Mike Brooks’s This Is Where the Future Bleeds is a dark fantasy adventure that asks what we owe each other when the world is ending. With sharp dialogue, queer representation, and creeping dread, it’s a book that refuses to look away from the bleeding future.
Ava Morwood’s Until We Drown is a psychological horror novel that burrows into the cracks of a fractured marriage and finds something ancient waiting there. Steeped in Peak District folklore and reworking Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid into something far darker, this is folk horror at its most intimate and devastating.
Catriona Silvey’s Vervain Hollow is a masterclass in folk horror and psychological suspense. Through the eyes of an unreliable narrator, this cult horror novel weaves a tale of memory and magnetism that lingers long after the final page.
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.
In this interview, Miranda Smith reveals how Scary Movie Night blends Hitchcock homage and domestic suspense into a one-night locked-room thriller. A former scream queen’s costume party becomes a deadly game of masks, gaslighting, and intimate betrayal.
Forget the shimmery monofins and the singing crab. Ava Morwood, author of Until We Drown, traces mermaid folklore through its strangest corners: Peak District drowning pools, Japanese ningyo, the Feejee Mermaid and a scholar who blamed the plague on rotting merfolk. Dark mermaid legends as you have never heard them.
C.N. Vair’s The Devil Knows Her Name (published as Fawn in the UK) reimagines witchcraft as costly, physical, and entwined with Appalachian land. In this interview, she discusses the novel’s ecological argument, its refusal to romanticise magic, and what it means to write for the women who were called rebellious.
Jeff Strand’s Fun Times at the Bloodbath is horror comedy with teeth, a video game horror novel about a playtest no one can quit. The Bram Stoker Award winning author weaponises the attention economy and folds extreme horror into his sharpest comic engine yet. Here is why it gets under your skin.
Sara Hinkley’s The Red Sacrament is historical vampire horror with a sharp political edge, set in a midnight Paris theatre in 1869. My review digs into the slow dread, the gorgeous gothic prose, and the way this queer vampire novel turns the Anne Rice tradition toward class, labour, and the coming Paris Commune.
Leah Rowan’s debut Marion reimagines Psycho with one savage swap: the woman in the shower fights back and kills Norm. My review digs into this feminist horror standout, from its dark humor and dual-POV craft to its themes of female rage, sisterhood, and surviving domestic abuse.
Blood in the Bricks proves folk horror doesn’t need fields or standing stones to unsettle you. Neil Williamson’s anthology hauls the genre into the underground, the surgery ward and the skate park, with standout urban horror short stories from James Bennett, Dan Coxon and Ray Cluley. A bleak, brilliant collection that finds the uncanny in the everyday city.
H.M. Wolfe’s Daggermouth is being sold as dark dystopian romance, but it reads like social horror with the safety off. In New Found Haven, love outside your ring is a death sentence, feminine rage is a survival skill, and a forced marriage becomes a cage. Here is why this enemies-to-lovers opener to The Heart duology belongs on any dark fiction shelf.
Costume designer Sarah Hinkley spent years dressing other people’s stories on the sets of SVU and Monsterland. Now she’s written her own: The Red Sacrament, a debut vampire novel set in a starving, besieged 1870 Paris. We talked queer vampire fiction, the long shadow of Interview with the Vampire, and why her immortals are petty, risk-averse, and far too tired of each other.
Luke Dumas follows A History of Fear and The Paleontologist with Nothing Tastes as Good, a body horror novel that drops Emmett Truesdale into the Obexity weight-loss trial and watches the miracle curdle into cannibal cravings. My review digs into how Dumas turns fatphobia, diet culture, and the Ozempic moment into the year’s most quietly devastating horror.
Tracy Fahey’s Queens of the Crone Age (PS Publishing, 2026) wakes the Cailleach, the Hag of Beara, and threads standalone tales into one long incantation. My review digs into why this feminist folk horror collection, steeped in Irish mythology and the power of older women, is some of the boldest work of her career.
