Mike Brooks’s This Is Where the Future Bleeds is a dark fantasy adventure that asks what we owe each other when the world is ending. With sharp dialogue, queer representation, and creeping dread, it’s a book that refuses to look away from the bleeding future.
Ava Morwood’s Until We Drown is a psychological horror novel that burrows into the cracks of a fractured marriage and finds something ancient waiting there. Steeped in Peak District folklore and reworking Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid into something far darker, this is folk horror at its most intimate and devastating.
Paula Cappa’s Wolf Magick is a Gothic dark fantasy that blends supernatural romance with shapeshifting horror and Celtic folklore. Marc Sexton has spent his life resisting wolf magick, but when shadow wolves begin hunting him, the beast within can no longer be controlled. This is a book that wants to be felt, not just followed.
Catriona Silvey’s Vervain Hollow is a masterclass in folk horror and psychological suspense. Through the eyes of an unreliable narrator, this cult horror novel weaves a tale of memory and magnetism that lingers long after the final page.
Maura McHugh’s House of Wyrd is an occult horror novella that uses the Tarot’s Major Arcana as both structure and sacrament. When art provocateur Aly Wyrd vanishes on the eve of her visionary project’s opening, her estranged daughter Pallas must walk the Illumination Trail—a physical journey up an Irish mountain that mirrors the Fool’s journey through the twenty-two trumps. What unfolds is a mother-daughter reckoning wrapped in the skin of a magical mystery.
Weldon Burge’s Enter Vengeance is a paranormal police procedural that starts as a locked-room mystery and slides into supernatural dread. A guilt-ridden detective and a reluctant psychic chase Tisiphone, a Greek Fury dealing out revenge to those the courts let walk. Lean, unsettling, and built on old-fashioned suspense.
The irresistible lure of silencing your anxiety—no matter the cost. What if the only cure for existential dread came in the form of a tracksuit-wearing alien with hypnotic powers? Addison Heimann’s Touch Me takes the tentacle sex horror subgenre and twists it into something unexpectedly relatable—a drug metaphor for a … Touch Me Review: Tentacle Sex as Drug MetaphorRead more
C.N. Vair’s Fawn is one of 2026’s most talked-about folk horror debuts, built around Tess Wynne, an Appalachian witch who rescues a red-mouthed, full-toothed fawn with unnatural appetites, and must decide what she is willing to become to protect what is hers. If that book has already got its teeth into you, this reading list was made for you. We’ve put together ten books that share Fawn’s DNA — from Emilia Hart’s multi-century witch saga Weyward to Cassandra Khaw’s blood-soaked fairy tale The Salt Grows Heavy to Genevieve Gornichec’s Norse folk horror The Witch’s Heart — each with a full mini-review. This is the definitive reading list for fans of folk horror, powerful witches, and women who bite back.
C.N. Vair’s debut folk horror novel The Devil Knows Her Name follows Tess Wynne, a century-old witch bound to her Appalachian land by a devil’s bargain, running a wildlife sanctuary against every threat the community and the devil himself can bring. Precise, slow-burning, and built on a genuine ecological and feminist argument, this is Appalachian horror at its most assured. Full review at Ginger Nuts of Horror.
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.
Sara Hinkley’s The Red Sacrament is historical vampire horror with a sharp political edge, set in a midnight Paris theatre in 1869. My review digs into the slow dread, the gorgeous gothic prose, and the way this queer vampire novel turns the Anne Rice tradition toward class, labour, and the coming Paris Commune.
Leah Rowan’s debut Marion reimagines Psycho with one savage swap: the woman in the shower fights back and kills Norm. My review digs into this feminist horror standout, from its dark humor and dual-POV craft to its themes of female rage, sisterhood, and surviving domestic abuse.
Blood in the Bricks proves folk horror doesn’t need fields or standing stones to unsettle you. Neil Williamson’s anthology hauls the genre into the underground, the surgery ward and the skate park, with standout urban horror short stories from James Bennett, Dan Coxon and Ray Cluley. A bleak, brilliant collection that finds the uncanny in the everyday city.
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.
Luke Dumas follows A History of Fear and The Paleontologist with Nothing Tastes as Good, a body horror novel that drops Emmett Truesdale into the Obexity weight-loss trial and watches the miracle curdle into cannibal cravings. My review digs into how Dumas turns fatphobia, diet culture, and the Ozempic moment into the year’s most quietly devastating horror.
