Books Backlist Bonanza Backlist Bonanza: 5 Underrated Suburban Horror Novels These five novels capture that suburban foreboding in different and strange ways. By Alex Brown | Published on December 10, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Suburbia is a weird place. Suburbia in the winter is even weirder. Streets that felt perfectly normal, boring even, at the height of summer, with the sun blazing down and folks out and about, now feel liminal and unnerving. The short days and long nights, the empty streets, the eerie silence, people returning to neighborhoods they no longer belong and lives they no longer live. These five novels capture that suburban foreboding in different and strange ways. White Smoke by Tiffany D. Jackson (Quill Tree Books, 2021) When her family relocates from sunny California to the rundown Midwestern town of Cedarville, Mari makes being miserable everyone’s problem. Her white stepdad thinks everything is great, her white younger stepsister is always getting her in trouble, and her Black mom and brother are mired in their own issues. Mari just wants to get high and get by. Something weird is going on, not only in her house but in Cedarville as well. Objects move around seemingly on their own, locals give them suspicious looks, and gentrifying property developers are scheming behind closed doors. Is their house haunted? Are the local urban legends true? Or is all the bad stuff just good old fashioned gaslighting and racism? Mari is about to find out the answers to those questions, whether she wants to or not. Comfort Me with Apples by Catherynne M. Valente (Tordotcom, 2021) This strange novella is a little bit of a lot of things. It dabbles in a bunch of genres—science fiction, fantasy, thriller, and horror—and combines them into something unique and unnerving. Sophia was made for her husband. She lives with him in their perfect house next to their perfect neighbors in their perfect gated community. She is happy. Everyone tells her she is happy. Others make sure she is always happy. But is she really? As she begins to notice tiny flaws in her world, she realizes it isn’t really hers. The rose colored glasses fall from her eyes as begins to see Arcadia Gardens not as a paradise but a prison. Valente’s gorgeous prose uplifts a nightmare into a larger conversation about agency and individualization. It’s a hard story to describe without giving away the game, but if I had to comp it to anything it would be The Stepford Wives and Sarah Gailey’s The Echo Wife. Direwood by Catherine Yu (Page Street YA, 2022) Set in a suburban town in the 1990s, Aja’s story begins as a missing person thriller, morphs into a horror novel, then ends up a vampire story. Aja and her older sister Fiona are two of the few Chinese Americans in their mostly white town, and the stress of that isolation has fractured their relationship. Aja sees herself as the lesser sister, the one who can never live up to the great heights of her perfect older sister. When Fiona goes missing, Aja tracks her back to Padraic, a vampire causing all kinds of havoc all over town. She lets him lure her to his lair, hoping to rescue Fiona and kill him, but what can one teenage girl do against a blood-sucking immortal? Linghun by Ai Jiang (Dark Matter INK, 2023) Outside Toronto, Canada is HOME, or Homecoming of Missing Entities, a highly selective neighborhood where the dead and the living are reunited. Wenqi’s family wins the housing lottery and gains a spot in this suburban haven, all so her mother can relive (or wallow, depending on your perspective) her memories of her dead son. The living who aren’t so lucky camp out in town waiting for a house to open. They are caught in a kind of purgatory, torn between their need to stay alive and their overwhelming desire to be with their dead.Wenqi’s neighbor, an older woman known only as Mrs., is the only one who doesn’t have a ghost haunting her home. Jiang jumps between these characters, Wenqi, Liam (a boy whose parents are waiting for their lottery to come up), and Mrs. The story unfolds around them and plays with perspectives and writing styles in startling ways.  We Came to Welcome You by Vincent Tirado (William Morrow, 2024) Maneless Grove is supposed to be Sol Reyes’ new start. Her job has gone from bad to worse. Her father is a bigot who makes known his disapproval of his daughter’s marriage to a Korean American woman. And her few glasses of wine have become an all-the-time affair. This gated community is a reset, but not in the way she hoped. Almost from the jump, terrible things start happening. The rooms in her house keep shifting, the HOA is increasingly overbearing and intrusive, and the terrible thing that happened on her property before they bought it is terrorizing the new owners. Comped as Midsommar meets The Other Black Girl and Lovecraft Country, this is a great entry point for suburban horror. It’s a dark satire that takes on systemic racism. [end-mark] The post Backlist Bonanza: 5 Underrated Suburban Horror Novels appeared first on Reactor.