The 90 best horror novels by women

No. 11 on this list. Northanger Abbey · Jane Austen · 1818

Taught in schools: AQA GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK)

Northanger Abbey appears on 82 university syllabi according to the Open Syllabus Project, placing it at the 47th percentile — widely taught in British literature and Regency fiction courses but not as ubiquitous as Pride and Prejudice. Its Wikipedia article spans 28 languages with an adaptations section, indicating solid global recognition. As the least canonical of Austen's major novels, it anchors the lower end of her recognized corpus.

No. 12 on this list. Piranesi · Susanna Clarke · 2021

Winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction (2021), with a Wikipedia presence in 39 languages — strong recognition for a novel published in 2020. Clarke's second novel after the celebrated Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, it arrived with significant literary anticipation and met it. Not yet in syllabi, which reflects recency rather than lack of merit.

No. 13 on this list. Rebecca · Daphne du Maurier · 1938

Taught in schools: AQA GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK)

Appears on 337 university syllabi (63rd percentile in Open Syllabus) and on the BBC Big Read Top 100 and 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. It is a standard text in courses on the gothic and on women's writing, and has been in print continuously since 1938.

No. 14 on this list. The Member of the Wedding · Carson McCullers · 1946

Frankie Addams is twelve years old and has been excluded from everything — every club, every game, every sense of belonging. The summer her brother gets married, she seizes on a plan: she will join the wedding, travel with the newlyweds, become part of something larger than herself. She renames herself F. Jasmine Addams and tells everyone in town she is about to leave forever. McCullers sets almost the entire novel in a kitchen: Frankie, her six-year-old cousin John Henry, and the family's cook Berenice Sadie Brown, talking through a summer afternoon that feels both eternal and vanishing. What gets said — about loneliness, about being caught in your own skin, about the desperate wish to belong to a 'we' — makes the kitchen feel like the whole world. The wedding turns out exactly as badly as the reader suspects it will. Frankie's grand illusions collapse in a matter of hours. But the collapse is the point. McCullers writes adolescence not as a phase but as a philosophical condition: the agony of being a self that doesn't yet fit anywhere. The prose moves between Frankie's feverish interior monologues and Berenice's steady, unsentimental wisdom. The novel ends in early autumn with everything changed and nothing resolved — a shape that feels less like failure than like honesty.

No. 15 on this list. The Mysteries of Udolpho · Ann Radcliffe · 1794

The Mysteries of Udolpho is a foundational text taught in 18th-century literature, Gothic studies, and women's writing courses in universities worldwide. Its Wikipedia article spans over 40 languages. Jane Austen's parody in Northanger Abbey has guaranteed it a permanent place in the British literary canon—any reader of Austen eventually encounters Udolpho. It sits at the center of every Gothic fiction course.

No. 16 on this list. The Ballad of the Sad Café · Carson McCullers · 1951

Miss Amelia Evans runs the general store in a nameless Georgia mill town: six feet two inches tall, with bones and muscles like a man, a medical skill she deploys without a license, and a decade-old marriage she annulled after ten days by throwing her husband Marvin Macy out the front door. Then one April evening a hunchbacked dwarf named Cousin Lymon arrives, claims kinship, and Miss Amelia does something no one has ever seen her do — she opens a room, sets out chairs, and pours her whiskey. The café lasts six years. Carson McCullers frames the whole story as a meditation on the nature of love, delivered by an omniscient narrator who stops the plot to lecture us directly: the lover and the beloved are never, in any real sense, the same person. One gives; the other merely consents to be loved. Marvin Macy, released from prison, walks back into town, and Cousin Lymon falls for him immediately and completely. Everything that follows is as inevitable as a Greek tragedy, and as inexplicable. The novella ends where it begins — the café boarded up, Miss Amelia alone upstairs, her face pressed to a crack in the shutters. McCullers writes Southern Gothic without blood and salvation — just loneliness, desire, and the strange temporary grace of a room where people are allowed to linger.

No. 17 on this list. The Magic Toyshop · Angela Carter · 1967

The Magic Toyshop is taught regularly in British postmodern and feminist literature courses as Carter's first major novel and an early exemplar of feminist Gothic fiction. It is less ubiquitous on syllabi than The Bloody Chamber or Nights at the Circus but occupies a secure place in courses on women's writing and postmodern British fiction. No data signals found in database; score based on established literary reputation.

