The Reigning Queens of Horror gathers thirty macabre classics that demonstrate women's central, though too often obscured, role in shaping Gothic, supernatural, and psychological terror. Ranging from ruined castles, hauntings, and inherited curses to domestic unease, social confinement, and uncanny intimacies, the volume traverses Romantic Gothic, sensation fiction, ghost story, detective-inflected mystery, and early psychological horror. Its standout materials include both canonical Gothic visions and rarer works whose rediscovery broadens the genre's history. The contributors form an unusually expansive transnational and transhistorical chorus, encompassing writers associated with the Gothic revival, Victorian and Edwardian supernatural fiction, American regionalism, New Woman writing, and modern psychological realism. Alongside major literary figures are popular storytellers and neglected innovators whose work reveals how horror furnished women with a language for confronting gendered authority, class anxiety, colonial fantasy, grief, desire, and the instability of domestic safety. Their varied cultural positions make the collection a valuable corrective to accounts of horror dominated by male practitioners. This anthology is recommended for students of Gothic literature, devotees of the uncanny, and readers seeking an intelligently curated encounter with women's macabre traditions. Within one volume, readers can trace formal experiment and recurring motifs across generations while appreciating the productive dialogue between celebrated classics and forgotten gems. It offers both engrossing reading and a rich foundation for reconsidering the history, breadth, and continuing power of horror.