Little disclaimer before we kick things off: this is obviously something a bit different – after feeling kind of restricted and intimidated by the little ‘music blog only’ box I’d put myself in, I’ve decided to change IKTS to a music AND lifestyle blog, hopefully giving myself permission to write about whatever I want whenever I want, whether it’s new albums, books I can’t wait to get my paws on, or video games (I have been playing So. Much. Tomb. Raider.).
So, now that that’s out of the way – here are 15 new Horror/Thriller books that I can’t wait to read in 2021!
15. What Big Teeth by Rose Szabo
What Big Teeth is the dark gothic fantasy debut by Rose Szabo. The plot follows Eleanor Zarrin, who hasn’t seen or spoken to her family since they sent her away to boarding school. After a horrifying accident causes her to flee the school Eleanor goes to the only place she knows – home. She struggles to fit in with monstrous relative that prowl in the woods or read fortunes from guts, but when an incident changes everything, Eleanore will have to embrace her inner darkness to help her family survive.
Release date: 2nd February
Average Goodreads rating: 3.5/5
14. The Lost Village by Camilla Sten
Described as The Blair Witch Project meets Midsommar, Sten’s latest follows documentary filmmaker Alice Lindstedt’s obsession with vanishing residents of an old mining town. In 1959, her grandmother’s entire family disappeared in this mysterious tragedy, and she’s been haunted ever since by the unanswered questions surrounding the only two people who were left. Alice enlists a crew to document the old village and find answers, but strange things start happening straight away. They’re not alone.
Release date: 23rd March
Average Goodreads rating: 3.6/5
13. Whisper Down the Lane by Clay McLeod Chapman
Inspired by the McMartin preschool trials and the Satanic Panic of the ’80s, the author of The Remaking takes on true-crime horror. During childhood, Richard went by another name. Having just moved to a new town with his mother, he started a white lie that ignited and spread like wildfire, engulfing an entire nation. Thirty years later, someone wants to remind Richard they know what he did and that someone has to pay.
Release date: 6th April
Average Goodreads rating: 3.7/5
12. The Mary Shelley Club by Goldy Moldavsky
New girl Rachel Chavez is eager to make a fresh start at Manchester Prep but winds up making enemies instead thanks to a prank gone wrong. It attracts the attention of a secret club of students with the sole objective to come up with the scariest prank ever to induce real fear. As the antics escalate, things get cutthroat and dangerous in this YA thriller.
Release date: 13th April
Average Goodreads rating: 4.1/5
11. The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix
Hendrix’s latest barely even announced a release date before rights were snatched up and a series adaptation was put in motion. In horror movies, the final girl is the one who’s left standing when the credits roll. The one who fought back, defeated the killer, and avenged her friends. The one who emerges bloodied but victorious. But after the sirens fade and the audience moves on, what happens to her? Lynnette Tarkington is a real-life final girl who survived a massacre twenty-two years ago, and it has defined every day of her life since. And she’s not alone. For more than a decade she’s been meeting with five other actual final girls and their therapist in a support group for those who survived the unthinkable, putting their lives back together, piece by piece. That is until one of the women misses a meeting and Lynnette’s worst fears are realised—someone knows about the group and is determined to take their lives apart again, piece by piece. But the thing about these final girls is that they have each other now, and no matter how bad the odds, how dark the night, how sharp the knife, they will never, ever give up.
Expect Hendrix to inject heart and horror homages while subverting slasher tropes.
Release date: 13th July
Average Goodreads rating: 4.1/5
10. The Book of Accidents by Chuck Wendig
A family of three moves back to their hometown, where unspeakable horrors traumatised the parents during their childhood. What happened then is happening all over again, and the family will have to fight for their souls as dark magic puts them in the middle of a good versus evil battle.
Release date: 20th July
Average Goodreads rating: 4.4/5
9. Chasing the Boogeyman by Richard Chizmar
This horror novel has been described as a cross between Stephen King and Michelle McNamara. In the summer of 1988, the mutilated bodies of several missing girls begin to turn up in a small Maryland town. The grisly evidence leads police to conclude a serial killer is on the loose, but rumours start to spread that the culprit isn’t quite human. Chizmar puts himself in the story to tell a personal account of the serial killer’s reign of terror, unaware that these events will continue to haunt him.
Release date: 17th August
Average Goodreads rating: 4.6/5
8. My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones
Shirley Jackson meets Friday the 13th in My Heart Is a Chainsaw, written by the New York Times bestselling author of The Only Good Indians Stephen Graham Jones, called “a literary master” by National Book Award winner Tananarive Due and “one of our most talented living writers” by Tommy Orange. Jade Daniels is an angry, half-Indian outcast with an abusive father, an absent mother, and an entire town that wants nothing to do with her. She feels like she’s trapped in a slasher film as tourists go missing, and the tension between her community and the celebrity newcomers to her rural lake town reaches a fever pitch. Only her encyclopaedic knowledge of horror films could have prepared her for this.
