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.
Isabelle Spotts’s Saint Delilah is a ghost story that refuses to be gentle. This feminist supernatural suspense novel follows Delilah, a murdered nineteen-year-old who becomes a ghost and, with the help of a medium and a man who can see the dead, hunts her killer. Evil entities threaten to consume her soul. It is a revenge narrative, a thriller, and a meditation on grief and justice. The dead don’t forget. Neither will you. Read the full review at Ginger Nuts of Horror.
Henry Corrigan’s Party of a Lifetime strands four queer friends in Monotony, a 1950s hell town that reshapes itself around their nightmares and slowly reshapes them too. This is body horror written with a mechanic’s patience, with a narcissistic mother at the centre of it, and it is the best thing Corrigan has written.
Trapped in a sea cave that rose overnight off the coast of Maine, nine academics must atone for their greatest sin or die. Megan Bontrager’s The Sea Hides Its Dead turns cosmic horror into a moral reckoning, and it is one of the finest horror novels of 2026.
Jonathan Janz turns a small-town urban legend into a slow-burn gothic nightmare about grief, guilt and the girl everyone was too scared to actually see.
Joey Powell’s Lost in Found Footage traps a horror vlogger inside the cursed film he sneaked a camcorder into. Abby Wolf reviews a metafictional horror novel that asks whether knowing every found footage trope actually keeps you alive in Hope Hollow. Out from Mad Axe Media on 11 August 2026.
Neil Williamson turns the family bequest into the scariest thing you own. Some objects come with … Hand-Me-Downs by Neil Williamson: The Horror You InheritRead more
