British Fantasy Awards 2026: Best Horror Novel Shortlist Ranked

British Fantasy Awards 2026: Best Horror Novel Shortlist Ranked | Feature

All six books up for the August Derleth Award, ranked, with the case for each.

The British Fantasy Awards 2026 shortlist for Best Horror Novel, the August Derleth Award, puts six books in front of the voters: Stephen Graham Jones, Dan Howarth, Grady Hendrix, MK Hardy, Kat Dunn and Gretchen Felker-Martin. The winner is named at FantasyCon in Glasgow, which runs from 9 to 11 October. It is a strong year, with two vampire novels, two sapphic gothics, a cursed film and a political novel with no monster in it at all. This is my ranking of the shortlist, counting down to a shared top spot, with the reasons for every place.

Five of these six books are set in the past, and none of them uses it to hide. The past here is a mirror held at an angle. Lionhearts takes the angle away. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter does both at once, and the two share the top spot.

Five of the six novels on this shortlist are set in the past. A Blackfeet man in Montana in the 1870s. Pregnant girls hidden in a Florida home in 1970. A steel baron’s wife in the Peak District in 1888. A new bride on the Caithness cliffs in 1890. A film archivist on Staten Island in 1985. The sixth, Lionhearts, is set in a Northern England you could catch a bus to tomorrow. It is also the hardest of the six to sit with.

The easy charge is that horror has gone to the dressing-up box, that a bonnet and a gas lamp let a writer off the hook. It does not hold up here. Hendrix’s 1970 home for unmarried mothers is about who gets to decide what happens to a girl’s body now. Jones’s massacre is about land and who took it. The past in these books is a mirror, not a bolthole.

But a mirror lets you look at yourself from a safe angle. Lionhearts takes the angle away, and that is the thread running through this list.

6. Black Flame by Gretchen Felker-Martin

The idea is the best on the list. Ellen Kramer restores old film at a failing archive on Staten Island. Her new job is The Baroness, a German exploitation film made by a queer Jewish director and long thought burned by the Nazis. As she works on the print, she loses time. She sees things. She starts to think the film is real, and that each frame she saves lets something out.

After Manhunt and Cuckoo, this is Felker-Martin slowing right down, and in my Black Flame review I found the pace hard work. A good quarter of the book goes by before the dark stuff shows its face. Ellen is numb by design, which is true to her, but it keeps the reader at arm’s length. The graphic scenes, when they come, are extreme even by this genre’s standards.

I called it a very well-rendered screensaver of hell at the time, and that still feels right. It is lovely to look at and hard to feel. It gets its third star for nerve, because no other book here takes a risk this big. It sits at six because a bold book and a moving book are not the same thing.

5. The Needfire by MK Hardy

Put Hungerstone and The Needfire side by side and you can see the family likeness. A woman in a cold marriage. A big old house with its own ideas. A second woman who wakes her up. What splits them is where the dread comes from.

MK Hardy is the pen name of Morag Hannah and Erin Hardee, two writers who work together in Scotland. Their Norah Mackenzie runs from a scandal in Glasgow into a marriage of convenience with Alexander Barland. His house, Corrain, sits on the Caithness cliffs and is slowly coming apart. Roots creep through the walls. Ships that are not there drift in the mist. The housekeeper, Agnes Gunn, is odd, alluring and hiding things.

Under all of it are the Clearances. The Barlands emptied this land of its crofters, and the land has not forgotten. In my review of The Needfire I argued that this is the book’s real strength: the house’s grudge is justice, not scenery. Agnes is a sly turn on the Mrs Danvers type, too.

It is not perfect. The first half takes its time, and Alexander is more a symbol of rotten gentry than a man. Where Dunn’s hunger is a spell, Hardy’s comes with a cause, rooted in real land and real people who were put off it. Read them back to back and each makes the other look sharper.

4. Hungerstone by Kat Dunn

Kat Dunn cut her teeth on young adult fiction, and this is her first novel for adults. She takes Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, the vampire story that beat Dracula to the punch by a quarter of a century, and drags it out of its Austrian castle into the smoke of industrial Sheffield and the moors above it. That move alone tells you she means business.

Lenore has been married to Henry, a steel baron with big social plans, for ten years. It has gone sour. Then a carriage crashes near their remote house, and Carmilla comes in from the wreck. She is pale and weak by day, bright at night, and will not eat at the table. Girls in the villages nearby start to sicken with a hunger of their own. A hunt Henry has planned hangs over the whole house.

