RUSA CODES Reading List: 2022 Horror Winners

One of my favorite library worker based awards I the RUSA CODES Reading List awards. From the site:

Established in 2007 by the CODES section of RUSA, The Reading List seeks to highlight outstanding genre fiction that merit special attention by general adult readers and the librarians who work with them.

The Council, which consists of twelve librarians who are experts in readers’ advisory and collection development, selects one book from each of eight different categories. The eight genres currently included in the council’s considerations are adrenaline titles (suspense, thrillers, and action adventure), fantasy, historical fiction, horror, mystery, romance, science fiction, and relationship fiction. However, the Council is constructed in such a way to be adaptable to new genres and changes in contemporary reading interest.

This year's winners are not up on the awards page website yet, but the announcement can be found here. As it says above there are 8 categories-- all genre based! Each category has a winner. That titles gets an annotation [which you can use to book talk the title to a patron] and 3 readalikes. There is also a short list of other titles as well. And Horror is its own category.

This means that for each of the 8 categories you have 8 titles that you can trust for each genre. That is 64 genre titles at your fingertips just this year alone! And then, take into account that the Award homepage goes back to 2014, and, well, try not to explode with genre resource happiness.

Also, it is VERY important to note that these are genre titles picked NOT by genre specialists, rather by general adult services librarians. That's what I love about this list. It reflects what is most appealing to a wide audience, not just hard core fans of each genre.

So what you are getting in terms of Horror is an excellent overview of MUST buy titles, ones that will resonate with a wide audience. 

Click through to look at the current genre award winners. And then go to the main Reading List web page for backlist access back to 2014. Just a quick perusal of these lists will give you a sense of where Horror is right now.

And last, but not least, I am reposting the entire Horror entry below, with links to my reviews because I have reviewed every single one of these titles in the last year:

Horror

Winner
“Nothing But Blackened Teeth” by Cassandra Khaw (A Nightfire Book, published by Tom Doherty Associates)

A wedding party camped in a crumbling Japanese mansion falls prey to their own creeping dread and the encircling yōkai–hungry inhabitants led by a ghostly bride. She was buried alive long, long ago, and she has been lonely.

Read-alikes: “The Ring” by Kōji Suzuki, “Night of the Mannequins” by Stephen Graham Jones; “It Will Just Be Us” by Jo Kaplan

Short List
“The Death of Jane Lawrence: A Novel” by Caitlin Starling (St. Martin’s Press, an imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group)
“My Heart is a Chainsaw” by Stephen Graham Jones (Saga Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.)
“Near the Bone” by Christina Henry (Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC)
“This Thing Between Us: A Novel” by Gus Moreno (MCD x FSG Originals, Farrar, Straus and Giroux)