Summer Horror Books That Bring the Heat

Trapped in her house while a repressive heat wave smothers Britain, Mina waits for a chance to finally work as a child psychologist. Most people only want experts, but how can she ever become an expert if she never gets experience? And then a journalist offers her exactly that.

There’s a teenage girl claiming that a witch is haunting her. Alice’s symptoms are disturbing and they’re only increasing. Mina is sure she can help. But the small town Alice lives in is filled with superstition and a history of dealing with witchcraft is cruel and barbaric ways. And if Mina doesn’t find the truth soon, both of their lives may be in danger.

In the midst of a hot Toronto summer, former film teacher Lois Cairns stumbles on a sample piece of silver nitrate silent footage. She discovers that it’s connected to the early work of a woman who disappeared in 1918. Desperate to make her mark on the world, Lois believes that if she can prove this woman was Canada’s first female filmmaker, it will be her chance to make her mark on the film world. But her research doesn’t take her into the dark crevices of shadow but into the blinding nightmare of light.

With nowhere to hide from fairy tales come to life and a noon-demon demanding a price be paid, Lois realizes that whatever happened in 1918 might happen to her.

Summer in Alabama can be sweltering. Even on the Gulf Coast where the sticky heat can drive anyone insane. Three Victorian houses sit on a strip of land where fetid air and encroaching sand threaten to overwhelm the families that summer there. It’s already taken one house, where nothing but sand fills the empty halls. But two remaining families who stubbornly come back every summer are soon going to learn that vacant doesn’t always mean empty. Because there’s something living in that third house. Something thinking about them. Something that is imagining all the gruesome and glorious ways they can die.

There’s heat. And then there’s the oppressive weight of a hot, humid jungle. That’s where a group of friends finds themselves trapped. It was supposed to be a lazy couple’s vacation at a Mexican resort. Sun-drenched days. Liquor-fueled nights. But when one of them disappears, the group decides to venture into the jungle to find him. What starts as a fun day adventure into the unknown spirals into a horrific nightmare when they stumble on ancient ruins. There’s an entity that lurks there. And it doesn’t want to let them go.

After her little sister accidentally drowns, sixteen-year-old Nif and her family move to a small Welsh town to grieve. But their rural life doesn’t bring any relief. The pain of loss lingers and a stifling heat wave chokes the town. To escape her unraveling family, Nif begins collecting talismans around the land where she meets Matty, a teen boy with secret rituals of his own. Through the sheen of summer heat, everything feels unreal. But for Nif what happens on these long, long days might change her life forever.

Cujo is a giant two-hundred-pound Saint Bernard. He’s little ten-year-old Brett’s best friend and a loyal pet to the Camber family. He was the perfect pet until he chases a rabbit into a cave, he gets bitten by a rabid bat and changes. When Donna stops by the house with her five-year-old son Tad, they face the monster Cujo has become.

They say never leave your dogs locked in a car in the heat of the summer because the heat can rise as much as fifty degrees more than the air outside in as little as an hour. Donna and Tad are about to find out exactly how terrible being trapped in that kind of heat can be.