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.
Stephanie Campisi’s The Unfinished Business is a cozy middle-grade ghost story that treats grief and letting go with rare honesty. I dig into the craft, the comedy, and why this spooky middle grade ghost story for kids about found family and the dead we carry sits out in front of where the genre is heading.
Stephanie Campisi kills off her mentor figure on page eighteen and rehires her as a ghost. In this interview the author of The Unfinished Business talks through her middle grade ghost story: grief played for laughs, a factory fire turned labour satire, and the one death the book refuses to console. Required reading for anyone tracking where cosy horror for kids goes next.
Helen Grant’s Steal Me is a folk horror novella built on fairy-tale bones, set in a small Scottish town where a bookshop sells each customer the one thing they most want to hide. My review digs into the cursed bookshop, the Grimm folklore at its root, and why this Scottish Gothic chiller about desire and temptation belongs on the same shelf as the folk horror revival.
Leicole Lang’s debut horror novel While They Watch channels the spirit of classic isolation horror, building on sequestered distress to instil some of the most intense chills in recent literary memory. Taking time to establish character before ratcheting up the spookiness, this indie horror masterpiece delivers a slow-burn dread that explodes into pure, adrenaline-pumping fear, refusing to hand-feed answers and staying true to its uncompromising principles straight through to the end.
Carlyn Greenwald’s What Happened to Those Girls drops three teenagers into a witch-haunted ghost town and lets only the bodies come back. My review digs into why this queer YA horror thriller, all grief and betrayal and small-town folk horror, hands its murder investigation to the one girl everyone wants to blame.
Carlyn Greenwald’s What Happened to Those Girls drops her most moody, body-horror-heavy book yet: a sapphic YA slasher where the toxic friend group doesn’t dissolve when the killer arrives — it’s the whole point. The Murder Land author talks survivor’s guilt, autistic representation, interstitial “found footage” chapters, and why losing someone who hurt you is its own kind of grief.
Rebecca Barrow’s Doe is a YA horror novel in verse that uses sharp, incantatory lines to build a dual-narrative story of jealousy, an ancient deer-like entity, and a deal that costs everything. Full review.
Joshua Millican’s Dopefoot is cryptid horror that earns its monster the hard way, growing dread out of Northern California’s outlaw cannabis trade before the Bigfoot legend ever steps in. This Mad Axe Media release blends backwoods folk horror with gonzo extremity and lands as one of indie horror’s most distinctive reads of 2026.
When a true-crime blogger insisted the killings in Harmed and Dangerous were real, Jasper Bark watched his own fiction bleed into fact. The truth was an alternate reality game engineered by Crystal Lake Publishing’s Naching T. Kassa — Killer Sleuth, fake QR codes, recorded readings and all. This is how a piece of viral book marketing fooled even a seasoned hoaxer.
