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Clay McLeod Chapman

CLAY MCLEOD CHAPMAN (Brooklyn, NY) is the creator of the rigorous storytelling session The Pumpkin Pie Show. His previous publications include Rest Area, Miss Corpus, and The Tribe trilogy Homeroom Headhunters, Camp Cannibal, and Academic Assassins (Disney). His films include The Boy (SXSW 2015), Henley (Sundance 2012), and Late Bloomer (Sundance 2005). Theater: Commencement and Hostage Song (with Kyle Jarrow). Comics: Edge of Spider-Verse, The Avengers, The Amazing Spider-Man, Ultimate Spider-Man, Vertigo Quarterly: SFX, and Self Storage. Chapman is a writing instructor at the Actors Studio MFA Program at Pace University.

Awards: Stoker (2025) see all

Genres: Horror, Young Adult Fantasy

New and upcoming books

August 2026

Devil Inside

March 2027

Mr. Lonelyhearts

September 2027

Where Devils Stand

Series

Tribe
   1. Homeroom Headhunters (2013)
   2. Camp Cannibal (2014)
   3. Academic Assassins (2014)

Novels

   Miss Corpus (2003)
   The Remaking (2019)
   Whisper Down the Lane (2021)
   Ghost Eaters (2022)
   What Kind of Mother (2023)
   Wake Up and Open Your Eyes (2025)
   Shiny Happy People (2025)
   Devil Inside (2026)
   Mr. Lonelyhearts (2027)

Collections

   Rest Area (2002)
   Nothing Untoward (2017)
   Acquired Taste (2025)
   Where Devils Stand (2027) (with others)

Novellas and Short Stories

   Commencement (2011)
   Lazaretto (2018)
   Stay on the Line (2024)
   Kill Your Darling (2024)
   Bodies of Work (2026)

Books containing stories by Clay McLeod Chapman

Something Peculiar XI (2026)
(Great British Horror, book 11)
edited by
Steve J Shaw

All Hallows Eve (2026)
edited by
Ellen Datlow

NEED (2026)
Horror Stories You Can't Live Without
edited by
Ruth Anna Evans

More books

Awards

2025 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel : Shiny Happy People

Award nominations

	2026 ITW Award for Best Young Adult Novel (nominee) : Shiny Happy People
	2025 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection (nominee) : Acquired Taste
	2024 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novelette (nominee) : Stay on the Line
	2024 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Long Fiction (nominee) : Kill Your Darling

Clay McLeod Chapman recommends

Quaint Folk (2026)
Bitter Karella
"Quaint Folk remakes The Wicker Man with Todd Haynes behind the camera, a heaving Hieronymus Bosch acid trip that skins the idyllic flesh off the folk horror subgenre and paints the reader's face in its blood."

Monstera (2026)
Delilah S Dawson
"Monstera is a botanical beauty. Lean forward and inhale Delilah S. Dawson's fragrant bouquet of sapphic depravity. One whiff and this nightshade novella will wrap its tendrils right around the"

House Haunters (2026)
KC Jones
"Jones has greenlit the Blair Witch's own reality TV program and it's bound to be a breakaway hit. House Haunters is my personal frontrunner for America's Next Top Haunt, a cursed codex that equally creeps and pleases, on par with other such belletristic ghost hunters as Philip Fracassi and Craig DiLouie."

Don't Leave Her Alone (2026)
Desirée de Fez
"Don't Leave Her Alone is an eldritch Pedro Almodovar nightmare, charting those liminal terrors found beyond the boundaries of the human body, where flesh itself is not safe."

Worry Box (2026)
Chris Panatier
"Chris Panatier will be a household name before long. Too bad all of those houses are haunted. Worry Box may just be his best yet, building up from the Spielbergian blueprints of Poltergeist, annexing Mike Flanagan's Bly Manor, then expanding upon Richard Mattheson's most heartfelt haunts to create a cursed house unlike any other, while still leaving plenty of room for his own preternaturally talented voice to flourish. Some books settle into your psyche after you read them. Worry Box moves into your mind and makes itself right at home. It's never leaving."

