This year has been rough and I didn’t get as much reading as I would have liked done, but I did get quite a few great books in and quite a few were very dark. I find that sometimes I can’t stomach reading horror and dark fiction, but sometimes, when things are troubling, it is strangely comfortable to immerse myself in the dark.
The words disquiet, Unsettled, Disturbed come to mind. And then they grow like a disease inside you until you know without a shadow of a doubt that you will never ever eat sour gummies again.
Stoker Award winner for 2022, this one was about as dark as they go. At times I had to put down the book to get a break, but I prevailed and it was a worth this. This book burrowed its ways into my brain stem and will live on there, uncomfortably.
Maybe this doesn’t count as dark fiction, but the closeness of narration, the bleakness of his realization, and the ultimate solution felt dark in a way that was all too real. This is one of those important books that everyone should read.
Weird and beautiful and feral. This novella is one of the comp titles I am using for my soon to be released novella. It’s powerful and dirty and full of the the dark magic of angry women.
You may have heard me talk about this one before. I read this story in it’s drafting stages and I loved it then and I love it even more now. A very strange friendship blooming in a nihilistic apocalypse that creates a bleak hope.
I don’t know what Faustian bargain Leigh Bardugo made but I’ve never read anything from her that I didn’t devour. I waited for the sequel to the Ninth House for a long time, and it took me a minute to get reacquainted with the complexities of the world, but once I did, I was gone again.
These books were ones that really helped me grab onto the darkness of this past year and stay afloat. It is through horror that we learn to make friends with our fears (or where to hide when we cannot).
So that’s the list. Some were I would love to hear your recommendations for horror and dark fiction as I build my list for the coming year.
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LC W. Allingham 
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