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.
Horror Book Reviews
Stephanie Campisi on The Unfinished Business and the Ghosts We Keep
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.
Steal Me by Helen Grant: A Folk Horror Novella That Reads You Back
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.
While They Watch by Leicole Lang: A Horror of Isolation
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.
What Happened to Those Girls: Review of Carlyn Greenwald’s Chilling Thriller
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 on Her Queer Slasher What Happened to Those Girls
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.
Doe by Rebecca Barrow: YA Horror in Verse That Breathes Dread
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.
Dopefoot by Joshua Millican: Cryptid Horror With Teeth
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.
Harmed and Dangerous: Is This the Real Life? Is This Just Fantasy?
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.
Women of the Weird West, edited by KC Grifant: The Frontier Reclaimed
KC Grifant’s Women of the Weird West gathers 25 stories and poems that hand the gun to every woman the old westerns left out. This weird western horror anthology from Brigids Gate Press blends frontier folklore, women in horror, and speculative western short stories into one of the sharpest entries in the weird west revival.
Tiffany Royster: Inside Echoes of the Forgotten, a Folk Horror Series
Horror author Tiffany Royster launched Echoes of the Forgotten on 12 June 2026, a folk horror series built on horror folklore and twelve standalone stories. In our interview she explains how the Broken Spine collective came together in twenty-four hours, why every author shares an equal voice, and what her own story Warden Tree adds to this multi-author horror series. She also hints at what the family plans to release next.
By Dawn’s Early Light by Graeme Reynolds: Supernatural Horror Review
Graeme Reynolds’ By Dawn’s Early Light pulls private investigator Jack Carlton back into the dark, trading AA meetings for the hunt for a serial killer called The Witchfinder. This splatterpunk sequel to Night Bleeds Into Dawn blends occult detective horror, real human characters and unflinching gore — and a finale that truly rips.
We Call Them Witches by India-Rose Bower: You Will Never Look at Anything the Same Way After This Novel
India-Rose Bower’s debut We Call Them Witches is a folk horror that braids eldritch creatures, pagan ritual and a sapphic romance through a post-apocalyptic Britain. Our review digs into how Bower builds dread, writes family, and lands right on the front edge of where horror is heading.
Bad Things Happen Here by Mark Morris: Horror That Never Left Room 55
Mark Morris’s Bad Things Happen Here is slow-burn British supernatural horror at its most character-driven and most unsettling. Five former university friends are pulled back together after twenty years when the past trauma they never actually dealt with starts bleeding into their children’s lives. Published by Flame Tree Press on 30 June 2026, this is ensemble horror fiction with the psychological precision and atmospheric dread that defines Morris at his best.
The Fantastical Horror of Frances White’s The Bone Door
In The Bone Door, Frances White crafts a trauma fantasy where a memory labyrinth becomes an emotional horror. Hop’s journey through locked doors is a devastating exploration of grief and healing. This isn’t just dark fantasy—it’s a compassionate look at bearing wounds that never fully close.
