Not looking for just your average ghost story, or creepy book. I want cosmic, eldritch horror. Unspeakable/unfathomable evils greater than humankind that some poor soul somehow stumbles upon or gets the attention of.
I loved The Fisherman. Obviously there’s Lovecraft, which I’ve read plenty of, but looking for something more modern. Not necessarily modern setting, but something written in the past twenty years preferably
by NosAstraia
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Ring Shout by P. Djeli Clark – published in 2020, it’s about Klan hunters but the Klan are Lovecraftian monsters from another dimension. It’s a novella too, so you can breeze through it pretty quick.
A God in the Shed by J-F DuBeau! Long story short, a teen who feels a lot like an outside in the small town she lives in stumbles into the God of hatred and death after it’s escaped confinement, and obviously the world has to deal with the consequences.
There’s a second book (Song of the Sandmen) and supposedly a third coming out… eventually.
The House on the Borderland, by William Hope Hodgeson. My favourite cosmic horror. Not really about *evil* – but I assume since you have familiarity with cosmic horror maybe you didn’t mean evil in the way I think. Give it a go!
Peter Clines has a bunch of cosmic horror books. I’ve only read The Fold and 14 thus far but both deal with the same sort of cosmic entity. I think he has several books, those two included, that are part of a shared universe.
If you don’t mind some fantasy, R Scott Bakker’s Second Apocalypse series has a decent bit of cosmic horror to it, especially in the later books in the series. The first three books, collectively The Prince of Nothing trilogy, only dip their toes into the cosmic horror, as they’re mainly about a Holy War between men. The final four books, The Aspect-Emperor quartet, dig a lot deeper into the world’s lore as humanity marches toward Golgotterath, the site where a spaceship crashed to earth thousands of years prior and unleashed unspeakable horrors onto the world. There’s also a lot of god-related cosmic horror at play as well in the latter four books.
Perdido Street Station and The Scar by China Mieville also contain a lot of cosmic horror.
Just finished *King Sorrow* by Joe Hill, its genre bending dark fantasy but covers the cosmic/eldritch horror in a multi-generational plotline pretty well.
The Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff Van der Meer
Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris? I enjoyed it much more than the classic movie adaptation. Highly recommend.
The Vorrh
The Twisted Ones and The Hollow Places both by Kingfisher
The Stand by Stephen King