This post may contain affiliate links which means if you make a purchase through my links, I will get a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend the products I love and trust.
15 Disturbingly Good Books For 2025 Book Club Meetings
If you are looking for discussion-worthy book club books that are eerie and disturbing , here is a list for you. These eerie books are also great book club suggestions with many topics to discuss. The list includes bone-chilling thrillers, horror books, and disturbing novels with addictive plots. Also check out my posts on best general book club questions and 13 fun and unique book club Ideas for 2025.
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
If your book club is looking for a deeply disturbing story about isolation, this is it. I Who Have Never Known Men is the story of a nameless young woman trapped underground leaves you questioning the meaning of freedom. The eerie and desolate tone will linger long after you finish.
A young woman is kept in a cage underground with thirty-nine other females, guarded by armed men who never speak; her crimes unremembered… if indeed there were crimes.
The youngest of forty—a child with no name and no past—she survives for some purpose long forgotten in a world ravaged and wasted. In this reality where intimacy is forbidden—in the unrelenting sameness of the artificial days and nights—she knows nothing of books and time, of needs and feelings.
Then everything changes… and nothing changes.
A young woman who has never known men—a child who knows of no history before the bars and restraints—must now reinvent herself, piece by piece, in a place she has never been… and in the face of the most challenging and terrifying of unknowns: freedom.
BUY NOW ON AMAZON | LISTEN FREE ON AUDIBLE
Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica
Tender is the Flesh is about a world where humans are turned into meat for consumption. It’s a disturbing story through a society where eating human flesh is legal, and the protagonist, Marcos, finds himself caught in a moral dilemma.
Blurb: Working at the local processing plant, Marcos is in the business of slaughtering humans —though no one calls them that anymore. His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the “Transition.” Now, eating human meat—“special meat”—is legal. Marcos tries to stick to numbers, consignments, processing.
Then one day he’s given a gift: a live specimen of the finest quality. Though he’s aware that any form of personal contact is forbidden on pain of death, little by little he starts to treat her like a human being. And soon, he becomes tortured by what has been lost—and what might still be saved.
BUY NOW ON AMAZON | LISTEN FREE ON AUDIBLE
The Cellar by Natasha Preston
The Cellar is a gripping thriller that follows a kidnapped girl held captive in a cellar. As the story unfolds, the chilling reality of her situation and the twisted mind of her captor create an atmosphere of constant tension. Your book club will love this thriller with shocking twists.
Blurb: Nothing ever happens in the town of Long Thorpe – that is, until sixteen-year-old Summer Robinson disappears without a trace. No family or police investigation can track her down. Spending months inside the cellar of her kidnapper with several other girls, Summer learns of Colin’s abusive past, and his thoughts of his victims being his family…his perfect, pure flowers. But flowers can’t survive long cut off from the sun, and time is running out.
BUY NOW ON AMAZON | LISTEN FREE ON AUDIBLE | READ with Kindle Unlimited
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
A Little Life goes into the dark corners of trauma and its lifelong impact. It tells the story of the intertwined lives of four friend. This is also one of the saddest books I have ever read.
Blurb: When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they’re broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity.
Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.
BUY NOW ON AMAZON | LISTEN FREE ON AUDIBLE
Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
If your book club wants really engaging psychological thriller books for book club, this book is a good choice. We follow the journalist Camille Preaker as she uncovers the murders of two young girls. But soon she confronts her own demons and uncovers dark truths. Sharp Objects takes you into the world of psychological suspense and family dysfunction.
Blurb: Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, reporter Camille Preaker faces a troubling assignment: she must return to her tiny hometown to cover the unsolved murder of a preteen girl and the disappearance of another. For years, Camille has hardly spoken to her neurotic, hypochondriac mother or to the half-sister she barely knows: a beautiful thirteen-year-old with an eerie grip on the town. Now, installed in her old bedroom in her family’s Victorian mansion, Camille finds herself identifying with the young victims—a bit too strongly. Dogged by her own demons, she must unravel the psychological puzzle of her own past if she wants to get the story—and survive this homecoming.
BUY NOW ON AMAZON | LISTEN FREE ON AUDIBLE
The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux
The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux is a classic story. It talks about obsession and tragedy set in the grandeur of the Paris Opera House. This classic horror story of the deformed and murderous Phantom’s obsession with the beautiful Christine is as a really great book for your reading group.
Blurb: First published in French as a serial in 1909, The Phantom of the Opera is a riveting story that revolves around the young, Swedish Christine Daaé. Her father, a famous musician, dies, and she is raised in the Paris Opera House with his dying promise of a protective angel of music to guide her. After a time at the opera house, she begins hearing a voice, who eventually teaches her how to sing beautifully. All goes well until Christine’s childhood friend Raoul comes to visit his parents, who are patrons of the opera, and he sees Christine when she begins successfully singing on the stage. The voice, who is the deformed, murderous ‘ghost’ of the opera house named Erik, however, grows violent in his terrible jealousy, until Christine suddenly disappears. The phantom is in love, but it can only spell disaster.Leroux’s work, with characters ranging from the spoiled prima donna Carlotta to the mysterious Persian from Erik’s past, has been immortalized by memorable adaptations. Despite this, it remains a remarkable piece of Gothic horror literature in and of itself, deeper and darker than any version that follows.
