All the Horror Books We’re Excited About in 2022

All the Horror Books We’re Excited About in 2022

All the Horror Books We're Excited About in 2022 - 659

It’s not news to horror fans that we’re living through a horror renaissance right now. The past few years have given us an embarrassment of riches when it comes to horror and gothic lit, and this particular train shows no sign of slowing down. 2022 is bursting at the seams with terrifying new reads!

This year, keep an eye out for new work from Paul Tremblay, Kristi DeMeester, Sara Gran, Gwendolyn Kiste, Cassandra Khaw, V. Castro, Gabino Iglesias, Christopher Golden, Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Hailey Piper, Catriona Ward, John Langan, Alma Katsu, T. Kingfisher, Ellen Datlow, and many, many, many more.

As ever, we take a broad view of what counts as horror fiction. Alongside traditional horror, here you’ll find all things gothic, dark, weird, and thrilling–and, hopefully, your next favorite scary book.

Looking for previous years’ lists? 2020, 2021.

Please note that publication dates are subject to change, especially considering ongoing worldwide supply chain issues – we’ll be updating the release dates below and adding new books as we hear of any changes, but the publisher’s website will always have the most up to date information.

Many titles publishing later in the year don’t have concrete release dates yet – we’ve listed those at the bottom under “Date TBD” – and if the publisher doesn’t have a dedicated page for a book yet, we’ve linked to Goodreads or to the book announcement elsewhere. And don’t miss our monthly new release posts here! Descriptions below are adapted from the publisher’s synopsis.


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January

  • It Will End Like This, Kyra Leigh (Jan 4): For fans of The Cheerleaders and Sadie comes a propulsive thriller that reminds us that in real life, endings are rarely as neat as happily ever after. A contemporary take on the Lizzie Borden story that explores how grief can cut deep.
  • Luckenbooth, Jenni Fagan (Jan 4): A bold, haunting, and startlingly unique novel about the secrets we leave behind and the places that hold them long after we are gone, a “quintessential novel of Edinburgh at its darkest.” (Irvine Welsh)
  • The Unfamiliar Garden, Benjamin Percy (Jan 4): Award-winning author Benjamin Percy delivers both a gripping science fiction thriller and a dazzling examination of a planet—and a marriage—that have broken.
  • Where the Drowned Girls Go, Seanan McGuire (Jan 4): The next addition to Seanan McGuire’s beloved Wayward Children series. There is another school for children who fall through doors and fall back out again. It isn’t as friendly as Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children. And it isn’t as safe.
  • Antifa Splatterpunk, ed. Eric Raglin (Jan 6): Sixteen horror writers explore fascism’s many terrors: police wielding strange bioweapons against the public, white supremacists annihilating their enemies through dark magic, and TV personalities vilifying all who defy the rising fascist tide. But these stories are resistance: Nazi-killing demons, Confederate-slaying witches, and everyday people punching fascists in the teeth. Among the gore is a glimmer of hope that one day this monster will return to its grave and never rise again.
  • The Girl in the Corn, Jason Offutt (Jan 11): Thomas teams up with the girl in the corn to save her world⎯and his⎯only to realize that he may not be able to distinguish good from evil before evil swallows them whole.
  • Quantum of Nightmares, Charles Stross (Jan 11): A unique blend of espionage thrills and Lovecraftian horror, Hugo Award-winning author Charles Stross’s Laundry Files continues with Quantum of Nightmares.
  • The Stars Are Not Yet Bells, Hannah Lillith Assadi (Jan 11): Through the scrim of fading memory, an elderly woman confronts a lifetime of secrets and betrayal, under the mysterious skies of her island home. Darkly romantic and deeply haunting, The Stars Are Not Yet Bells pulls us into a story of the tantalizing, faithless relationship between ourselves and the lives and souls we leave behind.
  • The Sound at the End, Kirsty Logan (Jan 13): A chilling, immersive audio experience, The Sound at the End follows the eclectic crew of an Arctic research base and the newcomer who may uncover the secrets they’re each desperate to outrun, written by award-winning novelist Kirsty Logan and performed by a full cast.
  • The Bookkeeper’s Skull, Justin D. Hill (Jan 18): More spine-chilling tales set in the Worlds of Warhammer.
  • Such a Pretty Smile, Kristi DeMeester (Jan 18): A biting novel from an electrifying new voice, Kristi DeMeester’s Such a Pretty Smile is a heart-stopping tour-de-force about powerful women, angry men, and all the ways in which girls fight against the forces that try to silence them.
  • Trouble the Waters: Tales from the Deep Blue, ed. Sheree Renée Thomas, Pan Morigan, & Troy L. Wiggins (Jan 18): A new anthology that gathers the tidal force of bestselling, renowned writers from Lagos to New Orleans, Memphis to Copenhagen, Northern Ireland and London, offering extraordinary speculative fiction tales of ancient waters in all its myriad forms.
  • Cracked Sky, Ben Eads (Jan 24): Reeling from the loss of their only child, Stephen and Shelley Morrison take a harrowing journey through a world beyond the crack in the sky, where their daughter’s spirit is trapped with The Lost Ones. They must stop her murderer before it fulfills its goals: Terrorize. Consume. Destroy.
  • Beulah, Christi Nogle (Jan 25):Beulah is the story of Georgie, an eighteen-year-old with a talent (or affliction) for seeing ghosts. Georgie and her mother and sisters are making a new start in the small town of Beulah, Idaho where Gina’s wealthy friend Ellen has set them up to help renovate an old stone schoolhouse. Georgie experiences a variety of disturbances—the town is familiar from dreams and she seems to be experiencing her mother’s memory of the place, not to mention the creepy ghost in the schoolhouse basement—but she is able to maintain, in her own laconic way, until she notices that her little sister Stevie also has the gift. Stevie is in danger from a malevolent ghost, and Georgie tries to help, but soon Georgie is the one in danger.
  • Devil House, John Darnielle (Jan 25): From John Darnielle, the New York Times bestselling author and the singer-songwriter of the Mountain Goats, comes an epic, gripping novel about murder, truth, and the dangers of storytelling.
  • Hold My Place, Cassondra Windwalker (Jan 25): When librarian Sigrun falls head-over-heels for the sophisticated and very married Edgar Leyward, she never expects to find herself in his bed—or his heart. Nevertheless, when his enigmatic wife Octavia dies from a sudden illness, Sigrun finds herself caught up in a whirlwind romance worthy of the most lurid novels on her bookshelves. Sigrun soon discovers Octavia wasn’t Edgar’s first lost love, or even his second. Three women Edgar has loved met early deaths. As she delves into her beloved’s past through a trove of discovered letters, the edges of Sigrun’s identity begin to disappear, fading into the women of the past. Sigrun tells herself it’s impossible for any dark magic to be at play—that the dead can’t possibly inhabit the bodies of the living—but something shadowy stalks the halls of the Leyward house and the lines between the love of the present and the obsessions of the past become increasingly blurred—and bloody.
  • Into the Midnight Void, Mara Fitzgerald (Jan 25): Fans of Holly Black and Kendare Blake will obsess over the conclusion to this deliciously dark YA fantasy duology! Emanuela has finally gotten what she’s always wanted. Since escaping her catacomb prison, she’s become the supreme ruler of everything under the veils. Finally, she has the power to throw aside senseless, old traditions and run things exactly the way they should be. But when cracks in her magic start to show, Emanuela begrudgingly allies herself with her enemies, including her frustratingly alluring archnemesis, Verene. Together, they discover deeper truths about the mysterious blood magic Emanuela and Verene both wield.
  • Mestiza Blood, V. Castro (Jan 25): A short story collection of nightmares, dreams, desire and visions centered around the Chicana experience. The stunning, star-reviewed V. Castro weaves urban legend, folklore, life experience and heartache in this intimate anthology of modern horrors.
  • Road of Bones, Christopher Golden (Jan 25): An American documentarian travels a haunted highway across the frozen tundra of Siberia in New York Times bestselling author Christopher Golden’s Road of Bones, a “tightly wound, atmospheric, and creepy as hell” (Stephen King) supernatural thriller.
  • The Wakening, JG Faherty (Jan 25): A team of paranormal investigators, a priest and a defrocked priest with a dark secret join forces to combat of a vengeful ancient demon, and the evil spreading throughout a small New York town.
  • The Pale Horse, Michael S Tyree (Jan 27): Welcome back to San Dismas. Take a trip through six tales of dread and heartache. A modern-day martyr is given a second chance at life as a vengeful avatar in The Psalm of Saint Jackie. An ex-politician learns to live with the ghosts of war crimes past in Survivor’s Guilt. In Cherrywood Hearts, a soon-to-be mother loses everything in one day of ill-fated luck but soon finds a new purpose in her journey through grief. She is thrown into an extraordinary situation where she must ask herself, how much would she sacrifice for the life of a child that is not her own? So come along if you dare, through stories of life. death, loss, closure, transformation, and finality, as we court the rider of The Pale Horse.

