There’s a special kind of magic that crackles through the air at the Cymera Book Festival. It’s the feeling of stepping into a world where stories are the only currency that matters. From the moment you walk in, you’re wrapped in a community that loves words deeply, thoughtfully and joyfully, and every year I leave with my imagination overflowing and my to-be-read pile threatening structural damage to my home.
To the authors, thank you for bringing not just your books but your whole selves. You sat on panels and made us laugh, think, and occasionally wipe away a tear. I’m looking at you, Tracy Fahey and Neil Williamson. You signed title pages with hands that must have been aching by the end, yet you still took time to listen to everyone who wanted their books signed. You reminded us that behind every story is a human being, and you made the written word feel gloriously alive.
To the organisers, your vision and tireless work built a festival that feels both world-class and wonderfully intimate. The programme was a masterclass in curation, the atmosphere was electric yet never overwhelming, and somehow you made the impossible logistics of a book-filled weekend seem effortless. Cymera shines because of the care you pour into every detail.
And to the volunteers, you are the warm, smiling heartbeat of it all. Guiding lost souls to the right venue, managing queues with superhuman patience, and never once judging me when I returned to the signing room for the third time, clutching yet another book. You are heroes in lanyards.
If I have one tiny, absurd complaint, it is this: I beg you, next year, please put the signing room somewhere without a full mirror wall. I spent half my time trying to get my books signed while strategically dodging my own reflection like a Victorian vampire who’s lost his invitation. I have a deeply irrational fear of mirrors, specifically the mirror monsters who live in them and are definitely, absolutely plotting against me.
Seeing a whole wall of them while clutching a fantasy novel felt less like a literary event and more like an ambush. I’m here to meet authors, not my own sinister doppelgänger. But honestly, if the biggest danger at Cymera is being briefly menaced by my own reflection, that’s a festival doing almost everything perfectly. Roll on next year.
Cymera Book Haul: Nine Books, One Ghost Cat, and a Water Heater Closet That Goes Nowhere Good, and Loads of the Uncanny
If you’ve ever attended Cymera, Edinburgh’s festival of fantasy, horror fiction, and the strange but wonderful authors who take over The Pleasance for a weekend and make you question your reading habits, your sleep schedule, and the structural integrity of your bookshelves, you know it is a dangerous place. Dangerous like a siren made of paper and ink.
You walk in with noble intentions. You tell yourself you’re “just browsing.” You are lying. The tote bags gape at you like hungry mouths, the table hums with exclusive editions that wink under the lights, and every author within a ten-foot radius has the kind of smile that says I know you want this, and you’re absolutely going to cave. The only thing more inevitable than buying books at Cymera is buying more books than you can physically carry home
This year, my messenger bag returned heavier than my conscience, groaning at the seams like a Victorian ghost with unfinished business. Nine novels. Nine. That’s not a haul; that’s a cry for professional intervention. Collectively, they span haunted houses, vampire historicals, Kowloon ghost folklore, sapphic Dracula prequels, and a Scottish dark fairy tale that decided passive sanctuary wasn’t doing enough.
Then, as if that wasn’t already a festival programme’s worth of dread, I somehow also acquired a horrific submarine novel (claustrophobia and deep-sea terror: exactly what my anxious brain needed), post-apocalyptic witches, a story about disappearing children that made me side-eye my own offspring for a full forty-eight hours, and a couple of books best described as “uncanny” in the way a smile that’s just a little too wide is uncanny. You know the kind. You read the first page and think, Ah, so this is how I develop a new phobia.
My bank account is currently in a medically induced coma. My TBR pile now qualifies for its own postcode. And I’ve reached the stage of book ownership where I’m genuinely considering whether the floor counts as a shelf if you arrange them in neat, structurally sound stacks. (It does. I checked. My daughter Cthella disagrees, but she also listens to Steps, so her opinion is suspect.) Here’s the damage. May it inspire your own terrible financial decisions.
