14 Horror Books Set in Winter

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Winter is for wearing cozy clothes, curling up on the couch with a hot drink and reading, reading, reading.

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If I lived in a colder climate, this is 100% how I would spend my free time in December, January and February. (The irony is I’m writing this as Texas is experiencing historic cold weather…so cold that I currently do not have running water.)

That’s a LOT of free time to spend reading, so I’m going to need quite the list. And who better to ask than my fellow members of The Halloween Book Club? They are a never-ending source of spooky book recommendations, which I love.

At the start of the week, I asked for their favorite horror books set in the winter. Yes, that one is on the list, but there are a ton of other recommendations I’d never heard of that are now on my TBR list.

If you’re looking for new horror/spooky/supernatural winter read, you’re sure to find a favorite on this list. And if you enjoy this list, join the book club!

 

14 Horror Books Set in Winter

Book descriptions and images from amazon.com.

 

Snow days are perfect for curling up on the couch to read. Here are 14 horror books set in winter you'll love, from The Halloween Book Club.Dead Voices by Katherine Arden

Note: This is book #2 in a series.

Having survived sinister scarecrows and the malevolent smiling man in Small Spaces, newly minted best friends Ollie, Coco, and Brian are ready to spend a relaxing winter break skiing together with their parents at Mount Hemlock Resort. But when a snowstorm sets in, causing the power to flicker out and the cold to creep closer and closer, the three are forced to settle for hot chocolate and board games by the fire.

Ollie, Coco, and Brian are determined to make the best of being snowed in, but odd things keep happening. Coco is convinced she has seen a ghost, and Ollie is having nightmares about frostbitten girls pleading for help. Then Mr. Voland, a mysterious ghost hunter, arrives in the midst of the storm to investigate the hauntings at Hemlock Lodge. Ollie, Coco, and Brian want to trust him, but Ollie’s watch, which once saved them from the smiling man, has a new cautionary message: BEWARE.

With Mr. Voland’s help, Ollie, Coco, and Brian reach out to the dead voices at Mount Hemlock. Maybe the ghosts need their help–or maybe not all ghosts can or should be trusted.

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Snow days are perfect for curling up on the couch to read. Here are 14 horror books set in winter you'll love, from The Halloween Book Club.Smee: A Short Story by Alfred McClelland Burrage

Note: The short story “Smee” was recommended by Jay C. This collection includes that story.

Alfred McLelland Burrage was born in 1889. His father and uncle were both writers, primarily of boy’s fiction, and by age 16 AM Burrage had joined them and quickly became a master of the market publishing his stories regularly across a number of publications. By the start of the Great War Burrage was well established but in 1916 he was conscripted to fight on the Western Front, his experiences becoming the classic book War is War by Ex-Private X. For the remainder of his life Burrage was rarely printed in book form but continued to write and be published on a prodigious scale in magazines and newspapers. His supernatural stories are, by common consent, some of the best ever written. Succinct yet full of character each reveals a twist and a flavor that is unsettling…..sometimes menacing….always disturbing. In this volume we bring you – Smee, The Last of the Kerstons, Someone in the Room, The Shadowy Escort, The Garden in Glenister Square, The Affair at Paddock Cross, Auntie Kate, The Lady of The Elms, The Supernatural in Fiction and Un-Paying Guests.

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Snow days are perfect for curling up on the couch to read. Here are 14 horror books set in winter you'll love, from The Halloween Book Club.Voices in the Snow (Black Winter Series) by Darcy Coates

Note: This is book #1 in a series.

Clare remembers the cold. She remembers abandoned cars and children’s toys littered across the road. She remembers dark shapes in the snow and a terror she can’t explain. And then… nothing. When she wakes, aching and afraid in a stranger’s gothic home, he tells her she was in an accident, a crash in the snow. He claims he saved her. Clare wants to leave, but a vicious snowstorm has blanketed the world in white, trapping them together, and there’s nothing she can do but wait.

At least the stranger seems kind… but Clare doesn’t know if she can trust him. He promised they were alone here, but she sees and hears things that convince her something else is creeping about the surrounding woods, watching. Waiting. Between the claustrophobic storm and the inescapable sense of being hunted, Clare is on edge… and increasingly certain of one thing:

Her car crash wasn’t an accident. Something is waiting for her to step outside the fragile safety of the house… something monstrous, something unfeeling.

Something desperately hungry.

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Snow days are perfect for curling up on the couch to read. Here are 14 horror books set in winter you'll love, from The Halloween Book Club.Where The Dead Go To Die by Aaron Dries and Mark Allan Gunnells

There are monsters in this world. And they used to be us. Now it’s time to euthanize to survive in a hospice where Emily, a woman haunted by her past, only wants to do her job and be the best mother possible.

Euthanize to survive. Post-infection Chicago. Christmas.

Inside The Hospice, Emily and her fellow nurses do their rounds. Here, men and women live out their final days in comfort, segregated from society, and are then humanely terminated before fate turns them into marrow-craving monsters known as ‘Smilers.’ Outside these imposing walls, rabid protesters swarm with signs, caught up in the heat of their hatred.

