Nine Horror Books Bringing Cursed Objects, Murder Clowns, Cosmic Rot and a Megalodon to the Shelf

My horror TBR does not need help, yet these nine books are difficult to pass without stopping.

The selection covers extreme horror, werewolves, zombie survival, cursed objects, criminal noir, cosmic horror, creature features and short fiction about damaged people. Nikola Tesla even turns up, because apparently historical inventors are no safer from fictional plagues than the rest of us.

Nikola Tesla is probably the worst possible person to tell that something is simply “magic.” He would want to test it, dismantle it and find the mechanism hiding underneath. Dropping him into a supernatural empire makes that instinct dangerous.

After an accident at Wardenclyffe Tower tears open space-time, Tesla lands in an Otherworld with almost no equipment and no clear route back. His attempts to understand the place quickly make him valuable to everyone fighting over it. The Emperor wants his inventions at the imperial court. The resistance sees someone who could upset the existing balance of power, with a weather witch named Lenore drawing Tesla closer to a conflict he wants nothing to do with.

He is not interested in choosing a ruler or becoming the face of a rebellion. He wants to repair the damage and return home. That position becomes harder to defend once the supernatural danger begins reaching beyond the Otherworld and toward the world he left behind.

The appeal here is watching a man associated with logic, electricity and invention confront forces that may not respect any familiar laws. Tesla can calculate, build and improvise, but every experiment also gives the people watching him another reason to control what he creates.

Purchase “Nikola Tesla and the Emperor of Plagues.”

Thom Brannan can also be found on X at @Thom_Brannan.

“Stara” follows a modern midwife in Great Britain whose obsession with preserving her youth involves bathing in the blood of stillborn babies.

That sentence should be enough to establish where Dani Brown intends to take the reader.

The story draws inspiration from Elizabeth Báthory and pushes the blood-bathing legend into contemporary extreme horror. Stara’s fixation grows through spells, charms and increasingly grotesque acts, with infant death and reproductive violence central to the material. This is the entry that requires the strongest content warning in the entire group.

Brown is not offering a tasteful brush with the macabre. “Stara” is aimed at readers who actively seek transgressive horror, repulsive characters and subjects that many books will not touch.

Purchase “Stara” by Dani Brown.

Cara is grieving the death of her father when she develops the ability to move objects with her mind. She cannot properly control the power, and her situation deteriorates after she discovers an antique stamp carrying dark magic.

A cursed stamp is a smart horror object. It is small, ordinary and easy to pass from one person to another. Nobody sees a stamp in a drawer and immediately prepares for paranormal disaster.

Patricia L. Stover builds the story around Cara’s grief, betrayal and growing suspicion that the people she loves are hiding dark secrets. At 57 pages in its Kindle edition, “The Keening Stamp” offers a compact supernatural read for anyone who wants a complete story in one sitting.

The combination of teenage psychic abilities and an object connected to the dead also gives the book a slight coming-of-age flavor, only with considerably worse consequences than the usual adolescent problems.

“The Keening Stamp” is available on Amazon.

Lucy Ashwood finishes an unremarkable day in late September. By the following morning, she is lying in blood beside three dead men.

Two of them worked for the MontVida Corporation. The third was a sheriff’s deputy. They arrived to serve notice of genetic patent violations and evict the Ashwood family, and the confrontation ended in an accidental massacre.

Lucy helps dispose of the bodies by feeding them to her pig, Wilbur.

Her cousin Arthur seeks help from a criminal collective called the Aggregate, which agrees to assist the family for a price. Lucy goes on the run under the weight of guilt and waking nightmares, while Arthur is pulled into a violent revolutionary world through the debt now owed to the organization.

The criminal plot is only the surface. A malevolent presence is rising from the soil beneath them, speaking through Wilbur, the cicadas and the dry wind. It wants access to this world and does not care how much of humanity is destroyed during the crossing.

G. Owen Wears combines rural crime, corporate control and cosmic horror without abandoning the grime of the original bloodbath. I am particularly interested in the pig. Horror has taught me never to dismiss the animal that knows more than every human in the room.

Purchase “The Aggregate” by G. Owen Wears.

Walton McCoy has done everything expected of him and is ready to leave home, travel across the country and decide where he belongs.

A night of passion and a scratch destroy that plan.

Walton must control the animal developing inside him while running from hunters who already know how to deal with a beast that has gone mad. The official content warnings include sexual violence, murder and gore, so this is not a restrained version of the werewolf story.

