Editorials
[Spoilers] The Devil Is in the Details of ‘Ready or Not’
Spoiler Warning: This article contains plot details.
On the day of her wedding, Grace (Samara Weaving) is meeting many of her in-laws for the first time. Her groom, Alex (Mark O’Brien), has been estranged from his family for the entirety of their relationship, and the family members she has met- like his drunk brother Daniel (Adam Brody)- haven’t left a great impression. Even still, Grace grew up in foster homes with no real family of her own, so she’s eager to please them. No matter how bizarre the requests, like participating in family game night on her wedding night. Grace soon learns just how high the stakes are, but for those paying attention and willing to play along, the devil is in the details and hiding in plain sight.
We can thank Rosemary Woodhouse and a key scene in Rosemary’s Baby for teaching us how to deal with anagrams in horror. When she receives the book All of Them Witches and is told the name is an anagram, she uses scrabble tiles to rearrange it until she discovers with dawning horror that it’s referring to her not so benign neighbor.
In Ready or Not, the driving force behind the entire plot is also an anagram – Mr. Le Bail: the Hasbro gamemaster to the Le Domas clan, and the source of their wealth. Patriarch Tony Le Domas (Henry Czerny) explains the family history, in which their ancestor bested a series of games orchestrated by Mr. Le Bail and granted them obscene riches in return. To keep it, and their lives, anyone marrying into the family must play a game of Mr. Le Bail’s choosing, via his card box. It’s fitting, then, that Mr. Le Bail’s name is a puzzle game to solve as well.
Le Bail is an anagram for Belial.
As for the Le Domas family name, that’s a trickier puzzle to solve. In ancient Rome, a domus was a specific type of house inhabited by the upper class. That fits. Centuries ago, those with the surname Domas were typically laborers and farmers, which lines up with Tony’s story of their ancestor who sold their family to the devil. But, in keeping with the anagram theme, Le Domas spells out Alex’s eventual betrayal of Grace, “A. Sold Me”; or it might simply reference how the Le Domas’ sell themselves to Belial in general. Of course, screenwriters Gary Busick and Ryan Murphy had something more thematically fitting in mind: fallen angel Asmodel. No matter how you rearrange it, their surname is a warning.
Being that the family is in league with the devil, literally, it becomes clear that this bizarre game night ritual is only an initiation into the Le Domas family if they’re deemed worthy. By worthy, I mean corruptible or morally impure. When Emilie’s (Melanie Scrofano) husband Fitch (Kristian Bruun) married into the family, Mr. Le Bail dictated his game to play was Old Maid, a card game for children. Fitch laughed off his confusion, but Mr. Le Bail pegged his personality from the outset. Like his wife, Fitch isn’t the brightest bulb in the clan but he can be counted on to give his support, no matter how badly he botches it. Similarly, Daniel’s wife Charity (Elyse Levesque) was tasked with playing Chess by Mr. Le Bail, a game of strategy. Charity reveals herself to have been a strategic social climber with a death grip on her married into wealth, so that too is a perfect fit.
As for Grace’s unfortunate receipt of the Hide and Seek card, that’s also easy to understand as the movie progresses; her tenacious will to survive and unbending moral code meant Mr. Le Bail realized she wouldn’t be the soul-selling type come dawn.
(L to R) Kristian Bruun, Melanie Scrofano, Andie MacDowell, Henry Czerny, Nicky Guadagni, Adam Brody, and Elyse Levesque in the film Ready or Not. Photo by Eric Zachanowich. © 2019 Twentieth Century Fox
Being a Le Domas family member means more than just wedding night pacts with Belial. There are sacrifices to be made on the regular. The first overt insight into this is when Grace finds the family stable as a potential hiding spot. It’s not filled with the typical horses, though, but goats. Grace is understandably too busy to stop and ponder why the Le Domas’ have a stable full of goats, but those who have connected the Belial dots know. It’s confirmed when the perpetually conflicted Alex confesses to a family member later how much it bothers him that slitting goats’ throats on the regular feels normal. The devotion to Mr. Le Bail is steadfast, regardless whether some Le Domases really grasp what that means.
Because many of the family members question the truth behind Mr. Le Bail and if they really could die at dawn if Grace isn’t sacrificed, Ready or Not tries to play the events a little ambiguous. Is the family just maniacally insane, or are their lives at serious risk? But as the saying goes, the devil is hiding in plain sight. The answers are there from the beginning.
There’s a lot of reading left to do in 2026, between the glut of summer releases and the approach of fall, when horror titles get a special push from publishers, but this has already been an incredible year for horror literature.
Some of the biggest names in the genre have turned in outstanding work, rising stars have made their mark, and we’re only halfway through the year.
To celebrate the midway point of 2026, with plenty of horror books still to come, we’re taking a look back at the best horror books we’ve read this year so far, listed alphabetically by author.