I have already read and reviewed most of these books, but I wanted physical copies. The final three books were picked up after being tempted by the authors on their panels and by chatting to them in the bar. Nowhere is safe from book temptation here, and I love it. To pay forward the temptation, here are some mini reviews of the books I have read and details of the books I had to have.
THE BABYSITTER LIVES
Stephen Graham Jones | Publisher: Saga / Gallery Publishing Group (Simon & Schuster)
Short, precise, and relentlessly pressurised, The Babysitter Lives proves Jones can do in a novella what others take four hundred pages to attempt. Charlotte is babysitting the Wilbanks twins on Halloween, and something in the walls has been waiting eleven years for exactly this night. An exercise in accumulating dread that makes every shadow worth fearing.
Charlotte has one night to survive, and Stephen Graham Jones wastes exactly none of it.
The Babysitter Lives (originally audio-only via Simon & Schuster Audio; now in print as part of the Saga Doubles bind-up) drops its Indigenous teenage protagonist into a deceptively ordinary Halloween eve babysitting job and then methodically disassembles every ordinary thing about it. Charlotte is watching the Wilbanks twins, Ron and Desi, a pair of six-year-olds who know things about the house that they shouldn’t. There are sounds in the walls. The water heater closet opens onto somewhere it shouldn’t. And eleven years ago, something terrible ended inside these rooms, and it never quite left.
Jones builds dread through accumulation rather than revelation: odd costumes, odd questions from the twins, the slow disclosure that Charlotte’s careful professional competence is exactly the wrong tool for what’s coming. The haunted house mechanics sit inside a broader meditation on identity — Charlotte checks the Native American box on her SAT forms, but the book is genuinely curious about what that means when the world is this indifferent — and the two concerns weave together rather than competing.
Short, precise, and relentlessly pressurised, this is Jones working without a safety net.
THE BUFFALO HUNTER HUNTER
Stephen Graham Jones | Publisher: Saga / Gallery Publishing Group (Simon & Schuster); UK: Titan Books
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter takes the vampire myth, strips away every borrowed elegance, and rebuilds it from the bones of the Marias Massacre. Good Stab’s confession is not vengeance dressed as monster fiction — it is ecology, memory, and the specific weight of a world deliberately unmade. Stephen Graham Jones has written something that doesn’t leave you when you close it.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter refuses to be the kind of vampire novel that goes down easy. Stephen Graham Jones constructs a nested confession, the academic Etsy Beaucarne discovers her ancestor Arthur’s 1912 diary, inside which a Blackfeet man named Good Stab has dictated his extraordinary history, and uses that architecture to deliver something that sits far outside the usual coordinates of supernatural fiction.
This is a historical horror built on the real wound of the Marias Massacre, where over two hundred Blackfeet were killed in 1870 by the U.S. Army along the Marias River. Good Stab’s vampirism is not glamour; it is hunger directed, infection earned through contact with something the white settlers dragged west without understanding what they carried.
Jones shifts his prose register between narrators with real precision, Arthur’s formality against Good Stab’s direct, physical vocabulary, and the Russian-doll structure, a story within a story within a story, never collapses under its own weight. It feels inevitable. Three days after finishing it, the absence where thirty million buffalo had been still sat somewhere in the chest. That is what good horror does. It makes the silence loud.
THE GIRL WITH A THOUSAND FACES
Sunyi Dean | Publisher: Tor / HarperVoyager (May 2026)
Architecturally daring and emotionally precise, The Girl with a Thousand Faces places one of horror’s most distinctive protagonists in an alternate Kowloon Walled City where the dead return because the world failed to see them. Sunyi Dean builds a ghost story where the horror isn’t the ghost. It’s whatever made it.
Fifty-three years old, flip-flopped, tattooed, employed by the Cobra Lily triad, and entirely unwilling to examine her own past: Mercy Chan is one of horror fiction’s most fully realised protagonists in recent memory, and the novel that builds around her is equal to her. Sunyi Dean’s The Girl with a Thousand Faces sets its ghost-talker heroine in an alternate 1975 Kowloon Walled City, a place thick with the unquiet dead, and asks a question that drives every page: what does a ghost actually need, as opposed to what an avenger wants to give?
