Peace Mbengei’s We Run the Night turns a Kenyan boarding school into a sealed arena for folklore, grief and body horror. This five-star YA horror debut makes the night runners frightening, but the adults who refuse to listen are worse.
Jim McLeod
Jim "The Don" McLeod has been reading horror for over 35 years and reviewing it for more than 16. He's the editor of Ginger Nuts of Horror, Europe's largest independent horror review and culture site, and a British Fantasy Award nominee for his work in the genre. When he's not busy inflicting his opinions on the horror community, he can be found annoying his family or getting thoroughly outwitted by his two dogs, Casper and Molly.
Peace Mbengei Interview: We Run the Night and the Luo Night Runners
Peace Mbengei talks through her debut YA horror novel We Run the Night, where Luo night runners turn grief into body horror inside a Kenyan boarding school. She discusses the strangler fig at the story’s centre, the institutional cover up that follows, and why forgiveness, not revenge, sets her heroine free.
Lost Boys by Dean Cade: Queer Horror Meets the Candy Man Murders
Dean Cade’s Lost Boys, book two of the Summer 1973 trilogy from Slashic Horror Press, rebuilds the Houston Mass Murders from the inside out, following a closeted gas-station teenager through the summer the Candy Man came for the Heights. Our five-star review of a queer horror and true-crime hybrid that remembers the boys history reduced to a body count.
Mazywood by Tananarive Due: The Wish That Grew Teeth
Tananarive Due’s Mazywood turns a child’s wish in 1926 Old Hollywood into a monster that waits fifty years for the family to come home. This creature feature and historical saga is her first novel since the multi-award-winning The Reformatory, and it confirms Gracetown as one of horror’s great haunted maps. A big, ambitious, occasionally overstuffed four-star return.
Crone by Keith Rosson: Folk Horror Noir That Bites Back
In Crone, Keith Rosson binds a Pacific Northwest crime noir to a folk horror ghost story, following a grieving ex-detective through a corrupt town toward a witch who has been keeping his missing daughter for thirteen years. It is body-horror addiction, biker-gang rot, and generational violence, held together by prose of frightening control
American Nightmare by Kelly McWilliams: Historical Horror of 1919 and the NAACP Spy Who Passed for White
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.