Looking for book suggestions

Since you like horror I’d recommend picking up a Stephen King book. The man is just SO readable, I think it’s a good way to get over a slump! You could start with one of his short story collections as there’s a bit less commitment there. Full Dark No Stars, is a good one off the top of my head, but I’ve enjoyed all his short story collections!

I'm not much schooled in horror but I can give two scifi recs.

1. The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. Murderbot is about a murderbot android who has hacked its control software to gain freewill. It also has extreme social anxiety and finds it difficult to interact with the people it's tasked with defending. Murderbot has to juggle its responsibilities with its social anxiety while trying to not reveal that it has hacked its control software since that would be cause for it to be wiped and reset. The first couple Murderbot Diaries books are novellas and easy reads so there's not a big commitment involved with the series. If you've made it through the first one, and especially the second one, and aren't liking the series then you probably won't like the rest of it. The first book is titled All Systems Red.

2. Bobiverse by Dennis E. Taylor. Bob died but luckily had just signed up to have his body frozen in hopes of future revival. He awakens to find that his brain has been scanned and his consciousness uploaded into a probe intended to be launched into space. His task is to explore, report, and make copies of himself. This series has a lot of humor and popculture references (no, not like Ready Player One) and is perfect for people who like the concept of exploring the unknowns of space. The first book is titled We Are Legion (We Are Bob).

Okay, hopefully I can give you decent suggestions! I am personally a life long reader. I've been reading since I was a kid and never really stopped. I personally don't have suggestions for horror fiction, as that's a genre I don't really read. I can suggest Stephen's King Full Dark, No Stars. It's a collection of short horror stories. I've only read a couple but they've been okay lol.

Outside of that, just some really well written, lighter read books I would recommend are:

• Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine: Short and sweet, fantasy/magical book. Levine is a strong writer who makes interesting stories.
• World War Z by Max Brooks: If you haven't read this book, I would highly recommend it! The movie is unrelated. The book is a series of vignettes as a journalist interviews people around the world about what happened during the zombie apocalypse and its aftermath. It's well written and compelling.
• The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer: I think this one is sci-fi, but it's a good book, with an interesting premise involving cloning technology and the impact of that on an individual. I don't think I'm doing it justice but a lot happens in this book and it's interesting.
• Literary Magazines. I don't have a particular one I keep up on, but there's a lot out there of specific genres and themes. Short stories are a good way to get back into reading, as they are pretty low stakes time investment. They can be more complicated reading, but there's lots of good ones.
• Escapepod (sci-fi), psuedopod (horror), and podcastle (fantasy) are also good short story options but they're narrated so you get to listen to them! If you're interested in escapepod or podcastle, I can recommend a few specific episodes that have stayed with me.

Hopefully any of these suggestions are helpful and good luck in your reading journey!

I'm also trying to get back into reading after falling out of the habit, and I find that so far it helps to grab "lighter" books. A lot of books at the library just felt daunting to me with how thick and dense they are. My preference is mysteries so I got a pulpy detective noir book at the library, and it was just the right length and tone for me.

If you read any novels as an adult or even as a teenager you remember liking, see if the author wrote any new books since then. Don't be turned off by a book being aimed at teens or young adults, sometimes those can have a better balance in tone than "adult" books and avoid feeling too heavy-handed.

Also consider going to your local library and just browsing the shelves, see what catches your eye. You can find a lot of good stuff that way. Look into events at the library too, not to attend but just for ideas. My library has a couple of reading groups, and the event listing includes a list of books for each meeting. So even if you don't attend, that can give you ideas.

Onto some specific recommendations:

• Anthologies by Ray Bradbury are always good, so that's a good starting point.
• Books by Grady Hendrix. I've only read one of his books so far, Horrorstör, but I just got another one of his called The Final Girl Support Group. I didn't even realize he'd also written Horrorstör until I looked up his name after seeing Final Girl Support Group and a couple other of his books at a bookstore.
• Dark Water by Koji Suzuki. He's the author of the Ring series, and this is a collection of short horror stories themed around water. A couple of the stories have been adapted into films or for TV shows in America.
• Tomorrow, When The War Began. It's a young adult series about a fictional war in Australia, and was one of the most gripping reads I've ever read. The Swedish government actually distributed the first book to students because they determined it to be the most likely book to get reluctant readers to read, so it might work well for you
• Unwind by Neal Shusterman. Quite possibly my all-time favorite novel and incredibly thought provoking. It's about a future where parents can sign away children between 13 and 18 to be "unwound", a process where a person's body is basically taken apart so the parts can be reused for transplants. It goes into all the aspects of that, and has some genuinely chilling and haunting sequences.
• Full Tilt by Neal Shusterman. This one is definitely more in the horror category than Unwind. Also aimed at young adults, but very thrilling from what I remember. It's about some teens ending up at a cursed carnival/amusement park, and having to survive seven rides in one night in order to leave.

