3 New Horror Books That Put a Fresh Spin on Old Tropes

Something in the Walls

By Daisy Pearce

SOMETHING IN THE WALLS (Minotaur Books, 291 pp., $28), follows Mina, a young woman taking big steps forward in her life. She’s just graduated from college with a degree in psychology and a specialization in child clinical work, and she’s about to get married. But things are far from perfect. Between her doubts about her fiancé, the trauma from her brother’s recent death and her inability to find work in her field, Mina is struggling. While visiting a bereavement group she meets Sam Hunter, a journalist who quickly offers Mina a chance to put her new degree to work, suggesting she help him with an article about a girl named Alice who claims a witch is haunting her.

The job requires they move in with Alice, and there, Mina expects to find something she can diagnose. But things quickly get complicated. The residents of Alice’s village congregate in front of her house and claim she can talk to the dead. Inside the house, Alice’s parents might have reasons to be coaching their daughter to lie. Then people start dying. The more Mina learns, the worse things get, and soon it becomes clear that more than just psychology is at play.

At first glance, the elements of the story — witches, a child who might be possessed, a small town with a dark secret — may sound like a collection of tired horror tropes, but in “Something in the Walls,” Pearce makes these old dogs perform wonderful new tricks. The novel is full of superb, and sustained, tension and heavy doses of folklore and eerie history, making this a fun read that is also smart and engaging. This might be Pearce’s best book yet.

Beta Vulgaris

By Margie Sarsfield

Elise, the protagonist of Sarsfield’s ambitious, impressive debut, BETA VULGARIS (Norton, 285 pp., paperback, $18.99), isn’t poor; she’s “broke.” To make money, she and her boyfriend, Tom, travel to a farm in Minnesota to work a sugar beet harvest.

The job is dull and takes place in the cold, but it pays well, and Elise and Tom get along with their co-workers. Then things go awry. Tom becomes moody. Elise, who stops taking her antidepressants because she can’t afford them, starts to question herself, and she develops a crush on her new friend, Cee. People start to go missing, including Tom and Cee. Also, do the beets they harvest seem to pulse like hearts? Contending with her anxiety, the unsettling crops, the disembodied voices she starts to hear and the disappearances, Elise begins to spiral.