Ginger Nuts of Horror has been reviewing horror books for 18 years. Here you will find reviews of new horror novels, novellas and short story collections, from small indie presses to the big imprints, across folk horror, gothic, cosmic, psychological horror and everything in between. Every review is free, independent and honest.
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.
Tracy Fahey’s Queens of the Crone Age (PS Publishing, 2026) wakes the Cailleach, the Hag of Beara, and threads standalone tales into one long incantation. My review digs into why this feminist folk horror collection, steeped in Irish mythology and the power of older women, is some of the boldest work of her career.
Helen Grant’s Steal Me is a folk horror novella built on fairy-tale bones, set in a small Scottish town where a bookshop sells each customer the one thing they most want to hide. My review digs into the cursed bookshop, the Grimm folklore at its root, and why this Scottish Gothic chiller about desire and temptation belongs on the same shelf as the folk horror revival.
Leicole Lang’s debut horror novel While They Watch channels the spirit of classic isolation horror, building on sequestered distress to instil some of the most intense chills in recent literary memory. Taking time to establish character before ratcheting up the spookiness, this indie horror masterpiece delivers a slow-burn dread that explodes into pure, adrenaline-pumping fear, refusing to hand-feed answers and staying true to its uncompromising principles straight through to the end.
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.
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.
