All six books on the British Fantasy Awards 2026 shortlist for Best Horror Novel, ranked ahead of FantasyCon in Glasgow. Stephen Graham Jones, Dan Howarth, Grady Hendrix, MK Hardy, Kat Dunn and Gretchen Felker-Martin are all in the running for the August Derleth Award. Here is where each one lands, and why.
In this Jack Mackay interview, the author of Gloam and The Haunting of Old Splinter talks blame, brothers and a wishing claw on the edge of the North York Moors. He also looks back on Gloam’s double win at The Week Junior Book Awards 2026, Indira Varma’s reading of the Gloam audiobook and why middle grade horror should be genuinely scary.
Hollow Folk, the new novel from the author of the Dark Things duology, stops the clocks at an Appalachian mountain resort and leaves three co-workers trapped with the hotel’s century-old secrets. Damascus Mincemeyer finds a haunted hotel novel that pairs a charming horror romance with Clark’s most chilling scares yet, and gives it four out of five. Fans of Where Dark Things Grow and Quill & Crow Publishing House will want to check in.
In this A. Rushby interview, the author of All Her Beautiful Deaths talks Victorian death photography, the ethics of looking at other people’s grief and why her sentient Culpepper House wishes its family well. She also explains why, after the darker Slashed Beauties, she wanted a feminist gothic full of yearning, and names the YA horror novel that gave her nightmares.
Jennifer Thorne’s werewolf horror novel sends a grieving carer into an empty country mansion for a weekend of trespass, and the owners come home hungry. My Newbourne Park review looks at the siege, the seduction that follows, and why this class horror novel is the best thing the Diavola author has written.
Yuvashri Harish’s YA horror novel sends a dutiful Tamil babysitter into a Halloween night overrun by classic monsters and a vengeful dead author. This Kill Your Darlings review finds a YA horror debut for 2026 with sharp things to say about racism and people-pleasing. The middle drags, but the bite is real.
Joshua Chaplinsky charts the two hundred and fifty year history of the haunted house novel, from Pliny the Younger’s cursed Athens letter through Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Stephen King’s The Shining and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. It lands as his own contribution to the subgenre, The Man in the Watch Still Visits Me at Night, arrives from CLASH Books.
