Spooky Books by Black Authors
It’s Spooky Season! The pumpkins are being carved, and horror films are taking over every streaming platform.
I love this time of year; the air is crisp, the drinks are hot, the scented candles are lit, and the comfy blankets are keeping me warm while I’m snuggled with a good book.
But not just any book; if you open my Kindle, my TBR list is giving spooky vibes only. My mom loves Horror films, so I grew up being scared to death but being unable to look away because I wanted to know what happened. And that rolled over into the books I read.
I like a bit of everything, so I’ve included novels with witches, serial killers, vampires, mystery, and paranormal romance…
Witchy Vibes
The Gris Gris Girls: Voodoo Vixens by Mariah C. Bond
Four women. Four powers. One coven that answers to no one.
In the mysterious, darkly alluring streets of New Orleans, four girls wield powers that could bend the very fabric of fate and seduction. Jasmine, the bold boutique owner with a mysterious charm; Berniece, the sharp-tongued chef whose culinary creations hold hidden spells; Lina, the rebellious graphic designer with a mastery of illusion; and Yvonne, the serene yoga instructor whose healing touch hides a deadly force.
Bound by their craft and a shared mission to right the wrongs of the world, these girls form an unbreakable coven—each carrying the weight of a special voodoo ability. Together, they battle dark forces, solve dangerous cases, and confront the city’s deepest injustices. But in a world where life can be as seductive as it is lethal, they must navigate the tangled web of power, passion, betrayal, and forbidden love.
Read the full synopsis HERE.
In the House of Transcendence by Amanda Ross
Zora is a necromancer. Some say she’s gifted, others say she’s cursed, but her abilities always terrify her. Hoping to start a new life, she flees her childhood home and travels to Savannah, but she soon learns that some things can’t be changed.
There, she meets an alluring and powerful witch named Birdie. She offers Zora a proposition: she’ll give Zora a place to stay, a job dancing at a magical burlesque club called Nightingale’s, and help controlling her powers if Zora can solve her lover’s murder.
Zora accepts Birdie’s offer and is soon drawn into the magical community of Savannah, where rituals and magical fights are performed in grand old homes, potions can make people float on air, and three magical houses vie for dominance.
Read the full synopsis HERE.
Rootwork (The Conjure Series Book 1) by Tracy Cross
In the summer of 1889, the lives of three African American sisters are upended when they are abruptly sent away from their parents and the only home they’ve ever known in a small, impoverished Louisiana parish to go live in the backwater with their mysterious, hoodoo-practicing Aunt Teddy, a powerful woman feared by some and hated by others.
United by love but separated by passion, will their introduction to a world of mysticism and magic connect the sisters by way of ancestral inheritance, or will they be driven apart by forces beyond their control after tragedy strikes at the hands of a racist sheriff?
A deeply personal story of family, faith, and folklore in the post-Reconstruction era of the segregated South, Rootwork is a suspenseful and heartfelt story of tragedy and triumph unlike anything you’ve read before.
Thrillers
Wrong Door: A Short Psychological Horror by Nycole B
Rochelle thought she knew the man she loved. She trusted Tevyn with her heart. Her future. Even enough to help him pull one last robbery inside a house in North Philly that should’ve been empty. It wasn’t.
The deeper they make it into the house, the stranger things become. The walls seem to know Tevyn’s secrets. Voices call out things Rochelle was never supposed to hear. Every locked door uncovers another piece of a double life her boyfriend spent months hiding.
Now she doesn’t know what’s more terrifying… The house that refuses to let them leave. Or the man she’s been sleeping beside. Some secrets die with people. Others wait behind the wrong door…
The Curse of Hester Gardens by Tamika Thompson
Nona McKinley raised three boys in the Hester Gardens section of Medford, Michigan, an impoverished community divided by those who follow their faith in God and those who turn to crime to survive. With her drug dealer husband behind bars and her eldest son shot to death at eighteen, Nona has devoted herself to ensuring her other children escape their brother’s fate.
Her second son Marcus is on the right path. He’s a valedictorian heading to an Ivy League school. He can get out.
But then, strange things start happening to Nona and other residents: mysterious footsteps are heard when she’s alone, people have phantom encounters in the streets, unattended appliances go off at all hours. Even more concerning is the state of Nona’s living sons.
Her youngest, Lance, is hanging around with a bad crowd, and Marcus becomes moody and secretive. Sometimes he even seems to act like a different person entirely. Read the full synopsis HERE.
Strangers Behind Closed Doors by Catherine Adel West
Giovanni Mason worked hard to become the first Black head concierge at Chicago’s exclusive and glamorous Ivory Hotel. It’s a job that requires patience, perfection, and, above all, self-control.
But when Giovanni reunites with her former best friend, makeup influencer Natalie Moore, things get heated as a mending of fences morphs into a public argument in the hotel restaurant, and Giovanni loses her cool. Hours later, Natalie is missing.
Evidence piles against Giovanni—a ransacked, blood-spattered hotel room, fresh bruises on her body, and a troubling gap in her memory from the last twelve hours.
