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.
Jack Rushton is a thirty-nine-year-old vampire who just wants to be left alone with his Radio 4 comedies and his unrequited crush. Instead, he’s been blackmailed by a six-hundred-year-old vampire queen, hunted by a clueless anti-vampire collective, and his teenage sister is developing migraines that might be something far worse. Gayle Ramage’s Jockula is a darkly comic Scottish vampire horror that earns both halves of that descriptor.
Rachel Feder’s The Turn is a contemporary Gothic novella that reimagines the classic governess narrative for the pandemic era. This unsettling literary horror explores the monstrous bond between caregiver and child, the politics of care, and the terror of having your own memory rewritten. A precise, slow-creeping piece of vampire fiction that earns every scare.
Kristopher Woofter’s Archival Anxiety in Documentary and Mockumentary Horror offers a heady intellectual investigation into how films like Ghostwatch, Lake Mungo, and Unfriended capture our cosmic fears of the uncapturable. This academic study traces the genre’s evolution from gothic epistolary novels to screenlife horror, examining our fraught relationship with the cameras that document our lives—and our deaths.
Ava Morwood’s Until We Drown is a psychological horror novel that burrows into the cracks of a fractured marriage and finds something ancient waiting there. Steeped in Peak District folklore and reworking Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid into something far darker, this is folk horror at its most intimate and devastating.
Paula Cappa’s Wolf Magick is a Gothic dark fantasy that blends supernatural romance with shapeshifting horror and Celtic folklore. Marc Sexton has spent his life resisting wolf magick, but when shadow wolves begin hunting him, the beast within can no longer be controlled. This is a book that wants to be felt, not just followed.
