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.
Patrick Freivald’s Mitchcraft: Vacation Magic School is middle grade horror about a boy who knows every spell and can cast none. At a summer camp in the woods, rude children vanish and return polite, and only the kids are scared. A creepy, funny magic school horror from Apokrupha Books that earns its five stars.
Rachel Louise Adams follows No Rest for the Wicked with a Coldren County novel set on a Wisconsin kill floor, and it is a slaughterhouse horror novel with real bite. This Where There’s Smoke review explains why Dolores Hawthorne’s second case earns five stars, and how Adams turns the meat trade’s soft words against the men who run it.
In a guest essay for Ginger Nuts of Horror, Rachel Louise Adams reveals why the second Coldren County novel, Where There’s Smoke, swaps Halloween for a slaughterhouse. She traces the choice to her PhD research and to the ideas in The Sexual Politics of Meat. The result is a slaughterhouse crime novel she calls darker and more personal than No Rest for the Wicked.
Madison Tyler Nelson’s supernatural horror debut follows Tatum Alexander, who sees the dead, as her best friend’s murder drags her back towards her imprisoned mother. In this Portrait of a Haunting review, I argue that a found family horror novel with a prickly heroine is cleverer than it first looks. For fans of witch coven novels and books like Ninth House.
Micaiah Johnson builds a house where nothing bad ever happens, then asks where all the bad … The Unhaunting by Micaiah Johnson Review: The House That Wants GhostsRead more
Phil Keeling’s debut horror short story collection moves from the fall of Babel to a low country monster hunt and a wounded angel in a root cellar. Our Be Not Afraid review finds religious horror with teeth, dark humour and Southern weird fiction at its sharpest. This is a self-published horror book that earns every one of its five stars.
Hervé Commère’s YA thriller comes as twenty-one sealed letters, one to tear open each day, as a young man in London races to save the sister who vanished ten years ago. This 21 Days of Fear review looks at how the advent calendar format turns waiting itself into fear. A five star epistolary thriller built for December.
Jennifer Thorne’s werewolf horror novel sends a grieving carer into an empty country mansion for a weekend of trespass, and the owners come home hungry. My Newbourne Park review looks at the siege, the seduction that follows, and why this class horror novel is the best thing the Diavola author has written.