Detective Redding Stark is the only one unconvinced of Giovanni’s guilt. She sees disturbing parallels to a series of disappearances targeting Black women and believes Natalie’s case is part of something bigger.
Together, she and Giovanni are pulled into a dangerous web of privilege, power, and betrayal inside—and far beyond—the walls of the Ivory Hotel. Will Giovanni and Detective Stark find Natalie or join the missing?
Beasts, Fairies, & Vamps
Succubus by Jade Jones
Love is just a game to Tremaine Hardy, aka Mane, who plays his way through the city of Chicago, leaving a trail of broken hearts behind him wherever he goes.
A master manipulator with a gorgeous face that could fool any woman, he’s a stranger to heartbreak himself. When his last woman swore that he would someday meet someone ten times worse than him who would give him a taste of the heartbreak he dealt out so regularly, Mane only laughed.
However, when he meets the ravishing and mysterious Inari, he finds out that his ex just might have been right. He falls hard for Inari, but as fate would have it, her devilish beauty and lustful appetites are too much for any mortal man to handle.
Eboenia: A Paranormal Romance by Natavia
Baltimore City is known as Charm City, the biggest city in Maryland. However, in a different realm above Baltimore City, there exists Charmden, a place filled with fairies. In this magical realm, Eboenia, a 22-year-old fairy, finds herself caught in a whirlwind of adventure.
On her Wedding day, she gets captured by War, a mysterious and powerful warlock—or so he seems. Despite being natural enemies, Eboenia and War form an unexpected bond. As they grow closer, War starts teaching her the dark arts, challenging her to explore a darker side of herself.
With secrets coming to light, Eboenia must decide if she’ll follow in War’s footsteps or find her own way back to her fiancé.
Taming Kane: A Dark Paranormal Romance (Fated Mates Book 1) by Tessa Stone
Kane
A thousand years of loneliness has ended. The curse on supernaturals is lifted, and we can finally meet our fated mates. I’ve waited patiently, but after ten years, I’m losing hope.
Then, during a winter storm, a car trespasses onto supernatural territory, and crashes, I catch her scent. Fate has finally answered my prayers—my mate is here. She’s beautiful, courageous, and strong-willed. But she’s also running from something and won’t tell me why.
Someone wants to take her from me. They don’t know they’re dealing with an untamed wolf who’s waited a thousand years for my mate. I’ll shred them to pieces if they try.
Tami
After a long day at work, my life turns upside down when Julian, my roommate’s sketchy boyfriend, decides I’d be perfect to give him children.
In a time when women’s rights are vanishing, even the police won’t help. Desperate, I flee to Wintermoon, a supernatural community in Upper Michigan. Read the full synopsis HERE.
Killas
Honey: A Novel by Imani Thompson
Yrsa is bored: bored with her PhD program, her entitled students, and the never-ending pages of racial violence and feminist theory she has to read. But most of all, she’s bored with the men in her life—especially the bad ones.
And then, one sunny afternoon, she accidentally kills one.
Suddenly a problematic professor is dead, and Yrsa, well—she’s no longer bored.
Emboldened, she starts to chase the high, and soon no misbehaving sexist man within commuting distance is safe.
Finally Yrsa’s academic research feels useful. But how long can killing in the name of feminist and racial solidarity justify her actions? And how long until her actions—and buried family secrets—come back to unravel her?
Breakout by Dhonielle Clayton, Tiffany D. Jackson, Nic Stone, Angie Thomas, Ashley Woodfolk, Nicola Yoon
For Thurgood Marshall Academy’s best and brightest–five friends who’ve been thick as thieves since kindergarten–this spring break is all about forgetting: they want nothing more than to wash away last year’s tragedy, and the human-shaped hole it left in their friend group.
It’s a hole the new kid, Anthony Brooks, seems to fit right into. So when he invites the Five to join him on a private island for a week at his dad’s luxury resort, they agree with zero hesitation.
No one’s counting on a freak tropical storm swooping in and killing the vibe. And speaking of killing, they’re also ill-prepared for the mounting collection of dead bodies… including (another) one of their own. Read the full synopsis HERE.
Murder by the Book by J.L. Campbell
Addison Comstock is a literary icon, known for her bestselling crime novels, razor-sharp tongue, and relentless rise to the top. But behind her polished brand lies a ruthless past filled with secrets, betrayals, and broken lives—including those of the writers she’s employed to ghostwrite her success.
When her longtime editor collapses and dies during a team retreat in Jamaica, what appears to be a medical emergency soon begins to feel like something far more sinister. Tensions rise, loyalties fray, and whispers of sabotage grow louder. Someone in Addison’s inner circle has decided enough is enough, and truth is becoming stranger than fiction.
As the body count climbs and buried truths resurface, Addison is desperate to maintain control of her crumbling empire. Read the full synopsis HERE.
Historical Scary Stories
I’ll Watch Your Baby by Neena Viel
1974. Lottie Turner is already infamous. Running a wheel of schemes and scams, she’s willing to work for what she wants in…creative ways. But no business is more lucrative than desperate families looking to adopt a child―and there’s only one way to procure children quickly.
And the only way to take what’s owed you is to cross the line no one else is willing to cross.
