San Diego County has kicked off fall, not with falling leaves and cozy sweaters, but with an excruciating heat wave. It’s madness! But maybe we can get our autumnal selves centered by focusing on the fall highlight of October: Halloween! We’ve got some nice horror books to set the tone for a scary season.
Although we have discussed it in this column recently, I feel that I have to begin by mentioning the novel The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones; this book was selected by One Book, One San Diego as the 2026 title for San Diegans to collectively read and discuss. It is a mixture of horror and historical fiction, a story within a story inspired by the Marais Massacre, combining revenge, vampires, power reversals and violence. Read along with the whole County with this title!
While ostensibly a science fiction tale, There Is No Antimemetics Division by a pseudonymous author known as “qntm” (aka Sam Hughes) has its share of the unsettling and uncanny. A mysterious government agency that secretly protects mankind from strange entities and unexplainable powers faces its greatest challenge: organisms whose very proximity destroys thoughts and information. How do you function as a human when you can’t trust your senses or memories? How do you fight an enemy you can’t perceive, or that you forget as soon as you look away? Sci-fi and action with a premise that gets creepier the further the tale unfurls.
There Is No Antimemetics Division
Patrick Horvath's Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees is a graphic novel horror/thriller that every reviewer summarizes the same (accurate) way: "Dexter meets Richard Scarry." The story is set in a wholesome small town of cuddly, anthropomorphic animals, where one of them hides a dark secret. The friendly bear who runs the town hardware store spends her weekends out of town, where she lets loose her inner serial killer. Her hometown remains carefree, until a grisly murder is discovered in Woodbrook, one that our evil protagonist didn't commit! Now she must discover the other serial killer in town, to prevent people from digging too deep and discovering her own bloody secret.
Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees
Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark is a horror book reminiscent of 2016’s hit Lovecraft Country. Both blend the terror and violence of Jim Crow racism with supernatural monsters to highlight both the unknown darkness and the well-known darkness of hatred. In Ring Shout, a trio of Black women in 1920s Georgia fight the machinations of demonic forces that inflame and feed off the bigotry and fury of the Ku Klux Klan. It’s a brisk read, peppered with forgotten American history that’s as scary as any horror movie.
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