Summertime is Horror Time! Twenty-One Summer Horror Books to Freak You Out

Not only is the living easy during summertime, so is reading summer-themed horror books!

While most people feel that Halloween is an especially good time for horror, I, not completely uncontroversially, argue that the summer is much more terrifying. The oppressive heat, the unknown waters, buzzing insects, nature and creatures coming to life all at once, crippling boredom... It can certainly be too much for some. Then there's my personal story - a couple of years back I had explained on the Otherlander's Blog how there is an intense connection between hot summer days and horror movies for me and maybe that clarifies this whole subject some more. We're not talking movies right now though, I will talk about summer-themed horror books. And luckily there are a lot of them. 

Incidentally I'm joining a water-themed reading challenge for my Horror Aficionados group called "Summer Horror Reading Challenge", prompting me to look up aquatic horror books set in and around oceans, seas and lakes and I want to share them with you.

I found a small selection of 21 books who range from mildly to wildly interesting. What I won't go for are obvious choices like Jaws, Lovecraft and his entourage or even Coleridge's "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" - those are luminaries and classics already and I'm on the lookout for fresher authors and more timely ideas and books.

I will probably read the first five to seven of these books for my challenge. The other books are just water-themed works I could think of or found during my research. However, I will certainly not be able to (re-) read all of them, not this summer at least. Who knows, though, maybe they are for you to enjoy? Causing you to freak out and lose control on the beach, swimming in a lake, on a cruise, on an island - you go ahead and choose your own horror.

1. The Devil and the Deep, Ed. by Ellen Datlow

In fifteen stories Meister Datlow brings us the whole range of aquatic terrors: shipwrecks, skulls, skinless relatives, body snatching sea monsters, mind snatching sea monsters, human eating sea monsters - every imaginable sea horror is what you will find in this anthology.

My favorite? "Broken Record" by Stephen Graham Jones of course, which is the story of a man stranded on a desert island, and whose list of the ten things he would take with him to that exact island start psychedelically melting into each other in his mind. Are they genuine hallucinations, though? Is that a werewolf? An absurd, maybe a little melancholy but very beautiful hallucination of a story to get caught in. Just my opinion, but it's the absolute winner of this collection. 

 

2. Flowers for the Sea by Zin E. Rocklyn

I have been eye flirting with this novella and this amazing cover (just look at those tentacles!) ever since it was released in the fall 2021 and finally recently Caro from the Otherland offered me an ARC to review and I'm the happiest I have been in a long time. The people in this story are the Survivors from a flooded kingdom who are trying to yet again survive the scarcity and murderous beasts that surround the arc they dwell on.

Iraxi is one of them but different nevertheless. She's pregnant with a child that just may be more than a child... Cover descriptions says it's "about the prices we pay and the vengeance we seek" - intrigues me!

3. Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

I guess we need to get used to reading stories about survivors of floods and sea catastrophes as our world pulls on tighter and tighter its blue cloak of water... Our Wives Under the Sea is yet another story on aquatic survivors and this time it's a deep-sea mission gone awry. Leah comes back changed and her wife Miri needs to figure out and deal with what has happened to her.
This synopsis alone says to me The Astronaut's Wife, Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife (wow! those wives, really) and a little bit of Vandermeer's Annihilation. But let's wait and see. I'm actually really excited about this read!

4. Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth by Stephen Graham Jones

SGJ is the only author mentioned twice in this list of mine, yet I still need to choose my reads and battles wisely from among his work as to not exhaust them all up here. I'm going for Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth, a collection of apparently very strange, absurd short stories from his days at Lazy Fascist Press, not only because of the flashy title but also because of the flashy cover. When I say short story, I mean short literally in this case - just a quick glance shows that some of them are a page long, sometimes half a page. No wonder then, that there are so many of them, 23 to be exact, and I 'm always up to some experimental horror, so let's see those metal teeth, I'm ready.

5. The Pisces by Melissa Broder 

I have a feeling that knowing more about this book will totally spoil the experience for me, so I'm really reluctant to go beyond what the jacket says: Lucy's life goes downhill and thinking she needs to spend some alone time, her sister offers her to stay at her house and dogsit for the summer. While Lucy still finds no rest, she becomes entranced by an eerily attractive swimmer one night sitting alone on the beach rocks.

