My Top 12 International Horror Novels
Agustina Bazterrica
Tender Is the Flesh
Trans. Sarah Moses
Scribner, 2020
When cannibalism is all that’s left due to the extinction of animals, what does it mean to fall in love with meat?
Chang Yu-Ko
Whisper
Trans. Roddy Flagg
Honford Star, 2021
A haunted taxi’s radio whispers a voice that kills those who hear it in this metaphorical novel about Taiwan’s past.
Grégoire Courtois
The Laws of the Skies
Trans. Rhonda Mullins
Coach House Books, 2019
A parent/teenager camping trip goes very wrong in this combination fairy tale/slasher novel.
Giorgio De Maria
The Twenty Days of Turin
Trans. Roman Glazov
Liveright, 2017
Nightly massacres grip Turin, but the witnesses cannot explain them, and the man who searches for their cause discovers that “what’s shared can never be unshared.”
Mariana Enríquez
Our Share of Night
Trans. Megan McDowell
Hogarth, 2023
During the military dictatorship in Argentina, a father and son flee one step ahead of the cult worshipers of a cosmic horror.
Johanne Lykke Holm
Strega
Trans. Saskia Vogel
Riverhead Books, 2023
A feminist gothic about what the world and patriarchy do to young women.
Jenny Hval
Girls against God
Trans. Marjam Idriss
Verso Fiction, 2020
A novel about a time-traveling Edvard Munch joining a death-metal band, a coven of witches, and a treatise on
queer feminist theory.
John Ajvide Lindqvist
Let the Right One In
Trans. Ebba Segerberg
St. Martin’s Griffith, 2007
A bullied twelve-year-old boy befriends another child, who happens to be an immortal vampire.
Fernanda Melchor
Hurricane Season
Trans. Sophie Hughes
New Directions, 2020
In a gritty, damned Mexican village, a witch is murdered, and the reader gets eight points of view about the murder through the perspectives of compassionately limned lowlifes.
Jo Nesbø
The Night House
Trans. Neil Smith
Knopf, 2023
A bullied orphan living with his aunt and uncle encounters a terrifying house that speaks to him through a phone and kills those he knows; fifteen years later, things get much worse.
Mónica Ojeda
Jawbone
Trans. Sarah Booker
Coffee House Press, 2022
Women on the verge prey on each other in this unsettling novel of psychological horror and cosmic horror.
Hye-young Pyun
The Hole
Trans. Sora
Kim-Russell
Arcade, 2017
In this claustrophobically told novel, a man who has killed his wife finds himself helplessly at the mercy of her mother.
Ahmed Saadawi
Frankenstein in Baghdad
Trans. Jonathan Wright
Penguin, 2018
In occupied Baghdad, an oddball collector of body parts accidentally creates a Frankenstein’s monster–like creature that needs human flesh to survive.
Samanta Schweblin
Fever Dream
Trans. Megan McDowell
Riverhead Books, 2018
A dying woman and a young boy verbally describe the effects of horrific events intruding into everyday lives in this suffocating, aptly named novel.
Zhou Haohui
Valley of Terror
Trans. Bonnie Huie
Amazon Crossing, 2017
A “fear disease” is killing the citizens of Longzhou, China, and the search for a cure turns up worse things than the disease.
