FEATURE.

First published August, 2013 (Booklist).

We’re all little afraid of the dark, aren’t we? Even those of us who are long, long past childhood? Read these superb novels, all reviewed in Booklist between August 2012 and July 2013, to find out just what might be lurking in that darkness.

Apocalypse Cow. By Michael Logan. St. Martin’s/Griffin, paper, $14.99 (9781250032867).

This startlingly funny novel imagines a contemporary Scotland in which animals are infested with an experimental virus that turns them into crazed killing machines—yes, zombie animals.

Ash. By James Herbert. Tor, $29.99 (780765328960).

This is a big, thrilling, pull-out-all-the-stops novel featuring David Ash, the skeptical psychic investigator who was introduced in Haunted (1988) and made his second appearance in The Ghosts of Sleath (1994).

Babayaga. By Toby Barlow. Farrar, $27 (9780374107871).

Barlow’s second book, after the novel-in-verse Sharp Teeth (2008), delivers a helluva good time, a delicious mash-up of Cold War spy thriller, horror novel, and love story.

Hitchers. By Will McIntosh. Night Shade, $24.99 (9781597803359).

In a charming novel about a terrorist bioweapon attack that wipes out a substantial portion of the population of Atlanta, the characters are well drawn and the plot is smartly constructed.

Little Star. By John Ajvide Lindqvist. Tr. by Marlaine Delargy. St. Martin’s/Thomas Dunne, $26.99 (9780312620516).

This is a confounding novel: irredeemable villains become admirable heroes; major characters are sacrificed in abrupt, shocking ways; and important players pop up late in the game. But it’s audacious!

Monster: A Novel of Frankenstein. By Dave Zeltserman. Overlook, $23.95 (9781590208601).

Repudiating the “outrageous fabrication” of Victor Frankenstein’s story as told by Mary Shelley is the aim of this imaginative and grotesque novel from the revisionist perspective of the monster.

NOS4A2. By Joe Hill. Morrow, $28.99 (9780062200570).

Hill is omnivorous in his appetite for story and character, and here he has created his best in both.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane. By Neil Gaiman. Morrow, $25.99 (9780062255655).

In Gaiman’s first novel for adults since Anansi Boys (2005), he mines mythological typology—the threefold goddess, the water of life (the pond, actually an ocean)—and his own childhood milieu to build a graceful story.

Red Moon. By Benjamin Percy. Grand Central, $25.99 (9781455501663).

Doing for werewolves what Justin Cronin’s The Passage (2010) did for vampires, this literary horror novel, set in an alternate version of the present day, humanizes the werewolf.

Zoo. By James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge. Little, Brown, $27.99 (9780316097444).

In the newest thrill fest from the prolific fiction factory that is James Patterson et al., something unnatural is causing normally placid animals to savagely attack humans.