This is all I know for now and it is all I want to know in advance. A number of people say it's disgusting, so I'm going with the guess that there's sex scenes with fish? I have no idea what awaits me but I kind of dig the uncertainty. Would love scenes with fish be really that disgusting?

6. They Came From The Ocean by Boris Bacic

The situation is that this book doesn't even have a synopsis and how is that even possible at this age and time? The reviews confirm what the title suggests: Bacic writes about various creatures emerging from the ocean, possibly attacking people. So a clean-cut, text-book example of a creature feature. I like creature features, they're the book equivalent of... creature features! Light entertainment without much thought is what I'm meaning to say. But maybe I'm completely wrong and it is scientific? Science fiction? The question is, how much more can I speculate about the content of a book that doesn't even have a cover text to fill out the space and reach my minimum word count per book? Not much, it seems.

7. Tidepool by Nicole Willson

Let's be honest - I'm not crazy into historical books. If it has to be historical and not about some flamboyant historical figure, I'm even less into them if they aren't set in Renaissance age England. However, I am willing to give a shot to Tidepool, which is set in the 1920s, is not about anyone particularly famous or significant but is set in a creepy and shabby oceanside town and corpses wash up on shore like dead fish. Young Sorrow discovers the town's deadly secret and from that point all inhabitants of Tidepool, human or not, mobilize to stop her from ever leaving the place again.

I'm imagining this as a more Gothic and atmospheric but a little less funny version of the 2019 film Ready or Not and please, oh please, let it be that!

 

8. The Chill by Scott Carson

I once roasted this book because it spends too much time info-dumping its readers on one of the most boring things imaginable: dam construction. I may have been a little unfair because there's plenty excitement too:... I'm so bad at this... In truth, I can't really think of a reason to read this book. It has a good premise, a flooded town, a curse and lots and lots of water and rain but it's not up my alley at all. The Chill starts off with likable characters and a solid story, but somehow turns boring, there's no nice way to say it. By the time things came to an end I had unfortunately lost interest big time.

 

9. The Deep by Alma Katsu

The Deep is the story of a young woman, Annie, who having survived the Titanic catastrophe, joins the crew of its sister ship Britannic as a nurse in WW1. Yes, THE Britannic that will unfortunately but eventually sink too. Talk about bad decisions... She is traumatized and bruised from not only the sinking of the former ship, but also from various supernatural phenomena that went unexplained in the ship's wreckage.

And now those phenomena start occurring on Britannic too...

Be my guest if you like confusing, back-and-forth dual time lines and unlikable, annoying characters, but this wasn't me. The only thing I was passionate about was the fact that both ships, literally and historically sank, so there was the prospect of all the characters drowning in cold waters and I couldn't wait for all of them to die. To give the devil his due - it was really well researched. Didn't really increase my joy of reading though.

 

10. The Fisherman by John Langan

After losing his wife to breast cancer, Abe finds solace in fishing with his colleague Dan Dresher, a fellow widower whose wife and kids died in a car accident. When one day Dan suggests they go fishing in a certain “Dutchman's Creek”, Abe couldn't have guessed that his pal has ulterior motives... the very dark and sinister kind of ulterior motives... Even when Howard, owner of Herman's Diner, warns them of the lair of a fellow called “Der Fischer” and tells them the chilling story surrounding the place, Abe doesn't think much of it and sticks with Dan. Big mistake!
No wonder Langan has won the 2016 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel with this superior book. It's hard not to get hooked on it; love the prose, love the story within story, love the plot that will suck you right in and not let go, love, love, love it!
This is horror as I think it should be.

 

11. Meg by Steve Alten

Well, well, well... İnci first bragging about not including Jaws because it's too much of a classic and then going for Meg of all the books, which is basically the same thing as Jaws but bigger. Much bigger, in fact - a much bigger, gigantic version of the white shark to be precise.

My first encounter with Meg was a couple of years ago, when I won a giveaway from the German publisher Heyne-Verlag of cinema tickets for the movie and a free copy of the book. I wasn't very keen on it in the beginning but ended up really liking the story and seeing that a pre-historic giant shark is the stuff of nightmares. Heck, I even liked Jason Statham in the movie. If you have been traumatized by Jaws in your childhood, Meg will do a good job keeping up the emotional damage.

