Desirée de Fez’s debut novel follows a mother and two daughters who can’t stand to be apart, until Christmas Eve in a shopping centre splits them open. Our Don’t Leave Her Alone review explains why this Spanish body horror novel, translated by Lizzie Davis, deserves a place on every horror shelf this autumn. Motherhood body horror fans should clear a space on the shelf.
Joko Anwar locks a meek journalist in a brutal Indonesian prison, and the bodies soon start piling up. Hope Madden finds a prison horror film that is slow to turn scary but full of gory horror comedy, a likeable cast and a surprisingly good heart. Our Ghost in the Cell review weighs the carnage against the camaraderie.
Peace Mbengei talks through her debut YA horror novel We Run the Night, where Luo night runners turn grief into body horror inside a Kenyan boarding school. She discusses the strangler fig at the story’s centre, the institutional cover up that follows, and why forgiveness, not revenge, sets her heroine free.
A.J. Malachite’s debut You See It Too turns the choose-your-own-adventure format into a body-horror trap, sending three queer students into a bayou preserve after a will-o’-the-wisp that turns out to have larvae. It is folk horror, eco-horror and Southern Gothic at once, with old money farming the swamp for generations. Four stars for a gamebook that refuses to let you save everyone.
Kailee Pedersen’s The Minimalist is a gruelling, unflinching psychological horror novel about a composer’s descent into madness. Published by St. Martin’s Press, it follows Mia Voss as she returns to her mentor’s Santa Fe mansion to complete his unfinished masterpiece, only to find the manuscript exerting a disturbing hold over her. Drawing from Pedersen’s own experiences as an adoptee and classical musician, this is body horror at its most intelligent—a meditation on artistic obsession, adoption trauma, and the sacrifices we make in pursuit of creative perfection.
The rotten city and the unreliable body are the same complaint, and very few novels admit it. Ahead of Lee Glenwright’s SOMA, a feature mapping British estate horror from Ramsey Campbell and Joel Lane to Gary McMahon and Alison Rumfitt, the body horror line from Clive Barker to Agustina Bazterrica, and the overlap almost nobody works.
