28 Must-Read Frightening Folk Horror Books

Reading folk horror often means traveling to all the remotest areas of Britain. Pine is set in the Scottish highlands. Lauren and her father Niall are missing part of their family, Lauren’s mother. On Halloween night, Niall picks up a strange woman in white on the side of the road, a trope from countless ghost stories and urban legends, and that’s only the start of the mysterious occurrences.

In this novel, set among the Métis community in Ontario, Canada, a woman searching for her missing husband seems to have found him, or his doppelgänger. He’s now going by Revered Wolff and preaching the Christian gospel in a revival tent. The Métis story of the Rogarou, a werewolf-like creature, is the basis for this novel.

This book is what happens when Daisy Jones and the Six has a baby with House of Leaves in rural England. Told in an interview transcript style, this novel features a fictional folk band holed up in the titular hall to record an album. Then the lead singer goes missing. This short horror gem definitely has a gothic haunted house vibe, but the way the story incorporates folk ballads and obscure English Christmas traditions ups the folk horror factor.

This novella introduces Danielle Cain, a queer punk rock traveller venturing to a squatter utopia in Iowa, to investigate her friend’s mysterious death. It turns out even off-the-grid anarchists sometimes summon murderous stag demons who turn on them. This book also has a sequel featuring Danielle Cain wielding her newfound demon-hunting skills.

I’ve written before how thought-provoking this novel is. Simply put, it’s about a supernatural entity seeking revenge against four Native American men for a misdeed they were all party to years ago. This book is slippery within the folk horror sub-genre, because it begins with a haunted house. By the end, however, an unruly and unforgiving embodiment of nature, a folk horror hallmark, rampages on full display.

This horror novel takes its folklore elements to the most urban possible setting, New York City. Still, when the main character Apollo goes in search of the truth of what happened to his wife and child, we will see that even someplace as populated as New York has forgotten islands, forests, and secret graveyards. The novel explores the familiar myth of the changeling, an otherworldly creature swapped out for a human baby.

If you’re looking for folk horror comics, Through the Woods is an excellent choice. It’s a compilation of five macabre horror stories. It definitely blends the folk horror sub-genre with body horror, because I was seriously frightened by the way the author draws teeth.

If you’ve read The Secret History, you know that reenacting ancient practices you’ve read about can have deadly consequences. Ghost Wall’s premise is also rooted in academia, specifically an anthropological course in which a family lives as ancient Britons did in the North of England. Does foraging for food and building structures to ward off invaders invariably lead to human sacrifice?

Water Ghosts is a reimagining of a Chinese ghost story set in a small farming town in California in 1928. Three bedraggled women appear out of the fog, disrupting the townsfolk and becoming intertwined with their lives. This dreamy folk horror shows how people can be haunted by their passions and betrayals.

If watching a regular episode of Hoarders gives you the creeps, wait until you read The Twisted Ones. When Mouse goes to rural North Carolina to clean out her deceased, hoarder grandmother’s home, she finds a journal. It details the horrifying things that live in the woods just outside, beings that seem purely mythical, until they aren’t.

Where many folk horror novels involve outsiders traveling to remote, insular communities, Experimental Film has a found footage angle instead. A Canadian film historian uncovers a lost early 20th century filmmaker, whose films depict the Slavic folk character Lady Midday, a demon who comes out at noon.

This is a folk horror novel for readers who are open to atmospheric horror that isn’t neat or tightly plotted. It’s a haunted house story, set near the cliffs of Dover. The house itself as a narrator at times, and the book has that fairytale feeling without being an outright retelling or reimagining. One of the characters in this novel suffers from pica, the disorder involving eating non-nutritive substances.

This is an offbeat book I wish more people would read. It’s not a typical folk horror novel; it’s more like the aftermath of one. Mostly told in retrospect, it’s about a woman’s reflection on her youth in a rural Midwestern town where teenagers undergo an animalistic transition period before adulthood. If you’ve ever marveled that something you thought was normal about your childhood was in fact quite strange, this book takes that premise to the extreme.

Carmen Maria Machado’s writing is very influenced by horror and is often at the nexus of body horror and folk horror. This book of short stories includes the standout “The Husband Stitch,” which recounts a woman’s treatment during childbirth mixed with the folktale of the girl with the green ribbon around her neck.