February

  • Ramses the Damned: The Reign of Osiris, Anne Rice & Christopher Rice (Feb 1): The gilded adventures of Ramses the Damned, iconic creation of the legendary bestselling author, continue in this breathtakingly suspenseful tale of a titanic supernatural power unleashed on the eve of war.
  • String Follow, Simon Jacobs (Feb 1): A darkly comic suburban Gothic about a malevolent force that targets a group of Ohio misfits, harnessing their angst for its sinister designs. Eerie, hypnotic, and shot through with dark comedy, String Follow is a razor-sharp story that exposes the sweating, bleeding truth of how kids become adults in twenty-first-century America. Simon Jacobs blends the startlingly original and the uncannily familiar, revealing the dark chaos that lurks beneath the surface of Midwestern suburbia.
  • The Violence, Delilah S. Dawson (Feb 1): Three generations of abused women must navigate their chilling new reality as a mysterious epidemic of violence sweeps the nation in this compelling novel of self-discovery, legacy, and hope.
  • Terror Peak, Edward J. McFadden III (Feb 4): What was supposed to be a fun week with his old crew turns tragic when former pro snowboarder Chance is caught in an avalanche and barely escapes nature’s fury… and something more. An ancient horror prowls the peak, and Chance’s obsessions shift as he hunts the creatures, and is forced to fight for his life.
  • The Book of the Most Precious Substance, Sara Gran (Feb 8): The highly anticipated new thriller from internationally renowned author Sara Gran, author of Come Closer and the Claire DeWitt series, about a rare book dealer’s search for the most powerful occult book ever written.
  • Cherish Farrah, Bethany C. Morrow (Feb 8): A slow-burn social horror novel about the only two Black girls in a privileged country club community. Told in Farrah’s chilling, unforgettable voice and weaving in searing commentary on race and class, Cherish Farrah will keep you on the edge of your seat until the last page.
  • Dead Silence, S.A. Barnes (Feb 8): Titanic meets The Shining in this SF horror in which a woman and her crew board a decades-lost luxury cruiser and find the wreckage of a nightmare that hasn’t yet ended. (A Nightfire title)
  • Echo, Thomas Olde Heuvelt (Feb 8): From international bestselling sensation Thomas Olde Heuvelt, author of Hex, comes Echo, a thrilling descent into madness and obsession as one man confronts nature—and something even more ancient and evil answers back. (A Nightfire title)
  • Jawbone, Mónica Ojeda (Feb 8): Fernanda and Annelise are so close they are practically sisters: a double image, inseparable. So how does Fernanda end up bound on the floor of a deserted cabin, held hostage by one of her teachers and estranged from Annelise? Interweaving pop culture references and horror concepts drawn from Herman Melville, H. P. Lovecraft, and anonymous “creepypastas,” Jawbone is an ominous, multivocal novel that explores the terror inherent in the pure potentiality of adolescence and the fine line between desire and fear.
  • The Queen of the High Fields, Rhiannon Grist (Feb 8): Two misfits, Carys Price and Angharad ‘Hazard’ Evans, strike out from their disenfranchised seaside town to take ownership of the High Fields, a mythical island brimming with world-bending promise. Objecting to the demands of modern society, they hope to find a place where they can live as they choose, but instead they find an ancient power that tears their friendship apart. Ten years later, Carys returns to the collapsing world of the High Fields to face the terrifying power of the friend-turned-goddess she left behind.
  • And In Her Smile, The World, Gordon B. White & Rebecca J. Allred (Feb 11): This work of dark fantasy follows Serena and Jeffery, who independently discover a cult of women and an alternate creation myth. When a not-so-chance meeting brings them together, the two have an important decision to make. It also highlights the dangers attendant with telling women to smile.
  • The Beyond, Ken Brosky (Feb 15): When Moon Song’s brother goes missing in the town of Blackrock, PA, Moon hires private investigator Ben Sawyer to help her uncover the truth. Together they discover what the people of Blackrock refuse to acknowledge: something terrible has happened inside the coal mine that defies all logical explanation, and it threatens the lives of every single person in town. Bodies are piling up at the funeral home, and many others have seemingly vanished. Moon’s only hope of finding answers rests in the hands of a local professor who knows the mine’s horrible secrets. But the professor has problems of his own, and unless he can confront the creature that’s hunting him, Moon’s chances of making it out of town alive are darker than a seam of coal.
  • Gwendy’s Final Task, Richard Chizmar & Stephen King (Feb 15): In Gwendy’s Final Task, the third and final book in the Gwendy’s Button Box trilogy, “horror giants” (Publishers Weekly) Stephen King and Richard Chizmar take us on a journey from Castle Rock to another famous cursed Maine city to the MF-1 space station, where Gwendy must execute a secret mission to save the world. And, maybe, all worlds.
