10 Best Lovecraftian Horror Books that Incite Incomprehensible Fear
Lovecraftian horror, named after its progenitor, H.P. Lovecraft, is not your everyday, garden-variety kind of horror. Forget about basic jump scares, vampires, or witches; this genre amplifies your fear to cosmic levels. It's about the horror of the unknown and the unknowable—"the fear of outer, unknown forces" as Lovecraft himself described it. The scale is immeasurable, the terror - boundless. These stories invariably center around unnamable creatures, dwindling timelines, and the grotesque warping of reality as we know it. If you're tired of clichéd hack-and-slashers, you've come to the right place.
Steered by narrators on the brink of sanity, Lovecraftian horror transports its readers to worlds unseen, an endless sea of darkness grounded in psychological terror. The best Lovecraftian novels don't just scare you, they unsettle you, inducing a deep-seated paranoia that lingers long after the book has been put down.
So, buckle up horror fanatics, as we take you on a chilling journey inscribing the ten best Lovecraftian horror books. These novels are handpicked, surely to incite a level of incomprehensible fear that would make even the stoutest of hearts miss a beat. Prepare to lose yourself to the expansive cosmic horror within these pages.
『The Ballad of Black Tom』
One of NPR's Best Books of 2016, winner of the Shirley Jackson Award, the British Fantasy Award, the This is Horror Award for Novella of the Year, and a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, World Fantasy, and Bram Stoker Awards People move to New York looking for magic and nothing will convince them it isn't there. Charles Thomas Tester hustles to put food on the table, keep the roof over his father's head, from Harlem to Flushing Meadows to Red Hook. He knows what magic a suit can cast, the invisibility a guitar case can provide, and the curse written on his skin that attracts the eye of wealthy white folks and their cops. But when he delivers an occult tome to a reclusive sorceress in the heart of Queens, Tom opens a door to a deeper realm of magic, and earns the attention of things best left sleeping. A storm that might swallow the world is building in Brooklyn. Will Black Tom live to see it break? "LaValle's novella of sorcery and skullduggery in Jazz Age New York is a magnificent example of what weird fiction can and should do." — Laird Barron, author of The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All "[LaValle] reinvents outmoded literary conventions, particularly the ghettos of genre and ethnicity that long divided serious literature from popular fiction." — Praise for The Devil in Silver from Elizabeth Hand, author of Radiant Days “LaValle cleverly subverts Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos by imbuing a black man with the power to summon the Old Ones, and creates genuine chills with his evocation of the monstrous Sleeping King, an echo of Lovecraft’s Dagon... [The Ballad of Black Tom] has a satisfying slingshot ending.” – Elizabeth Hand for Fantasy & ScienceFiction At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Author | Victor LaValle |
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Price | $4.99 |
Publisher | Tordotcom |
Release Date | Feb 16, 2016 |
Source | Google Books |
『The Fisherman』
Set during the Prohibition, The Fisherman is the story of Daniel Constantin. He is the son of a Basque fisherman from the small fishing village of Saint Pierre in the North Atlantic, and he hates the water. His father expects him to be a fisherman like himself, but because of his small frame and his constant seasickness, Daniel is miserable failure as a fisherman.Daniel meets Seamus Flanigan, a salty Irish rum-runner who offers him a job on his contraband-carrying schooner for a promised fortune. Daniel sees this as a way to make a very profitable living at sea, win his father’s approval, and win the heart of a young girl he loves named Anouk. What follows is a gripping adventure in which the rum-running crew battle perilous seas, pirates, Federal agents, and the U.S. Coast Guard. When the crew become tangled in the world of the notorious mobster Giancarlo Abbruzzi who is out to destroy them, it is up to Daniel to take the fishing lessons he has learned from his father Marcel, hunt Giancarlo, and stop his murderous plan before it is too late.The Fisherman is an epic tale of fathers and sons and of friendship and betrayal that leads us from Saint Pierre, to Nassau, Bahamas, to the infamous Rum Row off the coast of Long Island, to New York City. Intoxicating and deeply human, Daniel’s story is a testament to the power of never letting go of your dreams and of finding your treasures where you least expect them.
