You know the feeling of coming home to find everything slightly wrong. The couch pulled three inches left. A photograph tilted. Nothing you can name, but your body knows. That’s Ronald Malfi’s temperature with The Hive (Titan Books, April 14, 2026). This 768-page small town horror novel set in Mariner’s Cove, Maryland, builds dread like rust on a locked gate. After a strange storm scatters ordinary junk across the neighbourhood, the residents develop an obsessive attachment to their discoveries. A door. Coat hangers. A tricycle wheel. They lie for these objects. They kill for them. And ten-year-old Cory McBride, newly awakened to strange psychic powers, is the only one who sees the hive mind forming. Malfi spent twelve years wrestling this story into shape. The result is his most ambitious work yet: cosmic horror grounded in the domestic, where the real terror isn’t the monster but the coat hanger in your closet. Read the full review.
