The Bottom Line: Voted the Year’s Best Horror & Supernatural Novel in the 2025 BestThrillers.com Book Awards.
The Rules of Kongo earns this year’s Best Horror and Supernatural Novel Award because, in the tradition of The Silence of the Lambs, it delivers a rare fusion of hard-edged crime fiction and deeply unsettling terror. On plot alone, it stands as a fully absorbing law enforcement procedural, yet its psychological descent into black magic transforms it into something far more disturbing. By the final chapters, the boundary between grounded realism and supernatural menace becomes so porous that the story feels far more frightening than anything Clive Barker ever conjured.
Author Jaime Forza, himself a former federal agent, focuses the story on a newly minted as a DEA Special Agent who steps into the role hungry to prove himself in the escalating drug war.
What begins as a straightforward assignment quickly mutates into something far darker.
DeSano is thrust into an uneasy partnership with a mysterious witch doctor who has traded allegiance for the chance to inform. Their mission zeroes in on the hidden link between a brutal criminal syndicate and a black magic cult whose rituals are both bloody and strategic. These rites shield the cartel’s operations and exert a terrifying psychological force that pulls DeSano toward the edge of madness.
The deeper he ventures, the more horrifying the revelations become. DeSano is forced to confront powers that defy logic, secrets that corrode his sense of justice, and the darkest urges of human nature. Every discovery blurs moral boundaries and tightens the grip of the occult until reality itself begins to feel unreliable.
