Blood in the Bricks proves folk horror doesn’t need fields or standing stones to unsettle you. Neil Williamson’s anthology hauls the genre into the underground, the surgery ward and the skate park, with standout urban horror short stories from James Bennett, Dan Coxon and Ray Cluley. A bleak, brilliant collection that finds the uncanny in the everyday city.
H.M. Wolfe’s Daggermouth is being sold as dark dystopian romance, but it reads like social horror with the safety off. In New Found Haven, love outside your ring is a death sentence, feminine rage is a survival skill, and a forced marriage becomes a cage. Here is why this enemies-to-lovers opener to The Heart duology belongs on any dark fiction shelf.
Costume designer Sarah Hinkley spent years dressing other people’s stories on the sets of SVU and Monsterland. Now she’s written her own: The Red Sacrament, a debut vampire novel set in a starving, besieged 1870 Paris. We talked queer vampire fiction, the long shadow of Interview with the Vampire, and why her immortals are petty, risk-averse, and far too tired of each other.
Luke Dumas follows A History of Fear and The Paleontologist with Nothing Tastes as Good, a body horror novel that drops Emmett Truesdale into the Obexity weight-loss trial and watches the miracle curdle into cannibal cravings. My review digs into how Dumas turns fatphobia, diet culture, and the Ozempic moment into the year’s most quietly devastating horror.
Slasher Summer drops seven friends, each named after a slasher icon, back into the cabin where a cult ’80s film was shot. E. L. Chen talks to Ginger Nuts of Horror about the Final Girl, slasher tropes, the nostalgia economy, and writing diverse horror into a canon that killed people like her first. From Sweetside Motel to a Final Girl she keeps marching back onto set, Chen is the literary slasher’s sharpest new voice.
Tracy Fahey’s Queens of the Crone Age (PS Publishing, 2026) wakes the Cailleach, the Hag of Beara, and threads standalone tales into one long incantation. My review digs into why this feminist folk horror collection, steeped in Irish mythology and the power of older women, is some of the boldest work of her career.
Avalon Fast’s Camp takes the bones of a summer camp horror and grows something stranger from them. This sapphic, witchy coming-of-age tale follows Zola Grimmer’s grief-stricken Emily into a coven of damaged young women, trading slasher mechanics for melancholy magic. Here’s why this girl horror lingers.
