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.
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.
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.
Juliet Blackwell’s The Séance Garden is a paranormal mystery that builds its horror through accumulated unease rather than cheap shocks. Set in Monterey and centred on a skeptical historian of the occult, this Gothic-tinged supernatural suspense novel asks what happens when the past refuses to stay buried.
