Halloween is, of course, the traditional season for scary stories. But for those of us weirdly dedicated to the genre, it’s a year-round endeavor.
 
Today’s collection looks back on the past 10 years of horror novels and short fiction collections, but with a twist. The books below represent the most popular titles of the past decade, according to the Goodreads community at large. It’s a curated list based on reader ratings and shelvings—the books that end up most often on members’ Read, Currently Reading, and Want to Read shelves.
 
From there, we have sorted the books by publication year. In other words, these are the past decade’s most popular books according to Goodreads regulars as of now, with each book sorted into the year in which it hit shelves. It’s an interesting way to see which scary stories continue to resonate with your fellow readers, and when they came out.
 
As it happens, the past decade has been an uncommonly awesome one for innovative horror. You’ll see several familiar names in this collection, including Grady Hendrix, Stephen Graham Jones, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Victor LaValle, T. Kingfisher, and of course the genre’s resident godfather, Stephen King.
 
A few of these books transcended genre entirely to become part of the cultural conversation in the year they were released: The Reformatory from Tananarive Due, for instance, or Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country. You’ll find a scattering of international horror in translation, too: Mariana Enríquez’s Our Share of Night, Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny, and Agustina Bazterrica’s devastating Tender Is the Flesh.
 
Click on the book cover images for more information about each title, and use the Want to Read button to add promising leads to your own scary story shelf.