After years away, Laura Mauro returns with Biographies of Valiant Drunken Tigers, a short story and a novella steeped in Japanese folklore. Shadowsick sends a decapitated head into spectral flight, while Lovesongs of the Nonmigratory Birds pulls the Yuki-Onna into a bleak, heartfelt tale of two people coming apart. A comeback well worth the wait.
Isabela Livino’s debut An Immaculate Deception traps a pregnant, devout woman in an isolated 1870s Brazilian estate where a family’s bargain with the devil has gone wrong. A Latin American Gothic of vanishing mirrors and disbelieved women, sitting alongside Mexican Gothic and Rosemary’s Baby, held back only by a slow middle third.
A. Rushby follows Slashed Beauties with All Her Beautiful Deaths, a dual-timeline gothic that turns Victorian death photography into a mystery about grief, art and ownership. It is atmospheric, queer and quietly hopeful, held back only by a present-day strand that crowds out its richer 1865 half.
In Crone, Keith Rosson binds a Pacific Northwest crime noir to a folk horror ghost story, following a grieving ex-detective through a corrupt town toward a witch who has been keeping his missing daughter for thirteen years. It is body-horror addiction, biker-gang rot, and generational violence, held together by prose of frightening control
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.
Dan Howarth follows Last Night of Freedom with Lionhearts, a political horror novel about grief curdling into hate somewhere Northern and thoroughly let down. Our Lionhearts book review looks at Henry Oswald, the staccato prose, and an ending that turns a depressed landscape florid, charged and brutal. Bring paracetamol.
