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.
Horror book
Deadbeat by Maxim Volk, A Choose Your Own Queer Adventure Horror at Its Nastiest
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.
Pam Kowolski Is a Monster! by Sarah Langan Review: And I Thought I Held Grudges!
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.
Home Sick by Rhiannon Grist Review: Folk Horror That Gets Under Your Skin
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.
Why suspense makes digital games feel sharper
Why suspense makes digital games feel sharper Horror fans understand one thing very well: tension does not need to be loud to work. A closed door, a slow camera move, a pause before the reveal, or a small change in lighting can hold attention better than constant action. Digital games … Why suspense makes digital games feel sharper Read more
The Way It Haunted Him Review: Laura R. Samotin’s Dark Academia Horror Is the Real Thing
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.
Laura R. Samotin: On Grief, Demons and Dark Academia, All Because it was The Way it Haunted Him
Laura R. Samotin interview: her new queer dark academia horror The Way It Haunted Him channels Jewish folklore, grief, and a demon-infested archive.
Cymera Book Haul: Nine Books, One Ghost Cat, and a Water Heater Closet That Goes Nowhere Good, and Loads of the Uncanny
Ginger Nuts of Horror’s Jim McLeod reviews his book horror haul from Cymera Book Festival: Stephen Graham Jones x2, Sunyi Dean, Charlotte Cross, Amy Jane Stewart. Dread, ghosts, and a water heater closet to nowhere. Full roundup at GNOH.
Headlights by CJ Leede Review: Horror at Its Most Devastating
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.
The Devil in I by Angel R. Sánchez Review: Possession Turned Inward
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: A Gothic Ghost Story
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.
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Muñeca by Cynthia Gómez Review: Latine Gothic Horror at Its Sharpest
Muñeca by Cynthia Gómez is Latine Gothic horror at its most precise: a working-class bruja, a bespelled heiress, and 1968 Oakland burning below. Read our full review.
Cynthia Gómez: On Muñeca, Queer Gothic Horror, and Writing Oakland’s Magic
Cynthia Gómez discusses her debut novel Muñeca, a surreal queer Gothic set in 1968 Oakland, and why working-class witches make the most compelling horror protagonists.
Dan Coxon’s Come Sing for the Harrowing (2026): Folk Horror Reimagined
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.