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.
CC Adams returns with Where the Roaches Are, a horror short story collection set in a hospital where the real damage is social rather than supernatural. Echoes of Nigel Kneale, Mark Morris and Roald Dahl run through a book built to disquiet rather than terrify. Read the stories in the order Adams gives you, because the order is doing work.
Kim Bo-young takes Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth and relocates it to a quarantined Korean fishing village in A Plagued Sea, her first horror novella in English. Translated by Sophie Bowman for Tor Nightfire, it turns cosmic horror into a pandemic elegy about grief, guilt and the people we cannot protect. Our five-star review explains why this hundred-page Korean Lovecraft retelling lingers.
Kailee Pedersen’s The Minimalist is a gruelling, unflinching psychological horror novel about a composer’s descent into madness. Published by St. Martin’s Press, it follows Mia Voss as she returns to her mentor’s Santa Fe mansion to complete his unfinished masterpiece, only to find the manuscript exerting a disturbing hold over her. Drawing from Pedersen’s own experiences as an adoptee and classical musician, this is body horror at its most intelligent—a meditation on artistic obsession, adoption trauma, and the sacrifices we make in pursuit of creative perfection.
Tor Nightfire’s August 2026 debut from Max Doty reinvents the haunted house novel with no ghost at all, only a property that eats the dead and unmakes the record of them. Our review digs into the complicity horror at its core, the class and money threaded underneath, and why this domestic horror lingers long after the last page.
Dark Tide 20: Urban Legends brings together three horror novellas from Leigh Kenny, Dan Franklin, and Nick Roberts, published by Crystal Lake Publishing. Our review breaks down a haunted house, a mother’s dread, and a podcast summoning that all go badly wrong. Three flavours of fear, one frightening finish each.
C.D. Major’s The Residency is a gothic suspense novel that builds dread with patient, deliberate precision. Set on a remote Scottish island, it follows single mother Ginny as she accepts an artist’s residency that proves far more dangerous than she imagined. With its uncanny paintings, whispering walls, and a community that knows more than it says, this is slow-burn horror at its most effective.
Mason Coile’s Driven is a self-driving car horror novel that inverts every AI horror trope of the last three years: the machine does not wake up, the man goes to sleep. Andrew Pyper’s final book under the Coile name is a locked room story with wheels, a grief novel in disguise, and a very cold joke about the rental market.
Isabelle Spotts’s Saint Delilah is a ghost story that refuses to be gentle. This feminist supernatural suspense novel follows Delilah, a murdered nineteen-year-old who becomes a ghost and, with the help of a medium and a man who can see the dead, hunts her killer. Evil entities threaten to consume her soul. It is a revenge narrative, a thriller, and a meditation on grief and justice. The dead don’t forget. Neither will you. Read the full review at Ginger Nuts of Horror.
Henry Corrigan’s Party of a Lifetime strands four queer friends in Monotony, a 1950s hell town that reshapes itself around their nightmares and slowly reshapes them too. This is body horror written with a mechanic’s patience, with a narcissistic mother at the centre of it, and it is the best thing Corrigan has written.
