Our 10 Favorite Literary Ghost Stories

The Argentine author of the surrealist story collection The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, which was a finalist for the Booker Prize, returns with another “masterful collection full of grotesque body horror, red-hot terror, and mysterious events, revealing the pain and loss endured by women in modern-day Buenos Aires,” according to Publishers Weekly.

This 2023 National Book Award winner for fiction fuses fiction and true history to shine a spotlight on the forgotten queer lives of a bygone era. In the Star Tribune, Hamilton Cain praised it as, "a transfixing collage of gorgeous prose and manipulated illustrations, with themes of cultural erasure and the effervescence of lust and love.”

In the Lambda Award winner’s latest supernatural thriller, three Black siblings return to the white Dallas suburb where they grew up in the aftermath of their parents' unusual deaths. “In evocative prose, Solomon harnesses and recasts classic horror tropes to tell an original story of race and class, family, trauma, and grief,” observed Kirkus in its starred review. “With this exhilarating and unforgettable work, Solomon proves to be a formidable writer."

In Sri Lanka, a dead photographer tries to solve his own shocking murder in this 2022 Booker Prize winner that the judging committee called "a rollercoaster journey through life and death.”

A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted by the store's most annoying customer in the latest by a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author. It’s a unique ghost story that wades into themes of incarceration, grief, justice and protest during one of the most turbulent years in the city’s history.

The first novel in over a decade from the Birds of America author is a time-hopping ghost story told through the eyes of a teacher visiting his dying brother, a therapy clown and an assassin. It’s a tragicomic tale that’s peppered with the author’s unmistakable banter and unpredictable twists.

New Zealand’s 1860s gold rush is the backdrop of this ghostly Booker Prize-winning mystery structured around the twelve signs of the Zodiac.

Winner of the 2020 National Book Award in Translated Literature, this inventive novel combines historical fiction and personal narratives with the supernatural to deliver a haunting story of a homeless ghost in Tokyo's bustling train station.

The celebrated author won the 2017 Booker Prize for this imaginative Civil War story that finds Abraham Lincoln mourning the death of his young son Willie, who inhabits a Buddhist purgatory state filled with quarrelsome ghosts.

A 105-year-old South Korean matriarch is thrust into the afterlife to ward off a family curse in this ghostly generational saga that looks back at the Japanese occupation of Korea.