 

12. Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant

This 2017 novel is one of those "cryptids in eco horror" books - a niche that has been speedily trending within the genre in recent years and usually features Bigfoot, some lake monster or Chupacabra trying to survive in a polluted, dying environment, making the readers question who the real monster is (the answer is invariably man). In Into the Drowning Deep, Mira Grant aka. Seannan McGuire follows this tradition, yet introduces a breath of fresh air by bringing sirens/mermaids into the game, which, by the time the book was published were still kind of uncharted territory.

The Atargatis sets off to the Mariana Trench carrying the crew for a mockumentary about sirens but is lost at sea and no survivors were found in the aftermath. Seven years later a group of people mostly related to the victims of the Atargatis disaster, but also of marine hunters and scientists follows its path in order to unveil whatever happened to them.

Grant is grand, there's no way around it - I love how she so succeeds in creating a world where mermaids would be possible and back that with plausible speculative science. On the other hand, I felt very frustrated by the sheer amount of point-of-view-switching and of characters, which mostly felt all the same and interchangeable to me. So I started not to really care about them after a while. I don't know, maybe I am the problem, but I can't fully love this book. Still a somewhat interesting read, though.

 

13. Loch Ness Revenge by Hunter Shea

My fingers blistered because of how fast I added this to my TBR-list! Nessie as an all devouring black hole and with supernatural help from Hell in its battle against humanity? Yes, please!

 

Even though his name keeps on popping up all over I have never read anything by Hunter Shea yet - it's time to change that. Seemingly the undisputed king of the creature feature and cryptozoological subgenres, he has written more than 25 books, so I'll have more than enough options. 

 

 14. The Gulp/The Fall - Alan Baxter

    "Welcome to The Gulp, where nothing is as it seems."

I'm already a big fan of Australian author Alan Baxter (so much so that I inaugurated this very blog by reviewing his The Roo, a creature feature about a giant kangaroo attacking a small town in the Australian Outback) and his newest series of short story collections, Tales From The Gulp, consisting of The Gulp and The Fall has gotten me completely smitten. Gulpepper, a fictional, isolated Australian harbor town, juggles between just the right amount of cosmic horror and humor and you won't even realize how fast you have been turning those pages. The second installment, The Fall was only recently published and I can't wait to get my hands on that one. 

 

15. Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters by Jane Austen, Ben H. Winters

 

Well, this is silly. It is silly, but very much deals with sea monsters, so justly belongs here.
Regency Era England has been marked by a phenomenon called the Alteration which "turned the creatures of the ocean against the people of the earth; which made even the tiniest darting minnow and the gentlest dolphin into aggressive, blood-thirsty predators, hardened and hateful towards our bipedal race; which had given foul birth to whole new races of man-hating, shape-shifting ocean creatures, sirens and sea witches and mermaids and mermen; which rendered the oceans of the world naught but great burbling salt-cauldrons of death."
In this utterly hostile environment Austen's famous Dashwood sisters not only deliver wisdoms and witty conversations on the nature of relationships and men, they also fearlessly battle vengeful fish, mutated crustaceans and other abominable sea creatures.
Seriously though, this book is fun, but somehow the idea of the book is more fun than the actual realization, if you know what I mean. Every time I sat down for a read I started feeling as if it is too much for me and it actually took me a long time to finish it. I have previously read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies which follows the same principle and was smitten by that book, it just had such a nice flow. So I was expecting the same impact from this one too. I don't know to what degree that might have been the case because I prefer Pride and Prejudice to Sense and Sensibility but anyway, it was a fun read nevertheless.

16. Blood Cruise by Mats Strandberg

 "On the Baltic Sea, no one can hear you scream."

Warning: Anything I write about or recommend from Swedish horror author Mats Strandberg is highly biased since I met him and his husband a couple of years ago (remember this?) and he is one the most genuinely nice people in horror.

So I have no choice but to insist all of you read Blood Cruise where all passengers of the Charisma are trapped in the middle of the Baltic Sea, and they can scream all they want...