The four-timeline structure, two for Mercy, two for Siuyin, is architecturally daring, and it works. Dean closes the puzzle box properly. Her prose has heat in it, specificity that makes even small moments inhabitable: Bao the ghost cat draping his cold tail over Mercy’s arm, the cramped alleyways building pressure around every conversation. She draws on Chinese ghost folklore, the yuan gui tradition of spirits who cannot pass on because their injustice was never acknowledged, and the real history of the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong to ground the supernatural in something that costs.
This is horror doing its best work. Don’t miss it.
THE BRIDES
Charlotte Cross | Publisher: HarperCollins / Harlequin Trade Publishing
Charlotte Cross’s The Brides exhumes the silenced women of gothic legend and gives them language, love, and the full weight of their grief. Told across two timelines through diary entries, letters, and clinical reports, this sapphic Dracula prequel understands that the real horror was never the Count. It was everything that preceded him.
The Brides asks one question from its opening pages and refuses to let go: before they were monsters, who were they? Charlotte Cross answers it with an epistolary gothic of real structural intelligence, moving across two timelines, 1884 and 1903, through Lucy North’s intimate diary, Alice the lady’s maid’s visions, and the cold clinical distance of Dr John Seward’s 1903 psychiatric reports. The contrast is the engine. The women’s raw, immediate language against the institutional prose that dissects them is where the horror really lives.
The sapphic relationship between Lucy and Mafalda is the beating warmth at the novel’s centre, and Cross writes their connection with a tender urgency that makes what happens to them genuinely devastating. But the feminist reckoning goes wider than the romance. The societal cage the women inhabit before they ever reach Castle Dracula is the point; the gothic castle is simply a logical continuation of what the Victorian world already was for them.
Cross keeps Dracula at the periphery, which is exactly right. A monster who stays mostly offstage radiates far more dread than one who dominates every scene. This is the literary séance the story always deserved.
HEX HOUSE
Amy Jane Stewart | Publisher: Titan Books (Spring 2026)
Amy Jane Stewart takes the dark fairy tale archetype of the women’s sanctuary, turns it inside out, and asks what happens when it decides to fight back. Hex House is a debut of real structural confidence, Scottish atmospheric precision, and a radicalism about feminine survival that stays long after the final page.
Elly is pregnant, still in her wedding dress, and running through the Scottish night when the house appears. That opening image sets the register for everything that follows, and Amy Jane Stewart never lets it slip. Hex House is a feminist horror fairy tale published by Titan Books, structured across two timelines: Elly’s arrival at the impossible refuge that only appears to those who truly need it, and the parallel thread following Siobhan, a filmmaker who visited four years earlier and left with a scar that never heals and footage she keeps hidden from everyone, including herself.
Stewart’s dual-timeline structure withholds precisely what it needs to. We know something terrible happened at Hex House. The horror is in watching Siobhan’s reluctant return assemble the picture. What makes this debut exceptional is the radicalism of its central proposition: the feminist fairy tale of the women’s sanctuary turned inside out until the sanctuary decides to fight back. Reading Stewart’s prose is like watching a time-lapse of a poisonous flower in bloom, sentences that unfurl slowly then burst into something sharp and unexpected.
Hex House asks whether a victim can reclaim power without becoming monstrous. The answer is not comfortable. It shouldn’t be.
HOME SICK
Rhiannon Grist | Publisher: Solaris (Rebellion Publishing)
Home Sick is slow-burn psychological horror that presses the same bruise with methodical precision until the discomfort becomes something close to revelation. Rhiannon Grist has written a debut that understands female rage not as empowerment but as wreckage, and builds a claustrophobic folkloric dread from nothing more than a thin shared wall and an unstable narrator who cannot outrun herself.
“The symmetry should have tipped me off.”