Our Cut of Salt (2026)
Deena Helm
"Our Cut of Salt rages and aches and demands your complete attention, re-contextualizing the very notion of what a haunted house is."

Nightjars (2026)
Michael Wehunt
"Michael Wehunt doesn't just simply tell you a story, he inters you in one. Nightjars is such an immersive nightmare, it feels like being buried alive by a book. You will taste the loam at the back of your throat, the earth clotting up your airways. You're never climbing out from this novel."

Newbourne Park (2026)
Jennifer Thorne
"Jennifer Thorne is a travel agent of diabolic destinations . . . Her work doesn't merely transport you, it consumes you. You may never come back."

The Man of Wind and Moss (2026)
Alex Gonzalez
"Alex Gonzalez is the bard of modern toxic masculinity, a macabre Bob Dylan who just went electric with The Man of Wind and Moss, a noxiously awesome Big Chill, a millennial Evil Dead, a Modelo Negra folk horror that burns bright with so much self destructive rage it could light up the entire borough of Brooklyn."

The House That Eats the Dead (2026)
Max Doty
"Here I am, thinking I'm the one devouring The House That Eats The Dead, only to learn - too late - that Max Doty's devilishly voracious novel ended up devouring me. Better put your fear in escrow before opening this book. Your heart's going to need it."

The Winter Folk (2026)
Jen Julian
"The Winter Folk feels like an Appalachian Spirited Away, blending the Blue Ridge with Studio Ghibli, teeming with haints, haunts, and monsters. Jen Julian crafts a tale that feels as if it has been handed down through generations of storytellers, a hauntingly evocative gothic for every campfire."

The Red Sacrament (2026)
Sara Hinkley
"The Red Sacrament is a fanged guillotine of a novel with its pages pressed directly to your neck. You'll absolutely lose your head over it. An unholy Anne Rice-Victor Hugo hybrid, written with an elegance akin to horror haute couture, this sumptuously gaslit grand guignol firmly places Sara Hinkley alongside the likes of Silvia Moreno Garcia and Isabel Canas."

Carry Me to My Grave (2026)
Christopher Golden
"Carry Me To My Grave is a propulsive combustion engine of horror, akin to a cosmic Faulkner - imagine a supernatural As I Lay Dying - that also captures the fragile humanity of Bradbury. This novel never rests, and you won't either, once you start reading it, racing towards the end of one of Christopher Golden's absolute best."

The Siren of Groves Peak (2026)
Glenn Rolfe
"Once you hear this splendid splatter-shanty come calling, there isn't a reader alive who can deny the siren song of Glenn Rolfe's blood-and-brine soaked prose. Whether you'll still be alive after reading it is another question altogether..."

Backstabbers (2026)
Eliza Jabore
"Don't you dare turn your back on Backstabbers, a deliciously sinister sojourn into true crime country, full of cunning switchbacks and eviscerations, where every shocking twist threatens to send the reader's jaw plummeting straight down."

She Waits Where Shadows Gather (2026)
Michelle Tang
"Page for page, ounce for ounce, She Waits Where Shadows Gather may be one of the most haunted novels I've ever read. There's a part of me that doesn't want to pick up the book after finishing it, ever again, it feels so soaked in the supernatural. What did Michelle Tang summon to possess her stunning horror debut novel and how do I exorcise it?"

Make Me Better (2026)
Sarah Gailey
"Make Me Better is a hypnotic tide pool of a novel, a habitat of horror teeming with all types of taxonomies of folkish frights. It is a dizzying display of unwell wellness, encrusted in the brine of belief systems unfamiliar and curdled, that sucks you right in and never lets you up for air."

The Cove (2026)
Claire Rose
"This Christopher Pike-Wicker Man mashup has it all: coastal cult folk horror, I Know What You Did Last Summer-style teen screams, and one wicked undertow of a narrative. This pagan page turner draws you right in and absolutely drowns you."