 

17. Kraken by China Miéville

It is hard to believe that there is a Miéville book that I haven't read. But they exist and there are exactly three; UnLunDun, King Rat and Kraken. In my honorable but futile mission to finally tackle all the titles on my backlist I will sooner or later have to pick them up, so why not now and why not start with Kraken?

Giant kraken, squid worshiping sects, sorcerers, old Egyptian spirits, as funny as terrifying - my God, the synopsis truly gets better by the minute. Might add this to my challenge.

 

 18. The Deep by Rivers Solomon

Yetu is one of the mer-people who are descendants of the enslaved pregnant African women thrown overboard by slave owners. Because their past is too painful to be remembered, it is simply forgotten but for one person; the historian Yetu who remembers instead of everyone.

These memories are gradually destroying her and she runs to the surface in order to discover the world outside the deep. What she encounters there will help her find out that things need to change and memories and identity need to be reclaimed. 

The significance of The Deep is so evident that I feel like there isn't much I can say about it. The beautiful prose, the originality and imagination... This should really be required reading in schools everywhere.

 

19. The Lake Witch Trilogy by Stephen Graham Jones

I'm still waiting for the publication of the second book to write my big review for My Heart is a Chainsaw, but as time passes it gets harder remembering all the details, so let's hope I get this right.

For those of you surprised now - yes, My Heart is a Chainsaw is indeed aquatic horror. The title of the series, "The Lake Witch Trilogy" should give away both that and that there's another book to come which is a good thing, there's prospect for more.
Here we are following JD or Jade: an American-Indian teenager, outcast, horror nerd with an encyclopedic knowledge of slashers. This book focuses on a series of events (a series of murders, the emergence of a final girl) which convince JD there is an actual horror movie going on in town and that's all she ever asked for. Because if there is one person who knows the drill, it's her. 

Besides being an absolute feast for slasher fans and horror aficionados, this is also, as is usual with SGJ books, an emotional and touching account of life as an Indigenous American and as a young woman in a country where she isn't much worth and in a place where gentrification also means colonization. It has its funny moments too.

I'll have a few minor critique points, but as I mentioned above, I'll wait for the second installment. Can't wait.

 

20. Starfish by Peter Watts

An international corporation has developed a facility at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean to exploit geothermal power and sent a crew consisting of bioengineered people who are able to live and breathe underwater but who also all of them struggle with mental illnesses. While there's a disaster brewing from the deep below, how many of them will be able to survive?

Even though I haven't seen them in years, I was lucky enough to meet and have dinner with Watts and his wife Caitlin a couple of times and I'd personally say he's a cheery, fun guy. So it is with conflicting feelings that I have to confirm the quote (can't remember by whom) that whenever your joy of life becomes too much, you should read Peter Watts. His writing is indeed dark and gritty, but it is also as visceral as can be because while reading Starfish I remember being really cold and feeling wet to my bones even though it was May. Effective!

This is also a good book to start reading Watts in general and is readable as a stand-alone as well as the first part of the Rifters series. Very recommended!

 

21. The Drowning Kind by Jennifer McMahon

Pet Sematary meets your local water spa in The Drowning Kind - the saying (or was it lyrics of a song?) "be careful what you wish or you might end up sleeping with the fish" takes a very literal meaning in this book!
The plot comprises two interwoven story lines; in the first one social worker Jax returns to her childhood home after her sister's death and finds out that her sister has been researching the history of their family and the property. The other story line takes place in 1929 and revolves around a newlywed couple who are desperately but in vain trying for a baby. They search distraction in a trip to a healing spring in Vermont, where they find out the spring doesn't only heal, but also grants wishes...

Unfortunately, and I do feel sorry to say that, this didn't really do it for me...
I'm not exaggerating when I say that one third of the mysteries I have read this year have dual timelines; one in the present and the other in the past, explaining the origin of what is happening now. And for me this book was just one too many who uses that narrative device. That, combined with the usual "sometimes dead is better" just wasn't much exciting for me in the end. Even though I really liked the creepy water girl.

 

 

Off into the summer then, people! You now have the full list of summer horrors and absolutely zero excuses whatsoever not to read them. Enjoy!