In a loose way, these six books—suspense, horror, mystery—are arranged in the order I would read them through the course of a single day; the first two require full-on daylight, and the last I would read even after dusk (but it’s still a gripping story, though largely character-driven).

For me, Bazterrica’s was the most unsettling, but it’s also the shortest so it was over quickly, whereas Moreno-Garcia’s is long, with a lot of everyday scenes but a couple of very scary ones—but she’s usually shelved in fiction rather than genre, so maybe I was just scared by the cover illustration!

Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Silver Nitrate (2023) does for film what her debut Signal to Noise does for music: there’s power in art, and that’s amazing—or, not—depending who’s channeling it. Along the way, she seizes the opportunity to explore the history of occultists and pseudoscientists in ‘30s and ‘40s Germany, one of whom made his way to Mexico and provided the spark for this story’s villain. It’s set in Mexico City in the ‘90s, where Montserrat earns her living as a sound editor. Her childhood friend Tristán adjusts to the life of an actor who gets more voice-over work than movie roles, following a ten-year-old scandal with his co-star and an industry’s hesitancy to hire a leading man whose serial relationships with women weren’t enough to distract from his occasional relationships with men. Montserrat and Tristán are actually the main feature in this story.
Heavy on the mystical.

You’ll enjoy Blackfeet writer Stephen Graham Jones’ I Was a Teenage Slasher (2024) if the idea for this cross-over appeals: a John Hughes film with one of the Friday the 13th franchise. Jones’ style is like Stephen King’s if King had started out writing screenplays rather than novels—some similar qualities, but less character development. He seriously understands horror, and expresses his expertise with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek. Whenever I find my attention wandering, soon there’s a clever little bit (a reference to a common trope, or an unexpectedly poignant observation) that pulls me back in. It was a fun read on the hottest of summer days, and I was quite content to turn the pages for as long as my popsicle lasted, without taking any notes. But here is a tiny taste: “If I knew any other slashers, any other former teenage slashers, I guess I could ask them about their interior lives, their drives and motivations, their regrets and dreams and longings, but… we’re a solitary lot, I’m pretty sure.” You can spot the charm, can’t you?

One thread that connects Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is the Flesh (2017; Trans. Sarah Moses, 2020) with her novel The Unworthy (2024; Trans. Sarah Moses, 2025) is the importance of words and language. The power that they secure and wield. In Flesh, early on we learn: “There are words that are convenient, hygienic. Legal.” But as the events in that novel unfold, it’s clear that even those people who can recognise how powerful people manipulate language to obscure the horrors they commit, anyone who adopts the practices of an abusive system becomes complicit. In Unworthy, we soon hear a voice with “the resonance of crystal shattering” but our narrator cannot understand the “disquieting, fractured language.” Wombs swell with sin, there’s a “lugubrious sickness” yes, but tongues also blacken—and, there’s a “tongueless mouth”. When others arrive at the convent, they must learn its language—but often it’s drowned out, by all the wordless screaming. (I wrote about her short stories here.)

No screaming, only engines revving as the soundtrack for S.A. Cosby’s Blacktop Wasteland (2020). Beauregard’s  mother is in a long-term care home that suddenly requires a five-digit sum to keep her there (she reads her Bible, but leverage is her religion, he says). His daughter’s ready for college (and a year’s tuition is almost as costly as the nursing home). And the garage has been struggling since a competitor opened nearby. So even though he’s been out of trouble for years now, happily married to Kia with three kids—they’re about to lose everything, so he agrees to take on “one last job”. They live in Virginia, in a part of the state where roads have “names that sounded like rejected country song titles”. And it’s sharp little observations like these that balance the action in this novel and made it so satisfying for me. Sure, when someone threatens Beauregard, he’ll have “his friends Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson” close at hand. But he’s also not above noticing the “textured cross pattern” of the gun’s grip against his skin. It’s a great balance.

That gun could be one of the illustrations in Uketsu’s Strange Pictures (2022; Trans. Jim Rion, 2025), because each drawing reflects a grisly death…although not one of them shows a dead body. The first is presented as the drawing of an eleven-year-old girl by a psychologist who has turned to teaching; she encourages her students to profile the artist and shares her own assessment. (Part of this drawing is on the book cover: the bird inside the tree trunk.) The book is divided into four sections, with illustrations charts and graphics throughout. The prose is direct, the story uncluttered: the focus is on the puzzler’s process or, if you don’t enjoy puzzles, you can simply wait for the interpretations and explanations. I started to read it on a sunny weekend morning, because of the “Japanese Mystery-Horror Sensation” blurb on the cover—but for me it was all mystery (although murders are horrifying, yes), and I finished reading it the same day. There were a lot of quietly satisfying moments in the story, but one of my favourite parts surrounds a plot point which is noted to be a common plot device in classic Japanese detective fiction. Which I mention because, even though this is a contemporary story, it has a timeless feel for me.

Jon Hickey’s Big Chief (2025) is set over the course of a few days, preceding and including election day in the tribal government of Passage Rouge Nation (an Anishnaabeg community). Hickey studied at Cornell like the novel’s hero, and he’s an enrolled member of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians but he lives in San Francisco. It’s easy to imagine dotted lines between author and city-Indian-main-character, Mitch. Mitch is well aware of the ways in which he doesn’t fit in, but he’s jostled himself into an influential position in the part of the band that’s profiting off the casino, even though he grew up on the “other side” of the lake. It’s a woman from there who’s running against Mitch’s team, and the tensions are high. Power and profit, influence and corruption: it’s a quietly insistent page-turner if you want good things for Mitch and, partly because he’s a little reluctant to want them for himself, you can’t help but root for him. He’s a little guarded in his own life (even with his old girlfriend) but he spills out every little thought on the page, and it makes you care.

“‘They went at him hard, hennit?’ There’s that code switch in Mack’s voice, that ‘isn’t it?’ with an H sound thrown in there to emphasize his rez accent. It’s not put on—it’s real—but I’m struck by how quickly he can change his voices, just fall into them depending on who he’s talking to. I have one voice, it seems to me, and it definitely ain’t rez.”

What’s the first scary book you remember reading? Mine was The Thing at the Foot of the Bed (1959), and it was really the cover that terrified me!