The Whisper Man is the most contemporary kind of folk horror novel, building on urban legends, our modern version of fairytales. A serial killer from 20 years ago was nicknamed “The Whisper Man” for whispering in the windows of his victims. Enter Jake, a child and a newcomer to the town, who hears whispers at his own window.

In the quaint Hudson Valley town of Black Spring, there’s a 17th century witch just wandering into people’s houses. Her eyes and mouth are sewn shut, and she stands by people’s beds. The town tries to keep knowledge of their curse under wraps, but the teens want to make their local witch go viral. I’m still not brave enough to read this one, because the premise is so viscerally terrifying to me, someone who regularly experiences the real-life horror of sleep paralysis.

Pedro Páramo is considered a classic of Mexican literature and an early example of magical realism, but it also has folk horror elements. Juan Preciado, the main character, travels to his deceased mother’s hometown seeking his father and instead finds an actual ghost town. The novel is tied to folk culture and in particular oral storytelling.

Wakenhyrst is an Edwardian gothic horror novel tinged with folk horror elements. The novel is set at Wake’s End, a large manor house in East Anglia that borders a bleak fen from which terrible things might be emanating. It highlights the way old Christian practices and folk practices can blend.

The title refers to an ubume, a ghost that arises from the burial of a pregnant woman in Japanese folklore. If a mystery novel with folklore-inspired horror is what you’re after, here’s your book. The tale is narrated by a tabloid reporter who is investigating a story of a woman who’s been pregnant for 20 months with no end in sight. He also calls in his exorcist friend to help with the case.

Folk horror often involves contemporary characters happening upon a setting that seems anachronistic, but The Gallows Pole is a fully historical folk horror novel, set in the late 18th century. In it, a charismatic leader assembles a group to build a criminal coin-forging empire in his remote moorland home. He is also visited by visions of stag-headed men. Real history underpins the coin forging. But the stag-headed men? Who can say.

This is a good book for people looking to be only mildly creeped out. The title character, a boy named Lanny, moves to a village 60 miles outside of London. There he learns of the local bogeyman character drawn by schoolchildren. This novel was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2019, but that isn’t why I chose it for this list. I chose it because the bogeyman character’s name is Dead Papa Toothwort, and as if that weren’t enough, he narrates part of the novel. 

This novel is another take on changeling folklore, in which Lauren, a new mother to twins, swears she saw a woman take her babies and replace them with different creatures. Of course, no one believes her, and then another strange incident occurs. She becomes determined to bring her true infant sons home. The novel is steeped in dark fairytales throughout.

Daniel Lavery’s short story collection is the blend of horror and fairytales you are looking for. There are nightmare-inducing retellings of The Little Mermaid, The Frog Princess, Beauty and the Beast, and The Velveteen Rabbit (not technically a folk tale as it has an author). All are imbued with Lavery’s hyperliterate, clever prose stylings.

The Day the Sun Died is a great example of folk horror being used for allegorical purposes, in this case to question the optimism of the “Chinese Dream”—a counterpart to the so-called “American Dream”—outlined by president Xi Jingping. In this novel all the residents of a village deep in the mountains begin sleepwalking, or “dreamwalking,” consuming the village in violence and chaos.

Another novel set in the Scottish Highlands, this one has a shifting sense of reality and magic. In it, a woman comes to the Highlands to escape what happened to her in London. She is visited by floating white shapes on the loch and in the woods. When she comes across someone tearing apart a bird in the woods, she needs to know his secret.

Birds and deer are the animals that seem to be featured most commonly in folk horror novels. The Essex Serpent, a historical novel, features the return of a Loch Ness monster-like creature who gets blamed for mysterious deaths and disappearances. This book is not terrifying, with more flair for gothic melodrama (that is not a complaint!). It also investigates the rift between science and religion.

The title of this anthology is an Inuktitut word that means “in the dark,” so if you are afraid of the dark, this is the book for you. Not all the stories in this book would be categorized as folk horror—it dips into post-apocalyptic horror and body horror as well—but a giant walrus god does await you in one of the tales.

Okay, this last one is a romance novel, but hear me out. It’s set in a rickety, gothic manor in Cornwall in the late 18th century, and features a woman who is facing harsh treatment for writing feminist tracts, including folk horror-esque threats. If you’re a real scaredy cat who wants a dark romance inflected with the faintest tinge of folk horror, you’ll get a guaranteed happy ending with this one.