What if Titanic, but a horror story? That’s basically the gist of Alma Katsu’s The Deep, which infuses not one, but two real-life maritime disasters with a creepy supernatural finish. Katsu’s historical horror stories, which include titles like The Hunger and The Fervor, are deeply researched affairs that contain enough historical fact to make the supernatural feel possible.
Told across alternating timelines, the story follows Annie Hebbley as she works as a maid on the Titanic in 1912 and, then, four years later, serves as a nurse on its sister ship, the Britannic, during World War I. Both vessels are plagued by mysterious events: Unexplained singing, strange voices, disappearances, compulsions, attempted suicides, even deaths. The question of what’s causing them is one the novel slowly unravels, even as it encourages us to question how much of Annie’s story we should believe. Multiple POVs add depth and some interesting cross-class nuance about the experience of being aboard both ships, and the story is propulsive enough to make up for the fact that we already know how it all ends.
The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher
Recommendation for: staff writer Matt Schimkowitz
Guidelines: Faves include The Lord Of The Rings, The Exorcist, and pulpy detective mysteries. Open to anything, really. Still looking for the right Stephen King title to understand the hype. (Not The Shining or The Stand.)
Runner-up rec: The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger by Stephen King. Though it includes supernatural and some horror-adjacent elements, it really is its own high-concept fantasy/Western/apocalyptic nightmare fusion thing.
If I can find a way to recommend a T. Kingfisher book, that is an opportunity I am always going to take. As an author, her work tends to go in one of two directions: delicate, dark-edged fantasy (Nettle & Bone, Thornhedge) or weird, eerie horror. The Hollow Places falls firmly in the latter category, but keeps much of the whimsical feel and witty prose that colors almost all of her books, no matter how dark the subject matter gets.
The story follows the newly divorced Kara, who returns to her hometown of Hog Chapel, North Carolina, to live with a kindly uncle who runs an establishment full of oddities called the Glory To God Museum Of Natural Wonders, Curiosities And Taxidermy. There, she discovers a hole in the wall that leads to another dimension that feels like Narnia crossed with Pan’s Labyrinth and is populated by disturbing Lovecraftian creatures known only as the They. A novel that blends the cosmically fantastical with the straight-up terrifying and deeply human, it’s deeply weird and wonderful.
Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre by Max Brooks
Recommendation for: film critic Monica Castillo
Guidelines: Faves include All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers and The Thing
Runner-up rec: More of a bonus, really: “The Things”, a short story by Peter Watts that retells The Thing from the alien organism’s perspective.
The author of World War Z does Bigfoot in this survival horror story about a remote “off the grid” community populated by high-tech elites that finds itself cut off from civilization when Mout Rainer erupts. But not only do Greenloop’s residents have to deal with a lack of internet and the fact that their smart homes suddenly don’t work anymore, but the volcanic activity has also displaced a clan of hungry Sasquatches, who are apparently none too happy about the humans suddenly in their midst.
Told via news transcripts and surviving diary entries from a woman named Kate who lived in Greenloop, Devolution sees the group struggle with plenty of problems related to daily living (food hoarding, solar panels covered in volcanic ash, typical petty neighborhood infighting) before the rampaging Bigfoots arrive. Brooks’ prose is peppered wth smart observations and social criticisms about everything from our collective overreliance on technology to those performative “back to nature types” who never seem to actually go outside.
Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker
Recommendation for: news editor Drew Gillis
Guidelines: Faves include The Last Samurai and Madame Bovary. Not a super horror fan but recently enjoyed Carrying. Open to most things.
Runner-up rec: Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White. This dystopian horror story focuses on a young trans boy who flees the cult that raised him, but not until after he was injected with a serum meant to turn him into a living bioweapon capable of ending the world. Capital D-dark but furious, fascinating, and really different from a lot of what’s out there.
Told across dual, occasionally intersecting timelines, this lush and disturbing ghost story follows a 21st-century college student on the run from a crime he doesn’t remember committing and a 19th-century samurai hiding from imperial guards after her father’s return from the failed Satsuma Rebellion. The catch: They’re in the same house, and a portal through the closet in their bedroom connects their separate times. And something sinister is lurking under its floorboards.
As the two discover the ways in which the past and present are inexplicably tied together, there are plenty of creepy supernatural elements, some significant psychological tension, and a bit more graphic gore than you might expect from a story with the word gothic in the title. But its atmosphere is truly unique, and it’s intriguing without being too scary.
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