To enter the windowless basement that serves as the best new bookstore in Lockhart, you walk down a flight of stairs lined with a couple hundred Dracula masks and strings of garlic. While many bookshops favor natural light, this space embraces the darkness. Haunt Happy Books is full of antiques, skulls, a gold skeleton in a glass case, and thick, beautiful bookshelves stocked with only one genre: horror.
I visited Haunt Happy with my five-year-old, who quickly grew nervous about the loud footsteps, scraping chairs, and mysterious thumps coming from the ceiling. (The appropriately spooky noises were in fact caused by restaurantgoers enjoying Loop & Lil’s Pizza, the tenant above.) In a moment of possibly misguided parenting, I said, “Don’t worry, it’s just monsters.” I caught her before she could bolt too far up the stairs.
Haunt Happy isn’t the only store doing horror the Texas way. Central Texas boasts something you can’t seem to find anywhere else in the country: a trio of fright-focused bookstores within a hundred miles of one another. Ghoulish Books, in Selma, just north of San Antonio; Curio Mrvosa, in Taylor; and Haunt Happy draw in fans of murder and gore from across the state. Readers can visit all three in an afternoon (and stop in at Triple Six Social, a gothic-themed coffee shop in San Marcos, along the way). Compare this to the number of horror bookstores in New York City or Los Angeles (one each), and it’s clear something dark and wonderful is happening in the heart of Texas.
Once the domain of a handful of mega-best-selling authors (think Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Peter Straub), the business of bone-chilling has become much more diverse, with small presses and large publishers alike producing critically acclaimed and popular horror books. According to The Guardian, 2023 was a record-breaking year for sales in the genre, and 2024 is on pace to exceed it. Texas writers are at the center of the new wave: In just the past six months, residents and natives, including V. Castro, Johnny Compton, Gabino Iglesias, and Stephen Graham Jones have released major horror novels—to say nothing of the dozens of Texas writers publishing with small presses. If you’re looking for Lone Star terror, you have plenty of options to read and places to shop.
Chris Hoyt, a musician and the owner of Haunt Happy, joined the near-constant stream of creative people fleeing Austin almost a decade ago. In 2015, Hoyt and a group of friends opened Loop & Lil’s Pizza just off Lockhart’s main square. Since moving to town, he had dreamed of opening a bookstore, but none of the available pieces of real estate fit his vision. Turns out the answer was right under his nose. “The basement opened up, and my landlord said, ‘Nobody wants it because it’s so loud upstairs, there’s no plumbing, and it’s just a little creepy.’ ”
During a slumber party and movie-watching night with his daughter, Hoyt had a blast of inspiration. “For whatever reason, it just hit me. I was like, ‘What if it’s just all horror books?’ ”
So far, Lockhart residents and the town’s many visitors have been filling Haunt Happy. Business has grown since the shop opened, in January 2024, which means Hoyt has been able to steadily increase his inventory. “I’m having to get another bookshelf built just for our kids’ books,” he says.
The atmosphere alone is enough to keep readers coming back. “I think Haunt Happy is what people would have liked about mid-1990s Austin. A bookstore that has breadth and hipness,” says Agatha Andrews, a horror superfan and the host of the podcast She Wore Black. “It really reminds me of what I would have found on the Drag in 1993.”
Just a year after Hoyt moved to Lockhart, Alyse Mervosh and Alex Cuervo also left Austin, for Taylor. “We moved here about eight years ago,” Mervosh says. “[Austin] has changed a lot, and we had changed too. We just liked [Taylor] when we came out. We loved the old architecture here, the homes, the walkable downtown area.” In 2021, the couple opened Curio Mrvosa (the name is a play on Mervosh’s last name). They have already outgrown their old space, and they recently moved into a larger, brighter storefront on Taylor’s main street.
Each of these spaces feature unique decor that makes it clear you’re not in a traditional bookstore. Neon signs featuring Ghoulish Books’ logo, which can only be described as thick and goopy, cast the store’s entrance in a green light, and a life-size Chucky doll has a prominent, unsettling position in the robust kids’ section. Curio Mrvosa’s decor is best described as curio cabinet meets maker fair. The walls are covered with surreal, colorful artworks featuring cryptids, monsters, skeletons, and more. “We just really love visual stimulation and unusual bric-a-brac,” Cuervo says. “The horror is a big component, but it’s part of a bigger kind of fantastical sort of experiment of just combining all of these disparate things into one wonderful, weird place to get lost.”
While Curio Mrvosa stocks a lot of books even scaredy-cats might appreciate, it’s clear that the weird is at the heart of the store’s identity. “Horror was always going to be a significant section of the shop, and we were so delighted to see that people responded to it,” Mervosh says. “We were like, ‘Oh, we can actually grow this section. This can become even more of something we lean into, because people are more excited about it.’ ”
Max and Lori Booth have been neck-deep in gore since they were teenagers. They couple founded their small press, now called Ghoulish Books, when they were nineteen years old. But as their books racked up rave reviews and higher sales, they outgrew their home operation. “We operated only out of our house, preparing web orders in our kitchen and littering the house with stacks of inventory,” Max says. “It became unbearable.”
When a local indie bookstore shut down, Max and Lori pounced on the space. “Lori and I had always fantasized about one day operating our own horror-themed bookstore, so we decided to fully embrace the opportunity and expand Ghoulish as a retail shop in addition to the publishing company.”
Today, Ghoulish Books is producing some of the best and scariest horror books out there. The Ghoulish empire includes not only the publishing house and eponymous bookstore in Selma, but also a podcast network; the biyearly magazine Ghoulish Tales; an active Discord community with more than a thousand members; a steady stream of readings, movie screenings, and other events; and a new publishing imprint started with Toronto’s Little Ghost Books. The Booths also organize the Ghoulish Book Festival, which brings acclaimed, best-selling writers from across the world to the almost certainly haunted Hermann Sons Hall, in downtown San Antonio.
Curation is perhaps the key characteristic of indie bookstores, and anyone from the fear fanatic to the mildly spooky-inclined can find a book they’ll love in these stores. Chris Hoyt loves it when a customer doesn’t quite know what they want. “I have people who come in and say, ‘I don’t like monsters. I don’t like serial killers. I just want something that’s going to make me uncomfortable and be kind of creepy,’ ” he says. “Finding the right book for the right person is really exciting.”
The beauty of in-person shopping is, of course, not only in the personalized recommendations. Each of these bookstores stages community events: book readings, movie screenings, séances. Horror readers, like fans of other neglected genres, tend to stick together, and people are coming from across the state to shop and get scared. “[Horror] does bring people out from the whole region,” Mervosh says. Cuervo jumps in: “The freaks all find each other.”