Emily, a woman haunted by her past, only wants to do her job and be the best mother possible. But in a world where mortality means nothing, where guns are drawn in fear and nobody seems safe anymore – at what cost will this pursuit come? And through it all, the soon-to-be-dead remain silent, ever-smiling. Such is their curse.

This emotional, political novel comes from two of horror’s freshest voices and puts a new spin on an eternal topic: the undead. In the spirit of George A Romero meets Jack Ketchum, Where the Dead Go to Die it is an unforgettable epilogue to the zombie genre, one that will leave you shaken and questioning right from wrong…even when it’s the only right left.

It won’t be long before that snow-speckled ground will be salted by blood.

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Snow days are perfect for curling up on the couch to read. Here are 14 horror books set in winter you'll love, from The Halloween Book Club.The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley

During the languid days of the Christmas break, a group of thirtysomething friends from Oxford meet to welcome in the New Year together, a tradition they began as students ten years ago. For this vacation, they’ve chosen an idyllic and isolated estate in the Scottish Highlands—the perfect place to get away and unwind by themselves.

The trip begins innocently enough: admiring the stunning if foreboding scenery, champagne in front of a crackling fire, and reminiscences about the past. But after a decade, the weight of secret resentments has grown too heavy for the group’s tenuous nostalgia to bear. Amid the boisterous revelry of New Year’s Eve, the cord holding them together snaps, just as a historic blizzard seals the lodge off from the outside world.

Two days later, on New Year’s Day, one of them is dead…and another of them did it.

Keep your friends close, the old adage says. But how close is too close?

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Snow days are perfect for curling up on the couch to read. Here are 14 horror books set in winter you'll love, from The Halloween Book Club.Misery by Stephen King

Paul Sheldon is a bestselling novelist who has finally met his number one fan. Her name is Annie Wilkes, and she is more than a rabid reader—she is Paul’s nurse, tending his shattered body after an automobile accident. But she is also furious that the author has killed off her favorite character in his latest book. Annie becomes his captor, keeping him prisoner in her isolated house.

Annie wants Paul to write a book that brings Misery back to life—just for her. She has a lot of ways to spur him on. One is a needle. Another is an axe. And if they don’t work, she can get really nasty.

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Snow days are perfect for curling up on the couch to read. Here are 14 horror books set in winter you'll love, from The Halloween Book Club.The Shining by Stephen King

Jack Torrance’s new job at the Overlook Hotel is the perfect chance for a fresh start. As the off-season caretaker at the atmospheric old hotel, he’ll have plenty of time to spend reconnecting with his family and working on his writing. But as the harsh winter weather sets in, the idyllic location feels ever more remote…and more sinister. And the only one to notice the strange and terrible forces gathering around the Overlook is Danny Torrance, a uniquely gifted five-year-old.

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Snow days are perfect for curling up on the couch to read. Here are 14 horror books set in winter you'll love, from The Halloween Book Club.Winter Moon by Dean Koontz

Deepest night, Montana. An eerie light proclaims the arrival of a mysterious watcher in the woods. And one solitary man begins a desperate battle against something unknown—and unknowable.
 
Broad daylight, Los Angeles. An ordinary morning erupts in cataclysmic violence. A young family is shattered in a heartbeat.
 
Fate will lead this family to an isolated Montana ranch, but their sanctuary will become their worst nightmare. For there they will face a chillingly ruthless enemy, from which no one—living or dead—is safe.

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Snow days are perfect for curling up on the couch to read. Here are 14 horror books set in winter you'll love, from The Halloween Book Club.The Ascent by Ronald Malfi

Having lost himself in extreme sports since the death of his wife, sculptor Tim Overleigh joins a team of men bent on climbing the Godesh Ridge in Nepal in order to stop his downward spiral, only to find what was supposed to be a journey based in Tibetan mysticism to be an experiment in terror.

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Snow days are perfect for curling up on the couch to read. Here are 14 horror books set in winter you'll love, from The Halloween Book Club.Snow by Ronald Malfi

The blizzard begins pummeling the Midwest on Christmas Eve, leaving hundreds of passengers stranded at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Todd Curry doesn’t need another reason to disappoint his son, so he joins three other people in renting the last four-wheel drive available and they set out into the blinding snow.
 
Only two hours into the treacherous trip west, Todd swerves to avoid a man in the middle of the highway. The stranger claims his daughter is lost somewhere out in the snow. Though his odd demeanor and ripped clothes make Todd and his group uneasy, they agree to take the man to the nearest town—if the now-damaged car can make it.
 
What awaits them at the next exit, however, is nothing they could have imagined. Around an empty town square, fires burn, cars are abandoned., storefronts are smashed. And there is no one to be seen—for now…
 
But soon the shadows lurking on the edges of their vision will step into the light, and Todd and his fellow travelers will find themselves facing a sharp-scythed evil shaped from the snow, tearing its way into human form—and taking the neighborhood by storm.

