Jessica Hamilton’s folk horror debut sends a grieving mother into a haunted wood that offers her family a second life, at a price only she has to pay. A true crime podcast framing device and a bold menopause-as-horror metaphor make this one of the more inventive femgore entries this year, even when it over-explains its own best idea.
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.
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.
Tony Jones rounds up five new YA horror novels for August 2026. Cynthia Murphy’s Paint Me Like Your Dead Girls leads the pack as a top recommendation for schools, while Vincent Ralph’s Bleak Haven Quartet ends on a minor high. Melinda Salisbury and Jacqueline West deliver Folk Horror and small town chills.
Scott Hawkins ends an eleven year wait with Blacktail, a folk horror revenge novel told entirely by animals, in which a grieving half-breed wolf sets out to wake a sleeping Forest God and finish off the human race. Our review looks at the language of the Hunt, the squirrel death cult of Car, and why this eco-horror odyssey earns every one of its five stars.
E.F. Schraeder looks back at a 1980s Midwestern girlhood where the ordinary was the frightening part and the undead were a relief. The essay traces childhood fears through slasher films, the satanic panic and goth subculture, and explains exactly what job folk horror had to do. From the author of The Case for Cryptids.