  • The Lake of the Dead, André Bjerke (Feb 15): André Bjerke’s The Lake of the Dead (1942) was voted the all-time best Norwegian thriller, and its atmospheric 1958 film adaptation is regarded as one of Norway’s best films. This new translation is the first-ever American publication of Bjerke’s classic, which features an unusual mixture of murder mystery and supernatural horror that will keep readers guessing until the thrilling conclusion.
  • Mickey7, Edward Ashton (Feb 15): The Martian meets Dark Matter in Edward Ashton’s high concept science fiction thriller, in which Mickey7, an “expendable,” refuses to let his replacement clone Mickey8 take his place.
  • Moon Witch, Spider King, Marlon James (Feb 15): From Marlon James, author of the bestselling National Book Award finalist Black Leopard, Red Wolf, the second book in the Dark Star trilogy, his African dark fantasy epic. Here, Sogolon the Moon Witch takes center stage and gives her own account of what happened to the missing boy, and how she plotted and fought, triumphed and failed as she looked for him.
  • The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories, Volume Two, ed. James D. Jenkins and Ryan Cagle (Feb 15): Critics praised the first Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories, and now for this exciting follow-up volume the editors have expanded their search to even more countries, finding more of the world’s best horror fiction and making it available to American readers for the first time. Featuring a wide variety of tales from Brazil to Malta to Nigeria to Japan, and all points in between, this new anthology is a must-have for any horror fan or anyone interested in contemporary world literature.
  • Parallel Hells, Leon Craig (Feb 17): In this deliciously strange debut collection, Leon Craig draws on folklore and gothic horror in refreshingly inventive ways to explore queer identity, love, power and the complicated nature of being human.
  • A Woman Built By Man, ed. S.H. Cooper, Olivia White, and Elle Turpitt (Feb 17): An anthology of short stories written by women and femme-identifying individuals that explore the ways in which women are shaped by the men around them.
  • Beneath the Stairs, Jennifer Fawcett (Feb 22): In this spine-tingling, atmospheric debut for fans of Jennifer McMahon, Simone St. James, and Chris Bohjalian, a woman returns to her hometown after her childhood friend attempts suicide at a local haunted house—the same place where a traumatic incident shattered their lives twenty years ago.
  • Extasia, Claire LeGrand (Feb 22): From New York Times bestselling author Claire LeGrand comes a new, bone-chilling YA horror novel about a girl who joins a coven to root out a vicious evil that’s stalking her village. Perfect for fans of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Grace Year.
  • Five Deaths for Seven Songbirds, John Everson (Feb 22): When Eve Springer arrives to join the Songbirds it’s the fulfillment of her lifelong dream. But that dream is soon to become a nightmare. Somebody is murdering the Songbirds, using their own instruments as weapons. Will Eve be next?
  • Manhunt, Gretchen Felker-Martin (Feb 22): Y: The Last Man meets The Girl With All the Gifts in this explosive post-apocalyptic novel that follows trans women and trans men on a grotesque journey of survival. (A Nightfire title)
  • Spontaneous Human Combustion, Richard Thomas (Feb 22): In this new collection, Richard Thomas has crafted fourteen stories that push the boundaries of dark fiction in an intoxicating, piercing blend of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Equally provocative and profound, each story is masterfully woven with transgressive themes that burrow beneath the skin.
  • Tripping Arcadia, Kit Mayquist (Feb 22): From debut author Kit Mayquist, a propulsive and atmospheric modern Gothic with all the splendor of The Great Gatsby… and all the secrets, lies, and darkness that opulence can hide.
  • The Wolfden, Lillah Lawson (Feb 22): If Stormy Spooner thought she’d hit rock bottom before, she was wrong. Before she had fully healed from her bitter divorce, a chaotic turn of events left several people dead. Now, her reanimated boyfriend Phillip refuses to take her calls. Heartbroken and confused by her newfound powers, Stormy returns to work in an attempt to find her new normal.
  • In the Arctic Sun, Rowan Hill (Feb 25): The trees of Alaska’s Arctic wilderness have always been Sarah’s sentries and her house, a fortress, isolated from society and an abusive marriage. But the arrival of a new neighbor and an oil company drilling through primordial, cold earth changes the forest of her valley. It bleeds through the serenity and disrupts her home, her sanity. Plagued with insomnia from the midnight sun, Sarah increasingly suspects something is using her sanctuary to hide from the bright, incessant light. An insidious menace, ancient and beyond explanation, using the wilderness for cover. Her personal demon that cares nothing for Sarah or her mental health. Something that won’t stop until it takes it all.
  • Burn the Plans, Tyler Jones (Feb 26): From Tyler Jones (author of Criterium, The Dark Side of the Room, and Almost Ruth) comes a new collection featuring fourteen tales of supernatural suspense. Featuring thirteen short stories and one novelette, Burn the Plans is a relentless journey into the dark places we end up when all of our plans go wrong.

