Tomorrow on the general blog I will have my annual Becky's Best Books I Read in 2025 post which will include a link to this post listing my favorite Horror books of the year.
Before I get to my personal list, here is my annual recap of the year in Horror 2025 edition in the Lineup. From my introduction:
...I promise you, this is not your run-of-the-mill, end-of-the-year best books list. As I do each year here at The Lineup, I try to give you a more nuanced look at the year that was by walking you through some of the more interesting trends I have noticed accompanied by the example titles that illustrate them best.
We were blessed with an abundance of great horror this year, and while I would never be able to fit all of my favorites in this one article, I did see three distinct trends emerge, all of which took the genre in original and vibrant directions, drawing in new readers, and providing us all with amazing reading experiences.
Click here to read the entire post for free.
Now in terms of my personal favorite Horror reads of 2025, I am not going to give a top ten because this was a strange year for my favorite. Why was it strange? Well because the best book I read in every category and for every reason regardless of genre is the same book-- The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones. And what is even more jarring, I read that book in December of 2024 and I knew then, I would not read a better book in 2025.
In my 25 years of being a librarian, this has never happened to me. I have always been able to say that I have a few favorite books especially when considering genre. That makes this year very special, but also a little strange.
To that end, I am going to embrace the strangeness which this year presented to me and give you some books that I loved this year with links to my reviews. You can see all of the horror I read and even more that I consider 5 Stars by following my reviews at Goodreads. I use Goodreads to keep everything in one easy and searchable place for you to see all of the books I read each year, but especially all of the horror. And you can always find this link to my reviews in the right gut of the blog in the page titles-- Horror Review Index.
Another easy way to see everything I was paid to review (this will not have the books I read for fun many of which are not horror) is to use the "What I'm Reading" tag on the general blog here.
Once again, I officially read just under 70 Horror books for review in 2025. Some of those books I read in 2025 but the reviews won't post until 2026. In fact, I have 1 more to read and review before the end of the year.
You should 100% check out all of the books I read for review in 2025 because all of these are horror books I would recommend for all public libraries. And these reviews all appeared in Booklist or Library Journal, so you can have a resource to site when making the purchase. Even if you are backtracking now and into January, you can still easily get all the books I have recommended in those magazine with this simple click. Buying horror is an all year long activity. And like every popular genre, sometimes we have to catch up after the fact.
Okay now on to the books I loved and gave a star to in print; these are the books that stayed with me all year. As I revisited everything, these all flew to the top of the top. Each book came out in 2025 even if I read it in 2024. I have them listed in the order by reviews were published.
[Please note, one title I loved and read but it was not for review is Play Nice by Rachel Harrison. I did include it in the article above though.]
- Wake Up and Open Your Eyes by Clay McLeod Chapman
- At Dark, I Become Loathsome by Eric LaRocca
- Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix
- The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica
- When the Wolf Comes Home by Nat Cassidy
- The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones
- The Country Under Heaven By Frederic S. Durbin
- Girl in the Creek by Wendy N. Wagner
- The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling
- Angel Down by Daniel Kraus
- A Game in Yellow by Hailey Piper
- The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno Garcia
- Lucky Day by Chuck Tingle
- Killer on the Road/The Babysitter Lives by Stephen Graham Jones
- We Are Always Tender With Our Dead by Eric LaRocca
- Black Flame by Gretchen Felker Martin
- Acquired Taste (stories) by Clay McLeod Chapman
- Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite
- The Long Low Whistle by Laurel Hightower
I will elaborate more on a few of these on the main blog tomorrow but that is a wrap on Becky's Best Horror I read in 2025.
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