Read the full review to find out why Trad Wife is Sarah Langan’s best work to date, how it sits within the current wave of literary horror, and why its central argument about bodily autonomy, influencer culture, and the ancient horror of the controlled life is one the genre has been building toward for decades.
BOOK REVIEWS
Georgia Summers’ Trollheim: Nordic Folk Horror Done Right
Georgia Summers’ Trollheim: Tale of Sýstir announces itself in its opening pages as something different from the usual Nordic-flavoured fantasy. This is folk horror rooted in genuine Huldra mythology, the figure from Scandinavian folklore whose name derives from the Old Norse huldr, meaning “covered” or “secret.” When Sýstir’s mother is accused of witchcraft and burned at the stake, Summers is not using the witch trial as backdrop decoration. She is placing her story inside a specific, historical horror that resonates because it never entirely stopped being present. Sýstir, half-human and half-Huldra, escapes into the Dark Forest known as Trollheim, taken in by the rogue troll Agagkantor and accompanied by a wildcat companion named Fulgir, building a found family from the materials of loss and displacement.
Ronald Malfi’s The Hive Review: A 750-Page Nightmare of Conformity and Cosmic Dread
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.
A Parade of Horribles Review: Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 8
Horror that fights back. The abyss flinches.
Femme Feral Review: Sam Beckbessinger’s Feminist Werewolf Novel
Some horror novels make you check under the bed. Sam Beckbessinger’s Femme Feral makes you check your own reflection for teeth. This feminist body horror novel about a queer photographer’s lycanthropic liberation is a howl of feminine rage you won’t forget.
Abyss by Nicholas Binge Review: A Corporate Horror That Hits Too Close to Home
Joe Rice walks into an empty office in Canary Wharf. He sits down at a computer. An AI asks him how he is feeling. And the abyss opens. Not beneath his feet. Beneath his chair.
Don’t hand in your notice. You won’t live to regret it.
Ande Pliego’s The Library After Dark Review: Locked Room Horror Done Right
Ande Pliego builds a locked room out of childhood fears, fairy-tale shadows, and the toxic residue of preserved secrets. The Daedalus Library will hold you hostage. The prose moves like a faulty elevator. You will not escape unchanged. This is how you face the thing that terrified you first.
This Book Hates You 2.0 by David L. Tamarin Review: Extreme Horror Returns
This Book Hates You 2.0 is not a book to be read. It’s a contract signed in bad faith. David L. Tamarin’s transgressive fiction collection promises to assault your senses, and it faithfully delivers.
Peter Neal Lives in a Womb of Shadows
Peter Neal Lives in a Womb of Shadows The compound at the heart of this story doesn’t attack people physically in a traditional sense; it makes them feel safe, loved, and needed. What inspired this specific, insidious form of biological horror? I kept thinking about how the most dangerous things … Peter Neal Lives in a Womb of ShadowsRead more
Frostbite by Jill Palmer Review: A Gut-Punch of a Zombie Novel That Redefines Survival
Jill Palmer’s Frostbite is a masterclass in character-driven horror, proving the most terrifying apocalypse isn’t the monsters outside the gates but the inherited trauma found in a mother’s cold, calculating stare. It redefines survival as a brutal, hopeful act of choosing your own family.
Accumulation by Aimee Pokwatka Review: A Haunted House Novel That Knows the Real Horror Is Domesticity
Aimee Pokwatka’s ACCUMULATION writes domestic horror as ambient dread—the terror accumulates in the cracks of a woman’s attention, in the repetition of chores, the slow erosion of identity. This is a haunted house novel where the real ghost is everything she gave up.
Sarafina by Philip Fracassi Review: Where Civil War Brutality Meets Body Horror
“Sarafina weaponises hope, turning every sigh of relief into a prelude for something monstrous. Philip Fracassi proves he’s not just a horror writer; he’s a literary force who uses the Civil War as a backdrop for a terrifying meditation on survival, guilt, and the price of peace.”
Pixerina: A Haunting by Joanne Anderton Review – Suburban Gothic That Cracks Ordinary Walls
A house on a hill should feel safe. In Pixerina: A Haunting by Joanne Anderton, it does not. This suburban Gothic novella transforms familiar domestic spaces into something quietly sinister. The story follows Rebecca, an artist trapped between creative frustration and the weight of unspoken losses. She finds an old house. She becomes obsessed. Anderton builds dread not through jump scares but through atmosphere so thick you feel it in your ribs.
Alakazam by Mia Dalia Review: A Haunting Novella About Ambition, Identity, and the Cost of Disappearing
A magician’s abandoned house. Two curious friends. And the secret that refuses to stay buried. In Mia Dalia’s Alakazam, the line between illusion and reality dissolves like salt in Atlantic City’s humid air. This supernatural horror novella (PS Publishing, August 2025) follows two timelines: a mixed-race gay magician’s rise to fame … Alakazam by Mia Dalia Review: A Haunting Novella About Ambition, Identity, and the Cost of DisappearingRead more
Capture Spiral by Jez Conolly: The 1970s British Childhood Memoir That Gets Under Your Skin
The childhood you half-remember, told by the one person who never wanted to remember it at all. Capture Spiral: An Escape from Memory, a memoir by Jez Conolly, published by Temporal Boundary Press in 2026, is one of the most original and haunting pieces of British life-writing in recent years. … Capture Spiral by Jez Conolly: The 1970s British Childhood Memoir That Gets Under Your SkinRead more