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 always had a strange relationship with death. Monsters fall through windows, killers burn in house fires, demons are banished, curses are broken, and yet the audience knows better. If the mask is iconic enough, … 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.
Forget the shimmery monofins and the singing crab. Ava Morwood, author of Until We Drown, traces mermaid folklore through its strangest corners: Peak District drowning pools, Japanese ningyo, the Feejee Mermaid and a scholar who blamed the plague on rotting merfolk. Dark mermaid legends as you have never heard them.
C.N. Vair’s The Devil Knows Her Name (published as Fawn in the UK) reimagines witchcraft as costly, physical, and entwined with Appalachian land. In this interview, she discusses the novel’s ecological argument, its refusal to romanticise magic, and what it means to write for the women who were called rebellious.
C.N. Vair’s Fawn is one of 2026’s most talked-about folk horror debuts, built around Tess Wynne, an Appalachian witch who rescues a red-mouthed, full-toothed fawn with unnatural appetites, and must decide what she is willing to become to protect what is hers. If that book has already got its teeth into you, this reading list was made for you. We’ve put together ten books that share Fawn’s DNA — from Emilia Hart’s multi-century witch saga Weyward to Cassandra Khaw’s blood-soaked fairy tale The Salt Grows Heavy to Genevieve Gornichec’s Norse folk horror The Witch’s Heart — each with a full mini-review. This is the definitive reading list for fans of folk horror, powerful witches, and women who bite back.
C.N. Vair’s debut folk horror novel The Devil Knows Her Name follows Tess Wynne, a century-old witch bound to her Appalachian land by a devil’s bargain, running a wildlife sanctuary against every threat the community and the devil himself can bring. Precise, slow-burning, and built on a genuine ecological and feminist argument, this is Appalachian horror at its most assured. Full review at Ginger Nuts of Horror.
Jeff Strand’s Fun Times at the Bloodbath is horror comedy with teeth, a video game horror novel about a playtest no one can quit. The Bram Stoker Award winning author weaponises the attention economy and folds extreme horror into his sharpest comic engine yet. Here is why it gets under your skin.
Sara Hinkley’s The Red Sacrament is historical vampire horror with a sharp political edge, set in a midnight Paris theatre in 1869. My review digs into the slow dread, the gorgeous gothic prose, and the way this queer vampire novel turns the Anne Rice tradition toward class, labour, and the coming Paris Commune.
Leah Rowan’s debut Marion reimagines Psycho with one savage swap: the woman in the shower fights back and kills Norm. My review digs into this feminist horror standout, from its dark humor and dual-POV craft to its themes of female rage, sisterhood, and surviving domestic abuse.
Blood in the Bricks proves folk horror doesn’t need fields or standing stones to unsettle you. Neil Williamson’s anthology hauls the genre into the underground, the surgery ward and the skate park, with standout urban horror short stories from James Bennett, Dan Coxon and Ray Cluley. A bleak, brilliant collection that finds the uncanny in the everyday city.
