Horror Fiction by Authors of Color

January 13, 2016 1:41 PM

Recommendations? I've got Sumiko Saulson's Black Women in Horror list/bios of 60 writers, which is an extensive and exciting resource. But I'm not looking exclusively for work by black women, so - who else brings the chills?

Since I've got the chance to nitpick and pettifog, I will: I've got no love for vampires (sexy or non), supernatural romance, spec fic that gets a bit spooky for a minute, or dark fantasy; unfortunately for me as these seem to be thriving niches. I'll be double-lucky though if recommended reads are on Audible. Dark Dreams anthologies are already on my radar but I haven't dug in yet.

Fill my shelf with nightmares, please and thank you.

posted by Lou Stuells to Media & Arts (12 answers total)

Wrath James White
posted by dgeiser13 at 1:54 PM on January 13, 2016

Not quite horror, but really great suspense would be Natsuo Kirino (especially Out)
posted by brookeb at 2:10 PM on January 13, 2016

I have no idea whether Yoko Ogawa would be to your taste, but I can't stop recommending Yoko Ogawa. (Not "The Housekeeper and the Professor," which has no horror elements, but "Revenge" and "The Diving Pool.") Literary fiction with a good helping of the spooky and grotesque; Pregnancy Diary is my single favorite horror short story even though I keep wanting to debate whether it actually is a horror short story.
posted by Jeanne at 2:16 PM on January 13, 2016 [2 favorites]

It's not exactly horror, though it was initially marketed as such, but Victor LeValle's The Devil in Silver is definitely creepy (and horrifying, but that's in a what it says about our society way, not in a horror-the-genre kind of way).
posted by snaw at 2:18 PM on January 13, 2016 [1 favorite]

Some of the well known Japanese horror movies are based on books, e.g. Ring and Audition. I haven't read them myself, but I've heard they're scary.
posted by sively at 2:23 PM on January 13, 2016

I haven't read him myself, but I have heard good things about the up-and-coming Jayaprakash Satyamurthy.
posted by tiger tiger at 2:33 PM on January 13, 2016

If comics count, Spike Trotman published a horror comics anthology called Sleep of Reason, you can preview some of the art on the Kickstarter used to fund its publication.
posted by foxfirefey at 2:45 PM on January 13, 2016

Colson Whitehead's Zone One. Note, this is a one-off for him; he's not generally known as horror genre writer.
posted by fuse theorem at 4:51 PM on January 13, 2016 [1 favorite]

Stephen Graham Jones is a Native American who writes horror (I' haven't read any of his work, but met him at a reading of his work).
posted by ShooBoo at 7:21 PM on January 13, 2016 [1 favorite]

You need The Weird. It's not only authors of color, but they've got a real wide range of authors represented (lots of work in translation) and a bunch of terrifying stories by writers who aren't normally considered horror writers - Jamaica Kincaid is in there, just off the top of my head. And, bonus, their definition of the "weird" tracks perfectly with what you're interested in - there's an explicit ban on 'known' monsters (i.e., vampires, werewolves) in favor of the inexplicable and strange.
posted by pretentious illiterate at 7:40 PM on January 13, 2016 [1 favorite]

Sherman Alexie wrote a serial killer novel called Indian Killer about an Indian who is a killer. It's not his best work.
posted by Sara Anne at 12:23 AM on January 14, 2016

Usman T. Malik. Pakistani (now living in the U.S.) writer of horror, fantasy, and science fiction.
posted by tiger tiger at 4:23 AM on January 14, 2016