Ginger Nuts of Horror’s Jim McLeod reviews his book horror haul from Cymera Book Festival: Stephen Graham Jones x2, Sunyi Dean, Charlotte Cross, Amy Jane Stewart. Dread, ghosts, and a water heater closet to nowhere. Full roundup at GNOH.
Horror book
Headlights by CJ Leede Review: Horror at Its Most Devastating
CJ Leede’s Headlights is the most ambitious novel of her career: a supernatural FBI thriller set against the frozen Colorado wilderness that fuses folk horror, procedural crime, and cosmic dread into something that stays with you long after the last page. Special Agent Daniel Stansfield returns to Denver on his final day with the FBI, drawn back by a case he never solved and a signature that defies explanation — people waking on highway shoulders, wearing the skin of victims, each with a stranger’s hair knotted around their tongue. Leede uses horror to do what only horror can: hold grief, trauma, freedom, and the afterlife simultaneously, without flinching from any of them. This is a review of a novel that rearranges something in the reader. Read on.
The Devil in I by Angel R. Sánchez Review: Possession Turned Inward
Angel R. Sánchez’s possession novel The Devil in I trades grand spectacle for creeping internal dread, an indie horror book that understands how much damage a single misplaced shadow can do.
Sunyi Dean’s The Girl with a Thousand Faces: A Gothic Ghost Story
Sunyi Dean’s The Girl with a Thousand Faces (Tor/HarperVoyager, May 2026) is a structurally daring gothic horror set in an alternate 1975 Kowloon Walled City, where fifty-three-year-old triad ghost talker Mercy Chan is forced to confront a powerful new spirit and the past she cannot remember. Drawing on Chinese ghost lore, the real history of the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, and a bold four-timeline narrative, Dean’s second novel is a deeply personal, formally ambitious work that confirms her as one of the most interesting voices in the genre today. This is Jim McLeod’s full review for Ginger Nuts of Horror.
Castle Casino 2026: Up to 1300% Bonus for Australian Players
Castle Casino 2026: Up to 1300% Bonus for Australian Players Founded in 2022, Castle Casino takes the medieval theme seriously, and the bonus structure even more so. The welcome package climbs from 250% to 400% across three deposits, free spins stack up to 3,650 per year, and a $50 no … Castle Casino 2026: Up to 1300% Bonus for Australian PlayersRead more
Muñeca by Cynthia Gómez Review: Latine Gothic Horror at Its Sharpest
Muñeca by Cynthia Gómez is Latine Gothic horror at its most precise: a working-class bruja, a bespelled heiress, and 1968 Oakland burning below. Read our full review.
Cynthia Gómez: On Muñeca, Queer Gothic Horror, and Writing Oakland’s Magic
Cynthia Gómez discusses her debut novel Muñeca, a surreal queer Gothic set in 1968 Oakland, and why working-class witches make the most compelling horror protagonists.
Dan Coxon’s Come Sing for the Harrowing (2026): Folk Horror Reimagined
Dan Coxon’s Come Sing for the Harrowing, reissued by CLASH Books in April 2026, is eighteen stories of folk horror transported into the texture of contemporary British life. The uncanny shows up in a Cheddar Gorge cave system, a crumbling urban estate, a Brixton supermarket, a medieval tourist attraction that is just a little too authentic. Coxon, a World Fantasy Award-winning editor and twice British Fantasy Award-winning author, brings formal invention and restrained literary prose to a subgenre he clearly loves enough to pick a fight with. The result is the most interesting folk horror collection of 2026. Full review inside.
Backstabbers by Eliza Jabore Review: The Slasher That Bites Back
Eliza Jabore’s debut novel Backstabbers sends three friends, Jade, Stef, and Zoe, into Washington State’s Bones Hollow Trail, the former hunting ground of a serial killer, with nothing but wilderness, each other, and a true crime podcast for company. What begins as a survivalist slasher quickly becomes something more precise: a dark, funny, and quietly devastating study of female friendship under impossible pressure. This is the slasher novel 2026 needed.
Murphy’s Lore by Dan Soule: A Science Fiction Horror Novella That Gets Under Your Skin
Dan Soule’s Murphy’s Lore arrives in 2026 as a standalone republication of a novella originally published in Crystal Lake’s A Graveyard of Stars anthology. It follows Murphy, a nineteen-year-old Black British field medic aboard a maintenance vessel at the edge of Algol space, as her crew retrieves a decades-old coffin from the void — and the alien artifact inside begins to unpick each crew member at the seams. Blue-collar sci-fi horror in the tradition of Alien and Event Horizon, but more interested in grief than gore, Murphy’s Lore is Soule’s most precise and emotionally demanding work to date.
Eat the Light by Andrew Najberg, Review, A Post-Apocalyptic Cosmic Horror Masterwork
Andrew Najberg’s Eat the Light fuses post-apocalyptic survival horror with cosmic dread in a novel that follows two young sisters through a world where light itself has become predatory. Brutal, tender, and built on a sibling bond that gives the darkness something worth devouring, this is literary horror operating at full capacity.
Womb of Shadows: Peter Neal’s Biological Horror Debut
Peter Neal’s debut Womb of Shadows — Book One of the Gods of the New Age trilogy — is biological horror at its most intimate and most devastating. Dr. Evelyn Hart injects her infant daughter with an unauthorised gene therapy and sets in motion a chain of events connecting a Virginia family to a classified military programme and a boy whose skin produces a compound that rewrites human attachment from the inside. Literary in its prose, ferocious in its moral questions, and unlike anything else in contemporary horror, Womb of Shadows is a book that gets under your skin and repurposes you from within.
Kentucky Dragon by Michael Park: A Folk Horror Review
Kentucky Dragon by Michael Park is folk horror at its sharpest. A demonic debt, a Nazi inheritance, and a coal fire burning for three centuries converge in this intelligent, violent novel about intergenerational trauma and the moment the bill comes due. The chicken man will haunt your imagination long after the final page.
Cruising by Dean Cade, Review: The Summer of 1973 Never Felt so Terrifying
Dean Cade’s debut horror novel Cruising sets a closeted gay teenager’s summer against the real historical backdrop of the Houston Mass Murders, the worst serial murder case in American history. Published by Slashic Horror Press in March 2026, the first book in the Summer 1973 trilogy earns its horror through patience, historical precision, and a portrait of queer vulnerability in 1973 Texas that is both formally controlled and genuinely devastating. Read the full review at Ginger Nuts of Horror.
Philip Fracassi’s Gothic: The Horror of Wanting Too Much
Philip Fracassi’s Gothic follows Tyson Parks, a struggling horror novelist who receives an antique desk that channels an ancient evil through his creative desperation. In our full review at Ginger Nuts of Horror, we examine why this cursed-object novel is one of the sharpest entries in the writer-descending-into-madness subgenre in years, and why Fracassi’s multi-POV structure and pulp-literary sensibility make it something considerably more unsettling than nostalgia.