Who better to kick this list off other than the phenomenal Hailey Piper and her award-winning novella The Worm and His Kings? Set in 1990s New York City, it follows Monique as she tracks a monster underground on a hunt for her kidnapped girlfriend. This classic cosmic horror tale combines cults, an unknowable threat and biting commentary on classism and homelessness in a way only a true master like Piper can achieve.

The Only Good Indians follows four Indigenous men as they deal with the repercussions of their past mistakes in the form of a haunting entity. While exploring the themes of racism and intergenerational trauma, this book manages a creeping feeling of claustrophobia as the entity begins closing in on each of the four men. I can neither confirm nor deny that this book still has me side eyeing deer on the side of the road.

A phenomenal collection of Kiernan’s stories adding to the “Cthulhu Mythos,” Houses Under the Sea shows she has thoroughly mastered the art of cosmic horror. While playing in a sandbox so many have left their mark in, it can be hard to carve out your own niche in the mythos. However, Kiernan takes these myths and shapes them to her own design allowing for haunting tales that will stay with you long after you finish reading.

Junji Ito is often called the master of Japanese horror, with delights ranging from gas-powered fish monsters to the infinitely memeable “This is my hole! It was made for me!” quote. However, perhaps his most iconic cosmic horror comes in the form of Uzumaki (or Spiral) in which a small town is haunted, or perhaps cursed, by the recurrence of the same winding pattern over and over until it starts to consume everything. Who knew pattern recognition could be so terrifying?!

With Sister, Maiden, Monster, Lucy Snyder decided that living through COVID-19 wasn’t scary enough and made it ten times more terrifying by adding cosmic horror into the mix. This novella follows three women trying to survive an apocalypse caused by a global pandemic. Perhaps Christopher Golden said it best when he blurbed this book as, “A hideously gory, kink-fueled, feminist cosmic horror apocalypse novel that should be on the top of everyone’s reading list.” If you’re a little more reserved, maybe you don’t want to read this on the train!

Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom is, at its core, a rebuttal to and a deconstruction of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Horror at Red Hook, a story widely regarded to be his most racist work. It flips the focus of the story to center on a struggling black musician who gets pulled unwittingly into an underbelly of cosmic weirdness and eldritch horror that, in some ways, pales in comparison to the racism he already experiences in his day-to-day life. It’s a beautiful and lyrical subversion that makes the “other” in Lovecraft’s story a protagonist with agency, heart, and, most importantly, a power so often missing in their depictions.

The City We Became is a beautifully written love letter to New York City. It takes place in a world where major cities have human avatars that make them sentient and we pick up as five new avatars take on the different aspects of New York’s five boroughs. Together, they team up to fight “The Enemy,” a cosmic horror creature that is often used to represent gentrification. The novel balances fun and wittiness with a poignant message.

Does anything really need to be said about The Hellbound Heart or Clive Barker at this point? I mean, who hasn’t seen Hellraiser? Blurring the lines between cosmic horror and the darker impulses of human sensation, The Hellbound Heart, drags readers to a place where the sights are so beautiful they’re grotesque, so pleasurable they hurt. While often considered more for its body horror aspects, Barker’s novella has no lack of cosmic terror threaded into its pages.

The Twisted Ones follows a woman, Mouse, as she cleans up her grandmother’s house and reads her step-grandfather’s journal where he recounts terrifying tales that seem to be the ramblings of a mad man. However, the more time Mouse spends at the house, the more her step-grandfather’s journal seems to be telling the truth. Allied with her lovable dog and her hippie neighbors, Mouse has to take on more than she bargained for in the woods behind the house. This book gave me toe-curling anxiety, the desire to pet a redbone coonhound and a terrifying rhyme that got stuck in my head.

Scooby Doo, but make it cosmic horror. Meddling Kids captures the engaging mystery hunting vibe and comedic aspects of everyone's favorite crime solving teenagers, but blends in the true horror and lasting trauma that comes about with being thrust into dark situations at a young age – and facing down an eldritch horror in the process. If you want to combine nostalgia and an insatiable hunger for the existential, check it out!