This week, Ginger Nuts of Horror is marking the release of his new novel, Bad Things Happen Here, with three consecutive days of Mark Morris. Today, we are running our Top Five Mark Morris novels, five books drawn from across his career that show what he does when he is operating at full power. On Wednesday, Jim McLeod sits down with Mark for an in-depth interview. On Thursday, we publish our full review of Bad Things Happen Here.
Forty years after Stephen King published IT, Pennywise the Dancing Clown is still showing up: on HBO, in academic criticism, and now in Still Floating: 40 Years of Pennywise, edited by Bram Stoker Award-winner Tom Deady. The book brings together thirty contributors, including Stephen King expert Bev Vincent and co-author Richard Chizmar, to examine the cultural weight of a 1,138-page novel that never quite let go. This retrospective makes the case for why IT belongs in a different conversation than most horror fiction, and why that conversation is long overdue.
UK’s Best Horror Movies That Set the Mark
Horror books for 10 year olds that pass the classroom test. Twenty middle grade picks from a librarian’s 100 Book Challenge, backed by real pupil reviews.
Maxim Volk’s Deadbeat — the first entry in Slashic Horror Press’s Extremities series — drops you dead on page one and hands you a choice. A choose-your-own-path narrative maze in relentless second person, it follows a gay househusband resurrected by a naked cult and left to navigate undead existence with an insatiable hunger for human flesh. Funny, nasty, structurally inventive, and built around complicity as its core horror mechanism, Deadbeat is one of the most confident debut novels in queer horror this year. Jim McLeod reviews.
Sarah Langan’s Pam Kowolski Is a Monster! (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2025) is a 119-page psychological horror novella about failed journalist Janet Chow, who attempts to expose her high school nemesis — now “Madame Pamela,” America’s favourite doomsday psychic — and uncovers a version of their shared past she’s spent twenty years getting wrong. Langan builds horror from the inside out: bitter, funny, and structurally precise, this is one of the most accomplished novellas published in horror this year. Read the full review at Ginger Nuts of Horror.
Rhiannon Grist’s debut novel Home Sick (Solaris, 2026) is a slow-burn psychological horror rooted in Scottish folklore and the particular dread of the domestic uncanny. Following Tamsin as her Scottish countryside fresh start becomes something far less clean, Grist builds claustrophobic menace from shared walls, unreliable narration, and a folkloric framework that deepens rather than resolves the horror. Read the full Ginger Nuts of Horror review of this essential 2026 folk horror debut.
Laura R. Samotin’s The Way It Haunted Him (Titan Books, June 2026) is her adult horror debut — a claustrophobic queer dark academia novel set in a Jewish archive overrun with dybbuks, mazzekin, and the particular danger of a man who has mistaken punishment for love. Jim McLeod reviews for Ginger Nuts of Horror.
CJ Leede’s Headlights is the most ambitious novel of her career: a supernatural FBI thriller set against the frozen Colorado wilderness that fuses folk horror, procedural crime, and cosmic dread into something that stays with you long after the last page. Special Agent Daniel Stansfield returns to Denver on his final day with the FBI, drawn back by a case he never solved and a signature that defies explanation — people waking on highway shoulders, wearing the skin of victims, each with a stranger’s hair knotted around their tongue. Leede uses horror to do what only horror can: hold grief, trauma, freedom, and the afterlife simultaneously, without flinching from any of them. This is a review of a novel that rearranges something in the reader. Read on.
Angel R. Sánchez’s possession novel The Devil in I trades grand spectacle for creeping internal dread, an indie horror book that understands how much damage a single misplaced shadow can do.
Sunyi Dean’s The Girl with a Thousand Faces (Tor/HarperVoyager, May 2026) is a structurally daring gothic horror set in an alternate 1975 Kowloon Walled City, where fifty-three-year-old triad ghost talker Mercy Chan is forced to confront a powerful new spirit and the past she cannot remember. Drawing on Chinese ghost lore, the real history of the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, and a bold four-timeline narrative, Dean’s second novel is a deeply personal, formally ambitious work that confirms her as one of the most interesting voices in the genre today. This is Jim McLeod’s full review for Ginger Nuts of Horror.
A countdown of five essential horror movies about unlicensed doctors, from Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator to the Soska sisters’ American Mary, exploring what happens when the scalpel meets obsession.
Dan Coxon’s Come Sing for the Harrowing, reissued by CLASH Books in April 2026, is eighteen stories of folk horror transported into the texture of contemporary British life. The uncanny shows up in a Cheddar Gorge cave system, a crumbling urban estate, a Brixton supermarket, a medieval tourist attraction that is just a little too authentic. Coxon, a World Fantasy Award-winning editor and twice British Fantasy Award-winning author, brings formal invention and restrained literary prose to a subgenre he clearly loves enough to pick a fight with. The result is the most interesting folk horror collection of 2026. Full review inside.
Eliza Jabore’s debut novel Backstabbers sends three friends, Jade, Stef, and Zoe, into Washington State’s Bones Hollow Trail, the former hunting ground of a serial killer, with nothing but wilderness, each other, and a true crime podcast for company. What begins as a survivalist slasher quickly becomes something more precise: a dark, funny, and quietly devastating study of female friendship under impossible pressure. This is the slasher novel 2026 needed.
Dan Soule’s Murphy’s Lore arrives in 2026 as a standalone republication of a novella originally published in Crystal Lake’s A Graveyard of Stars anthology. It follows Murphy, a nineteen-year-old Black British field medic aboard a maintenance vessel at the edge of Algol space, as her crew retrieves a decades-old coffin from the void — and the alien artifact inside begins to unpick each crew member at the seams. Blue-collar sci-fi horror in the tradition of Alien and Event Horizon, but more interested in grief than gore, Murphy’s Lore is Soule’s most precise and emotionally demanding work to date.