If you missed any of these books earlier in the year, consider this your reminder to catch up.
Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker
A student running from a crime he may or may not have committed escapes to his father’s country home in Japan, only to find himself haunted by strange apparitions, while in the past, a young samurai tries to find salvation for her family and finds a door to the future instead. Kylie Lee Baker’s Japanese Gothic begins with this dialogue between past and present, and then blossoms into so much more, a cross-time ghost story about old wounds and what it really takes to finally heal them. I got so happily lost in this one that I would have read at least 200 more pages.
Persona by Aoife Josie Clements
In this tale of shut-ins, sex workers, artists, and the horrors they both summon and recoil from, Aoife Josie Clements weaves something that feels less like a story to be experienced and more like a psychic wound to be endured, and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible. Evocative in its prose and nightmarish in its imagery, Persona is a story of the masks we wear, and the understanding that not all of our masks are particularly pretty or even easy to breathe through. It’s a dense, literary, unnervingly vicious book, and while it’s already attracted an audience, it deserves a much bigger one.
Dead First by Johnny Compton
Johnny Compton’s latest novel opens with a throwing down of the gauntlet, a sequence that made me instantly think “How on Earth is he going to top this?” It’s a story that begins with a billionaire hiring a private investigator to determine why, despite trying in many brutal ways, he cannot die. That premise, and the scene which sets it all off, is so alluring and delightfully gruesome that you almost can’t believe it’s the way a book begins, and then Compton just keeps going, delivering a supernatural mystery that I could not put down.
Make Me Better by Sarah Gailey
A woman grieving for the life she wanted visits a mysterious island renowned for the healing salt its residents harvest and sell, seeking renewal and relief. What she finds instead is a strange cult with a twisted history with surprising resonance in her own life, and a people who are more than willing to grant the relief she wants, for a price. Laced with beautiful prose and moments of profound realization alongside folk and even cosmic horror, this is vintage Sarah Gailey.
Partially Devoured by Daniel Kraus
If you love horror film history and analysis, Partially Devoured is an essential. Written by Pulitzer Prize-winner Daniel Kraus, the book is a deep dive into his favorite movie of all time, George A. Romero‘s Night of the Living Dead, complete with exhaustive research into the making of the film and passages of deeply moving memoir woven in. If you’ve ever wanted to know what the eerie music that opens the film is called while also bursting into tears at how horror movies can save your life, this is a must-read.
Wretch by Eric LaRocca
Our reigning King of Extreme Horror, Eric LaRocca weaves books of uncommon beauty out of the most nightmarish parts of humanity, and Wretch is no exception. The story of a grieving man who longs for relief and searches for it amid a strange support group that might be a cult, Wretch is a brutal journey into the darkest part of us all, and explores what salvation we might find when we get to the rotten core of the world and peel back its layers. LaRocca’s on a tear of great work right now that few other genre writers can match.
Headlights by CJ Leede
A mystery, a serial killer horror show, a tribute to Stephen King‘s The Shining. All of these things describe CJ Leede’s Headlights, and yet they don’t begin to cover the full breadth of horror awaiting you in this novel. The story of a former FBI agent drawn back into the cold case that haunts him most, it’s a shocker brimming over with vivid moments that’ll live behind your eyes. CJ Leede has now published three novels, and they’re all bangers, so it’s time to get on board if you haven’t already.
It Came From Neverland by Cynthia Pelayo
Cynthia Pelayo has been one of our finest genre writers for years now, but It Came From Neverland is my favorite thing she’s written, and it’s not even close. A dark take on Peter Pan from the perspective of an adult Wendy Darling living in World War I-era London, Pelayo’s book works as both a satisfying horror narrative and a rich exploration of what it really means to never grow up. The horror never loses its potency, but it’s the search for the meaning behind the Peter Pan phenomenon in our own lives, and what we can do about it, that sticks with me most.
Filth Eaters by Ito Romo
Ito Romo’s Filth Eaters is a slim volume, one you can read in just a couple of hours if you’ve got the inclination, but it has the feel of a generation-spanning epic. The story of a breed of vampires born in Central America, the European vampires who encounter them, and the offspring they eventually produced, it spans centuries and packs loads of juicy lore into its pages while never losing its grip on character and narrative drive. I would read hundreds more pages of this world, but I’ll settle for this uncommonly grand-scale novella for now.
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep by Paul Tremblay
A former pro gamer gets a job at a tech company to pilot a brain-dead human body across the country, and so Paul Tremblay’s sci-fi-horror juggernaut begins. Indebted to Philip K. Dick, the primal snarl of Harlan Ellison, and the quirky comedy of The Big Lebowski, and yet wholly original, this is a towering and ambitious novel by one of horror’s most respected voices. What starts as a high-concept tech thriller soon becomes a startling meditation on the value of stories, who gets to tell them, and what happens when we cede too much control to machines we don’t understand. It’s a stunner.
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