The end of December, when a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of end-of-year roundups of things. 2022 has been a great year for horror in general, but also for me personally. Late in 2021, I decided I was going back to my roots, reading-wise — horror fiction was my first love growing up, and though my taste in fiction includes other genres, horror has always compelled me the most. So at the beginning of 2022, I resolved to start devouring as much as I reasonably could, with an eye toward indie authors and small press. In fact, I think I only read one “big” horror novel this year: Stephen King’s REVIVAL (which was a perfectly good time).
I also wanted to lean into more LGBTQ+ authors, particularly trans authors, and that journey has been extremely rewarding. I found several new favorite authors between last October and now, and most of them are on this list. There’s only one unfortunate omission: Joe Koch, whose Wingspan of Severed Hands blew my mind at the end of 2021. I have yet to read Joe’s Convulsive, which I consider a failing on my part — but I’ll see that remedied in 2023.
Anyway, here’s a list of my top 10 horror novels of 2022, loosely ranked. I should mention these are not necessarily books published in 2022, but what I happened to read in 2022. Also, they’re not numbered because they’re all pretty great and I couldn’t actually choose a single favorite if I wanted to — which I don’t.
The Nothing That Is, Kyle Winkler
“I marveled at how we, everyone, pretended to be King Shit in our everyday lives when really we were just galactic varnish on some more monstrous and vast body, simply an electric jelly sneezed into space demanding all protons and electrons come to their knees for our whims.”
The Nothing That Is grabbed me right from its premise: Cade McCall, an assistant manager at a catering business, receives a message for a curious but extremely well-paying gig. Cade takes the job and drives out to (where else) a creaky, foreboding old house, where he finds out it’s not what he expected — nor anything else that happens from that point forward.
The Nothing That Is embraces the humorous and macabre in equal measure: it’s funny without slipping into satire, scary without being overly serious, and overall wonderfully weird. I love it when I have no idea where a horror story might go next, and The Nothing delivers with an unsettling smile on its face. It’s also one of those stories where I wish I had more: I want to see more of Tina and Cade. I hope there’s a sequel. I hope there isn’t a sequel. Anyway, it’s good.
Fluids, May Leitz
“All love ends. It’s inevitable. I think the inevitability of its demise makes people do crazy things to each other. We get so scared that our lover will leave us or hurt us, but in the end, that pales in comparison to what death can do. Love and demise go hand in hand in that way. We always lose the ones we love. Always. But tonight, I loved a woman to completion.”
The blurb for Fluids warns it’s not for the faint of heart or stomach — relatively common boilerplate for horror novels, sure, but Leitz really means it. Fluids is like a fever dream of pure pain and despair, one long primal yowl of loneliness. Written in dreamy, stream-of-consciousness style, Fluids deposits the reader on shaky ground about what is or isn’t real, and abandons them there without further explanation. It’s weird, raw, grotesque, disgusting, and offers no comfort whatsoever. I loved it.
Woom, Duncan Ralston
“I loved Beth, and I thought she loved me. But the truth was she could never love anyone, because her love died the day her mother cut him to pieces and stuck them onto a slab of old plywood.”
I barely know where to start with Woom. This book is somewhat notorious, apparently having its own Facebook group of rightfully appalled readers. I was extremely skeptical after reading the blurb, but saw enough testimonials from people on Twitter about this book scarring their souls that I had to find out for myself. I half-expected to hate it, but if there’s one thing this book does well, it’s defy expectations.
Woom is a tough book to describe or recommend. It dives right into its “extreme horror” credentials, remorselessly gross and provocative from jump. I wouldn’t blame anyone for putting it down after any number of garish scenes, or dismissing it as the work of an “edgelord.” But somehow, at the end of all its ludicrous grotesquerie, it ends on a compassionate, loving note, which is not only extraordinary, but pays off the rest of the book with elegance. If this review sounds like a lot of mixed feelings, well, that’s also what reading the book is like. But I feel my time was well-spent!
