Kelly Creagh’s A Date with Death is the rare paranormal romance that gives death a day job and a line manager. This grim reaper romance pairs a skeleton on the clock with a children’s librarian for a cosy-horror, grumpy-sunshine slow burn about found family and what it means to actually live.
Jack Mackay follows his debut Gloam with The Haunting of Old Splinter, a middle grade horror that hands the old wishing claw legend to two comic-mad brothers on a Yorkshire moor. It is a Monkey’s Paw retelling with real teeth, and one of the finest children’s horror books of 2026.
Tony Jones returns with his latest YA horror and middle grade horror roundup, covering seven books that blend horror with thriller, dystopian and science fiction. Standouts include Dan Smith’s The Night House Files, perfect for reluctant readers, and twisty YA thrillers from Carlyn Greenwald and Dana Mele.
Every Christmas Eve, an old Victorian don lights a lamp and tells his students a ghost story. Decades later, one of them must face what those tales were really about. My review of Tom Mead’s The Lamp in the Window, an eerie Christmas ghost story novella from Absinthe Books.
Jack Rushton is a thirty-nine-year-old vampire who just wants to be left alone with his Radio 4 comedies and his unrequited crush. Instead, he’s been blackmailed by a six-hundred-year-old vampire queen, hunted by a clueless anti-vampire collective, and his teenage sister is developing migraines that might be something far worse. Gayle Ramage’s Jockula is a darkly comic Scottish vampire horror that earns both halves of that descriptor.
Rachel Feder’s The Turn is a contemporary Gothic novella that reimagines the classic governess narrative for the pandemic era. This unsettling literary horror explores the monstrous bond between caregiver and child, the politics of care, and the terror of having your own memory rewritten. A precise, slow-creeping piece of vampire fiction that earns every scare.
Kristopher Woofter’s Archival Anxiety in Documentary and Mockumentary Horror offers a heady intellectual investigation into how films like Ghostwatch, Lake Mungo, and Unfriended capture our cosmic fears of the uncapturable. This academic study traces the genre’s evolution from gothic epistolary novels to screenlife horror, examining our fraught relationship with the cameras that document our lives—and our deaths.
Miranda Smith’s Scary Movie Night drops a woman into a costume party full of friends dressed as movie killers, then locks the doors. My horror book review digs into the meta-slasher and locked-room thriller, the final girl reborn, and the coercive-control story under the fun.
Mike Brooks’s This Is Where the Future Bleeds is a dark fantasy adventure that asks what we owe each other when the world is ending. With sharp dialogue, queer representation, and creeping dread, it’s a book that refuses to look away from the bleeding future.
2026 has delivered an exceptional year for horror, from Nia DaCosta’s brutal 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple to Curry Barker’s devastating Obsession. We rank the best horror films of 2026 so far, including Kane Parsons’ Backrooms, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, and Damian Mc Carthy’s Hokum.
Ava Morwood’s Until We Drown is a psychological horror novel that burrows into the cracks of a fractured marriage and finds something ancient waiting there. Steeped in Peak District folklore and reworking Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid into something far darker, this is folk horror at its most intimate and devastating.
Why Horror Franchises Refuse to Die: Fear, Fandom, and the Business of Endless Sequels Horror has … Why Horror Franchises Refuse to Die: Fear, Fandom, and the Business of Endless SequelsRead more
Paula Cappa’s Wolf Magick is a Gothic dark fantasy that blends supernatural romance with shapeshifting horror and Celtic folklore. Marc Sexton has spent his life resisting wolf magick, but when shadow wolves begin hunting him, the beast within can no longer be controlled. This is a book that wants to be felt, not just followed.
Weldon Burge’s Enter Vengeance is a paranormal police procedural that starts as a locked-room mystery and slides into supernatural dread. A guilt-ridden detective and a reluctant psychic chase Tisiphone, a Greek Fury dealing out revenge to those the courts let walk. Lean, unsettling, and built on old-fashioned suspense.
In this interview, Miranda Smith reveals how Scary Movie Night blends Hitchcock homage and domestic suspense into a one-night locked-room thriller. A former scream queen’s costume party becomes a deadly game of masks, gaslighting, and intimate betrayal.