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Snow days are perfect for curling up on the couch to read. Here are 14 horror books set in winter you'll love, from The Halloween Book Club.The Winter People by Jennifer McMahon

West Hall, Vermont, has always been a town of strange disappearances and old legends. The most mysterious is that of Sara Harrison Shea, who, in 1908, was found dead in the field behind her house just months after the tragic death of her daughter.

Now, in present-day, nineteen-year-old Ruthie lives in Sara’s farmhouse with her mother, Alice, and her younger sister. Alice has always insisted that they live off the grid, a decision that has weighty consequences when Ruthie wakes up one morning to find that Alice has vanished. In her search for clues, she is startled to find a copy of Sara Harrison Shea’s diary hidden beneath the floorboards of her mother’s bedroom. As Ruthie gets sucked into the historical mystery, she discovers that she’s not the only person looking for someone that they’ve lost. But she may be the only one who can stop history from repeating itself.

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Snow days are perfect for curling up on the couch to read. Here are 14 horror books set in winter you'll love, from The Halloween Book Club.The Sanatorium by Sarah Pearse

Half-hidden by forest and overshadowed by threatening peaks, Le Sommet has always been a sinister place. Long plagued by troubling rumors, the formerly abandoned sanatorium has since been renovated into a five-star minimalist hotel.

An imposing, isolated getaway spot high up in the Swiss Alps is the last place Elin Warner wants to be. But Elin’s taken time off from her job as a detective, so when her estranged brother, Isaac, and his fiancée, Laure, invite her to celebrate their engagement at the hotel, Elin really has no reason not to accept.

Arriving in the midst of a threatening storm, Elin immediately feels on edge–there’s something about the hotel that makes her nervous. And when they wake the following morning to discover Laure is missing, Elin must trust her instincts if they hope to find her. With the storm closing off all access to the hotel, the longer Laure stays missing, the more the remaining guests start to panic.

Elin is under pressure to find Laure, but no one has realized yet that another woman has gone missing. And she’s the only one who could have warned them just how much danger they are all in…

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Snow days are perfect for curling up on the couch to read. Here are 14 horror books set in winter you'll love, from The Halloween Book Club.The Terror by Dan Simmons

The men onboard HMS Terror have every expectation of triumph. As part of the 1845 Franklin Expedition, the first steam-powered vessels ever to search for the legendary Northwest Passage, they are as scientifically supported an enterprise as has ever set forth. As they enter a second summer in the Arctic Circle without a thaw, though, they are stranded in a nightmarish landscape of encroaching ice and darkness. Endlessly cold, with diminishing rations, 126 men fight to survive with poisonous food, a dwindling supply of coal, and ships buckling in the grip of crushing ice.

But their real enemy is far more terrifying. There is something out there in the frigid darkness: an unseen predator stalking their ship, a monstrous terror constantly clawing to get in.

When the expedition’s leader, Sir John Franklin, meets a terrible death, Captain Francis Crozier takes command and leads his surviving crewmen on a last, desperate attempt to flee south across the ice. With them travels an Inuit woman who cannot speak and who may be the key to survival or the harbinger of their deaths. But as another winter approaches, as scurvy and starvation grow more terrible, and as the terror on the ice stalks them southward, Crozier and his men begin to fear that there is no escape.

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Snow days are perfect for curling up on the couch to read. Here are 14 horror books set in winter you'll love, from The Halloween Book Club.Frostbite: A Werewolf Tale by David Wellington

For Cheyenne Clark, there’s a bad moon on the rise…

There’s one sound a woman doesn’t want to hear when she’s lost and alone in the Arctic wilderness: a howl. When a strange wolf’s teeth slash Cheyenne’s ankle to the bone, her old life ends, and she becomes the very monster that has haunted her nightmares for years. Worse, the only one who can understand what Chey has become is the man–or wolf–who’s doomed her to this fate. He also wants to chop her head off with an axe.

Yet as the line between human and beast blurs, so too does the distinction between hunter and hunted…for Chey is more than just the victim she appears to be. But once she’s within killing range, she may find that–even for a werewolf–it’s not always easy to go for the jugular.

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What is your favorite spooky winter read?

Share it in the comments! Then don’t forget to join us in The Halloween Book Club for spooky reads all year long.

 

Happy reading,

 

 

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Miranda | Spooky Little Halloween

Miranda is the Houston-based writer, blogger, and Halloween lover behind Spooky Little Halloween, the blog celebrating October 31st all year long. Her favorite Halloween things include pumpkin guts, chocolate bars in her trick-or-treat pail, real haunted houses (including the one she lives in!), and historic cemeteries.

2 Comments

  1. Reply

    Amber

    February 22, 2021

    Oh. My. Gosh. Dean Koontz is such an amazing story teller and I really want to read that Winter Moon novel. Also, another book I get chilled by is from author Vaughn C. Hardacker called Wendigo. It was suspenseful and i recommend it to those who might have played the game Until Dawn.

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