Step into Little Ghosts and it looks like any other bookstore. New hardcovers and classic paperbacks are lined up, tight as Rockettes, on ceiling-high shelves, one so tall it calls for a library ladder. At the counter you can get a flat white to enjoy al fresco at the cozy patio out back.
But look closely. The boxes piled high in a window display? VHS copies of “Scream” and “Nightmare on Elm Street” but also “Demon Wind,” “He Never Died” and other cult-worthy scary movies. The midnight-black shelves are stocked with “Frankenstein” but also newer books with titles that sound like whispers between siblings trembling in a closet (“It Looks Like Dad”) or a text from Satan (“I’ll Watch Your Baby”).
You’re out of luck if you’re looking for “The Correspondent” at this Toronto emporium, but you’ll hit the jackpot if you need a few copies of “The Devil Made Me Do Him.”
Like every “Friday the 13th” sequel except “Jason X” — the one in outer space — there’s nothing exactly new about a genre bookstore. San Francisco’s Borderlands Books has been selling horror fiction since 1997. New York City’s Mysterious Bookshop, for the mystery-thriller corner of the market, has been open since 1979.
But while reading for fun has declined in America, horror fiction is booming, and not just during Summerween and Halloween. And bookstores that specialize in all things creepy are meeting the demand.
Through August, horror book sales are up 33 percent this year over last, according to Circana BookScan. The market is growing: 3.6 million copies were sold in 2025, up from 1.4 million in 2020.
Among the bookstores catering to the horror fan that have opened since August are The Infernal Annex in Olympia, Wash., Long Dark House in Alexandria, Va. and The Inked Page in Overland Park, Kan. Denver’s Broom Book & Candle is set to open by year’s end.
Add to that the stores that have arrived in the past year or so — Bloodstone Books in Sacramento, The Cursed Page in Sturbridge, Mass., Parallel Universe in Cleveland, to name a few — and horror bookstores are multiplying as fast as the slimy pod monsters from “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”
Chris Krawczyk and his husband, Jason, opened Little Ghosts Books in 2022, in a small storefront in Toronto’s happening but unpretentious Trinity-Bellwoods neighborhood. Little Ghosts hosts discussion groups and author readings and also runs a boutique press that has released several titles, including the anthologies “Your Flight Has Been Cancelled” (airline travel horror) and “Wet Screams” (monster erotica).
Chris, who identifies as transmasculine, said a big reason the couple opened their store was to provide horror’s “feral fans and authors” a sense of belonging on their own “island of forgotten toys.”
“It’s a community of people who didn’t have a community of people and now they have one,” said Chris. “And they don’t want to leave.”
The same goes for Michaela Granger, whose Midslumber Media opened last year in Portland, Ore. The response from horror aficionados and newbies alike, they said, “has been massive.”
“I expected it to be what I thought the horror community was, a genre built on the underdog and outsiders,” they said. “But there are more people coming in to explore the genre from all backgrounds in a way I’ve never seen before.”
The growth in horror bookstores mirrors the recent boom in romance outlets. And Granger sees women driving this scene, too. One of Midslumber Media’s most popular discussion groups is the Weird Girl Book Club, which focuses on a burgeoning genre rooted in “female rage, violence and being unconventional.”
In other words, monstrous. Kay West, a queer book critic who lives outside Toronto, said that in reading horror she found there to be something “very freeing about sometimes seeing yourself as the monster.”
“It feels really good to have other women characters taking revenge, taking up space and being unapologetic,” West said in between browsing tables at the Little Ghosts festival, a weekend literary and film event that the Krawczyks threw in September.
For horror authors, these stores feel like home.
“Sometimes I go to a bookstore and the horror section is a shelf and maybe it’s all Stephen King, and I love Uncle Steve,” said Rachel Harrison, a New York Times best seller whose latest novel is “Kiss Slay Repeat.” “But to walk into a store where it’s all genre fiction and that’s the point, it’s special.”
Why are these stores thriving? One reason is that, from “Backrooms” to “Widow’s Bay,” horror is in a golden age regardless of discipline. For the horror-curious, novels can be a great place to start; books don’t deliver jump scares, at least not in the same way that movies do.
But scary fiction does what all horror does: It recognizes that the world can be a horrible place and steps in “to help build resilience to the outside,” said Lauren Komer, who runs The Twisted Spine, a horror bookstore in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with her partner, Jason Mellow.
“The world is terrifying every day,” she said. “People like having a way to navigate real life in a way that’s controlled.”
Opened two years ago, Twisted Spine hosts discussion clubs and events, including movie screenings. Its shelves are divided into sections, including Kids, Dark Science and even Cookbooks. Like Little Ghosts, it has a cafe; fall specials include a Killer Lumberjack Latte, made with maple syrup.
Komer and Mellow also have other jobs: He is a violinist who plays on Broadway and she’s a neuroscientist who works at the National Institute on Aging.
How’s business? “Our bookkeepers are very happy,” Komer said.
Twisted Spine and Little Ghosts are following a model that Del Howison knows well. In 1994, he and his wife, Sue, opened one of the granddaddies of horror bookstores, Dark Delicacies in Burbank, Calif. They closed the brick-and-mortar store last year but still do mail order and pop-up events.
“We were tired of having to be somewhere in the morning,” said Howison, 73.
Howison said when the store first opened there “were a lot of closeted horror fans that had no outlet.” He assumed his customers would be young men, “maybe Goths,” he said.
But a big chunk of his customer base over the years was young women, some of whom were trying horror for the first time and wanted recommendations from a trusted source.
“The folks behind the counter at Barnes & Noble don’t know diddlysquat unless they look at their computer,” he said.
Howison remembered customers often asking what the scariest thing was that he sold.
“I said the L.A. Times,” he said. “It’s behind the counter.”
For Howison, the horror bookstore, like that psychopath Michael Myers, is all grown up and here to stay.
“You can come in and find the most horrifying books and at the same time have your kid in a stroller and find things that would tickle the child to death,” he said. “They now have Golden Books that are about ‘Jaws’ and ‘Alien.’ It’s amazing.”
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