Tatiana Schlote-Bonne’s What Feeds Below is a YA horror fantasy that descends into the Void and refuses to let you back up for air. Cave horror, fungal body horror, and a devastating friendship story combine into something genuinely new. Our full review explores what makes this one of 2026’s essential horror reads.
Tony Jones returns with his latest YA horror and middle grade horror roundup, covering seven books that blend horror with thriller, dystopian and science fiction. Standouts include Dan Smith’s The Night House Files, perfect for reluctant readers, and twisty YA thrillers from Carlyn Greenwald and Dana Mele.
Jack Rushton is a thirty-nine-year-old vampire who just wants to be left alone with his Radio 4 comedies and his unrequited crush. Instead, he’s been blackmailed by a six-hundred-year-old vampire queen, hunted by a clueless anti-vampire collective, and his teenage sister is developing migraines that might be something far worse. Gayle Ramage’s Jockula is a darkly comic Scottish vampire horror that earns both halves of that descriptor.
Rachel Feder’s The Turn is a contemporary Gothic novella that reimagines the classic governess narrative for the pandemic era. This unsettling literary horror explores the monstrous bond between caregiver and child, the politics of care, and the terror of having your own memory rewritten. A precise, slow-creeping piece of vampire fiction that earns every scare.
Kristopher Woofter’s Archival Anxiety in Documentary and Mockumentary Horror offers a heady intellectual investigation into how films like Ghostwatch, Lake Mungo, and Unfriended capture our cosmic fears of the uncapturable. This academic study traces the genre’s evolution from gothic epistolary novels to screenlife horror, examining our fraught relationship with the cameras that document our lives—and our deaths.
Paula Cappa’s Wolf Magick is a Gothic dark fantasy that blends supernatural romance with shapeshifting horror and Celtic folklore. Marc Sexton has spent his life resisting wolf magick, but when shadow wolves begin hunting him, the beast within can no longer be controlled. This is a book that wants to be felt, not just followed.
Maura McHugh’s House of Wyrd is an occult horror novella that uses the Tarot’s Major Arcana as both structure and sacrament. When art provocateur Aly Wyrd vanishes on the eve of her visionary project’s opening, her estranged daughter Pallas must walk the Illumination Trail—a physical journey up an Irish mountain that mirrors the Fool’s journey through the twenty-two trumps. What unfolds is a mother-daughter reckoning wrapped in the skin of a magical mystery.
Weldon Burge’s Enter Vengeance is a paranormal police procedural that starts as a locked-room mystery and slides into supernatural dread. A guilt-ridden detective and a reluctant psychic chase Tisiphone, a Greek Fury dealing out revenge to those the courts let walk. Lean, unsettling, and built on old-fashioned suspense.
“Gingerly” is supposed to mean cautious and frightened, but it has nothing to do with red hair and everything to do with bad faith. From Erik the Red and Elizabeth I to Shirley Manson and Ginger Wildheart, this is a celebration of the famous redheads who never once tiptoed, with one gloriously snarky paragraph about Mick Hucknall thrown in. Ginger Nuts of Horror goes to bat for its own kind.