Release date: 31st August
Average Goodreads rating: 4/5
7.Nothing but Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw
A Heian-era mansion stands abandoned, its foundations resting on the bones of a bride and its walls packed with the remains of the girls sacrificed to keep her company. It’s the perfect wedding venue for a group of thrill-seeking friends. But a night of food, drinks, and games quickly spirals into a nightmare. For lurking in the shadows is the ghost bride with a black smile and a hungry heart. And she gets lonely down in the dirt. Khaw’s latest is a creepy haunted house novella infused with Japanese folklore.
Release date: 19th October
Average Goodreads rating: 3.8/5
6. The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell
2017: 19 year old Tallulah is going out on a date, leaving her baby with her mother, Kim. Kim watches her daughter leave and, as late evening turns into night, which turns into early morning, she waits for her return. And waits. The next morning, Kim phones Tallulah’s friends who tell her that Tallulah was last seen heading to a party at a house in the nearby woods called Dark Place. She never returns.
2019: Sophie is walking in the woods near the boarding school where her boyfriend has just started work as a head-teacher when she sees a note fixed to a tree. ‘DIG HERE’ . . .
A cold case, an abandoned mansion, family trauma and dark secrets lie at the heart of Lisa Jewell’s latest novel.
I’ve already read several of Lisa Jewell books and loved them, usually completing them entirely in one sitting. They’re THAT good.
Release date: 22nd July
Average Goodreads rating: 4.4/5
5. The Burning Girls by C.J Tudor
An unconventional vicar moves to a remote corner of the English countryside, only to discover a community haunted by death and disappearances both past and present–and intent on keeping its dark secrets–in this explosive, unsettling thriller from acclaimed author C. J. Tudor. Uncovering the truth can be deadly in a village where everyone has something to protect, everyone has links with the village’s bloody past, and no one trusts an outsider.
Release date: 9th February
Average Goodreads rating: 4.1
4. Near the Bone by Christina Henry
A woman trapped on a mountain attempts to survive more than one kind of monster, in a dread-inducing horror novel from the national bestselling author Christina Henry. Mattie can’t remember a time before she and William lived alone on a mountain together. She must never make him upset. But when Mattie discovers the mutilated body of a fox in the woods, she realises that they’re not alone after all. There’s something in the woods that wasn’t there before, something that makes strange cries in the night, something with sharp teeth and claws. When three strangers appear on the mountaintop looking for the creature in the woods, Mattie knows their presence will anger William. Terrible things happen when William is angry.
Release date: 13th April
Average Goodreads rating: 3.8/5
3. Survive the Night by Riley Sager
It’s November 1991. George H. W. Bush is in the White House, Nirvana’s in the tape deck, and movie-obsessed college student Charlie Jordan is in a car with a man who might be a serial killer.
Josh Baxter, the man behind the wheel, is a virtual stranger to Charlie. They met at the campus ride board, each looking to share the long drive home to Ohio. Both have good reasons for wanting to get away. For Charlie, it’s guilt and grief over the murder of her best friend, who became the third victim of the man known as the Campus Killer. For Josh, it’s to help care for his sick father. Or so he says. Like the Hitchcock heroine she’s named after, Charlie has her doubts. There’s something suspicious about Josh, from the holes in his story about his father to how he doesn’t seem to want Charlie to see inside the car’s trunk. As they travel an empty highway in the dead of night, an increasingly worried Charlie begins to think she’s sharing a car with the Campus Killer. Is Josh truly dangerous? Or is Charlie’s suspicion merely a figment of her movie-fuelled imagination?
What follows is a game of cat and mouse played out on night-shrouded roads and in neon-lit parking lots, during an age when the only call for help can be made on a pay phone and in a place where there’s nowhere to run. In order to win, Charlie must do one thing—survive the night.
Release date: 6th July
Average Goodreads rating: 3.8/5
2. The Drowning Kind by Jennifer McMahon
McMahon is the New York Times bestselling author who has been compared very favourably to Shirley Jackson, with her twisty and haunting tales. The Drowning Kind focuses on Jax, who finds her sister Lexie has drowned at their grandmother’s estate. As she is going through Lexie’s things, Jax finds that she was researching the family and the history of the estate – which has a very dark history indeed. Woven in is the tale of Ethel Monroe, who finds that a spring which apparently grants wishes also takes what it is owed.
Said to be similar to The Haunting of Hill House or Bly Manor (the Netflix series’, not the novels that inspired them), so if you liked either of those then this is the book for you.
Release date: 6th April
Average Goodreads rating: 4/5
1. Tidepool by Nicole Willson
Willson’s historical horror is her debut novel, and it sounds suitably Lovecraftian in nature, if that is your sort of horror.
In 1913, Sorrow Hamilton heads to Tidepool, the last known place her missing brother visited. The residents of the town can’t give her an answer when she asks about her brother, and the corpses washed up on the beach convince Sorrow to get out of town and send in the professionals. But by then, she knows the town’s deadly secret, and the residents are not inclined to let her leave.
Release date: 3rd August
Average Goodreads rating: 5/5
What new Horror/Thriller releases are you excited for?
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