Manhunt, Gretchen Felker-Martin
“There had always been radfems in New England, enclaves of sneering middle-class white women who talked a lot about performing gender roles and appropriating lived experience. They curated incestuous little social media cells where they repeated the same six talking points to the same thirty other women while cis men came sniffing around their hindquarters, venting pent-up hatred on trans women and making sure real women saw them doing it so they could get accredited as feminists and maybe, if they were lucky, catch a whiff of pussy.”
I’m not sure what I can say about Manhunt that hasn’t already been said by much smarter people. There are some fantastic essays out there about Manhunt, and you may have heard Felker-Martin achieved notoriety for attracting the ire of a certain transphobic children’s author. But it’s an absolutely stellar book that lives up to the hype it’s received.
Set in a post-apocalyptic world where a strange virus has turned everyone with enough testosterone in their system (read: all cis men) into rampaging killers, Manhunt follows the story of three trans protagonists who have to learn to survive a world that’s become especially hostile to them. Manhunt has been rightly praised for its uncompromising prose, its honest brutality, and biting social commentary, but it’s also a story that loves its characters without contingency, flaws and all. Further, the characters love each other just as fiercely, which makes the betrayals and tragedies that much more poignant. Deliberately provocative and highly recommended.
Transmuted, Eve Harms
“She slurps her drink, leaving behind a red wine mustache. ‘I guess the art world isn’t ready for a half-Japanese, clown-obsessed, butch trans lesbian Francis Bacon.'”
I love horror that’s weird and inexplicable, and I love horror that starts out slow and escalates in a sharp curve near the end, and so Transmuted was a real feast for me. Transmuted is a story about the crushing weight of body dysphoria and the deadly allure of our most desperate wishes, with a heavy dose of body horror and an ending that delivers a shotgun blast to traditional expectations. And believe me when I say you are in no way prepared for the ending. Even if I told you, you probably wouldn’t believe me. But I recommend you see it for yourself, because it’s one of a kind.
Transmuted is a perfect alchemy of weird, funny, absurd and horrifying, and it left me eager for more. It’s a brisk, compact read, so if you like body horror and weird fiction, you have no excuse not to pick it up.
The Train Derails in Boston, Jessica McHugh
“As she convulses, an irregular rhythm seizes her heart. The beat ascends to her brain, where it balloons, stretching the organ until she’s able to see beyond normal perimeters. She can’t feel her body anymore, only the sensation of travel, as if being lifted into a world that’s always wanted her more than this one.”
Listen. I absolutely adore this book. I’d classify The Train Derails in Boston as the apotheosis of guilty pleasure, if I believed in guilty pleasures. This book is horny, seedy, and surreal, with characters who are astonishingly cruel to each other in ways that are only possible when they know their victim intimately. In short, if you feel you must have a character to root for because they’re a good and virtuous person, flee and do not look back, because The Train Derails in Boston has nothing for you. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any characters to root for — you just have to like them drunk, horny, and mean. The Train Derails brims over with petty cruelty and raw sexuality against a backdrop of hallucinatory horror and gruesome deaths — in other words, a very good time. And that ending — chef’s kiss.
We Are Here to Hurt Each Other, Paula D. Ashe
“Above us, the white light from dead stars spun capriciously through black fields of desolation. As they did before my birth; as they will do once I am dust. Pain is the source of all matter. It is the force that holds the universe together, that will tear it apart, only to rebuild again. Throughout the ages, humanity asks over and over again “why are we here?” and then pretends as if the Void does not bellow the answer back every single time.”
If you follow a lot of horror writers on Twitter, you’ve probably heard people confess the trauma they’ve received at the hands of Paula Ashe. Of all the books on this list, We Are Here to Hurt Each Other is by far the most unrelenting. The “hurt” in the title is extremely well-earned — this book is not fucking around. It’s not fun, and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible. A series of loosely interconnected short stories, Hurt digs deep into the darkest part of the human psyche and soul, peeling away the necrotic flesh and gazing at the bloody mess beneath with an unsympathetic eye. The stories span a broad array of forms, with Ashe’s cutting prose (reminiscent of Barker at his best) being consistent throughout. It’s lyrical, brutal, and haunting, and I can’t recommend it enough.
