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Ever since I got my hands on my first Goosebumps book (it was Be Careful What You Wish For, if you were wondering), I’ve always loved a book that packed a good scare. From sinister characters from different dimensions to hauntings that send shivers up my spine, I can’t get enough, and October is a great excuse to dive deep into the world of horror.
If you’re all right with trading in some sleep for some downright chilling thrills, then the horror works of these five authors of color are for you.
Tananarive Due
If you’re looking for Black horror, why not turn to an author who literally teaches a course on it? Tananarive Due is a master of the craft, winning the American Book Award for her novel The Living Blood and the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel and Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel for The Reformatory. She teaches a course called “The Sunken Place: Racism, Survival, and the Black Horror Aesthetic” at UCLA, so if anyone knows the mechanics of a scary tale inside and out, it’s Due.
The Good House, a novel of Due’s that often appears on best of horror book lists across the web, is a story about a woman who has to face her past and the past of her ancestors in a haunted house. Can’t go wrong with a good haunted house story, right?
Victor LaValle
As a fan of horror, I’d always wanted to get into the works of H.P. Lovecraft. That is, until I found out how racist he was. I was overjoyed to find a horror author like Victor LaValle who is not only an excellent horror author in his own right but also tackled a retelling of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Horror at Red Hook with the novella The Ballad of Black Tom, which went on to win the 2016 Shirley Jackson Award for best novella.
The Changeling and The Devil in Silver are also great horror novels to read from LaValle’s collection.
Octavia Butler
As one of my favorite authors, there was no way I’d put a list of horror writers together without talking about Octavia Butler. If you want to start off slow, go with Kindred, the story of a woman who is pulled back in time to reckon with the realities of American slavery. Parable of the Sower is a great choice for anyone who loves a good dystopian story, and Dawn is the start of a trilogy about a terrifying alien race calling on one woman to restore mankind after an apocalypse.
Stephen Graham Jones
Stephen Graham Jones is no stranger to horror. His novel The Only Good Indians won the Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction in 2020. It also won the Bram Stoker Award, as did his novel Night of the Mannequins.
If you’re a fan of slasher movies, My Heart is a Chainsaw is a good place to start. The first in a trilogy, in this novel (described as “Shirley Jackson meets Friday the 13th”), the main character uses her wealth of horror movie knowledge to combat the recent horrors unfolding in her own town.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
You might know of Silvia Moreno-Garcia from her beautifully covered Mexican Gothic (which won the Locus Award for Best Horror Novel in 2021), but Moreno-Garcia has been in the game for a while. If you love a good vampire story, give Certain Dark Things a read. In this novel, the main character gets his life turned upside down when he crosses paths with a jaded vampire on the run.
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