Forget the shimmery monofins and the singing crab. Ava Morwood, author of Until We Drown, traces mermaid folklore through its strangest corners: Peak District drowning pools, Japanese ningyo, the Feejee Mermaid and a scholar who blamed the plague on rotting merfolk. Dark mermaid legends as you have never heard them.
“Gingerly” is supposed to mean cautious and frightened, but it has nothing to do with red hair and everything to do with bad faith. From Erik the Red and Elizabeth I to Shirley Manson and Ginger Wildheart, this is a celebration of the famous redheads who never once tiptoed, with one gloriously snarky paragraph about Mick Hucknall thrown in. Ginger Nuts of Horror goes to bat for its own kind.
C.N. Vair’s Fawn is one of 2026’s most talked-about folk horror debuts, built around Tess Wynne, an Appalachian witch who rescues a red-mouthed, full-toothed fawn with unnatural appetites, and must decide what she is willing to become to protect what is hers. If that book has already got its teeth into you, this reading list was made for you. We’ve put together ten books that share Fawn’s DNA — from Emilia Hart’s multi-century witch saga Weyward to Cassandra Khaw’s blood-soaked fairy tale The Salt Grows Heavy to Genevieve Gornichec’s Norse folk horror The Witch’s Heart — each with a full mini-review. This is the definitive reading list for fans of folk horror, powerful witches, and women who bite back.
Every reviewer lies about the horror books they didn’t finish. This is my DNF confessional, five abandoned novels, the page I quit on, and the daft personal reasons I never made it to the end. Folk horror, slashers, and one book that made me put the telly on.
“Liminal horror” has become a hipster buzzword, so here is what it actually means and where it actually lives: the back of the shop. From Skinamarink, The Exit 8 and Vivarium to Edinburgh’s Hunter’s Tryst and the council-house terror of Ghostwatch, this is the case that the Backrooms are just a British backshift, and that British working-class horror beats the American liminal void at its own game. The Americans get the empty void. We get the void plus a supervisor.
Puppets in horror work because someone built them to be loved first. Furry Puppet Studio, the NYC custom puppet maker behind work for Apple, Casper, and Missy Elliott, shows why practical-effects horror keeps reaching for handmade faces. From Puppet Master to Dead Silence to Longlegs, the craft that delights is the same craft that frightens.
When a true-crime blogger insisted the killings in Harmed and Dangerous were real, Jasper Bark watched his own fiction bleed into fact. The truth was an alternate reality game engineered by Crystal Lake Publishing’s Naching T. Kassa — Killer Sleuth, fake QR codes, recorded readings and all. This is how a piece of viral book marketing fooled even a seasoned hoaxer.
This week, Ginger Nuts of Horror is marking the release of his new novel, Bad Things Happen Here, with three consecutive days of Mark Morris. Today, we are running our Top Five Mark Morris novels, five books drawn from across his career that show what he does when he is operating at full power. On Wednesday, Jim McLeod sits down with Mark for an in-depth interview. On Thursday, we publish our full review of Bad Things Happen Here.
Vic Kerry wakes up in I Know What You Did Last Summer—and he’s not scared. Between crushing on Jennifer Love Hewitt and exploiting Ben the Fisherman’s terrible wardrobe choices for a heat stroke victory, this horror interview template gets weird. Plus: why Velma needs Dr. House and Geordi La Forge.
Forty years after Stephen King published IT, Pennywise the Dancing Clown is still showing up: on HBO, in academic criticism, and now in Still Floating: 40 Years of Pennywise, edited by Bram Stoker Award-winner Tom Deady. The book brings together thirty contributors, including Stephen King expert Bev Vincent and co-author Richard Chizmar, to examine the cultural weight of a 1,138-page novel that never quite let go. This retrospective makes the case for why IT belongs in a different conversation than most horror fiction, and why that conversation is long overdue.
Ginger Nuts of Horror’s Jim McLeod reviews his book horror haul from Cymera Book Festival: Stephen Graham Jones x2, Sunyi Dean, Charlotte Cross, Amy Jane Stewart. Dread, ghosts, and a water heater closet to nowhere. Full roundup at GNOH.
The Scrappy-Doo plot twist buried inside James Gunn’s 2002 Scooby-Doo movie deserves a place among cinema’s great narrative subversions — here’s the case for taking it seriously.
Writing horror as an act of resistance, Amy Jane Stewart unpacks how her debut Hex House uses Scottish folklore to confront violence against women.
What shapes a horror writer? Antony J Stanton credits The Devil Rides Out, a ghostly TV film from 1982, and a healthy obsession with Dracula. He also names Between Two Fires as the most underrated horror novel ever written.
For 18 years, Ginger Nuts of Horror has been a voice the horror genre refused to silence. Now we need your help to keep the server running. I’m Jim Mcleod, the founder of Ginger Nuts of Horror. I started this website on a whim while recovering from surgery, heavily medicated, … Help Ginger Nuts of Horror Survive: 18 Years of Horror ReviewsRead more