March

  • The Doloriad, Missouri Williams (Mar 1): Macabre, provocative, depraved, and unforgettable, The Doloriad marks the debut of Missouri Williams, a terrifyingly original new voice. Told in extraordinary, intricate prose that moves with a life of its own, and at times striking with the power of physical force, this novel is a blazingly original document of depravity and salvation. Gothic and strange, moving and disquieting, and often hilarious, The Doloriad stares down, with narrowed eyes, humanity’s unbreakable commitment to life.
  • Escape from Yokai Land, Charles Stross (Mar 1): Regular readers of Charles Stross’s Laundry Files might have noticed Bob Howard’s absence from the events of The Nightmare Stacks, and his subsequent return from Tokyo at the start of The Delirium Brief. Escape from Yokai Land explains what he was doing there.
  • Gallant, V. E. Schwab (Mar 1): Everything casts a shadow. Even the world we live in. And as with every shadow, there is a place where it must touch. A seam, where the shadow meets its source. #1 New York Times–bestselling author V. E. Schwab weaves a dark and original tale about the place where the world meets its shadow, and the young woman beckoned by both sides. The Secret Garden meets Crimson Peak in this stand-alone YA novel perfect for readers of Holly Black and Neil Gaiman.
  • The Night, Rodrigo Blanco Calderon, trans. Daniel Hahn & Noel Hernández (Mar 1): Recurring blackouts envelop Caracas in an inescapable darkness that makes nightmares come true. Real and fictional characters, most of them are writers, exchange the role of narrator in this polyphonic novel. They recount contradictory versions of the plot, a series of femicides that began with the energy crisis. The central narrator is a psychiatrist who manipulates the accounts of his friend, an author writing a book titled The Night; and his patient, an advertising executive obsessed with understanding the world through word puzzles.
  • Sundial, Catriona Ward (Mar 1): Sundial is a new, twisty psychological horror novel from Catriona Ward, author of The Last House on Needless Street. You can’t escape what’s in your blood… All Rob wanted was a normal life. She almost got it, too: a husband, two kids, a nice house in the suburbs. Far from her childhood home, Sundial, hidden deep in the wild Mojave Desert. But beneath the veneer, Rob is terrified for her oldest daughter, Callie, who collects tiny bones and whispers to imaginary friends. Rob sees a darkness in Callie, one that reminds her too much of the family she left behind. Running from her past has led her directly back to it — what’s buried at Sundial could never stay a secret forever, and Rob must risk one last trip out there to protect her family, and her future. (A Nightfire title)
  • Freaks, Brett Riley (Mar 3): Four high-school friends suffer daily humiliation at the hands of three bullies. When the friends accidentally open a portal to another dimension, they unintentionally allow terrifying, other-worldly creatures to invade their small Arkansas town. Discovering that they are now endowed with strange superpowers, the four teens must fight to save the lives of family and friends now in mortal peril and thwart a secret government task force that appears to be hunting them.
  • Escaping the Body: Poems, Chloe N. Clark (Mar 7): Chloe N. Clark’s poetry collection is a surreal and profound journey through space, forests, monsters, myths, spells, magic tricks, forests, and the body. Escaping the Body is a collection of dreams of the flesh, exploring the cosmic rifts between the soul and the body, encouraging readers to escape their body in search of the liminal space beyond skin and bones.
  • The Book of Living Secrets, Madeleine Roux (Mar 8): Perfect for fans of The Hazel Wood, this genre-bending page-turner from New York Times bestselling author Madeleine Roux follows two girls who transport themselves into the world of their favorite book only to encounter the sinister alternate reality that awaits them.
  • Face The Night, Alan Lastufka (Mar 8): Cellar, Ohio’s first police sketch artist just drew the wrong face. A face with no name, with no voice, but with one hell of a secret…
  • Last Exit, Max Gladstone (Mar 8): American Gods meets The Dark Tower in Last Exit, a dark, contemporary fantasy of the open road, alternate realities, and self-discovery, from a Locus Award-nominated and Hugo and Nebula Award-winning writer Max Gladstone.
  • A Black and Endless Sky, Matthew Lyons (Mar 15): From the author of The Night Will Find Us comes a white-knuckled horror-thriller set across the American Southwest. Road trips can be hell. Siblings Jonah and Nell Talbot used to be inseparable, but ever since Jonah suddenly blew town twelve years ago, they couldn’t be more distant. Now, in the wake of Jonah’s divorce, they embark on a cross-country road trip back to their hometown of Albuquerque, hoping to mend their broken relationship along the way. But when a strange accident befalls Nell at an abandoned industrial site somewhere in the Nevada desert, she begins experiencing ghastly visions and exhibiting terrifying, otherworldly symptoms. As their journey through the desolate American Southwest reveals the grotesque change happening within his sister, one thing becomes clear to Jonah: It’s not only Nell in there anymore.
  • The Book of Cold Cases, Simone St. James (Mar 15): A true crime blogger gets more than she bargained for while interviewing the woman acquitted of two cold case slayings in this chilling new novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Sun Down Motel.