Author | Debbie Shannon |
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Price | $2.99 |
Publisher | Fogbow Books, LLC |
Release Date | Aug 08, 2018 |
Source | Google Books |
『Annihilation』
Area X has claimed the lives of members of eleven expeditions. The twelfth expedition consisting of four women hopes to map the terrain and collect specimens; to record all their observations, scientific and otherwise, of their surroundings and of one another; and, above all, to avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.
Author | Jeff VanderMeer |
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Price | unknown |
Publisher | Macmillan |
Release Date | Feb 04, 2014 |
Source | Google Books |
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Price | unknown |
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Release Date | |
Source | Google Books |
『The Shadow Over Innsmouth』
The Shadow over Innsmouth is a horror novella by American author H. P. Lovecraft, written in November-December 1931. It forms part of the Cthulhu Mythos, using its motif of a malign undersea civilization, and references several shared elements of the Mythos, including place-names, mythical creatures, and invocations. The Shadow over Innsmouth is the only Lovecraft story that was published in book form during his lifetime.
Author | H P Lovecraft |
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Price | unknown |
Publisher | |
Release Date | Apr 18, 2020 |
Source | Google Books |
『Revival』
Years after a charismatic minister is banished in the wake of a faith-shattering tragedy, a heroin-addicted rock-and-roll guitarist from the same hometown reconnects with the man and forges a terrible pact.
Author | Stephen King |
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Price | unknown |
Publisher | Simon and Schuster |
Release Date | Nov 11, 2014 |
Source | Google Books |
『The Croning』
Strange things exist on the periphery of our existence, haunting us from the darkness looming beyond our firelight. Black magic, weird cults and worse things loom in the shadows. The Children of Old Leech have been with us from time immemorial. And they love us... Donald Miller, geologist and academic, has walked along the edge of a chasm for most of his nearly eighty years, leading a charmed life between endearing absent-mindedness and sanity-shattering realization. Now, all things must converge. Donald will discover the dark secrets along the edges, unearthing savage truths about his wife Michelle, their adult twins, and all he knows and trusts. For Donald is about to stumble on the secret... ...of The Croning. From Laird Barron, Shirley Jackson Award-winning author of The Imago Sequence and Occultation, comes The Croning, a debut novel of cosmic horror.
Author | Laird Barron |
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Price | $14.99 |
Publisher | Start Publishing LLC |
Release Date | May 01, 2012 |
Source | Google Books |
『The Mist』
#1 New York Times bestselling author Stephen King’s terrifying novella about a town engulfed in a dense, mysterious mist as humanity makes its last stand against unholy destruction—originally published in the acclaimed short story collection Skeleton Crew and made into a TV series, as well as a feature film starring Thomas Jane and Marcia Gay Harden. In the wake of a summer storm, terror descends...David Drayton, his son Billy, and their neighbor Brent Norton join dozens of others and head to the local grocery store to replenish supplies following a freak storm. Once there, they become trapped by a strange mist that has enveloped the town. As the confinement takes its toll on their nerves, a religious zealot, Mrs. Carmody, begins to play on their fears to convince them that this is God’s vengeance for their sins. She insists a sacrifice must be made and two groups—those for and those against—are aligned. Clearly, staying in the store may prove fatal, and the Draytons, along with store employee Ollie Weeks, Amanda Dumfries, Irene Reppler, and Dan Miller, attempt to make their escape. But what’s out there may be worse than what they left behind. This exhilarating novella explores the horror in both the enemy you know—and the one you can only imagine.
