Best Scary Books To Read from 2023
2023 has been a great year for thrills. The scary books to read category has some big hitters from the industry with books from Stephen King, Alice Feeney, Grady Hendrix and more! From thrillers, horror, suspense, and mystery these eerie, intense and sometimes disturbing books landed top on our list.
Check out the nominees of the 3rd Annual Bookfinity Moodie Awards. These are the best of the best books of the past 12 months. The books were selected based on how they made the reader feel once they read the book.
This Year’s Mood Categories:
Scared – The book that you couldn’t stop reading...even when your hands were shaking.
Happy – The book that boosted your “Moodie” and brightened your spirits.
Empowered – The book that cheered on your soul.
Inspired – The book that left you more motivated than before.
Informed – The book that gifted you with more perspective.
Amused – The book you couldn't put down and that left you delightfully entertained.
View the winners and other moods now!
Best Scary Books to Read - Moodie Awards
Good Bad Girl
by Alice Feeney
THE INSTANT USA TODAY BESTSELLER!!
Sometimes bad things happen to good people, so good people have to do bad things.
Twenty years after a baby is stolen from a stroller, a woman is murdered in a care home. The two crimes are somehow linked, and a good bad girl may be the key to discovering the truth. Edith may have been tricked into a nursing home, but at eighty-years-young, she's planning her escape. Patience works there, cleaning messes and bonding with Edith, a kindred spirit. But Patience is lying to Edith about almost everything.
None of This Is True
by Lisa Jewell
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author known for her "superb pacing, twisted characters, and captivating prose" (BuzzFeed), Lisa Jewell returns with a scintillating new psychological thriller about a woman who finds herself the subject of her own popular true crime podcast.
Celebrating her forty-fifth birthday at her local pub, popular podcaster Alix Summer crosses paths with an unassuming woman called Josie Fair. Josie, it turns out, is also celebrating her forty-fifth birthday. They are, in fact, birthday twins.
by Grady Hendrix
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
When Louise finds out her parents have died, she dreads going home. She doesn't want to leave her daughter with her ex and fly to Charleston. She doesn't want to deal with her family home, stuffed to the rafters with the remnants of her father's academic career and her mother's lifelong obsession with puppets and dolls. She doesn't want to learn how to live without the two people who knew and loved her best in the world.
Small Mercies: A Detective Mystery
by Dennis Lehane
Instant New York Times Bestseller
"Small Mercies is thought provoking, engaging, enraging, and can't-put-it-down entertainment." -- Stephen King
In the summer of 1974 a heatwave blankets Boston and Mary Pat Fennessy is trying to stay one step ahead of the bill collectors. Mary Pat has lived her entire life in the housing projects of "Southie," the Irish American enclave that stubbornly adheres to old tradition and stands proudly apart.
Holly
by Stephen King
A New York Times Notable Book
Holly Gibney, one of Stephen King's most compelling and ingeniously resourceful characters, returns in this thrilling novel to solve the gruesome truth behind multiple disappearances in a midwestern town.
When Penny Dahl calls the Finders Keepers detective agency hoping for help locating her missing daughter, Holly is reluctant to accept the case. Her partner, Pete, has Covid. Her (very complicated) mother has just died. And Holly is meant to be on leave. But something in Penny Dahl's desperate voice makes it impossible for Holly to turn her down.
Their Vicious Games
by Joelle Wellington
You must work twice as hard to get half as much.
Adina Walker has known this the entire time she's been on scholarship at the prestigious Edgewater Academy--a school for the rich (and mostly white) upper class of New England. It's why she works so hard to be perfect and above reproach, no matter what she must force beneath the surface. Even one slip can cost you everything.
I Have Some Questions for You
by Rebecca Makkai
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Named a Best Book of 2023 by USA Today, NPR, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Real Simple, PopSugar, and CrimeReads
A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past--the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the murder of her former roommate, Thalia Keith, in the spring of their senior year. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia's death and the conviction of the school's athletic trainer, Omar Evans, are hotly debated online, Bodie prefers--needs--to let sleeping dogs lie.
Silver Nitrate
by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
NATIONAL BESTSELLER - From the author of The Daughter of Doctor Moreau and Mexican Gothic comes a fabulous meld of Mexican horror movies and Nazi occultism: a dark thriller about the curse that haunts a legendary lost film--and awakens one woman's hidden powers.
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, BookPage, Book Riot
Montserrat has always been overlooked. She's a talented sound editor, but she's left out of the boys' club running the film industry in '90s Mexico City. And she's all but invisible to her best friend, Tristán, a charming if faded soap opera star, though she's been in love with him since childhood.
All the Sinners Bleed
by S a Cosby
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - USA Today Bestseller - Washington Post's The Twelve Best Thrillers of the Year - TIME's 100 Must Read Books of the Year
A Black sheriff. A serial killer. A small town ready to combust.
Titus Crown is the first Black sheriff in the history of Charon County, Virginia. In recent decades, quiet Charon has had only two murders. But after years of working as an FBI agent, Titus knows better than anyone that while his hometown might seem like a land of moonshine, cornbread, and honeysuckle, secrets always fester under the surface. Then a year to the day after Titus's election, a school teacher is killed by a former student and the student is fatally shot by Titus's deputies.
Yellowface
by R F Kuang
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK
Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But Athena's a literary darling. June Hayward is literally nobody. Who wants stories about basic white girls, June thinks.
So when June witnesses Athena's death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena's just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers during World War I.
So what if June edits Athena's novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song--complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? Doesn't this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller? That's what June claims, and the New York Times bestseller list seems to agree.