After a violent incident at work, Tamsin goes looking for a fresh start in a remote cottage far away from her old life. Here she could make real friends, find a job she loves, become a whole new person, even.
But the solitary cottage is actually a semi-detached, with only a thin wall separating her from a total stranger. Her neighbour is an enigma. Dowdy one moment, vivacious the next, but always wearing an unnerving smile. Tamsin can’t shake the feeling that there’s something wrong with her, especially when she starts experiencing disturbances in her own home.
As the locals share strange stories about her house, and her barely contained paranoia spirals out of control, Tamsin begins to suspect that the past she was so desperate to escape might never let her go.
Be sure to check our book reviews on Thursday for our full review of Home Sick
The following three books are the ones that tempted me by the temptation goblins at Cymera, and to tempt you to buy them here are the book details. Reviews will follow as soon as I read them
WE CALL THEM WITCHES
India-Rose Bower | Publisher: Michael Joseph / Penguin Random House (UK); Poisoned Pen Press (US)
Bower’s debut puts pagan ritual at the centre of survival horror and means it. In a Britain two years into eldritch catastrophe, Sara’s knowledge of old wards is the only thing standing between her family and the creatures they call witches. We Call Them Witches is post-apocalyptic folk horror with a beating sapphic heart
WHERE ONCE HE STOOD
Dan Coxon | Publisher: Black Shuck Books (Signature Series)
Where Once He Stood asks what a parent will believe when their child vanishes. Coxon builds a modern suburban folk tale from real streets and impossible houses, fusing missing-person crime dread with Satanic horror and time slips that fracture the everyday world completely. The comparison to Don’t Look Now is earned. An urgent, precise novella from one of British horror’s most assured voices.
“At this point, I’ve been a parent for half my adult life, and there’s nothing more scary than the idea of losing your children. This story started with a simple question: what would I do if my son suddenly vanished? How would I process that overwhelming desire to get him back – and would that desire leave me open to believing something that no sane person should believe?
I also wanted to ground it firmly in reality, so many of the places within these pages are real. I know the road where the main action takes place (although it has a different name); I grew up on these streets.
As you’ll see, the result is an odd mix of missing person crime narrative and Satanic horror, with some time slips and a little portal fantasy along the way. But at its heart, Where Once He Stood remains a modern suburban folk tale about disappearing houses and lost children – and the leap of faith that is sometimes required to bring them home.”
ATOMIC COFFIN
Benedict Anning | Publisher: Transworld Publishers / Penguin Random House (UK); Simon & Schuster (US)
Atomic Coffin takes the Cold War spy thriller into the crushing dark of the North Atlantic and finds something worse than the Soviets waiting. Heidi Sperling’s black ops mission to investigate an impossible submarine becomes a fight to keep her mind intact as reality dissolves around her. A debut of genuine claustrophobic dread from a major new voice.
December 1984. SIS field asset Heidi Sperling [codename Thistle] exfiltrates from East Berlin with the sole copy of a critical intelligence leak: a naval log containing a solitary message received from a previously unidentified Soviet submarine.
Incredulously – impossibly – it seems the vessel, known only as TK-15, has been sitting motionless and undetected in the waters between Scotland and Iceland for three whole years. And now this latest message reads: ACTIVE.
Picked up by the Royal Navy’s submarine HMS Viking, Heidi is thrust into a ‘black ops’ mission: find TK15 and neutralise it at any cost. But as her only ally on board the Viking falls sick, she realises this modified vessel is far more than a Soviet experiment to gain an upper hand in the nuclear arms race. Here, in the crushing depths of the North Atlantic, it seems something darker has awoken – something that cannot be contained by any superpower.
As Heidi’s own reality twists around her, an unknowable force cripples the Viking’s defences and drives its crew to madness. Trapped in the deep, Heidi has no choice but to find a way to save the remaining crew and stop TK-15 for good, before it steals what’s left of her mind . . .
There you have it, surely every single one of these books needs to be on your bookshelf, and you all need to come up to Edinburgh next June for the next Cymera, you won’t be disappointed.
