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.
Desirée de Fez’s debut novel follows a mother and two daughters who can’t stand to be apart, until Christmas Eve in a shopping centre splits them open. Our Don’t Leave Her Alone review explains why this Spanish body horror novel, translated by Lizzie Davis, deserves a place on every horror shelf this autumn. Motherhood body horror fans should clear a space on the shelf.
All six books on the British Fantasy Awards 2026 shortlist for Best Horror Novel, ranked ahead of FantasyCon in Glasgow. Stephen Graham Jones, Dan Howarth, Grady Hendrix, MK Hardy, Kat Dunn and Gretchen Felker-Martin are all in the running for the August Derleth Award. Here is where each one lands, and why.
S.H. Cooper’s horror short story collection gives ten dead voices the last word, from a cursed maiden in a cave to a drowned girl and her alligator guardian. My Death in Its Many Forms review looks at the revenge horror, ghost stories about grief and quiet craft that make this self-published horror collection a five-star read.
Ben Unsworth reviews Cthulhu Cymraeg: The Night Country, the Welsh Lovecraftian anthology edited by Mark Howard Jones for Macabre Ink. Its seven long stories trade tentacles for mood, with Arthur Machen’s land as the backdrop for some fine Lovecraftian fiction. John Llewellyn Probert and George supply the two tales he expects to see in his year’s best.
Hollow Folk, the new novel from the author of the Dark Things duology, stops the clocks at an Appalachian mountain resort and leaves three co-workers trapped with the hotel’s century-old secrets. Damascus Mincemeyer finds a haunted hotel novel that pairs a charming horror romance with Clark’s most chilling scares yet, and gives it four out of five. Fans of Where Dark Things Grow and Quill & Crow Publishing House will want to check in.
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.