  • Roost, Hope Madden (Mar 15): Every spring in small town Ohio, kids get a touch more daylight, wander a little farther from the front porch, and spend a bit more time off on their own, exploring. One such spring, the Murphy twins were considered an Easter miracle. And now, almost 18 years later — Easter week, 1988 — the girls approach their birthday, and busybodies around town get a little anxious. Every time their birthday falls on Easter Sunday, bad things seem to happen, and the neighbors have noticed. A babysitter goes missing. The little girl up the road meets a bad end. Maybe it’s coincidence. Maybe living in a town dropped smack in the middle of farmland — with miles of corn in every direction — makes people feel isolated from the outside. Folks start to see evil where it isn’t. Or maybe this year, the devil’s come home to roost.
  • What We Harvest, Ann Fraistat (Mar 15): For fans of Wilder Girls comes a nightmarish debut guaranteed to keep you up through the night, about an idyllic small town poisoned by its past, and one girl who must fight the strange disease that’s slowly claiming everyone she loves.
  • The World Below, David Peak (Mar 15): Witches, LSD psychosis, and the slippery nature of truth: The World Below is about the limitless horror of grief and the unbreakable bonds of blood. Be prepared!
  • Palimpsest: A Collection of Contemporary Horror, Caitlin Marceau (Mar 16): From one of Canada’s hottest young talents comes this stellar collection of contemporary horror stories and poetry. Caitlin Marceau’s work ranges from the quietly unnerving to the deeply disturbing, taking in post-apocalyptic futures, supernatural forces, psychological terrors and deals with the devil. One thing’s for certain: these stories will linger in your mind for long after you’ve read them.
  • The Bone Orchard, Sara A. Mueller (Mar 22): Sara A. Mueller’s The Bone Orchard is a fascinating whodunit set in a lush, gothic world of secrets and magic–where a dying emperor charges his favorite concubine with solving his own murder, and preventing the culprit, which undoubtedly is one of his three terrible sons, from taking control of an empire.
  • The Shadow Glass, Josh Winning (Mar 22): Dark Crystal meets About a Boy in a thrilling race against the clock to save the world in this nostalgia-infused adventure.
  • We Are the Ones Possessed, Adrian Ernesto Cepeda (Mar 22): Adrian Ernesto Cepeda, author of La Belle Ajar, brings you a death-themed horror poetry collection with mortality, murder, and muerte oozing from every one of these terrifying verses.
  • When It Rains, Mark Allan Gunnells (Mar 25): The rain keeps falling, and at Friedkin University, the sanctuary of the campus bookstore swiftly becomes a dangerous battlefield. Is it man versus nature? Or man versus man?
  • Wicked Blood, E.C. Hanson (Mar 25): After the unexpected death of their parents, three teenagers must fend for themselves in a farmhouse. Marina, the lone daughter of the Florin family, assumes the reins of the family. But her brothers start to display weird habits and their penchant for violence gets out of control. Will Marina be able to contain them or will she submit to their power in an attempt to prolong her young life?
  • All the White Spaces, Ally Wilkes (Mar 29): Something deadly and mysterious stalks the members of an isolated polar expedition in this haunting and spellbinding historical horror novel, perfect for fans of Dan Simmons’s The Terror and Alma Katsu’s The Hunger.
  • Below, Laurel Hightower (Mar 29): While driving through the mountains of West Virginia during a late-night snowstorm, a recently divorced woman experiences bizarre electrical problems, leaving her with little choice but to place her trust with a charismatic truck driver. But when an unexplainable creature with haunting red eyes gets between them, she is forced to make one of the toughest decisions of her life. Will she abandon the stranger who kept her safe—or will she climb down below, where reality has shapeshifted into a living nightmare?
  • Monarch, Candice Wuehle (Mar 29): The cryptic worlds of Hanna and Stranger Things mingle with the dark humor of Dare Me in this debut novel about a teen beauty queen who discovers she’s been a sleeper agent in a deep state government program
  • My Dearest Darkest, Kayla Cottingham (Mar 29): Wilder Girls meets The Craft in this sapphic horror debut that asks: what price would you be willing to pay to achieve your deepest desires?
  • The Resting Place, Camilla Sten (Mar 29): The medical term is prosopagnosia. The average person calls it face blindness—the inability to recognize a familiar person’s face. When Eleanor walked in on the scene of her grandmother’s murder, she came face to face with the killer—a maddening expression that means nothing to someone like her. A heart-thumping, relentless thriller that will shake you to your core, The Resting Place is an unforgettable novel of horror and suspense.
  • Shadow Flicker, Gregory Bastianelli (Mar 29): What is the secret behind the hallucinations on Kidney Island, just off the coast of Maine? Are the shadow flickers of the wind turbines causing the lack of sleep, or is there a far darker power at work?
  • The Temps, Andrew DeYoung (Mar 29): Wryly funny and briskly plotted, The Temps is a surprising literary take on the experience of being young and underemployed in a world plagued by apocalyptic fears.
  • The Way of the Worm, Ramsey Campbell (Mar 29): The third and final novel in Ramsey Campbell’s triumphant Lovecraftian trilogy, The Three Births of Daoloth, where time travel, monstrous evil and the alien apocalypse combine to create a stunning conclusion for streaming TV lovers and suspense readers alike.

