Best horror books to read in 2024

Reading lists

The best horror books to read this spooky season

Welcome to the Chaoskampf

Jane Flett is a Scottish writer who lives in Berlin. Her fiction has been commissioned for BBC Radio 4, featured in Electric Literature's Recommended Reading, Highly Commended in the Bridport Prize and performed at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. She's a recipient of the Scottish Book Trust New Writer Award, the New Orleans Writing Residency and the Berlin Senate Stipend for non-German literature. Freakslaw is her first novel.

The year that Florida fell into the sea, I killed a man and joined a cult and ran away to Mexico. I ate human flesh for the first time. 
 
It’s another sticky summer in New Orleans and the world is ending. Natural disasters abound, tourists are descending on the Old Town and Marcy’s old wrestling scar has reopened. It’s enough to make any girl want to take her seemingly perfect husband and tedious job and set it all on fire. 
 
So when Marcy meets a crew of degenerate filmmakers who are keen to whisk her away from her ordinary life, she lets herself be swept into their world of filth, arson and debauchery. 
 
For their part, they’re convinced Marcy’s strange scar is a sign she’s the Chosen One they need to lead their community through the end of times. For hers, she’s never been able to resist that kind of flattery. 
 
Praise for Freakslaw 
'A transgressive, inventive dark fantasy' Guardian 
'Cracking with desire, hedonism, angst, violence and sex' Heat 
'A celebration of the marginalised' Observer 
'As frightening as it is seductive' Herald

Jane Flett

A transgressive, inventive dark fantasy with believably complex characters.

Crackling with desire, hedonism, angst, violence and sex, this is a vibrant and wildly entertaining read.

The zany narrative races along, stuffed with chaos, magic and fabulously unique characters. It’s brilliant on how badly society treats its ‘freaks’. Mad and fun.

If it feels as if her debut […] is one she was born to write, then good for her. She succeeds magnificently, leaning into every queer punk excess and fantastical delight . . . A celebration of the marginalised, reframing otherness as a source of great vitality and power.

As frightening as it is seductive, this tale of a tightly knit band of outsiders pitting themselves against “that pulsing Calvinist heart” makes for a dark but thrillingly vibrant read.

Freakslaw is nonstop freaky, witchy, outlaw, glamour misfit fantasy - adventure fantasy, sex fantasy, revenge fantasy. Geek Love meets American Horror Story meets The Craft meets John Waters. I'd kill to run away with this circus.

A shimmering blade of a book. Every sentence is honed for high delight &mdash; a captivating cast of characters, dazzling language, and so funny &mdash; but there's a smart and dangerous bite to all the campy, glittery glory. Freakslaw makes space for feminist, queer anger... and shows it a great time. We've never been so happy to roll up, roll up.

Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta, authors of The View Was Exhausting

Delightful, delirious and transgressive, this book is the wildest of carnival rides, an open-mouthed kiss with the lingering taste of candyfloss and smoke. Jane Flett has created a queer punk masterpiece and we should all be so lucky to have our lives turned upside down by a visit to the Freakslaw.

Freakslaw is a cornucopia of the carnivalesque, where freaks are fabulous and weird is wonderful. Flett&rsquo;s sumptuously technicolour prose is as startlingly original as it is compulsively moreish.

Carole Hailey, author of The Silence Project

Part block party, part call to arms, Freakslaw is almost a new kind of genre. Wild, raunchy, brutal &ndash; a madcap funhouse with heart.

I don't think I've read anything quite like Freakslaw before. A wild, fun house of horrors &ndash; whip smart, the sharpest writing, funny, visceral and filled with vengeance. I loved it!

Rachelle Atalla, author of The Pharmacist

A strong spiritual successor to Katherine Dunn's Geek Love, Freakslaw gorgeously captures the desire to get away from places that can't contain you&mdash;and the complications of looking for escape.