Hope some of these might sound good!

I have two horror recs! They're not fantastic but they're fun and helped me get back into the habit of reading.

1. The Descent by Jeff Long
   If you've seen the movie called The Descent, it was NOT based on this book but it might as well have been. Strange creatures start coming up from caves and sewers. Humans decide to head down and get a LOT more than they bargained for. Kinda goes off the rails towards the end but I couldn't put it down.

2. The White Road
   The first section is the most harrowing cave horror I've ever read. (could you tell I was on a caves kick?) In the later sections, they head to Mt. Everest and it becomes a human vs the elements story which is fun.

1984 by George Orwell
It is not horror but dystopia (perhaps scifi)
Without exception of masterpiece, old fashioned but the main narrative is still effective in my opinion

Two suggestions I have would be Fantasticland by Mike Bockoven and Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff.

I read Fantasticland a while back but I STILL THINK ABOUT IT! And Matt Ruff is pretty awesome. The book became a loosely based on series on HBO I believe.

Since you mentioned horror fiction, two entries by Mark Danielewski

• House of Leaves: it’s not an easy book; however, that is its charm for a returning reader. If you find yourself too impatient to sit down and read a book, the House is more like a Wikipedia binge if you follow the footnotes.
• The 50-Year Sword is my comfy fall read. Despite its 290 pages, its formatting gimmicks mean it can be read cover-to-cover within three hours.

Other authors & genres:

• Jorge Luis Borges, Labrynths: a collection of short stories greatly influential to Mr. Danielewski
• Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities and Mr. Palomar are both short novels; The Complete Cosmicomics is his short story collection.
• Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts: what if you woke up and couldn’t remember your name?

Horror/Sci-fi:
Sisyphean by Dempow Torishima - Be aware that this is not a straightforward book. It's 4 stories in the same universe (there might be one character who appears in 2ish of them, or it could just be a different guy with the same name), and the characters either have no idea what's going on or feel no need to explain so you have to piece things together yourself or else accept the mystery. Its very Junji Ito-style body/cosmic horror, with some Kafka absurdity/existentialism thrown in. As far as the plotline goes: Basically, in the far, far future things are gonna get real weird, genetically speaking, but that doesn't mean people don't have to show up at the office on time. Or make sure the clients are happy. And even when you're at home, you still have to worry about what the neighbors think. Also, nanobots may just be more trouble than they are worth and not a very good idea at all.

David Wong's John Dies at the End, This Book is Full of Spiders, and What the Hell Did I Just Read: A Novel of Cosmic Horror are a trilogy of, predictibly, body/cosmic horror comedy sci-fi novels about a couple of dorky weirdos who have to fight an evil entity from another dimension who gains access to ours through a drug called Soy Sauce.

M. John Harrison also writes a lot of weird sci-fi with horrific or at least disturbing under- and over-tones. There are also comedic elements in some of his works. I recently read The Kefahuchi Tract trilogy (Humanity takes its turn scavenging technology from the detritus left by more developed previous species near an anomalous black hole and also everyone loves the 1940s for some reason? Oh and also doing horrific things to preteen volunteers to turn them into sentient spaceships), The Course of the Heart (more like magical realism than sci-fi), and I'm currently reading The Centauri Device (A space trucker with PTSD turns out to have special alien powers; I'm only a couple chapters into this one) and liked them. I also just read The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (more magical realism) and I'm not sure how I feel about it. It's basically about a very magical event as experienced by some people who were not very involved in the whole thing, and nothing gets explained.

This will be a bit of an oddball suggestion, but "Tales of Moonlight and Rain" are a good collection of short stories written by Uyeda Akinari, originally published in Edo-era Japan, specifically in 1776.

The book itself (before introductory texts and whatnot) is under 150 pages, but it provokes such a dark mood and tone that some copies (depending on the publisher) have a little subscript to the title, explicitly calling them "Japanese Gothic Tales."

It's not horror, but it's sometimes rather dark. Have you read all of Joe Abercrombie's FIRST LAW series? It does have 9 books but you can DEFINITELY stop after the first three, or read the standalone middle three, or choose any path you desire. The audiobook narrator is absolutely amazing, if that's your style. It's not like the Wheel of Time or some massive saga. The plots are relatively simple - it's the characters and their thoughts that make it what it is.

I just read

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terraformers

I think it's great, I haven't read a recent sci-fi novel in a while since the time Clifford Stoll was good but this shows that people are still writing good stuff in the genre.

Have you read any Clive Barker? I'm usally not into horror but I really like Barker. IMO, Weaveworld is a good one to start with. He has some short story collections and some YA novels if you'd like to ease in from either of those directions, too.