April

  • One Hand to Hold, One Hand to CarveM. Shaw (April 1): In this novella illustrated by Echo Echo, two halves of a human cadaver awaken on a cold morgue slab. The two distinct personalities, Left and Right, remember nothing of their previous life as a singular body. Bound by necessity to carve out an existence on the fringes of society, the two brothers have very different ideas of the life they want. Their impending schism will lead each on his own frightening path; one forward to a new life, one backward to the origin of their struggle. A surreal body horror journey that redefines familial bonds and what it means to be an individual.
  • Under Her Skin, ed. Lindy Ryan and Toni Miller (Apr 5): Black Spot Books’ inaugural poetry collection spotlights women in horror poetry, centering on the concept of body horror, and featuring work from Bram-Stoker award-winning and nominated authors, as well as dozens of poems from women (cis and trans) and non-binary femmes in horror.
  • Every Crawling, Putrid Thing, David Busboom (Apr 8): In his debut collection, David Busboom presents fifteen tales of dark fantasy and horror, populated by bizarre reptiles, occult serial killers, carnivorous protoplasms, and parasitic worms. A child faces down the giant ape destroying his parents’ marriage. A cheating husband wakes up to find his hand replaced by a mucous-covered tentacle. A Midwestern office complex becomes the setting for a ghastly, apocalyptic nightmare. Here, where weird pulp horror meets the darker sides of love and disillusion, you’ll find slime, and stink, and Every Crawling, Putrid Thing.
  • And Then I Woke Up, Malcolm Devlin (Apr 12): In the tradition of Mira Grant and Stephen Graham Jones, Malcolm Devlin’s And Then I Woke Up is a creepy, layered, literary story about false narratives and their ability to divide us.
  • The Doctor’s Demons, Maria Abrams (Apr 12): Child psychiatrist Hannah Cohen thought she could handle difficult cases. But medical school never prepared her for Elena. Nor the demon that’s possessing her. Hannah finds a way to rid Elena of her demon, but not without a price. Years later, Hannah has grown comfortable exorcising the demons of her patients. Until she meets Lucas. Whatever is inside of Lucas is far more powerful than anything she has faced. The denizens of Hell are angry with Hannah. And they sent one of their leaders to destroy her.
  • Maggots Screaming!, Max Booth III (Apr 12): On a hot summer weekend in San Antonio, Texas, a father and son bond after discovering three impossible corpses buried in their back yard.
  • Woman, Eating, Claire Kohda (Apr 12): A young, mixed-race vampire must find a way to balance her deep-seated desire to live amongst humans with her incessant hunger in this stunning debut novel from a writer-to-watch.
  • Convulsive, Joe Koch (Apr 19): A collection of weird horror stories from Shirley Jackson Award finalist Joe Koch, author of The Wingspan of Severed Hands.
  • End of the World House, Adrienne Celt (Apr 19): Groundhog Day meets Ling Ma’s Severance in End of the World House, a thought-provoking comedic novel about two young women trying to save their friendship as the world collapses around them.
  • Passersthrough, Peter Rock (Apr 19): A father and his estranged daughter reconnect to try to understand a decades-old trauma in this haunting novel, part ghost story, part lyrical exploration of family, aging, and how we remember the past.
  • The Devil’s Gift, Joshua Robinson (Apr 20): All twelve-year-old Daniel wanted was a girlfriend. What he got was way more than he bargained for in this thrilling debut novella by London-based horror writer Joshua Robinson.
  • Revelations: Horror Writers for Climate Action, ed. Seán O’Connor (Apr 22): 100% of the proceeds from this charity anthology, featuring a star-studded table of contents that includes Stephen King, Paul Tremblay, Tananarive Due, Clive Barker, and more, benefit climateoutreach.org. With an introduction by Sadie Hartmann.
  • Sifting the Ashes, Michael Bailey and Marge Simon (Apr 22): A collaborative poetry collection by Bram Stoker Award-winning writers Michael Bailey and Marge Simon—dissecting a fiery world’s relentless destruction. What might be found in the remains after all is lost?
  • And At My Back I Always Hear, Scott Nicolay (Apr 26): From World Fantasy Award-winning author Scott Nicolay comes And at My Back I Always Hear, a new collection of eight tales of the macabre and the uncanny.
  • The Children on the Hill, Jennifer McMahon (Apr 26): From the New York Times bestselling author of The Drowning Kind comes a genre-defying new novel, inspired by Mary Shelley’s masterpiece Frankenstein, that brilliantly explores the eerie mysteries of childhood and the evils perpetrated by the monsters among us.
  • The Fervor, Alma Katsu (Apr 26): From the acclaimed and award-winning author of The Hunger and The Deep comes a new psychological and supernatural twist on the horrors of the Japanese American internment camps in World War II.
  • Leech, John C. Foster (Apr 26): Archibald Leech is the secret weapon Control unleashes when the fabric of reality tears and alien mathematics leak into our world. Control wields him like a barely understood instrument, because Leech can see through the curtain, and it’s enough to drive a man mad. But now his relationship with Control is slowly disintegrating as his need to create a safe home for his volatile and hard-drinking wife increases. Unfortunately, people in Leech’s line of work don’t retire so easily—not when he’s pitting himself against doppelgangers, demigods, and whatever the hell else might be waiting in line to give him a bad day.
  • Rosebud, Paul Cornell (Apr 26): A multilayered, locked-room science fiction horror novella in which five sentient digital beings—condemned for over three hundred years to crew the small survey ship by the all-powerful Company—encounter a mysterious black sphere. Their course of action is clear: obtain the object, inform the Company, earn lots of praise. But the ship malfunctions, and the crew has no choice but to approach the sphere and survey it themselves. They have no idea that this object—and the transcendent truth hidden within—will change the fate of all existence, the Company, and themselves.
  • The Void Ascendant, Premee Mohamed (Apr 26): The mindblowing, cosmic conclusion to the breakout Beneath the Rising trilogy. Seven years ago, the last survivor of Earth crashed through uncountable dimensions to a strange new world. Nick Prasad found shelter, and a living, as a prophet for the ruling family—servants of the Ancient Ones who destroyed his home. Now, he’s been offered a chance to rid the multiverse of the Ancient Ones, past and present and forever, although he’ll have to betray his new masters to do it. The first step is jailbreaking a god—and that’s the easy part…