Queen of Teeth, Hailey Piper
“To be a new thing was no simple choice. Depression had been the closest thing she had to a terminal illness, stealing her life a little bit each day. That injection, or the Sibs it might’ve triggered, became the catalyst for new division, unseen in all but one chimera before. She could become new in more ways than mind. No stones weighed her down this time.”
I’ve already written about Queen of Teeth at length, so I’ll direct you there if you want to read more about it — which I feel you should do, because Queen of Teeth is phenomenal. Hailey Piper rocketed to the top of my list of favorite authors in 2021 and has stayed there since.
All the White Spaces, Ally Wilkes
“Far stronger than Francis had been in life, and we’d only been making it stronger. With every death—every murder—every set of footprints wandering off into the snow. And then we’d gone to find it—to confront it. Acknowledging its might. Humans pitting themselves against the wild desolate landscape. How it must have laughed.”
Admittedly, I was biased about this book going in, because it is, without a doubt, Extremely My Shit. I love historical horror when it’s well-crafted (which All the White Spaces certainly is), I love stories about cold and isolated places, and stories where inexplicable things lurk in the dark — which, when finally confronted, show us our own distorted reflections gazing balefully back at us. So All the White Spaces was an absolute feast; a real Donner party, if you will. Also, protagonist Jonathan Morgan is a trans man, which Wilkes deftly employs to add dimension and depth to the story, incorporating the difficulties Jonathan faces without exploiting or mining his suffering. All the White Spaces is a perfect winter read, practically made for curling up with a hot drink on a frigid, windy night.
This is Where We Talk Things Out, Caitlin Marceau
“This is what it was like growing up with her: every event, every memory, rewritten and retold to you enough times that you couldn’t help but wonder if the version you remembered was wrong. It always started with the tears she could summon on command, and ended with Miller apologising for something she never did and agreeing that Sylvie was right. Even now, Miller can’t help but wonder if she’s being too hard on Sylvie. She told Florence that she wanted to make it work with her mother, but the longer she’s here, the less she believes it’s true.”
To be truthful, This is Where We Talk Things Out deserves its own post, but I’m going to talk about it here regardless. It’s rare to find a book I think is perfectly paced, but This is Where We Talk Things Out is one of them. The book gives you one or two easy breaths before it begins to ramp up the tension and dread in a perfectly ascending arc — the kind of book where you know what’s coming but are still shocked when it does. The third act in particular is relentlessly paced and spring-tight with suspense.
A great horror story in its own right, Talk Things Out also has a lot to say about the realities of living with an abusive, gaslighting parent, in a manner so keenly realized that if you’ve experienced it yourself, you’re likely to find it uncomfortable in places. (Marceau has graciously included content notes for those who want them.) Talk Things Out is the perfect size for the story it has to tell, but I would have devoured it if it were three times as long. 10/10, no notes.
Honorable Mentions
Finally, I want to mention a few titles that nearly made the cut — I made myself limit this list to ten, and it was a most loathsome task to do so. I enjoyed these no less than the others, and they’re all well worth your time.
- The Book of Queer Saints, edited by Mae Murray. A rich and decadent serving of Problematic Characters and the horror authors who love them. Pick this up and strip-mine it to make a list of your new favorite horror authors.
- Psychros, by Charlene Elsby. Say there, would you like a story about a cold-blooded killer with ravenous and deadly sexual appetites who copes with the death of her boyfriend by killing over and over again? Well, do I have the book for you.
- Skin, by Kathe Koja. If you’re at all familiar with Kathe Koja, this book has the same dreamy lyricism and unflinching transgression of her other work. If you’re not familiar with Kathe Koja, now’s as good a time as any.
- Non-Practicing Cultist, by Scott J. Moses. This short tale is like the last third of an obscure and amazing horror movie you found while flipping through late-night cable. It’s grimy, pulpy, fast-paced, and sells for less than a buck, so get on this. I’d read a whole-ass series about the protagonist.
And that’s my list. Thanks a lot for reading!