No. 18 on this list. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall · Anne Brontë · 1848

Taught in schools: AQA GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK), Leaving Certificate English – NCCA / State Examinations Commission (Ireland)

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a fixture in Victorian literature and women's writing curricula worldwide, regularly taught alongside Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Its Wikipedia article exists in over 30 languages and it has been the subject of sustained academic attention, particularly following feminist recovery of Anne Brontë's work in the late 20th century. It appears frequently on Victorian fiction syllabi at universities in the UK, US, and beyond.

No. 19 on this list. Don't Look Now · Daphne du Maurier · 1971

Du Maurier occupies an unusual position — widely read and taught in gothic, horror, and British literature courses, but not consistently placed in the highest canonical tier. The title story is anthologized frequently and appears on horror and short fiction syllabi.

No. 20 on this list. The Fifth Child · Doris Lessing · 1988

Harriet and David's comfortable English life is disrupted by their fifth child, Ben, whose strange, violent nature they cannot understand. Lessing's chilling novel explores the limits of family love and the fear of the uncontrollable.

No. 21 on this list. Reflections in a Golden Eye · Carson McCullers · 1941

Taught in American Gothic and Southern literature courses but not the universal curriculum staple McCullers's longer works occupy. Appears in college anthologies of 20th-century American fiction and on 'essential McCullers' reading lists. John Huston adapted it into a 1967 film with Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor, cementing its cultural presence beyond academia.

No. 22 on this list. The Birds and Other Stories · Daphne du Maurier · 1952

'The Birds' is among the most recognized short stories in 20th-century British fiction, secured in the cultural consciousness by Hitchcock's 1963 film adaptation. The story appears regularly on British school syllabi and in anthologies of horror and psychological fiction. The rest of the collection occupies a respected but secondary position — 'The Apple Tree' and 'Kiss Me Again, Stranger' appear in some anthologies, but du Maurier's short fiction as a whole holds a lower academic profile than her novels. The collection does not feature on many university core reading lists outside British literature survey courses.

No. 23 on this list. Her Body and Other Parties · Carmen Maria Machado · 2017

Appears on 235 university syllabi according to Open Syllabus, placing it in the 59th percentile—strong for a 2017 debut collection. Taught primarily in contemporary fiction, queer literature, and creative writing courses. Wikipedia article exists with a dedicated Reception section. Too recent to have achieved canonical status, but its syllabi trajectory suggests staying power in the short story and gender studies curricula.

No. 24 on this list. The Italian · Ann Radcliffe · 1796

The Italian is a fixture of Gothic and Romantic-era survey courses, though it's taught less universally than Radcliffe's own The Mysteries of Udolpho or than Frankenstein and Dracula within the wider Gothic canon. No syllabus or Wikipedia-language data was available for this title in our database, but it holds a stable place in history-of-the-novel curricula.

No. 25 on this list. Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales · Yoko Ogawa · 1998

Widely assigned in contemporary world-literature and short-story courses since the 2013 translation, in print from Picador and Harvill Secker.

No. 26 on this list. Gideon the Ninth · Tamsyn Muir · 2019

Hugo and Nebula finalist. A defining work of 2010s genre fiction with a devoted fanbase.

No. 27 on this list. The Little Stranger · Sarah Waters · 2009

Taught in schools: Pearson Edexcel GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK)

Abundantly atmospheric and elegantly told, The Little Stranger is Sarah Waterss most thrilling and ambitious novel yet. After her award-winning trilogy of victorian novels, sarah waters turned to the 1940s and wrote the night watch, a tender and tragic novel set against the backdrop of wartime britain shortlisted for both the orange and the man booker, it went straight to number one in the bestseller chart in a dusty post-war summer in rural warwickshire, a doctor is called to a patient at hundreds hall home to the ayres family for over two centuries, the georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine but are the ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life little does dr faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become entwined with his prepare yourself from this wonderful writer who continues to astonish us, now comes a chilling ghost story.

No. 28 on this list. Things We Lost in the Fire · Mariana Enriquez · 2016

International Booker shortlist. Widely reviewed and translated. Establishing canonical status in world literature and horror.

No. 29 on this list. Fever Dream · Samanta Schweblin · 2017

Amanda wakes in a rural Argentine clinic, her daughter Nina beside her, neither able to remember what happened. David, a strange local boy, helps her reconstruct events through a fractured dialogue. Schweblin's uncanny novella builds inexorable dread as it probes environmental disaster, motherhood, and the terror of contamination.

No. 30 on this list. White Is for Witching · Helen Oyeyemi · 2009

Recognized as an important work of literary Gothic fiction. Studied in university courses on race and the Gothic. Growing in critical estimation.