Bone of My Bone (2026)
Johanna van Veen
"Bone Of My Bone is a holy sojourn of a novel. Fans of Christopher Buehlman's Between Two Fires will surely worship this blasphemous masterclass of sapphic historical horror. I, for one, am bowing down before Johanna van Veen."

These Familiar Walls (2026)
C J Dotson
"These Familiar Walls is further burning testament that the past won't only just haunt you, it'll come crashing like a blazing boomerang. C. J. Dotson sets her ghosts on fire and this haunting novel is an absolute incendiary sensation. You'll burn through this book or it'll burn right through you."

The Caretaker (2026)
Marcus Kliewer
"The homes Marcus Kliewer haunts aren't merely filled with phantoms, but cerebral spirits and broken-hearted ghosts. THE CARETAKER is quite possibly the ultimate 'don't go in there' novel, offering up an apocalyptic final girl for the ages. This is a breakneck book, filled with razor-wire tension, where the reader runs the risk of losing their mind with every flip of the page."

Wretch (2026)
Eric LaRocca
"Reading Wretch is akin to discovering the gospels of a cruel god, where suffering bleeds into the sublime. LaRocca's new testament is equally sacrilegious as it is transcendent, and I for one will forever consider myself an acolyte of his brutal body of work."

The Body (2026)
Bethany C Morrow
"Bethany C. Morrow's The Body is a holy war of outright horror, pulsing with an adrenalized anxiety that's palpable from page one. The dread just doesn't stop. That's not just a promise - it's a downright vow."

The Night That Finds Us All (2025)
John Hornor Jacobs
"The Night That Find Us All is a cosmic Master and Commander, blending Melville and Lovecraft with an added dash of acidic humor to keep the scurvy away. John Hornor Jacobs summons his superb gothic sensibilities in what is hands down his most exhilarating and breakneck novel to date."

How to Fake a Haunting (2025)
Christa Carmen
"Christa Carmen joins the eerie echelon of Catriona Ward and Silvia Moreno-Garcia as one of the reigning queens of modern gothic. How to Fake a Haunting forgoes the fog and centuries-old castles for something far more frightening: the beguiling black mold insinuating itself within contemporary homelife. The gloom and ghouls may be prefab, but the ghosts lingering within this toxically haunted house are real all the same."

Her Wicked Roots (2025)
Tanya Pell
"Tanya Pell is a horror horticulturist who has cultivated a manic botanic gothic that grafts Silvia Moreno-Garcia to Daphne du Maurier, and what sprouts out is absolutely beautiful. Her Wicked Roots reaches in and rummages through the reader's subconscious until there's no weeding it out."

Crafting for Sinners (2025)
Jenny Kiefer
"Crafting for Sinners is a crafty yarn crocheted from the same skein as Grady Hendrix's Horrorstor and Rachel Harrison's Cackle. Jenny Kiefer sure has spun herself a gloriously gory, bisexual MacGyver of the Damned, and it absolutely fits this particular sinner like the comfiest blood-soaked sweater."

They Fear Not Men in the Woods (2025)
Gretchen McNeil
"In Gretchen McNeil's new eco-creeper folk horror freakout, she totally flips the script to - Take nothing but trauma, leave nothing but nightmares, kill nothing but mankind. You'll burn through this book so fast, the rustle of pages will sound like the bristling of tree branches after a breeze blows through."

Play Nice (2025)
Rachel Harrison
"Rachel Harrison isn't playing around. Play Nice is her scariest book so far, by far, so don't say you weren't warned. Reading Rachel is akin to an incantation, summoning a master craftsman of horror, then ending up possessed by her downright demonic ability to hurt and haunt you all at once. No exorcism will expel this novel from your consciousness."

The Mean Ones (2025)
Tatiana Schlote-Bonne
"A folk-horror flex that suplexes every summer campfire story you've ever heard, The Mean Ones gets its grip around the reader and crushes their skull."