May

  • Book of Night, Holly Black (May 3): #1 New York Times bestselling author Holly Black makes her stunning adult debut with Book of Night, a modern dark fantasy of shadowy thieves and secret societies in the vein of Ninth House and The Night Circus.
  • The Hacienda, Isabel Cañas (May 3): Mexican Gothic meets Rebecca in this debut supernatural suspense novel, set in the aftermath of the Mexican War of Independence, about a remote house, a sinister haunting, and the woman pulled into their clutches…
  • Orphans of Bliss: Tales of Addiction Horror, ed. Mark Matthews (May 4): Orphans of Bliss is the follow-up anthology to the Shirley Jackson Award-nominated Lullabies for Suffering and features stories from Cassandra Khaw, Gabino Iglesias, John FD Taff, S.A. Cosby, Josh Malerman, and many more.
  • The Exorcist’s House, Nick Roberts (May 6): Psychologist Daniel Hill and his family buy a rustic farmhouse nestled in the rolling hills of West Virginia. All hell breaks loose when they discover a hidden room and learn about the previous owner’s predilection for performing exorcisms.
  • Your Body is Not Your Bodyvarious (May 6): A New Weird Horror anthology to benefit trans youth in Texas. EXTREME CONDITIONS DEMAND EXTREME RESPONSES: twenty-seven writers from the trans/gender nonconforming communities come together to voice their rage, defiance and fearlessness in the face of the Texas government’s recent attempts to criminalize trans/GNC youth and their families. Featuring Hailey Piper, Joe Koch, LC von Hessen, M. Lopes da Silva, Bitter Karella and many more.
  • Your Mind is a Terrible Thing, Hailey Piper (May 7): Communications specialist Alto’s shift aboard the starship M.G. Yellowjacket turns hellish after waking from a tryst to learn every crewmate has vanished. Worse, a sinister presence has crawled aboard the ship. It’s violent, destructive, and it can reach into your thoughts to make you see and feel what it wants.
  • Dark Stars, ed. John F.D. Taff (May 10): Dark Stars, edited by John F.D. Taff, is a tribute to horror’s longstanding short fiction legacy, featuring 12 terrifying original stories from today’s most noteworthy authors, with an introduction by bestselling author Josh Malerman and an afterword by Ramsey Campbell. (A Nightfire title)
  • Friend of the Devil, Stephen Lloyd (May 10): From acclaimed television writer Stephen Lloyd comes a devilishly good debut: a lightning-fast horror/noir mash-up for fans of Jim Butcher and Joe Hill.
  • Hidden Pictures, Jason Rekulak (May 10): From Jason Rekulak, Edgar-nominated author of The Impossible Fortress, comes a wildly inventive spin on the classic horror story in Hidden Pictures, a creepy and warm-hearted mystery about a woman working as a nanny for a young boy with strange and disturbing secrets.
  • Siren Queen, Nghi Vo (May 10): From award-winning author Nghi Vo comes a dazzling new novel where immortality is just a casting call away. Luli Wei is beautiful, talented, and desperate to be a star. But in Luli’s world, the worst monsters in Hollywood are not the ones on screen. The studios want to own everything from her face to her name to the women she loves, and they run on a system of bargains made in blood and ancient magic, powered by the endless sacrifice of unlucky starlets like her. For those who do survive to earn their fame, success comes with a steep price. Luli is willing to do whatever it takes—even if that means becoming the monster herself.
  • Howls From the Dark Ages: Tales of Medieval Horror, ed. Howl Society (May 12): An anthology of medieval horror stories including original fiction from Hailey Piper, Cody Goodfellow, Brian Evenson, Molly Bronstein, and others.
  • The Cherry Robbers, Sarai Walker (May 17): The highly anticipated second novel from Sarai Walker, following her “slyly subversive” (EW) cult-hit Dietland—a feminist gothic about the lone survivor of a cursed family of sisters, whose time may finally be up.
  • Just Like Mother, Anne Heltzel (May 17): Rosemary’s Baby meets The Return in Anne Heltzel’s suspenseful modern gothic debut. The last time Maeve saw her cousin was the night she escaped the cult they were raised in. For the past two decades, Maeve has worked hard to build a normal life in New York City, where she keeps everything—and everyone—at a safe distance. When Andrea suddenly reappears, Maeve regains the only true friend she’s ever had. Soon she’s spending more time at Andrea’s remote Catskills estate than in her own cramped apartment. The more Maeve immerses herself in Andrea’s world, the more disconnected she feels from her life back in the city; and the cousins’ increasing attachment triggers memories Maeve has fought hard to bury. But confronting the terrors of her childhood may be the only way for Maeve to transcend the nightmare still to come… (A Nightfire title)
  • The Legacy of Molly Southbourne, Tade Thompson (May 17): Arthur C. Clarke Award-winner Tade Thompson completes his chilling series. Whenever Molly Southbourne bled, a murderer was born. Deadly copies, drawn to destroy their creator, bound by a legacy of death. With the original Molly Southbourne gone, her remnants drew together, seeking safety and a chance for peace. The last Molly and her sisters built a home together, and thought they could escape the murder that marked their past. But secrets squirm in Molly Southbourne’s blood—secrets born in a Soviet lab and carried back across the Iron Curtain to infiltrate the West. What remains of the Cold War spy machine wants those secrets back, and to get them they’re willing to unearth the dead and destroy the fragile peace surrounding the last copies of Molly Southbourne.
  • Sair Back, Sair Banes, Anthony Engebretson (May 17): A woman is prey to a loch-dwelling creature of Scottish folklore in this debut dark fantasy novella by author Anthony Engebretson.
  • Uncommon Charm, Kat Weaver and Emily Bergslien (May 17): In the 1920s gothic comedy novella Uncommon Charm, bright young socialite Julia and shy Jewish magician Simon decide they aren’t beholden to their families’ unhappy history. Together they confront such horrors as murdered ghosts, alive children, magic philosophy, a milieu that slides far too easily into surrealist metaphor, and, worst of all, serious adult conversation.
  • Helpmeet, Naben Ruthnum (May 24): It’s 1900, and Louise Wilk is taking her dying husband home to Buffalo where he grew up. Dr. Edward Wilk is wasting away from an aggressive form of syphilis. But it’s becoming clearer that his disease isn’t exactly a disease, but a phase of existence. A powerful work of possession and transformation.
  • Hide, Kiersten White (May 24): A high-stakes hide-and-seek competition turns deadly in this dark supernatural thriller from New York Times bestselling author Kiersten White.
  • Twenty Years Dead, Richard Farren Barber (May 27): After twenty years in the ground, the dead briefly rise. At his father’s grave, this is Dave’s last opportunity to discover why a man would abandon his wife and young son.
  • Black Tide, KC Jones (May 31): A character-driven science fiction/horror blend, KC Jones’ Black Tide is Stephen King’s Cujo meets A Quiet Place. It was just another day at the beach. And then the world ended. Mike and Beth didn’t know each other existed before the night of the meteor shower. Chance made them neighbors, a bottle of champagne brought them together, and a shared need for human connection sparked something more. After a drunken and desperate one-night stand, the two strangers awake to discover a surprise astronomical event has left widespread destruction in its wake. But the cosmic lightshow was only part of something much bigger, and far more terrifying. (A Nightfire title)
  • Corpsemouth and Other Autobiographies, John Langan (May 31): John Langan returns with one new and ten previously uncollected tales of cosmic horror. In these stories, Langan continues to chart the course of 21st century weird fiction, from the unfamiliar to the familial, the unfathomably distant to the intimate. Includes extensive story notes and an introduction by Sarah Langan.
  • Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters, John Langan (May 31): A new edition of Bram Stoker Award-winning author John Langan’s long out-of-print debut collection, featuring the addition of an all-new story. Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters is a collection of tales both elegant and macabre, steeped in the tradition of the literary weird.
  • When Other People Saw Us, They Saw the Dead, ed. Lauren T. Davila (May): An anthology of dark, unsettling writing from some of the most exciting contemporary BIPOC writers. Blending Gothic, horror, folklore, fantasy and fairy-tale, these eerie short stories will disturb, move and humor you. Death is ever-present in these pages, blending with notions of home, memory, grief and belonging, as well as gentrification, white supremacy and colonization.

