It’s not going to be everyone’s cup but “There is no Antimemetics Division” has an unusual premise and is a lot of fun. It’s also on the shorter side.
Ascension Nicholas Binge - A giant mountain appears out of nowhere in the South Pacific. An expedition is sent to climb it and everyone either dies or comes back insane. So, a new expedition is sent…
Organized as an epistolary novel
I just read “Incidents Around the House” by Josh Malerman. He also wrote “Bird Box”, which became the Sandra Bullock Netflix movie of the same name. Don’t know if that works as an endorsement or not…
Anyway, IAtH is a haunting story told from the point of view of a little girl of about 6 years old. I was highly skeptical of the narrative conceit and gave it a try thinking I would hate it and bail, but I got hooked and found it very readable.
I’ve decided to take a run at basically everything in this thread, and I started with this one. I’m on page 110 and I’m completely gripped. It’s already gone in some non-trope-y directions. Though I do keep thinking of Coraline, which is unavoidable.
Terminal Island by Walter Greatshell. Really creepy story that takes place on Catalina Island. I have some personal experience with the setting and about how unsettling some of the year-rounders can be. Greatshell has taken that weird vibe and ramped it up to 11.
Found! Just needed to narrow my search.
You might give Graham Masterton a try. He’s a Brit who IIRC lives in Poland now, and he’s the best horror novelist that almost nobody in the U. S. has heard of. He specializes in weird (sometimes completely bonkers) premises that he somehow makes work.
For example, Ghost Virus. This is a horror novel about clothes that come to life and cause innocent people to do horrific things.
Just a warning: Masterton is gory. Really gory. Like, “makes Stephen King look like A. A. Milne” levels of gory. But if you don’t mind that, the books are fun and good reads.
Land of the Beautiful Dead
Not my Genre at all but this one intrigues me.
Cool, when you’re done with it let me know what you thought of the ending.
Oh yeah, I read a couple Masterson novels as a teen and loved them. The first one I read was ‘The Manitou’, maybe his most well-known novel, which was indeed very gory body horror.
Then I read ‘The Devils of D-Day’, about a guy who discovers a demon sealed into an old abandoned WWII tank.
This is one of those. The concept might sound silly, but it was very weird and creepy, in a good way. At least, as a teen I thought so. I should give it a re-read, see if it still holds up.
George RR Martin wrote an interesting one, set on a Mississippi River steamboat. It’s called Fevre Dream. It’s a vampire story, but the setting makes it very unusual.
I didn’t mention it since I’m in the middle of reading it now, but the more I read it, ‘The Hitchcock Hotel’ seems to fit the bill for the OP: Kind of a unique premise, small group of people, no vamps or werewolves. It may be more ‘mystery’ than ‘horror’ but it’s categorized under both in Goodreads.
The basic setup: a man who’s such a huge Hitchcock movie buff that he opened up a Hitchcock-themed hotel invites his old college friends over for a reunion visit. They were all very close in college, but had some sort of serious falling-out in their Senior year (hinted at, but not yet revealed as of my place in the book) that caused them to go their separate ways.
The hotel owner, Alfred (named by his mother, who first turned him on to Hitchcock movies- shades of Norman Bates and his mother!), has a hidden agenda, again only hinted at as of my place in the book so far, in which he plans to do something that will both punish his old friends for how they treated him way back when, and put his financially failing hotel on the map. What could it be…MUHHHHdah? Not a spoiler, everybody’s alive so far where I’m at in the book, but it is a Hitchcock-themed mystery novel, so somebody prolly gonna die.
The narrative structure alternates chapters between the POVs of each friend character, which is a nice storytelling device. The guests, who all have their own emotional damage and baggage, start seeing and hearing weird things…which may or may not be caused by Alfred.
These books are fantastic and @Jackmannii 's description is bang on.
And, though not a book, but a movie Ghosts of War. It is ostensibly a horror and ghost story, taking place in a French chateau in WW II, with a completely unexpected and moving ending.
Stephen King’s short story “Trucks” was the basis of two movies, “Trucks” (for TV) and “Maximum Overdrive”.
I sometimes still feel a sense of unease when walking narrow spaces between vehicles in a parking lot.
I felt that ending was inevitable, or mostly inevitable, if only to escape from her parents…they were adding a lot of pressure on top of Other Mother, even if in their own idiosyncratic ways they were trying to solve the problem. (Ursa by yelling and lashing out, Russ by endlessly pontificating and enabling). Other Grandma at the end was quite creepy.
The Last Days of Jack Sparks by Jason Arnopp. As I say in my review:
Part 1 scared me so much I would actually call my dog over and have her sit next to me on the couch before I’d start reading.
Part 2 gets a bit too preposterous to be that creepy anymore.
Part 3 was a genre-jumping mind-fuck that I thought was rather ingenious.
I’m nearing the end of The Necromancer’s House by Buehlman, which is a rather convoluted horror novel about a man who, years ago, stole a horde of various old alchemical & magical books from the then Soviet Union. But now his past is catching up with him and wants revenge.
Great descriptions of how the magic is created and the horrific results of it’s use.
Personally, I think The Daughter’s War is better read after reading the earlier The Blacktongue Thief, although that doesn’t have many horror elements to it. Good fun though!