BUY NOW ON AMAZON | LISTEN FREE ON AUDIBLE | READ with Kindle Unlimited
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
Homegoing is a powerful exploration of the legacy of slavery and its impact on generations of families. The story is told from several timelines but primarily follows two half-sisters and their descendants. It’s one of the unforgettable books I have read as a blogger.
Blurb: A novel of breathtaking sweep and emotional power that traces three hundred years in Ghana and along the way also becomes a truly great American novel. Extraordinary for its exquisite language, its implacable sorrow, its soaring beauty, and for its monumental portrait of the forces that shape families and nations, Homegoing heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction.
Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle’s dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast’s booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia’s descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation.
Generation after generation, Yaa Gyasi’s magisterial first novel sets the fate of the individual against the obliterating movements of time, delivering unforgettable characters whose lives were shaped by historical forces beyond their control. Homegoing is a tremendous reading experience, not to be missed, by an astonishingly gifted young writer.
BUY NOW ON AMAZON | LISTEN FREE ON AUDIBLE
Heaven by Mieko Kawakami
Heaven is a devastataning novel about a 14-year-old student who subjected to relentless torment for having a lazy eye . The raw and unflinching story about the devastating effects of bullying is a deeply unsettling novel for book club.
Blurb: Hailed as a bold foray into new literary territory, Kawakami’s novel is told in the voice of a 14-year-old student who subjected to relentless torment for having a lazy eye. Instead of resisting, the boy chooses to suffer in complete resignation. The only person who understands what he is going through is a female classmate who suffers similar treatment at the hands of her tormentors.
These raw and realistic portrayals of bullying are counterbalanced by textured exposition of the philosophical and religious debates concerning violence to which the weak are subjected.
Kawakami’s simple yet profound new work stands as a dazzling testament to her literary talent. There can be little doubt that it has cemented her reputation as one of the most important young authors working to expand the boundaries of contemporary Japanese literature.
BUY NOW ON AMAZON | LISTEN FREE ON AUDIBLE
The Perfect Child by Lucinda Berry
The Perfect Child is a disturbing psychological thriller that explores the dark side of parenthood. When Christopher and Hannah welcome orphan Janie into their lives, they discover something truly horrific. 47 Book Club Questions For The Perfect Child by Lucinda Berry
Blurb: A page-turning debut of suspense about a young couple desperate to have a child of their own—and the unsettling consequences of getting what they always wanted.
Christopher and Hannah are a happily married surgeon and nurse with picture-perfect lives. All that’s missing is a child. When Janie, an abandoned six-year-old, turns up at their hospital, Christopher forms an instant connection with her, and he convinces Hannah they should take her home as their own.
But Janie is no ordinary child, and her damaged psyche proves to be more than her new parents were expecting. Janie is fiercely devoted to Christopher, but she acts out in increasingly disturbing ways, directing all her rage at Hannah. Unable to bond with Janie, Hannah is drowning under the pressure, and Christopher refuses to see Janie’s true nature.
Hannah knows that Janie is manipulating Christopher and isolating him from her, despite Hannah’s attempts to bring them all together. But as Janie’s behavior threatens to tear Christopher and Hannah apart, the truth behind Janie’s past may be enough to push them all over the edge.
BUY NOW ON AMAZON | LISTEN FREE ON AUDIBLE | READ with Kindle Unlimited
Bunny by Mona Awad
Bunny is a twisted and surreal story. It follows Samantha Heather Mackey who is drawn into the bizarre world of the Bunnies. If you looking for best horror books for book club, this will be a great choice.
Blurb: We were just these innocent girls in the night trying to make something beautiful. We nearly died. We very nearly did, didn’t we?
Samantha Heather Mackey couldn’t be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England’s Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort–a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other Bunny, and seem to move and speak as one.
But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies’ fabled Smut Salon, and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door–ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies’ sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus Workshop where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision.
The spellbinding new novel from one of our most fearless chroniclers of the female experience, Bunny is a down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, friendship and desire, and the fantastic and terrible power of the imagination.
BUY NOW ON AMAZON | LISTEN FREE ON AUDIBLE
What Lies Between Us by John Marrs
What Lies Between Us follows Maggie and Nina’s twisted relationship. I really loved the eerie and gothic vibes of the novel. From the true extent of their shared past to the chilling narrative of manipulation and revenge. your book club will love it. Check out 45 Book Club Questions For What Lies Between.
Blurb: They say every house has its secrets, and the house that Maggie and Nina have shared for so long is no different. Except that these secrets are not buried in the past.
