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.
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.
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.
