Mia Dalia’s Lullabies for the Lost brings musical horror to the Black Shuck Shadows list, with four short bursts leading into the novella Discordant. The shorts remix familiar devil child and cosmic horror ideas, while the novella channels Don DeLillo by way of Faust. A fun horror short story collection, though the novella is already sold on its own.
Kelly McWilliams makes her adult debut with a historical horror novel about a white-passing NAACP spy investigating lynchings during the Red Summer of 1919. Our five-star review looks at how American Nightmare refuses catharsis, and why that refusal makes it the strongest Black horror fiction of the year. Out from Crown on 15 September 2026.
Something Sour in the Sweet Shop: Horror’s Long Affair With Candy Horror is meant to live … Something Sour in the Sweet Shop: Horror’s Long Affair With CandyRead more
Dan Howarth follows Last Night of Freedom with Lionhearts, a political horror novel about grief curdling into hate somewhere Northern and thoroughly let down. Our Lionhearts book review looks at Henry Oswald, the staccato prose, and an ending that turns a depressed landscape florid, charged and brutal. Bring paracetamol.
Scott Hawkins ends an eleven year wait with Blacktail, a folk horror revenge novel told entirely by animals, in which a grieving half-breed wolf sets out to wake a sleeping Forest God and finish off the human race. Our review looks at the language of the Hunt, the squirrel death cult of Car, and why this eco-horror odyssey earns every one of its five stars.
Kat Hillis and Rosiee Thor return to Trident Falls in Summer Coven, the second Dead & Breakfast paranormal cozy mystery. Two married vampire innkeepers investigate a poisoned pet psychic, a coven of witches, and a missing person. A queer, funny, warm-hearted whodunit for anyone who wants their vampires kind.
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Clay McLeod Chapman’s Devil Inside is a horrormance in the fullest sense: a demonic possession horror novel that treats its love story with total seriousness and is all the more frightening for it. Jordan died for two and a half minutes. Lilith has never had a body of her own. Our five star review of one of the boldest horror romance books of 2026.
CC Adams returns with Where the Roaches Are, a horror short story collection set in a hospital where the real damage is social rather than supernatural. Echoes of Nigel Kneale, Mark Morris and Roald Dahl run through a book built to disquiet rather than terrify. Read the stories in the order Adams gives you, because the order is doing work.
Kim Bo-young takes Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth and relocates it to a quarantined Korean fishing village in A Plagued Sea, her first horror novella in English. Translated by Sophie Bowman for Tor Nightfire, it turns cosmic horror into a pandemic elegy about grief, guilt and the people we cannot protect. Our five-star review explains why this hundred-page Korean Lovecraft retelling lingers.
Kailee Pedersen’s The Minimalist is a gruelling, unflinching psychological horror novel about a composer’s descent into madness. Published by St. Martin’s Press, it follows Mia Voss as she returns to her mentor’s Santa Fe mansion to complete his unfinished masterpiece, only to find the manuscript exerting a disturbing hold over her. Drawing from Pedersen’s own experiences as an adoptee and classical musician, this is body horror at its most intelligent—a meditation on artistic obsession, adoption trauma, and the sacrifices we make in pursuit of creative perfection.
Tor Nightfire’s August 2026 debut from Max Doty reinvents the haunted house novel with no ghost at all, only a property that eats the dead and unmakes the record of them. Our review digs into the complicity horror at its core, the class and money threaded underneath, and why this domestic horror lingers long after the last page.
Olivie Blake’s Dreamland sends an aspiring actress into a cursed Hollywood dynasty during a Los Angeles summer of murders and Santa Ana winds. A formally daring literary horror novel that fuses the gothic estate with the machinery of modern celebrity, even if the back half loosens its grip.
Dark Tide 20: Urban Legends brings together three horror novellas from Leigh Kenny, Dan Franklin, and Nick Roberts, published by Crystal Lake Publishing. Our review breaks down a haunted house, a mother’s dread, and a podcast summoning that all go badly wrong. Three flavours of fear, one frightening finish each.
C.D. Major’s The Residency is a gothic suspense novel that builds dread with patient, deliberate precision. Set on a remote Scottish island, it follows single mother Ginny as she accepts an artist’s residency that proves far more dangerous than she imagined. With its uncanny paintings, whispering walls, and a community that knows more than it says, this is slow-burn horror at its most effective.
Mason Coile’s Driven is a self-driving car horror novel that inverts every AI horror trope of the last three years: the machine does not wake up, the man goes to sleep. Andrew Pyper’s final book under the Coile name is a locked room story with wheels, a grief novel in disguise, and a very cold joke about the rental market.