Every other night, Maggie and Nina have dinner together. When they are finished, Nina helps Maggie back to her room in the attic, and into the heavy chain that keeps her there. Because Maggie has done things to Nina that can’t ever be forgiven, and now she is paying the price.
But there are many things about the past that Nina doesn’t know, and Maggie is going to keep it that way—even if it kills her.
Because in this house, the truth is more dangerous than lies.
BUY NOW ON AMAZON | LISTEN FREE ON AUDIBLE | READ with Kindle Unlimited
A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck
If you are looking short book club book suggestion for your reading group, this is a good one. A family man is casted away into Hell. There will be so much to talk about A Short Stay in Hell and Soren’s endless search.
An ordinary family man, geologist, and Mormon, Soren Johansson has always believed he’ll be reunited with his loved ones after death in an eternal hereafter. Then, he dies. Soren wakes to find himself cast by a God he has never heard of into a Hell whose dimensions he can barely grasp: a vast library he can only escape from by finding the book that contains the story of his life.
In this haunting existential novella, author, philosopher, and ecologist Steven L. Peck explores a subversive vision of eternity, taking the reader on a journey through the afterlife of a world where everything everyone believed in turns out to be wrong.
BUY NOW ON AMAZON | LISTEN FREE ON AUDIBLE
Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh
If your group enjoys dark, medieval stories, check out Lapvona. There are so mnay great points to talk about the brutal world of Lapvona. Marek’s twisted journey through faith, power, and survival will leave everyone shaken. It’s also an underrated book club pick in my opinion.
In a village in a medieval fiefdom buffeted by natural disasters, a motherless shepherd boy finds himself the unlikely pivot of a power struggle that puts all manner of faith to a savage test, in a spellbinding novel that represents Ottessa Moshfegh’s most exciting leap yet
Little Marek, the abused and delusional son of the village shepherd, never knew his mother; his father told him she died in childbirth. One of life’s few consolations for Marek is his enduring bond with the blind village midwife, Ina, who suckled him as a baby, as she did so many of the village’s children. Ina’s gifts extend beyond childcare: she possesses a unique ability to communicate with the natural world. Her gift often brings her the transmission of sacred knowledge on levels far beyond those available to other villagers, however religious they might be. For some people, Ina’s home in the woods outside of the village is a place to fear and to avoid, a godless place.
Among their number is Father Barnabas, the town priest and lackey for the depraved lord and governor, Villiam, whose hilltop manor contains a secret embarrassment of riches. The people’s desperate need to believe that there are powers that be who have their best interests at heart is put to a cruel test by Villiam and the priest, especially in this year of record drought and famine. But when fate brings Marek into violent proximity to the lord’s family, new and occult forces upset the old order. By year’s end, the veil between blindness and sight, life and death, the natural world and the spirit world, civility and savagery, will prove to be very thin indeed.
BUY NOW ON AMAZON | LISTEN FREE ON AUDIBLE
The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada
The Factory captures the absurdity of modern work life. The writing is surreal and unsettling. The factory becomes a living, breathing entity that slowly consumes its workers. It’s perfect for book club discussions about reality and meaninglessness.
The English-language debut of Hiroko Oyamada—one of the most powerfully strange young voices in Japan.
In an unnamed Japanese city, three seemingly normal and unrelated characters find work at a sprawling industrial factory. They each focus intently on their specific jobs: one studies moss, one shreds paper, and the other proofreads incomprehensible documents. Life in the factory has its own logic and momentum, and, eventually, the factory slowly expands and begins to take over everything, enveloping these poor workers. The very margins of reality seem to be dissolving: all forms of life capriciously evolve, strange creatures begin to appear… After a while—it could be weeks or years—the workers don’t even have the ability to ask themselves: where does the factory end and the rest of the world begin?
Told in three alternating first-person narratives, The Factory casts a vivid—if sometimes surreal—portrait of the absurdity and meaninglessness of modern life. With hints of Kafka and unexpected moments of creeping humor, Hiroko Oyamada is one of the boldest writers of her generation.
BUY NOW ON AMAZON | LISTEN FREE ON AUDIBLE
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
The Memory Police is for book club members who enjoy literary, thought-provoking dystopias. You will love the setting; The island where objects and memories disappear . There are also themes of themes of loss, memory, and resistance.
On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses—until things become much more serious. Most of the island’s inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten.
When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past.
A surreal, provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, The Memory Police is a stunning new work from one of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in any language.
There you have the list of books that can be unsettling and challenging.
BUY NOW ON AMAZON | LISTEN FREE ON AUDIBLE
More Books For Book Clubs
20 Insanely Good Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club Picks
14 Perfect Page-Turners for Your November Book Club
The 5 Most Gripping Mystery-Thriller Recommendations from Reese’s Book Club
26 Most Rated Thriller Books on Goodreads
10 Addictive Psychological Thrillers Every Freida McFadden Fan Needs
51 Bone-Chilling Psychological Thriller Books for Book Clubs
9 Books Guaranteed to Start Debate in Your Book Club
24 Underrated Book Club Books For 2024
Stephy George
