest and most shameful history, the story initially follows a junior professor in 2012 who finds a diary composed by her great-great-great-grandfather, a Lutheran minister who lived on the Western frontier a hundred years earlier. Arthur’s writings contain the strange story of a Blackfeet warrior named Good Stab, who recounts being bitten by a bizarre creature who endowed him with supernatural powers and an unquenchable thirst for blood. But Jones’ story is something more than a simple vampire Western, forthrightly depicting the horrors of the conflict between the West’s Indigenous inhabitants and those who came to colonize their land (the real-life Marias Massacre is a plot point). Like most of this particular author’s work, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter weaves Blackfeet language and history throughout its dark slow-burn tale, which, everyone should be aware, is extremely gory.
Keep scrolling for more great stories.