Let Not Your Sorrow Die (2025)
Bracken MacLeod
"Let Not Your Sorrow Die, otherwise known as The Brutality of Bracken, is the omitted sixty-seventh book from the Bible, a wrathful assortment of tales better told with your fists than words, given that MacLeod bloodied his knuckles while writing them. These stories punch you straight in the face with every flip of the page."

Breathe In, Bleed Out (2025)
Brian McAuley
"I found my bliss in Breathe In, Bleed Out's bloodshed and you can, too. Brian McAuley will forever be my slasher sage, my guru of all things gruesome, my purveyor of tantric panic, my phobic yogi. He brings such a joie de vivre to his holistic homicides, you can practically feel the back spatter splatter off the page."

This is My Body (2025)
Lindsay King-Miller
"This Is My Body blends faith and body horror into a queer cosmic romp that would make any exorcist blush. In this fresh possession epic, a marriage made in hell between David Cronenberg and William Peter Blatty, Lindsay King-Miller discovers there are entire chasms left to be purified within the human soul."

Secret Lives of the Dead (2025)
Tim Lebbon
"Tim Lebbon has hand-crafted a stunning hard-boiled artifact of horror noir, equal parts witchcraft and crime, blood and heartwood, serving as further testament to his supernatural abilities as one of contemporary speculative fiction's leading alchemists."

Basilisk (2025)
Matt Wixey
"One doesn't read Basilisk. This book must be dismantled like a bomb. A hacker's House of Leaves, a Nabokovian bio-weapon, a piece of cypherpunk folklore, this found footage mindphuck is pure red-pilled adrenaline."

When the Wolf Comes Home (2025)
Nat Cassidy
"Utterly relentless, this kinetic hot rod of a horror novel is pure adrenalized dread that starts and never stops and nothing will save you from its breakneck tension, bone-breaking horror, and heartbroken prose."

The Staircase in the Woods (2025)
Chuck Wendig
"Chuck Wendig is the Frank Lloyd Wright of horror, and here's his masterstroke of malaise. The Staircase in the Woods is a true blueprint for terror."

Senseless (2025)
Ronald Malfi
"A brutal Rubik's Cube of a book covered in blood... This vamped out, sun-bleached mobius strip is a masterclass in horror noir."

At the Bottom of the Garden (2025)
Camilla Bruce
"One gorgeously morbid gothic novel that's just as gleeful as it is gashlycrumb."

You Better Watch Out (2024)
James S Murray and Darren Wearmouth
"Ho, ho oh no--It's SAW in Santa's workshop! Murray and Wearmouth make damn sure not a creature will be stirring once you're through reading this breakneck-paced, blissfully savage book. Wear a poncho, because things are about to get bloody. Real bloody."

Coup De Grace (2024)
Sofia Ajram
"Coup de Grace isn't merely absorbing - I feel as if I was digested by this book, dissolving bit by bit with every flip of the page. Sofia Ajram has constructed a stunning mobius strip of a nightmare, equal parts Clive Barker and M.C. Escher, full of fleshy architecture and seductively serpentine prose."

Cold Snap (2024)
Lindy Ryan
"Cold Snap reads like a whiteout of blinding grief. The deeper you plunge into this haunting novella, the more you lose sight of your surroundings. Before long, you won't be able to tell where the pages end and reality begins. It's that immersive."

Catherine the Ghost (2024)
Kathe Koja
"Kathe Koja divinely taps into the hereafter with Catherine the Ghost, summoning Wuthering Heights and beckoning Bronte to speak from beyond the veil. What they manifest together is a haunting meditation on love and literature, both for and from, two exquisite texts communing with one another across the centuries."

Bitter is the Heart (2024)
Mina Hardy
"Bitter is the Heart is pure arrhythmic horror. Reading it disrupts your own pulse. Symptoms include deep-rooted trauma, disquieting mother-daughter bonds, and sleepless, sleepless nights."

