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.
Joshua Chaplinsky’s The Man in the Watch Still Visits Me at Night is a surreal, multi-timeline haunted house novel about the ways abuse gets passed down through a family like an heirloom nobody wants. The first third asks more patience than it gives back, but once the Vogel House’s true shape emerges, this becomes one of the more genuinely upsetting horror novels of the year.
Jessica Hamilton’s folk horror debut sends a grieving mother into a haunted wood that offers her family a second life, at a price only she has to pay. A true crime podcast framing device and a bold menopause-as-horror metaphor make this one of the more inventive femgore entries this year, even when it over-explains its own best idea.
China Miéville returns after fourteen years with The Rouse, a vast work of weird fiction that folds grief, war and necromancy into a single twentieth-century epic. It is a formidable, demanding ghost story, and it rewards patience far more than it courts it. Our four-star review sorts the wonder from the sheer weight of the thing.
After years away, Laura Mauro returns with Biographies of Valiant Drunken Tigers, a short story and a novella steeped in Japanese folklore. Shadowsick sends a decapitated head into spectral flight, while Lovesongs of the Nonmigratory Birds pulls the Yuki-Onna into a bleak, heartfelt tale of two people coming apart. A comeback well worth the wait.
