Muñeca by Cynthia Gómez is Latine Gothic horror at its most precise: a working-class bruja, a bespelled heiress, and 1968 Oakland burning below. Read our full review.
Dan Coxon’s Come Sing for the Harrowing (2026): Folk Horror Reimagined
Dan Coxon’s Come Sing for the Harrowing, reissued by CLASH Books in April 2026, is eighteen stories of folk horror transported into the texture of contemporary British life. The uncanny shows up in a Cheddar Gorge cave system, a crumbling urban estate, a Brixton supermarket, a medieval tourist attraction that is just a little too authentic. Coxon, a World Fantasy Award-winning editor and twice British Fantasy Award-winning author, brings formal invention and restrained literary prose to a subgenre he clearly loves enough to pick a fight with. The result is the most interesting folk horror collection of 2026. Full review inside.
Backstabbers by Eliza Jabore Review: The Slasher That Bites Back
Eliza Jabore’s debut novel Backstabbers sends three friends, Jade, Stef, and Zoe, into Washington State’s Bones Hollow Trail, the former hunting ground of a serial killer, with nothing but wilderness, each other, and a true crime podcast for company. What begins as a survivalist slasher quickly becomes something more precise: a dark, funny, and quietly devastating study of female friendship under impossible pressure. This is the slasher novel 2026 needed.
Murphy’s Lore by Dan Soule: A Science Fiction Horror Novella That Gets Under Your Skin
Dan Soule’s Murphy’s Lore arrives in 2026 as a standalone republication of a novella originally published in Crystal Lake’s A Graveyard of Stars anthology. It follows Murphy, a nineteen-year-old Black British field medic aboard a maintenance vessel at the edge of Algol space, as her crew retrieves a decades-old coffin from the void — and the alien artifact inside begins to unpick each crew member at the seams. Blue-collar sci-fi horror in the tradition of Alien and Event Horizon, but more interested in grief than gore, Murphy’s Lore is Soule’s most precise and emotionally demanding work to date.
Eat the Light by Andrew Najberg, Review, A Post-Apocalyptic Cosmic Horror Masterwork
Andrew Najberg’s Eat the Light fuses post-apocalyptic survival horror with cosmic dread in a novel that follows two young sisters through a world where light itself has become predatory. Brutal, tender, and built on a sibling bond that gives the darkness something worth devouring, this is literary horror operating at full capacity.
Womb of Shadows: Peter Neal’s Biological Horror Debut
Peter Neal’s debut Womb of Shadows — Book One of the Gods of the New Age trilogy — is biological horror at its most intimate and most devastating. Dr. Evelyn Hart injects her infant daughter with an unauthorised gene therapy and sets in motion a chain of events connecting a Virginia family to a classified military programme and a boy whose skin produces a compound that rewrites human attachment from the inside. Literary in its prose, ferocious in its moral questions, and unlike anything else in contemporary horror, Womb of Shadows is a book that gets under your skin and repurposes you from within.
Kentucky Dragon by Michael Park: A Folk Horror Review
Kentucky Dragon by Michael Park is folk horror at its sharpest. A demonic debt, a Nazi inheritance, and a coal fire burning for three centuries converge in this intelligent, violent novel about intergenerational trauma and the moment the bill comes due. The chicken man will haunt your imagination long after the final page.