A Mask of Flies (2024)
Matthew Lyons
"Matthew Lyons' bare knuckle prose is brutal enough to split skin, split lips, split the reader's soul straight down the middle. A Mask of Flies pulls no punches and finds a particular poetry in its bloodshed that resonates long after you've been knocked out."

The Drowning House (2024)
Cherie Priest
"Inhabiting the same sandy block as Michael McDowell's The Elementals and Josh Malerman's A House at the Bottom of a Lake, Cherie Priest's The Drowning House has taken up permanent residence in my subconscious alongside the briniest haunted houses around. Be forewarned: there's an undertow to this novel. Once you start reading, it'll suck you right in."

The Dissonance (2024)
Shaun Hamill
"Shaun Hamill proves there are strange new worlds yet to be explored on the bookshelf. The Dissonance is yet another testament to Hamill's mantel as a master storyteller, blending the terrors and wonders of traumatic magic. You won't read another novel quite like The Dissonance this year, or perhaps ever in this life--or even beyond it."

Incidents Around the House (2024)
Josh Malerman
"Josh Malerman is such an insidious architect. I call all of his haunted houses home, and this just might be his most devilish design yet."

The House That Horror Built (2024)
Christina Henry
"After reading The House That Horror Built, I brought the terror into my own home and now it won't leave. Christina Henry has me questioning every creak, every warping floorboard, every stray sound around my house and now I can't sleep at night. There's something in the walls of this novel and it watches you while you read."

The Woods All Black (2024)
Lee Mandelo
"Retribution has never been this sexy."

Forgotten Sisters (2024)
Cynthia Pelayo
"Cynthia Pelayo writes with an elegiacally forensic eye, equal parts poet and coroner. Her jaw-dropping autopsy Forgotten Sisters plays out like a true-crime Grey Gardens fantasia penned by Shirley Jackson and it's worth every lyrical incision."

A Botanical Daughter (2024)
Noah Medlock
"This flourishing horticultural horror could only be the monstrous byproduct of a mad phytologist, Mary Shelley grafted onto Jeff VanderMeer, a gothic greenhouse of sporror that reaches down deep into the substrata of the reader's subconscious and eternally takes root. I absolutely loved it."

Where the Dead Wait (2023)
Ally Wilkes
"With ALL THE WHITE SPACES, Ally Wilkes chilled readers to the bone, and now with WHERE THE DEAD WAIT, she sucks the very marrow out from them. Hallucinatory, haunting, and hunger-panged, this frostbitten novel gnawed away at my very sanity and I loved every nibble of it."

A Light Most Hateful (2023)
Hailey Piper
"What has sprouted out from Hailey Piper's head is a fully-formed goddess of a novel, equal parts terrifying, awe-inspiring, and downright worshipful. I'm still scorched by A Light Most Hateful, even after closing its pages, blinded by its brilliance."

Knock Knock, Open Wide (2023)
Neil Sharpson
"Celtic creepypasta Knock Knock, Open Wide is a dark miracle and Neil Sharpson is an infernal bard belched straight out from Hell itself. Your next nightmare has just arrived."

Edenville (2023)
Sam Rebelein
"Sam Rebelein's Edenville is pure cosmic gonzo...This jaw-dropping -- apologies, jaw-ripping -- novel earns its place amongst contemporary classics The Library at Mount Char and The Book of Accidents. You won't read anything quite like it... not in our universe, anyway."

The September House (2023)
Carissa Orlando
"Peel back The Yellow Wallpaper, check out of The Overlook, and say farewell to Hill House... There's a new haunted house on the market and Carissa Orlando is the realtor of our nightmares. You'll never want to leave once you start reading."

Schrader's Chord (2023)
Scott Leeds
"Scott Leeds truly has an ear for fear. Any reader who cracks this cursed book open is doomed to devour it in one sitting like I did. Now I hear ghosts wherever I go."

