Josh Hanson’s The House on Blood Street is literary haunted house horror with a giallo heart, a story about obsession and grief that makes the house feel like yours before it takes everything away. Here is my full review of the Black Crow Books release, out 29 July 2026.
Juliet Blackwell’s The Séance Garden is a paranormal mystery that builds its horror through accumulated unease rather than cheap shocks. Set in Monterey and centred on a skeptical historian of the occult, this Gothic-tinged supernatural suspense novel asks what happens when the past refuses to stay buried.
My review of Splasher by Billie Host, the 2006-set supernatural slasher where a haunted university pool picks off a swim team one accident at a time. Queer horror, Y2K nostalgia and a genuine ghost story grief engine make this a slasher novel that remembers to feel.
Bram Stoker winner Gwendolyn Kiste delivers a haunting queer horror retelling of The Great Gatsby in In These Gilded, Ghostly Hearts, following Daisy Buchanan’s daughter as she confronts her mother’s ghost and the still-grasping fingers of Jay Gatsby. This sapphic Gothic novella explores grief, legacy, and the hunger of a house that feeds on unfulfilled love.
The Undiscovered Country delivers horror noir thrills as Adam Paradise, Frankenstein’s creature turned PI, battles Ku Klux Klan necromancy in 1930s New Orleans. Teel James Glenn crafts a supernatural thriller that examines humanity’s capacity for organised hatred while celebrating compassion as the ultimate act of heroism.
Kelly Creagh’s A Date with Death is the rare paranormal romance that gives death a day job and a line manager. This grim reaper romance pairs a skeleton on the clock with a children’s librarian for a cosy-horror, grumpy-sunshine slow burn about found family and what it means to actually live.
AV Wilkes steps beyond the polar ice with Old Gods, a micro-collection of five reprinted cosmic and folk horror stories. From an 1881 whaling ship to a vampire-haunted seaside hotel, this is queer horror with real tenderness and a deep cold running through every page.
Jack Mackay follows his debut Gloam with The Haunting of Old Splinter, a middle grade horror that hands the old wishing claw legend to two comic-mad brothers on a Yorkshire moor. It is a Monkey’s Paw retelling with real teeth, and one of the finest children’s horror books of 2026.
Every Christmas Eve, an old Victorian don lights a lamp and tells his students a ghost story. Decades later, one of them must face what those tales were really about. My review of Tom Mead’s The Lamp in the Window, an eerie Christmas ghost story novella from Absinthe Books.
Jack Rushton is a thirty-nine-year-old vampire who just wants to be left alone with his Radio 4 comedies and his unrequited crush. Instead, he’s been blackmailed by a six-hundred-year-old vampire queen, hunted by a clueless anti-vampire collective, and his teenage sister is developing migraines that might be something far worse. Gayle Ramage’s Jockula is a darkly comic Scottish vampire horror that earns both halves of that descriptor.
Rachel Feder’s The Turn is a contemporary Gothic novella that reimagines the classic governess narrative for the pandemic era. This unsettling literary horror explores the monstrous bond between caregiver and child, the politics of care, and the terror of having your own memory rewritten. A precise, slow-creeping piece of vampire fiction that earns every scare.
Kristopher Woofter’s Archival Anxiety in Documentary and Mockumentary Horror offers a heady intellectual investigation into how films like Ghostwatch, Lake Mungo, and Unfriended capture our cosmic fears of the uncapturable. This academic study traces the genre’s evolution from gothic epistolary novels to screenlife horror, examining our fraught relationship with the cameras that document our lives—and our deaths.
Miranda Smith’s Scary Movie Night drops a woman into a costume party full of friends dressed as movie killers, then locks the doors. My horror book review digs into the meta-slasher and locked-room thriller, the final girl reborn, and the coercive-control story under the fun.
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.
