Spooky novellas written by women or nonbinary authors
Just in time for Halloween! The novella form is so perfect for horror, with its combination of moral seriousness, sensory vertigo, and difficult-to-sustain tension. Horror is a genre of parables, wherein ethical and existential problems are raised and resolved with a violence proportionate to their invasiveness into “normal” life.
By setting modest parameters and eschewing subplots, a novella can play out a single high-stakes problem from start to finish. And with the page count so low, you’re almost guaranteed to stay up into the dark and dreadful night to finish it. Devour these quickly, before they devour you. --Crimereads
Having written the introduction for this one, I’m biased. That said, this novella about a blocked writer who embarks on the biography of a forgotten modernist is a modern-day classic of weird fiction, an uncanny feminist fable, and a folk horror gem…
My favorite of Sarah Moss’s body of work, this slender, gorgeously-written folk horror novella grapples with the patriarchal (and worse) urges behind survivalism, nostalgia, and a fanatical obsession with England’s past. Teenage Silvie and her…
This slim little volume puzzled many as a follow up to Gone Girl. In fact, it is a perfect example of the spooky novella—Halloween-ready, yet also a perfect stocking stuffer for lovers of darkly humorous fiction, canny narrators, uncanny events, and…
If you’re in the mood for a Japanese destination wedding plagued by ghosts and murder and toxic friend drama, look no further. A dysfunctional friend-group arrives at a haunted Heian-era mansion where a jilted bride and her handmaidens were buried…
In this twisting, Lynchian Moebius strip of a story, a woman lies delirious in a hospital struggling to answer the questions of an unearthly little boy about what went wrong. An eerie merging of psychological and environmental horror, it is set in…
A fast, fierce, and unexpectedly cathartic coming of age tale, this San Antonio-set novella lives up to its The Craft comp. Five Chicana teens summon up something they don’t understand, and the resulting possession has catastrophic results. When the…
I love a spooky Christmas story in the M. R. James tradition. There’s just something about holiday horror that makes you feel cozier in comparison with the dead, wintry landscape outside the window. (And if you live somewhere green, you’ll be even…
The Ex-Detective and a translator set out into a hostile, snowy landscape to track down a client’s ex-wife. The result is a beautiful, fascinating, primal-scene fairy tale laced with body horror and steeped in questions of translation and the…
Abby Gillman is just starting to accept that blood is part of growing up. But finding a ghost at the end of trail of blood was not supposed to be part of that. No one believes her and Abby starts to wonder why she’s the only one who can see the…
