King tops June 2025 chart
The Top 5
Stephen King leads a strong lineup of May releases and tops Malevolent Dark’s Horror Fiction Top 25 June 2025 edition with his novel Never Flinch. It’s the third King title to reach No. 1 since the Horror Fiction Top 25 debuted in October 2023. In fact, King’s Holly topped that first October 2023 chart. The bestselling author also hit No. 1 on the June 2024 chart with his short story collection You Like It Darker.
In Never Flinch, King weaves two storylines together: a killer on a mission of vengeance and a vigilante targeting a feminist celebrity speaker. Sparked by a letter from someone threatening to kill fourteen people in response to the needless death of an innocent man, a detective turns to King favorite Holly Gibney for assistance. Meanwhile, a stalker is disrupting the feminist celebrity speaker’s events, causing the activist to hire Holly as her bodyguard. The two narratives converge in what promises to be “a chilling and spectacular conclusion.”
At No. 2 is serial killer thriller The Man Made of Smoke by Alex North. It’s about a criminal profiler haunted by a crime he witnessed as a child when he narrowly escaped an encounter with a serial killer. When his father passes away under suspicious circumstances, the profiler is determined to uncover the truth but wonders if the serial killer from his childhood has returned. Publishers Weekly writes: “Fans of Thomas Harris will be creeped out by North’s hair-raising antagonist.”
Going Home in the Dark by Dean Koontz is No. 3. It’s about a group of four childhood friends. When the one who stayed home falls into a coma twenty years later, the other three return to face the past and the memory of a mysterious and murderous figure that they were made to forget.
No. 4 is We Live Here Now by Sarah Pinborough. With the beautiful opening line, “The raven watches the stone house on the crossroads through the long year,” We Live Here Now is a haunting Gothic novel about a married couple who moves from London to a Dartmoor country house called Larkin Lodge after the wife’s nearly fatal accident. The house is beautiful, but the wife starts to believe that it’s haunted by someone who was murdered in it. However, Emily’s post-accident condition can cause hallucinations, and the haunting incidents only happen when she is alone. As her marriage crumbles, she becomes obsessed with finding the truth about Larkin Lodge.
Rounding out the Top 5 is The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling. “In fifteen days, there will be no food in Aymar Castle.” So begins The Starving Saints, billed as “a dark medieval tale of survival, divine intervention, and unraveling mysteries amidst a castle’s descent into madness.” With food running low inside a castle under siege, the survivors are saved by the mysterious arrival of the divine figures of the Constant Lady and her Saints. The entire castle soon falls under their spell and descends into bacchanalian madness while forgetting the army beyond its walls. Three women of different backgrounds see the situation for what it is and must resist the temptations of the castle’s divine masters to save the castle.
Anthologies and Collections
For fans of shorter fiction, there are two collections and one anthology in this month’s Horror Fiction Top 25.
At No. 7 is All Triggers, No Warnings by John Everson. This collection features 18 tales by the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Covenant. The stories include gorgeous ghouls and seductive sirens, hideous creatures that wear another’s face, tentworms that spin death into dessert, a tour of a factory of the living dead, sexual encounters beyond the grave, and a secret pinball club where the silver ball is deadly.
The Horror Collection: Amber Edition edited by Kevin J. Kennedy is No. 13. The 23rd book in the series is the fifth to reach the Top 25 since I began compiling the chart in October 2023. The Amber Edition collects 18 stories that include gangster ghosts, twisted fairy tales, voodoo vengeance, ravenous zombies, bloodthirsty vampires, savage werewolves, and haunted carnivals. The anthology features tales by Mark Lukens, Mark Towse, MJ Mars, Graham Masterton and Karolina Mogielska, Calvin Demmer, Sheri White, Ben Young, Alyson Faye, Chisto Healy, Michael S.A. Graziano, Jeff Strand, RJ Meldrum, Brian Moreland, Christina Bergling, Callum Pearce, Joel Austin, Ju Collins, and S.E. Howard.
At No. 23 is Crate Full of Chaos by Iain Rob Wright. It’s a collection of 28 tales of terror that include classic slashers, poignant tragedies, and hilarious satire. Author JA Konrath writes: “Iain Rob Wright scares the hell out of me!” and author Matt Shaw calls Wright “a horror mastermind.”
Cryptid Fiction
My favorite subgenre of horror is cryptid fiction, and two titles made this month’s chart.
At No. 16 is Clash of the Cryptids: Part 2 by Luka T. Jacobs. Book 4 in the Nicole Beretti Thriler series, Clash of the Cryptids: Part 2 picks up immediately after a stunning revelation about Beretti’s past. She has no time to deal with the grief because the war between the Sasquatch and Dogmen is intensifying as the centuries-old conflict arrives on the doorstep of Beretti’s hometown.
