Gretchen McNeil’s second adult novel drops a former-FBI priest and a stubborn constable on a boat-less Newfoundland island where the locals crave daily Mass. Our five-star review reads We Are For The Dark as religious folk horror that fuses detective fiction, Catholic dread, and a love story into one merciless question.
Hell is a company in Mackenzie Reed’s adult debut, and the joke mostly works. Our four-star review gets into the corporate-underworld satire, the slow-burn romance, the grief thread, and the worldbuilding that strains under its own reveals.
In Still Lost, Sam A. Miller hands the deadpan of Sam O’Nella Academy a nervous system. His eight linked near-future science fiction stories let a superior alien race fix every human threat, then watch us wreck ourselves anyway. A debut short story collection that runs warmer than Black Mirror and closer to George Saunders.
Susan McCauley’s The Raven is a four-star gothic horror novel set in the 1665 plague winter, where a Yorkshire cobbler’s grief, faith and madness braid into folk-horror dread. A patient, disturbing historical horror about the monster who keeps a kind face.
Jo Salazar’s If We Survive the Night is apocalyptic YA horror built around one of the most compelling antiheroes the genre has produced in years. Quinn, sixteen, ASPD-diagnosed, and done with the systems that have failed her since childhood, finds herself at the start of the zombie apocalypse inside a residential treatment centre. What follows is a fast, psychologically precise survival story that asks hard questions about who gets written off as dangerous, who gets called a hero, and what those labels are actually worth when civilisation ends. Sharpened by Salazar’s social work background and driven by a protagonist you can’t look away from, this is feminist horror fiction doing exactly what the best of the genre does: using monsters as a mirror.
Jonathan Wood’s Washed Up on Dark Shores literalises greed as a god called Mammon and lets it eat the world one savage sentence at a time. Our five-star review digs into the corporate cosmic horror, the ferocious prose style, and how it connects to his work as Jon Hollins and J.P. Oakes.
Josh Malerman traps a woman inside an artist’s empty frame in Pictures of You, a Hitchcockian captivity thriller from the Bird Box author. A superb, unnerving concept, held back only by a structure that keeps letting the pressure out. Del Rey, September 2026.
Mia Dalia’s Lullabies for the Lost brings musical horror to the Black Shuck Shadows list, with four short bursts leading into the novella Discordant. The shorts remix familiar devil child and cosmic horror ideas, while the novella channels Don DeLillo by way of Faust. A fun horror short story collection, though the novella is already sold on its own.
Kelly McWilliams makes her adult debut with a historical horror novel about a white-passing NAACP spy investigating lynchings during the Red Summer of 1919. Our five-star review looks at how American Nightmare refuses catharsis, and why that refusal makes it the strongest Black horror fiction of the year. Out from Crown on 15 September 2026.
Something Sour in the Sweet Shop: Horror’s Long Affair With Candy Horror is meant to live … Something Sour in the Sweet Shop: Horror’s Long Affair With CandyRead more
