10 International New and Upcoming Horror Novels for Fall 2025

In his 1981 book Danse Macabre, Stephen King writes that the horror genre is primarily concerned with power. This quote often leaves the non-horror reader scratching their head. In our current media landscape, “power” suggests colorful costumed superheroes and newsreels of dictators slamming a fist against a podium. Meanwhile, horror frightens, shocks, disgusts, and exploits. If images of masked killers and demonic clowns suggest power, then it’s power used in the wrong way. A way that suggests that we enjoy, even revel in, the gross power we have over others. 

But King’s definition offers another way to understand the relationship between horror and power. Power isn’t just a tool to be wielded over others; it is also something that can be removed from us at any time. What changes when the worst happens? When we know there’s a shark in the water but can’t stop tourists from playing in the surf?

And how do we react when horror exposes the powers that we can’t see? 

By choosing to examine the powers that bind us, we can empower ourselves.

Horror can be many things. A cautionary tale. A revenge plot. The story of the powerless against the very powerful. In the list below, detectives seeking justice for the missing and murdered. The colonized taking revenge on the colonizer. Decades-old skeletons can no longer hide in the closet. 

When the twenty-four-seven news cycle and “doomscrolling” are our cultural norms, it may seem counterintuitive, even unhealthy, to turn to a genre preoccupied with more fear and doom during our free time. 

But if we ignore fear, it can be used in the “wrong” way—to immobilize us, rule us, and turn a blind eye to suffering. By choosing to examine the powers that bind us, we can empower ourselves. Not just for our own sake, but to be more kind, empathetic global citizens.

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United States
Stephen Graham Jones
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
Simon & Schuster / Saga Press, 2025

A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor, is discovered within a wall. What it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to 217 Blackfeet dead in the snow. Told in transcribed interviews by a Niitsítapi named Good Stab, who shares the narrative of his peculiar life over a series of confessional visits.

South Korea
Bora Chung
Midnight Timetable: A Novel in Ghost Stories
Trans. Anton Hur
Algonquin Books, 2025

An employee on the night shift at the Institute learns why some employees don’t last long at the center. The handkerchief in Room 302 once belonged to the late mother of two sons, whose rivalry imbues the handkerchief with undue power and unravels the lives of those who seek to possess it. Meanwhile, a live-streaming, ghost-chasing employee steals a cursed sneaker down the hall but later finds he can’t escape its tread. The cat in Room 206 begins to reveal the crimes of its former family, wanting to understand its own path to the Institute’s dimly lit halls.

Brazil
Ana Paula Maia 
On Earth as It Is Beneath
Trans. Padma Viswanathan
Charco Press, 2025

On land where enslaved people were once tortured and murdered, the state built a penal colony in the wilderness, where inmates could be rehabilitated but never escape. Now, decades later, and having only succeeded in trapping men, not changing them for the better, its operations are winding down. But in the prison’s waning days, a new horror is unleashed: every full-moon night, the inmates are released, the warden is armed with rifles, and the hunt begins. Every man plans his escape, not knowing if his end will come at the hands of a familiar face or from the unknown dangers beyond the prison walls. 

Mexico
Ave Barrera
Restoration
Trans. Robin Myers & Ellen Jones
Charco Press, 2025

Jasmina has been hired by her maybe-boyfriend to restore his family home, a grubby, abandoned time capsule where a great artist once lived. As she moves from room to room—scrubbing, scraping, plastering over cracks—the stories inhabiting them awaken, and the lives of the women who came before her begin to overlap with her own. Who is the woman in the photograph? And what secrets linger in that last locked room?

South Korea
Cheon Seon-Ran
The Midnight Shift 
Trans. Gene Png
Bloomsbury, 2025

When four isolated elderly people die back-to-back at the same hospital, Su-Yeon doesn’t understand why she’s the only one at her precinct that seems to care. But her colleagues at the police force dismiss the case as a series of unfortunate suicides due to the patients’ loneliness. But Su-Yeon doesn’t have the privilege of looking away: her dearest friend, Grandma Eun-Shim, lives on the sixth floor, and Su-Yeon is terrified that something will happen to her next.

United States
Dennis E. Staples
Passing Through a Prairie Country
Counterpoint, 2025

For decades, a dark force has terrorized the Languille Lake reservation. Spoken of only in whispers as “the sandman,” he lurks in the Hidden Atlantis Lake Resort and Casino, the reservation’s main attraction and source of revenue, leeching its patrons’ dreams and preventing the ghosts that linger there from moving on. Fleeing a breakup, Marion Lafournier, a midtwenties Ojibwe, seeks solace in the slot machine’s siren song. Meanwhile, Glenn Nielan, recently out of the closet and an aspiring documentarian, hopes to capture the faces of the Ojibwe land while experiencing the casino’s thrills. But he will learn that all who choose to play the sandman’s games are in danger of falling into his grasp.

Argentina
Agustina Bazterrica
The Unworthy: A Novel
Trans. Sarah Moses
Scribner, 2025

From her cell in a mysterious convent, a woman writes the story of her life in whatever she can find—discarded ink, dirt, and even her own blood. A lower member of the Sacred Sisterhood, deemed an unworthy, she dreams of ascending to the ranks of the Enlightened at the center of the convent and of pleasing the foreboding Superior Sister. But when a stranger makes her way past the convent walls, joining the ranks of the unworthy, she forces the narrator to consider her long-buried past—and what she may be overlooking about the Enlightened.

Spain
Irene Solà
I Gave You Eyes and You Looked toward Darkness 
Trans. Mara Faye Lethem
Graywolf Press, 2025

Dawn is breaking over the Guilleries, a rugged mountain range in Catalonia frequented by wolf hunters, brigands, deserters, race-car drivers, ghosts, and demons. In a remote farmhouse called Mas Clavell, an impossibly old woman lies on her deathbed. Family and caretakers drift in and out. Meanwhile, all the women who have lived and died in that house are waiting for her to join them. They are preparing to throw her a party. As day turns to night, four hundred years’ worth of stories unspool, and the house reverberates with raucous laughter, pungent feasts, and piercing cries of pleasure and pain.

United States
Laurie L. Dove
Mask of the Deer Woman
Berkley, 2025

At rock bottom following her daughter’s death, ex-Chicago detective Carrie Starr has nowhere to go but back to her roots. Starr’s father never talked much about the reservation where he was raised, but the tribe needs a new marshal as much as Starr needs a place to call home. In the past decade, too many young women have disappeared from the rez. Some have ended up dead, others just . . . gone. Now, local college student Chenoa Cloud is missing, and Starr falls into an investigation that leaves her drowning in memories of her daughter—the girl she failed to save.

Norway
Ingvild Bjerkeland
Beasts
Trans. Rosie Hedger
Levine Querido, 2025

The world has been overrun by hitherto unknown beasts. Society has collapsed: the power is gone, cars are abandoned across the highways, and anyone left is hiding from the terrifying creatures—and one another. Thirteen-year-old Abdi and his five-year-old sister, Alva, are on the run, their last hope to escape through the forest and to the sea. As they recall the strange events that led to the beasts’ arrival, and how the two of them got to where they were, they must ask themselves who they can trust—and what they will do to survive.

University of Oklahoma