What I like most is where Dunn points the fangs. Le Fanu’s Carmilla is a threat to a household. Dunn’s Carmilla is a way out of one. The marriage is the real horror here, ten years of being a rich man’s ornament, and Lenore’s slow, building anger is what drives the book. Dunn writes it in rich, lush prose that suits the gas lamps and the blood. Henry is also the first of two Henrys on this list, and I would not have either of them round for tea.

It is not a book that will keep you up with the lights on. It is more seductive than scary, and that will split readers who come to it for the vampire. It also reads like two halves, and the join between them shows. Neither problem cost it its fourth star from me, but both kept it off the top.

3. Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix

Wellwood House in St Augustine is where girls go to vanish for a while. They are pregnant and unmarried, and the plan is simple: have the baby in secret, sign it away, go home and never speak of it. Fifteen year old Fern arrives scared and alone. Around her are Rose, a hippie who means to keep her baby, Zinnia, a young musician, and Holly, not yet fourteen, who does not speak. Miss Wellwood runs the place with an iron grip. Then a librarian slips Fern a book of witchcraft.

Anyone expecting a fun coven romp has the wrong book. As I said in my Witchcraft for Wayward Girls review, this is pregnancy horror, and it is angry. The cruelty the adults hand out is far scarier than any spell. The magic is real, and it costs the girls, but Hendrix never lets you forget who built the trap in the first place. It is his strongest and most clear-eyed book.

So why not top of the pile? It runs close to five hundred pages in paperback and is the warmest, most readable book on the list. Fern grows from a terrified girl into someone who can fight back, and the ending lets you leave with hope. The two books that share first place are far less interested in your comfort.

Joint 1st: Lionhearts by Dan Howarth

Here is the book with no costume on. Henry Oswald, the second Henry on this list, loses his daughter in an explosion. Then he loses his marriage, his job and his home. A local community group offers him a hand. What sits under the kindness is hatred, and Henry is half in and half out, close enough to feel its pull.

There is no monster. There is no ghost. There is a part of Northern England that has been let down for years, and a man with every reason to want someone to blame. When I reviewed Lionhearts by Dan Howarth, I said the book wants to indict you, and it does. Howarth makes Henry’s slide feel almost reasonable, then turns round and asks why you were nodding along. The short, clipped prose keeps you locked inside a head you would rather leave. It is brutal and hard going, and that is the point.

It is also the outsider here. Howarth put it out through Northern Republic, his own imprint, after an indie press folded and an agent passed. It sits on a list beside Titan, Tor Nightfire, Solaris and Manilla Press, and it earns its place. A win for Lionhearts would be a win for every writer who has been told no and did it anyway.

Joint 1st: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones

Three voices, one inside the next. Etsy Beaucarne is an academic in 2012, chasing tenure, when she finds a journal from 1912. It belongs to her ancestor Arthur Beaucarne, a Lutheran pastor in Montana. Inside the journal is a third voice: Good Stab, a Blackfeet man who comes to Arthur’s church and tells him what happened after a caged creature called the Cat Man bit him in 1833.

Jones strips the vampire back to the bone. No flying, no capes, barely even the word. This is an infection, and what it leaves behind is a hunger that never ends. The real villains are the buffalo hunters, killing herds for hides and starving the people who lived off them. Behind it all is the Marias Massacre of 1870, when the US Army attacked a Blackfeet camp. Arthur, pompous, greedy and talking far too much, is both a pain and a joy, and the book swings from grief to horror to some proper laughs.

Anthony Watson reviewed it for us first and thought it might be Jones’s best book yet. When I came to it in my Buffalo Hunter Hunter review, I agreed, and saw it as the peak of a run that takes in The Only Good Indians and My Heart Is a Chainsaw. It asks work of you. There are Pikuni words left untranslated and history it expects you to know. It pays you back in full.

And it is the answer to the pattern this list throws up. Like the other historical books here, it uses the past to say something about now. Like Lionhearts, it will not let you watch from a safe seat, because Etsy’s frame drags 1870 into a living woman’s life. Lionhearts takes the angle away; Jones does both at once. That is why they share the top, and why I could not split them.

Whoever lifts the award in Glasgow, the shortlist has already made its case. The past is not where horror goes to hide; it is where it goes to load.

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