Gretchen McNeil’s second adult novel drops a former-FBI priest and a stubborn constable on a boat-less Newfoundland island where the locals crave daily Mass. Our five-star review reads We Are For The Dark as religious folk horror that fuses detective fiction, Catholic dread, and a love story into one merciless question.
Tony Jones rounds up five new YA horror novels for August 2026. Cynthia Murphy’s Paint Me Like Your Dead Girls leads the pack as a top recommendation for schools, while Vincent Ralph’s Bleak Haven Quartet ends on a minor high. Melinda Salisbury and Jacqueline West deliver Folk Horror and small town chills.
Hell is a company in Mackenzie Reed’s adult debut, and the joke mostly works. Our four-star review gets into the corporate-underworld satire, the slow-burn romance, the grief thread, and the worldbuilding that strains under its own reveals.
Penny Lane Is Dead delivers strong practical gore and real tension inside its beach house setting. But Hope Madden finds the home invasion horror undercut by tonal clashes and a third act aimed at the wrong target.
Vincent Ralph talks us through Corpse Creek, the grief horror centrepiece of his Bleak Haven series, and the drowned brother who will not stay under. He explains how four YA horror novels rework R.L. Stine’s Fear Street into something darker, and why Fear Farm had to end the whole thing in blood.
In Still Lost, Sam A. Miller hands the deadpan of Sam O’Nella Academy a nervous system. His eight linked near-future science fiction stories let a superior alien race fix every human threat, then watch us wreck ourselves anyway. A debut short story collection that runs warmer than Black Mirror and closer to George Saunders.
Susan McCauley’s The Raven is a four-star gothic horror novel set in the 1665 plague winter, where a Yorkshire cobbler’s grief, faith and madness braid into folk-horror dread. A patient, disturbing historical horror about the monster who keeps a kind face.
Jo Salazar’s If We Survive the Night is apocalyptic YA horror built around one of the most compelling antiheroes the genre has produced in years. Quinn, sixteen, ASPD-diagnosed, and done with the systems that have failed her since childhood, finds herself at the start of the zombie apocalypse inside a residential treatment centre. What follows is a fast, psychologically precise survival story that asks hard questions about who gets written off as dangerous, who gets called a hero, and what those labels are actually worth when civilisation ends. Sharpened by Salazar’s social work background and driven by a protagonist you can’t look away from, this is feminist horror fiction doing exactly what the best of the genre does: using monsters as a mirror.
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