BOOK REVIEWS

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Pam Kowolski Is a Monster! by Sarah Langan Review: And I Thought I Held Grudges!

Pam Kowolski Is a Monster! by Sarah Langan Review: And I Thought I Held Grudges!

Sarah Langan’s Pam Kowolski Is a Monster! (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2025) is a 119-page psychological horror novella about failed journalist Janet Chow, who attempts to expose her high school nemesis — now “Madame Pamela,” America’s favourite doomsday psychic — and uncovers a version of their shared past she’s spent twenty years getting wrong. Langan builds horror from the inside out: bitter, funny, and structurally precise, this is one of the most accomplished novellas published in horror this year. Read the full review at Ginger Nuts of Horror.

by Jim Mcleod•
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Home Sick by Rhiannon Grist Review: Folk Horror That Gets Under Your Skin

Home Sick by Rhiannon Grist Review: Folk Horror That Gets Under Your Skin

Rhiannon Grist’s debut novel Home Sick (Solaris, 2026) is a slow-burn psychological horror rooted in Scottish folklore and the particular dread of the domestic uncanny. Following Tamsin as her Scottish countryside fresh start becomes something far less clean, Grist builds claustrophobic menace from shared walls, unreliable narration, and a folkloric framework that deepens rather than resolves the horror. Read the full Ginger Nuts of Horror review of this essential 2026 folk horror debut.

by Jim Mcleod•
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Headlights by CJ Leede Review: Horror at Its Most Devastating

Headlights by CJ Leede Review: Horror at Its Most Devastating

CJ Leede’s Headlights is the most ambitious novel of her career: a supernatural FBI thriller set against the frozen Colorado wilderness that fuses folk horror, procedural crime, and cosmic dread into something that stays with you long after the last page. Special Agent Daniel Stansfield returns to Denver on his final day with the FBI, drawn back by a case he never solved and a signature that defies explanation — people waking on highway shoulders, wearing the skin of victims, each with a stranger’s hair knotted around their tongue. Leede uses horror to do what only horror can: hold grief, trauma, freedom, and the afterlife simultaneously, without flinching from any of them. This is a review of a novel that rearranges something in the reader. Read on.

by Jim Mcleod•
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Sunyi Dean’s The Girl with a Thousand Faces: A Gothic Ghost Story

Sunyi Dean’s The Girl with a Thousand Faces: A Gothic Ghost Story

Sunyi Dean’s The Girl with a Thousand Faces (Tor/HarperVoyager, May 2026) is a structurally daring gothic horror set in an alternate 1975 Kowloon Walled City, where fifty-three-year-old triad ghost talker Mercy Chan is forced to confront a powerful new spirit and the past she cannot remember. Drawing on Chinese ghost lore, the real history of the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, and a bold four-timeline narrative, Dean’s second novel is a deeply personal, formally ambitious work that confirms her as one of the most interesting voices in the genre today. This is Jim McLeod’s full review for Ginger Nuts of Horror.

by Jim Mcleod•
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Dan Coxon’s Come Sing for the Harrowing (2026): Folk Horror Reimagined

Dan Coxon’s Come Sing for the Harrowing (2026): Folk Horror Reimagined

Dan Coxon’s Come Sing for the Harrowing, reissued by CLASH Books in April 2026, is eighteen stories of folk horror transported into the texture of contemporary British life. The uncanny shows up in a Cheddar Gorge cave system, a crumbling urban estate, a Brixton supermarket, a medieval tourist attraction that is just a little too authentic. Coxon, a World Fantasy Award-winning editor and twice British Fantasy Award-winning author, brings formal invention and restrained literary prose to a subgenre he clearly loves enough to pick a fight with. The result is the most interesting folk horror collection of 2026. Full review inside.

by Jim Mcleod•
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Backstabbers by Eliza Jabore Review: The Slasher That Bites Back

Backstabbers by Eliza Jabore Review: The Slasher That Bites Back

Eliza Jabore’s debut novel Backstabbers sends three friends, Jade, Stef, and Zoe, into Washington State’s Bones Hollow Trail, the former hunting ground of a serial killer, with nothing but wilderness, each other, and a true crime podcast for company. What begins as a survivalist slasher quickly becomes something more precise: a dark, funny, and quietly devastating study of female friendship under impossible pressure. This is the slasher novel 2026 needed.

by Jim Mcleod•
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Murphy’s Lore by Dan Soule: A Science Fiction Horror Novella That Gets Under Your Skin

Murphy’s Lore by Dan Soule: A Science Fiction Horror Novella That Gets Under Your Skin

Dan Soule’s Murphy’s Lore arrives in 2026 as a standalone republication of a novella originally published in Crystal Lake’s A Graveyard of Stars anthology. It follows Murphy, a nineteen-year-old Black British field medic aboard a maintenance vessel at the edge of Algol space, as her crew retrieves a decades-old coffin from the void — and the alien artifact inside begins to unpick each crew member at the seams. Blue-collar sci-fi horror in the tradition of Alien and Event Horizon, but more interested in grief than gore, Murphy’s Lore is Soule’s most precise and emotionally demanding work to date.

by Jim Mcleod•
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Womb of Shadows: Peter Neal’s Biological Horror Debut

Womb of Shadows: Peter Neal’s Biological Horror Debut

Peter Neal’s debut Womb of Shadows — Book One of the Gods of the New Age trilogy — is biological horror at its most intimate and most devastating. Dr. Evelyn Hart injects her infant daughter with an unauthorised gene therapy and sets in motion a chain of events connecting a Virginia family to a classified military programme and a boy whose skin produces a compound that rewrites human attachment from the inside. Literary in its prose, ferocious in its moral questions, and unlike anything else in contemporary horror, Womb of Shadows is a book that gets under your skin and repurposes you from within.

by Jim Mcleod•
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Cruising by Dean Cade, Review: The Summer of 1973 Never Felt so Terrifying

Cruising by Dean Cade, Review: The Summer of 1973 Never Felt so Terrifying

Dean Cade’s debut horror novel Cruising sets a closeted gay teenager’s summer against the real historical backdrop of the Houston Mass Murders, the worst serial murder case in American history. Published by Slashic Horror Press in March 2026, the first book in the Summer 1973 trilogy earns its horror through patience, historical precision, and a portrait of queer vulnerability in 1973 Texas that is both formally controlled and genuinely devastating. Read the full review at Ginger Nuts of Horror.

by Jim Mcleod•