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.
Jeff Strand’s Fun Times at the Bloodbath is horror comedy with teeth, a video game horror novel about a playtest no one can quit. The Bram Stoker Award winning author weaponises the attention economy and folds extreme horror into his sharpest comic engine yet. Here is why it gets under your skin.
H.M. Wolfe’s Daggermouth is being sold as dark dystopian romance, but it reads like social horror with the safety off. In New Found Haven, love outside your ring is a death sentence, feminine rage is a survival skill, and a forced marriage becomes a cage. Here is why this enemies-to-lovers opener to The Heart duology belongs on any dark fiction shelf.
Carlyn Greenwald’s What Happened to Those Girls drops three teenagers into a witch-haunted ghost town and lets only the bodies come back. My review digs into why this queer YA horror thriller, all grief and betrayal and small-town folk horror, hands its murder investigation to the one girl everyone wants to blame.
Carlyn Greenwald’s What Happened to Those Girls drops her most moody, body-horror-heavy book yet: a sapphic YA slasher where the toxic friend group doesn’t dissolve when the killer arrives — it’s the whole point. The Murder Land author talks survivor’s guilt, autistic representation, interstitial “found footage” chapters, and why losing someone who hurt you is its own kind of grief.
Joshua Millican’s Dopefoot is cryptid horror that earns its monster the hard way, growing dread out of Northern California’s outlaw cannabis trade before the Bigfoot legend ever steps in. This Mad Axe Media release blends backwoods folk horror with gonzo extremity and lands as one of indie horror’s most distinctive reads of 2026.
KC Grifant’s Women of the Weird West gathers 25 stories and poems that hand the gun to every woman the old westerns left out. This weird western horror anthology from Brigids Gate Press blends frontier folklore, women in horror, and speculative western short stories into one of the sharpest entries in the weird west revival.
Maxim Volk’s Deadbeat — the first entry in Slashic Horror Press’s Extremities series — drops you dead on page one and hands you a choice. A choose-your-own-path narrative maze in relentless second person, it follows a gay househusband resurrected by a naked cult and left to navigate undead existence with an insatiable hunger for human flesh. Funny, nasty, structurally inventive, and built around complicity as its core horror mechanism, Deadbeat is one of the most confident debut novels in queer horror this year. Jim McLeod reviews.