1994. Bless has finally found the family she deserved. After suffocating slowly with lackluster parents and a non-starter past, she’s found the friends that means everything to her.
That she’d live and die for. As they make their way across the country, one smash and grab at a time, Bless is used to acting fast and thinking on her feet.
But someone is playing a long game. Someone has unfinished business. Soon Bless is trapped in a web of horrors past and present, where the only escape hatch is a path only she can walk, if she finds the courage to take it.
This Cursed House by Del Sandeen
In the fall of 1962, twenty-seven-year-old Jemma Barker is desperate to escape her life in Chicago—and the spirits she has always been able to see. When she receives an unexpected job offer from the Duchon family in New Orleans, she accepts, thinking it is her chance to start over.
But Jemma discovers that the Duchon family isn’t what it seems. Light enough to pass as white, the Black family members look down on brown-skinned Jemma. Their tenuous hold on reality extends to all the members of their eccentric clan, from haughty grandmother Honorine to beautiful yet inscrutable cousin Fosette.
Then the shocking truth comes out. Jemma learns the Duchons are cursed—and they believe only she can free them. Read the full synopsis HERE.
On Sundays She Picked Flowers by Yah Yah Scholfield
When Judith Rice fled her childhood home, she thought she’d severed her abusive mother’s hold on her. She didn’t have a plan or destination, just a desperate need to escape. Drawn to the forests of southern Georgia, Jude finds shelter in a house as haunted by its violent history as she is by her own.
Jude embraces the eccentricities of the dilapidated house, soothing its ghosts and haints, honoring its blood-soaked land. And over the next thirteen years, Jude blossoms from her bitter beginnings into a wisewoman, a healer.
But her hard-won peace is threatened when an enigmatic woman shows up on her doorstep. The woman is beautiful but unsettling, captivating but uncanny. Ensnared by her desire for this stranger, Jude is caught off guard by brutal urges suddenly simmering beneath her skin.
Read the full synopsis HERE.
Young Adult
Tender Beasts by Liselle Sambury
With the death of Sunny’s mother, matriarch of the wealthy Behre family, Sunny’s once picture-perfect life is thrown into turmoil. Her mother had groomed her to be the family’s next leader, so Sunny is confused when the only instructions her mother leaves is a mysterious note: “Take care of Dom.”
The problem is, her youngest brother, Dom, has always been a near-stranger to Sunny…and seemingly a dangerous one, if found guilty of his second-degree murder charge.
Still, Sunny is determined to fulfill her mother’s dying wish. But when a classmate is gruesomely murdered, and Sunny finds her brother with blood on his hands, her mother’s simple request becomes a lot more complicated.
Dom swears he’s innocent, and although Sunny isn’t sure she believes him, she takes it upon herself to look into the murder—made all the more urgent by the discovery of another body. And another.
Read the full synopsis HERE.
The Black Girl Survives in This One: Horror Stories by Desiree S. Evans
Be warned, dear reader: The Black girls survive in this one.
Celebrating a new generation of bestselling and acclaimed Black writers, The Black Girl Survives in This One makes space for Black girls in horror.
Fifteen chilling and thought-provoking stories place Black girls front and center as heroes and survivors who slay monsters, battle spirits, and face down death. Prepare to be terrified and left breathless by the pieces in this anthology.
I Don’t Wish You Well by Jumata Emill
Five years ago, the infamous Trojan murders turned the small town of Moss Pointe, Louisiana into a living nightmare. Four teen boys—all star players on Moss Pointe High’s football team—were murdered one after the other by a Trojan-mask-wearing killer.
Eventually, the murderer was unmasked. But the community has never forgotten—and some folks in town still wonder whether the police got it right.
Eighteen-year-old Pryce Cummings is one of them. An aspiring journalist, Pryce is pretty sure he just stumbled upon evidence that throws the killer’s guilt into question. It’s the perfect story for his own podcast, and a reason to go back to the hometown he’s avoided since coming to terms with his sexuality while at college.
But in Moss Pointe, digging into the past is anything but welcome. There’s so much more to what happened there five years ago, and Pryce is ready to crack it all wide open . . . if he lives to tell the tale.
The Taking of Jake Livingston by Ryan Douglass
Living in two worlds is exhausting and no one knows this better than sixteen-year-old Jake Livingston.
His working-class, diverse neighborhood is a far cry from the world of St. Clair Prep, where he is one of the only Black students, constantly at the mercy of racist teachers and peers who don’t understand him.
But when his neighbor—a survivor of a grisly school shooting—is murdered and the bloody initials of the now-dead shooter, Sawyer Doon, are left on the entryway wall of Jake’s home, Jake is forced to confront another world he wishes he could escape—the world of the dead.
As a medium, Jake sees ghosts around him all the time. Most are harmless. Stuck in their death loops as they relive their deaths over and over again, they rarely interact with people.
And while for most of his life Jake has avoided them, this time there is no running away. Sawyer was a troubled teen who shot and killed six kids at a local high school before taking his own life.
Read the full synopsis HERE.
Sistah Girls, I hope you find something on this list that will have you curled up with a good snack with the lights on because these stories will have you scared.