Werewolf horror has always been tied to the terror of losing ownership of your own body. Walton begins the book preparing to take control of his future and ends up fighting for control over his flesh, his violence and whatever remains of the person he was before the scratch.

The hunters may understand the monster better than Walton does, but their solution is unlikely to involve patience or sympathy.

Purchase “Canis Lupus Humanus.”

Calista “Cali” Lindquist has already survived and destroyed an apparently unkillable beast. She and her mother now hunt monsters to prevent anyone else from experiencing the same horror and loss.

Their work takes them to Philadelphia, where someone is using face paint and magic tricks to prey on innocent people. Cali soon crosses paths with Collin, a treacherous follower of the mysterious Master Poppie, and an expanding horde of bloodthirsty clowns.

Her past may be as dangerous to the mission as the creatures she is hunting.

Clown horror can lean toward comedy, surrealism, splatter or childhood nightmare fuel. An entire clown army gives this book room to use all four.

Cali also enters the story with experience. She understands that monsters exist and has chosen to pursue them. That immediately changes the usual clown-horror arrangement. The woman surrounded by painted killers is armed, trained and hunting them too.

Viktor Bloodstone is the joint pen name used by Brian Koscienski, Chris Pisano and Jeff Young for their horror, suspense and gothic fiction.

Purchase “The Killer of Devils: Book 1: Clowns.”

Brian Koscienski can be found on Instagram at @novelguybrian.

Colin McCoy travels through southeastern Ohio aboard a pontoon boat named ALICIA, trying to avoid the walking dead while carrying guilt he cannot escape.

He finds three siblings inside an abandoned restaurant: teenager Stacey, her younger brother Jason and their baby sister Rosie. They need passage out of Ohio and into a safe zone in Texas.

The boat does not carry them all the way.

Colin is left stranded and must lead the children, a local police officer, a cook and a gangster’s girlfriend across a dead city. The undead are waiting, but the living remain capable of creating their own disasters.

I will always make room for a zombie book that changes the usual transportation. Cars clog highways. Helicopters run out of fuel. A pontoon boat moving through southeastern Ohio gives “Dead River” a different starting texture before forcing its survivors back onto land.

Colin is also responsible for vulnerable people while his judgment is being eaten away by guilt. Keeping the group alive may require him to become somebody he no longer believes he can be.

Purchase “Dead River” by Brian J. Smith.

Regular TBM Horror readers may already know R. Jacob Honeybrook through his work on “The Honeycut” and his involvement with the Midnight Terrors podcast.

“Books for the Broken” gathers six stories from Honeybrook’s first five years as a published author. The collection moves between psychological horror and bleak crime noir, following haunted men and mysterious women through fog-covered woods, neon cities and desert highways.

That combination gives the anthology a wider emotional range than a collection built around one monster or setting. Memories deteriorate. People carry old damage into new places. Some run from their past while others continue chasing the very thing likely to destroy them.

Short collections are useful for horror readers who want variety without leaving one author’s voice completely behind. Six stories can produce six separate wounds, and Honeybrook’s interest in noir means the monsters do not need claws or supernatural powers to cause lasting damage.

This release also marked Honeybrook’s first time making his work available in a physical book, following several years of digital publication.

Purchase “Books for the Broken: An Anthology of Horror.”

Follow R. Jacob Honeybrook on Instagram

Alex loves horror movies, but fictional monsters provide little preparation for his job as a deckhand aboard a luxury yacht on the Great Barrier Reef.

The guests demand shark fin soup. Alex is forced to slaughter the catch, coating the deck in enough blood to draw the attention of an ancient megalodon.

He survives the first encounter physically damaged and determined never to board another boat. His life collapses anyway, and a blackout drinking binge in Bali ends with him enslaved aboard a brutal fishing vessel. A sadistic captain controls the ship while the prehistoric predator waits below.

“Abattoir Ocean” has two varieties of predator. The megalodon supplies the scale and creature-feature carnage, while the men aboard the fishing vessel create a more intimate form of captivity and abuse.

The shark does not need a complicated motive. It has blood in the water and prey above it. The human violence gives Alex a problem that cannot be solved by simply staying away from the edge of the boat.

Sam M. Phillips has written several creature and deep-sea thrillers, including “Megalodon Gulf,” “Depths of Horror” and “Gorgon.” “Abattoir Ocean” runs 189 pages, which should keep the voyage moving without requiring readers to spend an entire summer trapped at sea.

Purchase “Abattoir Ocean.”