Port Luck by Timothy King is No. 17. It’s about a town that was abandoned nearly 80 years ago after a series of unexplained deaths and disappearances. The town becomes a thriving community again until a body is found on its outskirts. A sheriff investigates what appears to be a random animal attack but soon reveals itself to be more sinister. As the death toll rises, the sheriff digs into the town’s tragic past to stop the cycle of violence.
Other Top 25 Highlights
Here are some other interesting titles released in May that range from grief horror and sci-fi to Southern Gothic and extreme horror.
At No. 8 on the chart is the grief horror of Ghost Girls and Rabbits by Cassondra Windwalker. It’s about a mother distraught over her daughter who went missing ten years ago. When no one cares about finding her, the mother kidnaps Alaska’s first Native senator and holds her captive. Told from the perspective of both women with almost no quoted dialogue, Ghost Girls and Rabbits is a bold but depressing tale written to shine a spotlight on the emotional toll inflicted by the plight of missing and murdered indigenous females.
At No. 10 is Deadgirl: The Novelization by two-time Splatterpunk Award-winning author Bridgett Nelson. The book adapts the controversial 2008 film written by Trent Haaga. It’s about two high school boys who slip into an abandoned hospital and stumble upon what appears to be a woman’s corpse, stripped bare and chained to a table. Nelson breathes new life into the narrative by telling the dead girl’s story in effective flashbacks that alternate with what the boys are doing in the present.
At No. 15 is the sci-fi horror Overgrowth by Mira Grant. Billed as Day of the Triffids meets Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Cuckoo, Overgrowth is about a woman who since age three has been telling anyone who will listen that she’s an alien disguised as a human being and the armada that left her on Earth is returning for her. When an alien signal is broadcast around the world, it indicates that the woman’s biological family has crossed the gulf of space to bring her home. What does that mean for humanity?
At No. 18 is Pam Kowolski is a Monster! by three-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author Sarah Langan. A woman named Janet whose life and career are stagnant recognizes Pam, her mortal enemy from high school, while watching TV. Pam is an attractive, rich and famous online psychic predicting the end of the world. Janet decides to write an article to take Pam down and expose her as a fraud. It’ll require Janet to dig deep into their shared past, a process that makes her worry: What if Pam is right about the apocalypse? A Cabin at the End of the World author Paul Tremblay raves: “I couldn’t have loved this more. Funny, smart, disturbing, creepy. The novella that 2025 deserves.” Langan wrote the Bram Stoker Award-winning novels Audrey’s Door and The Missing.
At No. 25 is Hushbone by David A Lambert. Southern Gothic horror set in Georgia, Hushbone is about a dark entity unleashed by the opening of an ancient book after men had sealed the entity away in 1873. The result is strange whispers start plaguing the townspeople as forgotten sins claw their way to the surface. When the whispers grow louder, the body count rises, leading a sheriff to suspect the past and a priest to learn that the ground he preaches on was never consecrated — it was quarantined.
Turbo Teasers
Here are ten quick teasers for the rest of the Top 25:
— Haunted house thriller Something I Keep Upstairs by J.D. Barker had the best tagline on this month’s chart: “For a haunted house to be born, somebody has to die.”
— The Night Birds by Christopher Golden delivers atmospheric horror set in a deteriorated, half-sunken freighter ship off the coast of Galveston, Texas. Golden is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Ararat.
— The Girl Under the Sun by Dan Padavona is Book 13 in A Logan and Scarlett Thriller Killer series.
— Unsafe: Book 3 by Christopher Artinian continues one of the most highly rated post-a
— Stephen King calls Whistle by Linwood Barclay “terrific” in what’s billed as “a c
— Rats that are larger, smarter, organized, and hungry invade Manhattan in The Nest by Conrad Jones.
— An aging horror writer and a lonely boy find themselves battling a blood-craving creature in the poignant novel Thrift Store Puzzles by John Boden.
— The Ugly Truth by Aron Beauregard, Shane McKenzie, and John Skipp unites three of horror’s darkest minds to bring together a trio of interconnected tales of treachery. Beauregard is the two-time Splatterpunk Award-winning author of Playground and Beyond Reform (with Jon Athan and Jasper Bark), and Skipp is the 2021 J.F. Gonzalez Lifetime Achievement Award recipient.
— The Screaming Forest by Ron Ripley is Book 1 in his Dark Relics series about a ghost whisperer who solves paranormal mysteries.
— Feeders by Matt Serafini is a “darkly satirical supernatural thriller that follows a would-be influencer whose dreams of online fame spiral into nightmare territory when she encounters a mysterious and dangerous social media platform.” Two-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author Brian Keene calls Serafini “one of the best new voices in horror fiction.”
Anyway, that wraps up my report on this month’s chart. Without further ado, here’s the Top 25. As always, clicking on the book titles takes you to their Amazon pages where they can be purchased.