Indigenous people have been telling scary stories for thousands of years. For most of modern horror’s history, though, we showed up as the curse instead of the storytellers. Think of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, sitting on an Indian burial ground. This Mi’kmaq land brings the dead back wrong in Pet Sematary, or the medicine man clawing his way out of a woman’s neck in The Manitou. Then there are the sacred beings Hollywood keeps borrowing for weak sauce creature features.
Now Native writers hold the pen, and the rest of the horror world has noticed. Stephen Graham Jones keeps winning the genre’s biggest awards. Never Whistle at Night has spent two years on the indie bestseller list, and the recently released sequel has found its way onto bestseller lists as well. First-time novelists are landing with major horror imprints, and the readership and accolades keep growing.
A huge reason for the growing fandom of Indigenous horror is that it doesn’t follow the usual Horror playbook. In Indigenous horror, the land is alive and paying attention, and we know the spirits exist, the evil we face is not always evil, just consequence and justice. Still, the more terrifying elements are real history, from boarding schools to missing and murdered relatives. In our stories, living to the last page doesn’t mean you’ve won. We already know what it takes to come out the other side of trauma, and our families have been doing it for generations. In these stories, the supernatural only deepens the wounds people still carry, forcing us to confront the terrifying reality that merely staying alive is not the same as survival.
Here are 13 books from some of the newest and most celebrated voices in Indigenous Horror to add to your reading list. When you’ve finished these, check out our list from last year to keep the scares coming.
1. Off the Reservation — Stephen Graham Jones
The sequel to The Only Good Indians picks up five years later with survivor Nate Yellow Tail, who climbs into a beat-up camper van with three older Blackfeet to bring home the bones of a Blackfeet boy who died at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Once they have the bones, something terrible comes along with them.
2. Back for Blood: Never Whistle at Night Part II — edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.
Twenty-one new stories, illustrated by Cheyenne and Arapaho painter Brent Learned, from a lineup that includes Jessica Johns, Tommy Orange, Alicia Elliott, Joshua Whitehead and Ramona Emerson. It ranges from psychological dread to gore-soaked monster hunts.
3. It Looks Like You in the Dark — Mathilda Zeller
In an Iñupiaq village in Alaska’s Kobuk River Valley, Tapeesa knows the kushtuka legend: a hungry creature that wears the face of someone you love. When a mine arrives and her sister vanishes, she follows into the Arctic dark. Zeller expands her Never Whistle at Night story, drawing on Alaskan lore and her own family history.
4. Savage Lake — Nick Medina
Nell returns with her horror-buff teenage son to the family cabin on Torchlight Lake to sell it fast. Then the local Tribe barricades the roads through its land, days become weeks, screams carry over the water, and Nell starts slipping away from herself. From the author of Indian Burial Ground and The Whistler.
5. That Which Feeds Us — Keala Kendall
A Hawaiian gothic: Lehua searches for her missing twin at a luxury resort built on a former plantation island, where spirits are thick and paradise is rotten underneath. Trade reviewers singled out its body horror and its use of colonial history to build dread.
6. Borderland — Graham Akhurst
City-raised Indigenous teen Jono lands an internship with a documentary crew promoting a government mining project in the western Queensland desert, on land rumored to be sacred. A gothic eco-horror shortlisted for Aurealis Awards in both the horror and young adult novel categories.
7. The Sleeping Sisters — Jennifer Givhan
Fortuna Miércoles moves her family across the Rio Grande to outrun a bloodline curse, just as Albuquerque’s unsolved mesa killings start again beneath the dormant volcanoes called the Sleeping Sisters. Literary horror crossed with a serial-killer hunt.
8. An Ordinary Violence — Adriana Chartrand
Dawn has been followed by uncanny happenings for most of her life, including cryptic messages from her dead mother. When her life in Toronto falls apart and she heads back to the prairie city where she grew up, her brother walks out of prison with a charismatic new friend who seems to lead a dangerous supernatural network. Eerie and at times darkly funny.
9. Remains to be Told: Dark Tales of Aotearoa — edited by Lee Murray
Stories and poems set in the shifting landscape of Aotearoa New Zealand, drawing on its myths, history and haunted bush. Contributors include Pasifika writer Gina Cole, Dan Rabarts, Kirsten McKenzie and Tracie McBride, plus a poem by Neil Gaiman. It’s a mixed lineup of Māori, Pasifika and non-Indigenous writers rather than an all-Indigenous one.
10. Carnalis — Tiffany Morris
A lesbian cannibal novella that follows Lauren, who works in a kitchen, through a story of hunger, desire, feminine rage and betrayal. Early blurbs read it as a takedown of capitalism and colonialism. From the author of Green Fuse Burning.
11. The Moth Dreamer — Amy Lynn Farrell
Sixteen-year-old Aubrey sees her cousin’s death in a vision, and then it happens. More visions follow, a Trickster speaks to her in dreams, and a creature that feeds on suffering stalks her until it crosses into the waking world.
12. It’s Under the Deck — Jacy Morris
From the author of We Like It Cherry: Phil smells something dying under his deck, tries to remove it, and starts to come apart. A tight, one-sitting slide into madness.
13. Red Ants — Kimberly Blaeser
The prose debut of a prizewinning poet, longlisted for the National Book Award. Anishinaabe characters carry traditional stories into a present full of monsters, mosquitoes, protests and facial-recognition software. The supernatural sits next to dry humor here, so it’s the lightest scare on the list.
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![Linda Aguilar (Chumash). Basket [detail], 2013. Coiled horsehair, beads, shells, wooden bingo markers, and credit/debit card parts. Donated by Monica Jane Wyatt; 2013.27.1. Photo courtesy of the Autry Museum of the American West.](https://i0.wp.com/redpopnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/2013_27_1-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1)
