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.
Henry Corrigan’s Party of a Lifetime strands four queer friends in Monotony, a 1950s hell town that reshapes itself around their nightmares and slowly reshapes them too. This is body horror written with a mechanic’s patience, with a narcissistic mother at the centre of it, and it is the best thing Corrigan has written.
