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.
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 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.
Out Law is vintage Dresden in a smaller package. Harry owes Marcone a debt, and the repayment involves helping a former criminal go straight. The IRS gets involved. An Aztec demon gets involved. Harry’s patience gets tested. The novella’s real magic is the moral friction: redemption is hard, awkward, and maybe impossible. But Butcher makes you root for it anyway. Lean prose, sharp action, genuine heart. The best Dresden novella yet.
A. G. Slatter’s The Sourdough Compendium gathers three long-out-of-print mosaic collections into a single 657-page volume of gothic horror that reads like the Rosetta Stone for her entire Sourdough universe. Our review explores how these folk horror stories, built on fairy-tale logic and female defiance, reward every dark fantasy reader who discovers them.
C.J. Dotson’s These Familiar Walls is a dual-timeline suburban horror novel that burns through the haunted house tradition and builds something sharper from the ashes. Following Amber Walker across 1998 and 2020, it is a psychological horror novel about the stories families tell to survive, the secrets buried in familiar walls, and the terrifying possibility that you deserve to be haunted. For fans of T. Kingfisher, Catriona Ward, and Cassandra Khaw.
Writing horror as an act of resistance, Amy Jane Stewart unpacks how her debut Hex House uses Scottish folklore to confront violence against women.
Brides In the Dark Review: Jacob Steven Mohr’s horror novella blends Gothic dark fairy tale and harpy lore into a tense fable of hidden truths.
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Camilla Bruce’s The Temptation of Charlotte North is a dark gothic fantasy that understands atmosphere is not decoration but a character with its own pulse. Set on a remote island in 1910, the novel follows Charlotte North, a rebellious young woman who discovers that a violent spirit released from an ancient tower might be the leverage she needs to escape a predetermined life. With three carefully woven points of view and prose that balances elegance with restraint, Bruce has written her most confident, unnerving novel yet.
