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.
Hope Madden’s Roost is a literary folk horror novella that follows twin sisters Joy and Hope across four Easter birthdays in a slowly dying Ohio town. With Catholic dread, small-town American gothic atmosphere, and a winged shadow that keeps coming home, this 2026 Lacandon Jungle Press reissue proves Madden’s gift for restraint. Here is why this coming-of-age horror sits with you long after the final page.
Puppets in horror work because someone built them to be loved first. Furry Puppet Studio, the NYC custom puppet maker behind work for Apple, Casper, and Missy Elliott, shows why practical-effects horror keeps reaching for handmade faces. From Puppet Master to Dead Silence to Longlegs, the craft that delights is the same craft that frightens.
E. L. Chen’s Slasher Summer drops seven friends back at the cabin where their favourite 1980s slasher was filmed, then lets the masked killer arrive on schedule. My horror book review digs into the Final Girl twist, the meta-slasher structure, and why this throwback belongs beside books like The Final Girl Support Group.
Mark Morris has been writing British horror fiction since 1989, and Bad Things Happen Here may be his most emotionally precise novel yet. In this wide-ranging interview, he talks about intergenerational fear, the Nordic folklore that shaped That Which Stands Outside, and what it actually takes to survive four decades in a genre that has buried far bigger names. Essential reading for anyone who takes UK horror seriously.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dean Cade’s debut horror novel Cruising sets a closeted gay teenager’s summer against the real historical backdrop of the Houston Mass Murders, the worst serial murder case in American history. Published by Slashic Horror Press in March 2026, the first book in the Summer 1973 trilogy earns its horror through patience, historical precision, and a portrait of queer vulnerability in 1973 Texas that is both formally controlled and genuinely devastating. Read the full review at Ginger Nuts of Horror.
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Georgia Summers’ Trollheim: Tale of Sýstir announces itself in its opening pages as something different from the usual Nordic-flavoured fantasy. This is folk horror rooted in genuine Huldra mythology, the figure from Scandinavian folklore whose name derives from the Old Norse huldr, meaning “covered” or “secret.” When Sýstir’s mother is accused of witchcraft and burned at the stake, Summers is not using the witch trial as backdrop decoration. She is placing her story inside a specific, historical horror that resonates because it never entirely stopped being present. Sýstir, half-human and half-Huldra, escapes into the Dark Forest known as Trollheim, taken in by the rogue troll Agagkantor and accompanied by a wildcat companion named Fulgir, building a found family from the materials of loss and displacement.
What Pliego builds in The Library After Dark is less a locked-room mystery and more a labyrinth where the architecture itself remembers, each corridor a mirror reflecting the protagonist’s buried history and the lies she has told herself to survive.
Some horror novels make you check under the bed. Sam Beckbessinger’s Femme Feral makes you check your own reflection for teeth. This feminist body horror novel about a queer photographer’s lycanthropic liberation is a howl of feminine rage you won’t forget.