Author | Stephen King |
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Price | $9.99 |
Publisher | Simon and Schuster |
Release Date | May 23, 2017 |
Source | Google Books |
『The Terror』
The "masterfully chilling" novel that inspired the hit AMC series (Entertainment Weekly). The men on board the HMS Terror — part of the 1845 Franklin Expedition, the first steam-powered vessels ever to search for the legendary Northwest Passage — are entering a second summer in the Arctic Circle without a thaw, stranded in a nightmarish landscape of encroaching ice and darkness. Endlessly cold, they struggle to survive with poisonous rations, a dwindling coal supply, and ships buckling in the grip of crushing ice. But their real enemy is even more terrifying. There is something out there in the frigid darkness: an unseen predator stalking their ship, a monstrous terror clawing to get in. “The best and most unusual historical novel I have read in years.” —Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe
Author | Dan Simmons |
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Price | $10.99 |
Publisher | Little, Brown |
Release Date | Mar 08, 2007 |
Source | Google Books |
『The Last Days of New Paris』
A thriller of war that never was—of survival in an impossible city—of surreal cataclysm. In The Last Days of New Paris, China Miéville entwines true historical events and people with his daring, uniquely imaginative brand of fiction, reconfiguring history and art into something new. “Beauty will be convulsive. . . .” 1941. In the chaos of wartime Marseille, American engineer—and occult disciple—Jack Parsons stumbles onto a clandestine anti-Nazi group, including Surrealist theorist André Breton. In the strange games of the dissident diplomats, exiled revolutionaries, and avant-garde artists, Parsons finds and channels hope. But what he unwittingly unleashes is the power of dreams and nightmares, changing the war and the world forever. 1950. A lone Surrealist fighter, Thibaut, walks a new, hallucinogenic Paris, where Nazis and the Resistance are trapped in unending conflict, and the streets are stalked by living images and texts—and by the forces of Hell. To escape the city, he must join forces with Sam, an American photographer intent on recording the ruins, and make common cause with a powerful, enigmatic figure of chance and rebellion: the exquisite corpse. But Sam is being hunted. And new secrets will emerge that will test all their loyalties—to each other, to Paris old and new, and to reality itself. Praise for The Last Days of New Paris “Beautiful, stunningly realized . . . [The Last Days of New Paris] is a brief vacation in alien latitudes, a midnight layover in an imaginary place.”—NPR “A thoughtful, highbrow novella . . . Miéville’s self-assured style offers up a strong sense of humanity, while the strange Surrealist monsters give Last Days a fun and complementary mad-science component.”—USA Today “[A] testament to the necessary, progressive power of art . . . Both moving and disturbingly timely.”—Newsday “A novel both unhinged and utterly compelling, a kind of guerrilla warfare waged by art itself, combining both meticulous historical research and Miéville’s unparalleled inventiveness.”—Chicago Tribune “An extraordinarily original work that foregrounds Mieville’s considerable ingenuity and innovation.”—The Millions “Hauntingly poetic, strangely beautiful, and erratically intense.”—San Francisco Book Review “Dazzling . . . quite a feat.”—The Guardian
Author | China Miéville |
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Price | $8.99 |
Publisher | Del Rey |
Release Date | Aug 09, 2016 |
Source | Google Books |
In closing, I highly encourage brave souls who revel in the unfathomable terror of Lovecraftian horror to consider delving into this list of ten spine-chilling novels and comics. They will shatter all conventional understandings of traditional horror, and present you with narratives that cross the boundaries of imagination into the domain of cosmic dread. These books offer madness-inducing entities capable of striking fear into the hearts of even the most hardened readers. If you've always longed for a glimpse at the exquisite terror that lies beyond the edge of human comprehension, these carefully selected tales are your passport to those frightening realms. Whether you're a longtime Lovecraft fan, or someone new wanting to plunge into the abysmal depths of such horror, remember that once you commence this chilling journey, there's absolutely no turning back. Proceed if you dare, these readings are not for the faint of heart!
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