13 Fungal Horror Books To Read If You Like ‘The Last of Us’

Leech by Hiron Ennes

In an isolated chateau, the baron’s doctor has died. The doctor’s replacement has a mystery to solve: discovering how the Institute lost track of one of its many bodies.

For hundreds of years the Interprovincial Medical Institute has grown by taking root in young minds and shaping them into doctors. The Institute is here to cure and to cut, to cradle and protect the species from the apocalyptic horrors their ancestors unleashed.

In the frozen north, the Institute’s body will discover a competitor. A parasite is spreading through the baron’s castle, already a dark pit of secrets, lies, violence, and fear.

What Moves The Dead by T. Kingfisher

When Alex Easton, a retired soldier, receives word that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying, they race to the ancestral home of the Ushers in the remote countryside of Ruritania.

What they find there is a nightmare of fungal growths and possessed wildlife, surrounding a dark, pulsing lake. Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in strange voices at night, and her brother Roderick is consumed with a mysterious malady of the nerves.

Aided by a redoubtable British mycologist and a baffled American doctor, Alex must unravel the secret of the House of Usher before it consumes them all.

Wanderers by Chuck Wendig

Shana wakes up one morning to discover her little sister in the grip of a strange malady. She appears to be sleepwalking. She cannot talk and cannot be woken up. And she is heading with inexorable determination to a destination that only she knows. But Shana and her sister are not alone. Soon they are joined by a flock of sleepwalkers from across America, on the same mysterious journey.

For as the sleepwalking phenomenon awakens terror and violence in America, the real danger may not be the epidemic but the fear of it. With society collapsing all around them and an ultraviolent militia threatening to exterminate them, the fate of the sleepwalkers depends on unraveling the mystery behind the epidemic.

The Beauty by Aliya Whiteley

Somewhere away from the cities and towns, in the Valley of the Rocks, a society of men and boys gather around the fire each night to listen to their history recounted by Nate, the storyteller. Requested most often by the group is the tale of the death of all women. They are the last generation.

One evening, Nate brings back new secrets from the woods; peculiar mushrooms are growing from the ground where the women’s bodies lie buried. These are the first signs of a strange and insidious presence unlike anything ever known before…

Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon

Vern – seven months pregnant and desperate to escape the strict religious compound where she was raised – flees for shelter in the woods. Forced to fight back against the community that refuses to let her go, she unleashes incredible brutality far beyond what a person should be capable of, her body wracked by inexplicable and uncanny changes.

To understand her metamorphosis and to protect her small family, Vern has to face the past outside the woods. Finding the truth will mean uncovering the secrets of the compound she fled but also the violent history in America that produced it.

The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey

Melanie is a very special girl. Dr. Caldwell calls her “our little genius.”

Every morning, Melanie waits in her cell to be collected for class. When they come for her, Sergeant Parks keeps his gun pointing at her while two of his people strap her into the wheelchair. She thinks they don’t like her. She jokes that she won’t bite, but they don’t laugh.

Melanie loves school. She loves learning about spelling and sums and the world outside the classroom and the children’s cells. She tells her favorite teacher all the things she’ll do when she grows up. Melanie doesn’t know why this makes Miss Justineau look sad.

Cold Storage by David Koepp

When Pentagon bioterror operative Roberto Diaz was sent to investigate a suspected biochemical attack, he found something far worse: a highly mutative organism capable of extinction-level destruction. He contained it and buried it in cold storage deep beneath a little-used military repository.

Now, after decades of festering in a forgotten sub-basement, the specimen has found its way out and is on a lethal feeding frenzy. Only Diaz knows how to stop it.

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

After receiving a frantic letter from her newlywed cousin begging for someone to save her from a mysterious doom, Noemí Taboada heads to High Place, a distant house in the Mexican countryside. She’s unsure what she will find—her cousin’s husband, a handsome Englishman, is a stranger, and Noemí knows little about the region.

Her only ally in this inhospitable abode is the family’s youngest son. Shy and gentle, he seems to want to help Noemí, but might also be hiding dark knowledge of his family’s past. As Noemí digs deeper, she unearths stories of violence and madness.

The Marigold by Andrew F. Sullivan

The Marigold sits a half-empty promise: a stack of scuffed rental suites that crumbles around its residents as a mysterious sludge spreads slowly through it. Public health inspector Cathy Jin investigates this toxic mold as it infests the city’s infrastructure, while Sam “Soda” Dalipagic stumbles onto a dangerous cache of data. 13-year-old Henrietta Brakes chases a friend deep underground after he’s snatched into a sinkhole by a creature from below.

All the while, construction of the city’s newest luxury tower, Marigold II, has stalled. Stanley Marigold, the struggling son of the legendary developer behind this project, decides he must tap into a hidden reserve of old power to make his dream a reality — one with a human cost.

The Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed

The world is nothing like it once was: climate disasters have wracked the continent, causing food shortages, ending industry, and leaving little behind. Then came Cad, mysterious mind-altering fungi that invade the bodies of the now scattered citizenry. Reid, a young woman who carries this parasite, has been given a chance to get away but she can’t bring herself to abandon her mother and the community that relies on her.

When she’s offered a coveted place on a dangerous and profitable mission, she jumps at the opportunity to set her family up for life, but how can Reid ask people to put their trust in her when she can’t even trust her own mind?

I’ll Bring You the Birds from Out of the Sky by Brian Hodge

When Nona Conklin brings him a painting by the great-grandfather she never knew, gallery owner Timothy Randolph knows he’s found the project of a lifetime: curating a spectacular cache of folk art hidden for decades in the mountains of her home.

The Conklin Collection is haunted and haunting, powerful in its brutal simplicity. What looks like the work of a fevered imagination begins to appear more and more like the desperate attempts of a man toiling at the edge of his limits to depict what cannot be depicted…

But the most crucial painting of all is missing. And the only place it could be is the last place that should be searched.

Fruiting Bodies, and Other Fungi by Brian Lumley

Don’t look for commonplace nightmares in these stories. Brian Lumley’s monsters are never commonplace! In the award-winning ‘Fruiting Bodies’, for example, the terror doesn’t stalk the night but moves almost imperceptibly underfoot, or through the woodwork… or in other places!

‘The Pit-Yakker’ is a tale of industrial decay, of a love that might have been, a hatred stillborn, and a scar to disfigure the landscape of the mind forever.

And as for ‘The Man Who Felt Pain’… well, don’t we all? Yes, but not everyone else’s!

Fungi edited by Orrin Grey and Silvia Moreno-Garcia

A collection of fungal wonders…and terrors. In this new anthology, writers reach into the rich territory first explored by William Hope Hodgson a century ago: the land of the fungi. Stories range from noir to dark fantasy, from steampunk to body horror.

Join authors such as Jeff VanderMeer, Laird Barron, Nick Mamatas, W.H. Pugmire, Lavie Tidhar, Ann K.Schwader, Jesse Bullington, Molly Tanzer and Simon Strantzas through a dizzying journey of fungal tales. Feast upon Fungi.