King-Free, Modern Horror Fiction [2] Quiz

Answer: Come With Me

"Come With Me" is far from New York author Ronald Malfi's first work (he'd been writing for two decades before this came out), but it is one that saw a fair bit more regard than others. With his novels continuing to gain increasingly high regard from horror circles, "Come With Me" cracked into a bit more mainstream readership, being one of Goodreads' top nominees for Best Horror Novel in 2021. Earlier, Malfi had been nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel for "Floating Staircase".

In the book, after Aaron's wife, Allison, was killed in a freak incident at a nearby shopping center, his grief led him to an unexpected receipt for a motel room out-of-state. Determined to figure out why she was hiding this from him, he set out to uncover the truth...and found that she was on the search for answers in a completely unrelated mystery. Oh yeah, and along the way, something from beyond the veil was leading him around.

Answer: Mexican Gothic

Winner of the Locus Award for Best Horror Novel in 2020 (amongst other accolades), Silvia Moreno-Garcia's "Mexican Gothic" proved to be a popular genre piece when it released in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing her work to be taken in by a captive audience while also contributing to a number of growing voices placing a spotlight on Mexican experience in horror. Shortlisted for both the Bram Stoker Award and the Shirley Jackson Award, it would also end up becoming a Canada Reads pick in 2023 (as Moreno-Garcia is Mexican-Canadian).

In the book, what started as a young woman's trip to a family home outside a remote Mexican village turned into a horror story. Though present to determine why her cousin's family might want to kill her, it turned out that the truth was much more supernatural and much more insidious than initially believed.

Answer: The Only Good Indians

Between his short stories and his novels, Stephen Graham Jones has developed to become one of the leading voices in horror in the 2010s and 2020s, consistently releasing new works to great renown and claiming numerous spots on the shortlists of the Shirley Jackson Awards, the Bram Stoker Awards, and the Locus Awards.

Following a quartet of Blackfeet tribe members going about their lives but paying retribution not only for an event from their past, but for a deviation from their right ways, "The Only Good Indians" features horrifying imagery pulled directly from Indigenous folklore, a common theme from Jones' writings. The title of the book comes from the Union general saying, "the only good Indian is a dead Indian."

Answer: How to Sell a Haunted House

A camp horror enthusiast, Grady Hendrix is known not only for his prolific novel-writing across numerous subgenres in the horror sphere, but for his contributions to the "Paperbacks From Hell" collection, aiding Valancourt Press in reissuing out-of-print paperback horror novels of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

It's works like those that inform many of his own writings as they reimagine classic tropes for a modern context. "How to Sell a Haunted House", for instance, follows siblings Louise and Mark as they return home to South Carolina to clean out their recently-deceased parents' household. What they discover, though, is Pupkin, a long-forgotten childhood puppet who, as it turns out, was a bit more nefarious than they remember. The pair have to dredge up trauma to make it out alive.

Answer: A Short Stay in Hell

The story is a bit more bleak than the description in the question lets on. A Mormon man is brought to Hell upon his death and told that God-- though not necessarily the one he worshipped-- has determined he shall be sent to Hell. This being said, he will only be in Hell until he locates the book that contains the story of his life. What he and other recently deceased souls realize, however, is that Hell is nothing more than an infinite library of infinite books, and while his story may be out there, finding any book that contains coherent language is a task in and of itself.

Answer: Incidents Around the House

Josh Malerman hit it big with his debut novel, "Bird Box", and continued with a streak of uniquely varied horror novels over the course of the next decade. His 2024 novel, marking ten years of published works, was "Incidents Around the House", a story in which a young girl appears to be beset upon by a malevolent spirit she refers to only as 'Other Mommy'. As the story unfolds her parents' relationship is strained and they seem helpless to escape, and all of it is told from the girl's naive point of view.

"Incidents Around the House" also marked Malerman's sixth year being nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for Novel.

Answer: Tender is the Flesh

An almost-sparing novel in terms of its narrative, "Tender is the Flesh" depicts a future in which animal meat has been tainted by a global blight, leaving humanity with little choice but to legalize the consumption of human flesh and leading to industries in which humans are raised for slaughter. Though the novel depicts this cannibalism-- and the process through which that occurs-- in stark and brutal detail, the story's message extends beyond that to create an allegory for consumption in all regards.

Agustina Bazterrica, writing from Argentina, released this as her debut novel in 2017 and it was translated for international audiences in 2020, allowing her to gain a massive audience due to the book's prominent featuring on TikTok. She has since released a number of short stories and a dystopian religious novel, "The Unworthy", in 2025.

Answer: Uzumaki

Inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft, Junji Ito may be the most famous horror manga author/artist of all time, having released countless works over decades of published pieces. Amongst his most famous are the long-form manga "Tomie", about a mysterious and dangerous woman afflicted with supernatural qualities, and "Uzumaki", about those who come into contact with a cursed town that falls victim to unearthly and ineffably terrifying spirals.

"Uzumaki" was originally released, serialized, between 1998 and 1999. Despite Ito's long career to come after, it has long been considered his most important and influential creation.

Answer: We Used to Live Here

About a couple flipping a house, this winding story begins when a family knocks on their door claiming that the father lived there in his youth. Unknowing of the weird circumstances that would follow, Eve and Charlie let them inside but the eerie visit escalates and the house appears to take on a life of its own that threatens to pull the couple into a nightmare.

"We Used to Live Here" is a rare and interesting case in which a novel is built out of serialized chapters originally posted on the NoSleep Reddit forum, known for its amateur short-form fiction. The book also contained a number of documents, generally placed between chapters, to elaborate on the mysterious nature of the haunted house featured within.

Answer: This Thing Between Us

Although this 2020 novel appears, on the surface, to be about the dangers of technology, is actually packs a bigger punch in its meditations on grief and culture. Following a widower named Thiago as he recounts the events that befell him and his wife, Vera, the story begins with their purchase of the Itza, a device originally meant to make their lives easier. Vera would be killed, tragically, but as the story unfolded, it would appear that the curse put upon their home would shoulder much of the blame for her untimely death. Thiago would cross the country...and possibly other worlds...trying to escape the terror and face the truth.

"This Thing Between Us" was Gus Moreno's first full novel, released around numerous contributions in the audio fiction and graphic novel realms.