Whalefall (2023)
Daniel Kraus
"A brutal, unsparing, wildly uplifting book. The sheer buoyancy had me breathless by the end."

Unquiet (2023)
E Saxey
"Unquiet deceptively presents itself like a frozen lake: The further one treads across E. Saxey's haunting, delicate text, the closer to cracking the ice one gets. I fell through this gorgeously gothic novel and still haven't come up for air."

Burn the Negative (2023)
Josh Winning
"Josh Winning has won my heart with this Hollywood horror-noir, which plays out like A Nightmare On Sunset Boulevard."

Bunker Dogs (2023)
Gage Greenwood
"Claustrophobically composed and tautly paced, BUNKER DOGS takes a suffocating plunge into utter what-the-fuckery that will leave you losing sleep just to reach the paralyzing end. I tore through this book."

Looking Glass Sound (2023)
Catriona Ward
"Catriona Ward is an inspired spider and Looking Glass Sound is her most masterful web yet... while we, dear readers, are nothing more than mere flies happily trapped within the pages of this brilliantly intricate novel."

Linghun (2023)
Ai Jiang
"Ai Jiang probes the very notion of ghosts to offer us something far more haunting: it is the living who we should fear the most, where the boundless parameters of our own grief lay down the blueprint for an altogether new Hill House to inhabit."

The Haunting of Alejandra (2023)
V Castro
"V. Castro charts a terrifying legacy of tears with The Haunting of Alejandra, an empathic epic that maps out the birth of a curse and tethers itself to the very ancestry of its tragic protagonist."

Gothic (2023)
(Gothic, book 1)
Philip Fracassi
"GOTHIC is the literary equivalent of the abyss gazing right back at you from the hellish depths of its pages. Don't lean in too close, lest you fall into this nightmarish novel and never find your way out again."

A History of Fear (2022)
Luke Dumas
"A History of Fear presents itself as a disquieting cache of nightmares, a nested doll narrative that reads like a found-footage Falling Angel by William Hjortsberg. Readers, beware: this novel is not safe and will have you questioning what's real for many sleepless nights to come."

What Moves the Dead (2022)
(Sworn Soldier, book 1)
T Kingfisher
"The distilled terror of T. Kingfisher's What Moves the Dead insinuates itself into the reader's nervous system from the very first sentence and quickly overtakes their sense of self control. I was powerless against this novella's pestilential pull and had to finish it in one sitting... or maybe it finished me. Now it's under my skin and I can't trust the touch of anything anymore."

Echo (2022)
Thomas Olde Heuvelt
"I just scaled Mt. Olde Heuvelt and let me tell you, the view up here is absolutely terrifying. Reading ECHO caused me vertigo. The sense of dread inspired by this breathtaking novel - the dread of something monstrous wearing the face of someone we love - reaches so deep, I can still feel the lingering chill in my bones well after putting the book down."

Slewfoot (2021)
Brom
"Brom has made a convert out of me with Slewfoot, which takes hold of the maxim 'sympathy for the devil' and yanks hard on that literary taproot, unearthing a far more elemental and complex truth. Demon or no, evil or not, the mighty stag Slewfoot deserves our love and devotion. He's got mine now. All hail Brom, all hail Slewfoot!"

Chasing the Boogeyman (2021)
(Boogeyman, book 1)
Richard Chizmar
"Chizmar’s Chasing the Boogeyman has been written upon missing person flyers and published on telephone poles. HAVE YOU READ THIS STORY? For your own safety, you should… The Boogeyman will soon enter the pantheon of suburban legends that fill our backyards like summer fireflies, his name whispered into ears all over. Pray you keep yours."

Impacted (2021)
Benji Carr
"Like a shot of novocaine, Benji Carr injects his novel with enough pitch black comedy to take all my pain away. Impacted had my jaw on the floor, either from laughter or sheer gob-smacking shock. Pray you remember to grab your own mandible back up once you've finished reading this hilarious debut novel."

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