New horror books to make you break out in a cold sweat on a hot summer’s day

William Morrow, 270 pages, $33.50

I know it’s early in the year, but I’m giving the (just invented) 2018 Most Kickass Premise award to Paul Tremblay’s latest novel, The Cabin at the End of the World. At a remote lake in New Hampshire, Wen, the seven-year-old adopted daughter of Andrew and Eric, is approached outside the family’s rented cabin by a young man named Leonard and his three friends, all of them bearing gruesome homemade weapons. The reason for this unexpected visit: the four strangers, along with Wen’s family, have been singled out to save the world from an imminent apocalypse. There is a condition, Leonard explains: one member of Wen’s family must voluntarily agree to murder another. If they refuse to make this sacrifice, the first of a series of world-ending catastrophes will commence later that day. Tremblay takes a little while to elevate his apocalyptic home invasion scenario to its screeching heights, but when he does the novel is wrenching, surreal, and continually surprising.

The Outsider

By Stephen King

Simon and Schuster, 576 pages, $39.99

A boy in the typical Middle American community of Flint City is brutally raped and murdered. Armed with what they believe to be incontrovertible evidence — the suspect, little-league coach Terry Maitland, was seen with the boy the day of the murder and his DNA and fingerprints are all over the crime scene — the local police proceed to arrest Maitland in very public fashion during a baseball game. But because this is a Stephen King novel, and one of his most wildly imaginative in some time, the case soon falls apart. Maitland, it seems, was out of town when the boy was murdered, and he has eyewitnesses and even video evidence to prove it. Does Maitland have a doppelganger? Can he astral project his body? King keeps readers guessing as he weaves a hybrid police procedural/horror story that doesn’t feel overly long at nearly 600 pages.

Black Helicopters

By Caitlin R. Kiernan

Tor, 200 pages, $19.50

Caitlin Kiernan’s Black Helicopters explores the same fictional universe as her 2017 novella Agents of Dreamland, which, among other dizzying sleights of hand, riffed on the cosmic horrors of H.P. Lovecraft’s best tales (especially “The Whisperer in Darkness”). A reading of that work is not necessary before reading Black Helicopters, but the novella provides a good entry point for the vast cosmic conspiracy fully evoked in this book. The new novel’s short, opaque chapters — which are more like puzzle pieces than units of a linear narrative — are set between 1966 and 2152 and draw on a deep well of cosmic horror, noir and spy tropes. Kiernan wields her shifting landscapes, time periods and character viewpoints with seeming ease, while seeding the text with references to the invasion of Lovecraftian entities that is the novel’s core. Demanding reading, yes, but worth the effort.

By Figures Unseen: Selected Stories

Steve Rasnic Tem

Valancourt Books, 340 pages, $23

Steve Rasnic Tem’s all but unclassifiable stories and novels have attracted a devoted following in horror and dark fantasy circles over the last few decades. In this welcome edition of more than thirty of Tem’s best stories, those readers just arriving at the party can explore the depth of feeling and elusive but powerful employment of mood and symbol in this under-appreciated author’s work. Plot synopses don’t do justice to the stories. There are ghosts, real and imagined, phantoms and spectres, surreal images and haunted landscapes. Most of all there are flawed individuals negotiating the unspeakable mysteries of family and memory. An incredible collection.