Heather Parry, author of Orpheus Builds A Girl

Holy hell, I loved this book. A carnivalesque tale spun in luscious, crackling prose, Freakslaw is the glittery punk offspring of Katherine Dunn&rsquo;s Geek Love and Angela Carter&rsquo;s Nights at the Circus. You know those books you want to roll around in, rub on your skin, and clasp to your heart? Freakslaw is one, and I can&rsquo;t wait to see what Jane Flett does next.

Chelsea G. Summers, author of A Certain Hunger

A stampede of literary brilliance, a riot of filthy delinquency, Jane Flett's Freakslaw is &ndash; like the funfair whose story it tells &ndash; on a mission to liberate and unnerve. A well-plotted, page-turner where an unforgettable cast of characters bathe in the glow of her linguistic fireworks, Freakslaw is a one queer roller coaster you won't want to get off.

Victoria Gosling, author of Before the Ruins

Warm, hazy, sensual and alive, Flett’s setting is made so rich by her darkly lyrical writing style – highly original and almost poetic, striking in the confidence and completion of its sound for a debut novel – that the novel almost physically feels as though it lasts the entire summer.

Beg, borrow, or buy this one. Because when the Freakslaw comes to town, you want to be around for it.

With a large cast of characters handled skilfully by the author, the overall feeling of Freakslaw is a picaresque Day-Glo nightmare of a book, a modern slice of folk horror that shows heaps of promise for the future.

One that I am forcing my friends to read just so we can discuss it

Flett presents a bonkers, yet accurate, representation of the Shire in a sticky, nasty bottle.

Delightfully dark and experimental, a celebration of the wild pleasures of living in the world and in every variety of human body

Discover the dazzling new queer literary horror novel about chosen family and the risks it takes to become the person you want to be. 
 
‘The glittery punk offspring of Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus.’ Chelsea G. Summers, author of A Certain Hunger 
 
A travelling funfair of seductive troublemakers arrive in a repressed Scottish town. What could possibly go wrong? 
 
It’s the summer of ’97 and the Scottish town of Pitlaw is itching for change. 
 
Enter the Freakslaw – a travelling funfair populated by deviant queers, a contortionist witch, the most powerful fortune teller, and other architects of mayhem. It doesn’t take long for the Freakslaw folk to infiltrate Pitlaw’s grey world, where the town’s teenagers – none more so than Ruth and Derek – are seduced by neon charms and the possibility of escape. 
 
But beneath it all, these newcomers are harbouring a darker desire: revenge. 
 
And as tensions reach fever pitch between the stoic locals and the dazzling intruders, a violence that’s been simmering for centuries is about to be unleashed… 
 
 
Praise for Freakslaw: 
 
'A transgressive, inventive dark fantasy' Guardian 
 
'Crackling with desire, hedonism, angst, violence and sex' Heat 
 
'As frightening as it is seductive' Herald 
 
'I'd kill to run away with this circus' Michelle Tea, author of Modern Tarot 
 
‘A queer punk masterpiece' Leon Craig, author of Parallel Hells 
 
'A strong spiritual successor to Katherine Dunn's Geek Love' Heather Parry, author of Orpheus Builds a Girl

Jane Flett

Praise for Freakslaw

A transgressive, inventive dark fantasy with believably complex characters.

Crackling with desire, hedonism, angst, violence and sex, this is a vibrant and wildly entertaining read.

The zany narrative races along, stuffed with chaos, magic and fabulously unique characters. It’s brilliant on how badly society treats its ‘freaks’. Mad and fun.

A transgressive, inventive dark fantasy with believably complex characters.

Crackling with desire, hedonism, angst, violence and sex, this is a vibrant and wildly entertaining read.

The zany narrative races along, stuffed with chaos, magic and fabulously unique characters. It’s brilliant on how badly society treats its ‘freaks’. Mad and fun.

A transgressive, inventive dark fantasy with believably complex characters.

Crackling with desire, hedonism, angst, violence and sex, this is a vibrant and wildly entertaining read.

The zany narrative races along, stuffed with chaos, magic and fabulously unique characters. It’s brilliant on how badly society treats its ‘freaks’. Mad and fun.

Books by Jane Flett

Articles featuring Jane Flett

The best horror books to read this spooky season

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