June

  • The Wasp Child, Rhiannon Rasmussen (June 6): This sci-fi novella breathes new life into some of Kafka’s themes about capitalist society and identity by setting them on Meridian Colony, an alien planet where corporate values dictate human worth. Kesh is afraid. Afraid of his classmates, his abilities, and his prospects for the future. He longs to escape. Then, his classmates kidnap and dump him in the middle of the alien rainforest. Alone. Faced with certain death, Kesh locates the sansik, giant bugs native to the planet. Though the sansik seem to care for him at first, they set off a horrific metamorphosis in Kesh, and when they trade him back to Meridian, he becomes a living scientific curiosity. A bleak future of analysis without autonomy awaits him. Trapped between the grasp of Meridian’s laboratories and a harsh alien world, Kesh must escape to have any chance of finding his purpose—and place—in the world.
  • Aurora, David Koepp (June 7): From the author of Cold Storage comes a riveting, eerily plausible thriller, told with the menace and flair of Under the Dome or Project Hail Mary, in which a worldwide cataclysm plays out in the lives of one complicated Midwestern family. 
  • For The Throne, Hannah Whitten (Jun 7): The breathtaking sequel to For The Wolf, the instant NYT and USA Today fantasy bestseller. Red’s sister Neve is trapped in a mysterious land of twisted roots, lost gods, and mountains made of bone, and the only clues to her rescue are a magic mirror and a dark prince who wants to bring the whole thing crumbling down. 
  • From Below, Darcy Coates (June 7): No light. No air. No escape. Hundreds of feet beneath the ocean’s surface, a graveyard waits… Years ago, the SS Arcadia vanished without a trace during a routine voyage. Sixty years later, its wreck has finally been discovered more than three hundred miles from its intended course. Cove and her dive team have been granted permission to explore the Arcadia’s rusting hull, but the Arcadia has not yet had its fill of death, and something dark and hungry watches from below.
  • Hell Followed with Us, Andrew Joseph White (June 7): A furious debut novel from Andrew Joseph White about embracing the monster within and unleashing its power against your oppressors. Perfect for fans of Gideon the Ninth and Annihilation.
  • Little Bird, Tiffany Meuret (June 7): The skeletons in the closet have nothing on the one in your backyard. Freshly divorced and grieving the death of her father, Josie Lauer has caged herself inside her home, drinking heavily. Everything changes when Josie wakes to find a small shrub has sprouted in her backyard the morning after yet another bender. Within hours, the vine-like plant is running amok—and it’s brought company: a busybody new neighbor who insists on thrusting herself into Josie’s life, and a talking skeleton called Skelly that has perched itself in Josie’s backyard on a throne made of vines. As the strangely sentient plant continues to grow and twist its tendrils inside Josie’s suddenly complicated life, Josie begins to realize there’s a reason Skelly has chosen to appear. She must figure out what that reason is, or else she might find herself on the wrong side of catastrophe.
  • The Nectar of Nightmares, Craig Laurance Gidney (June 7): The stories in The Nectar of Nightmares weave and remix myths, legends, and identities. Ranging from retold folktales to diverse settings like the Harlem Renaissance and the contemporary drag ball scene to phantasmagoric secondary worlds, this is a horror collection for those who have descended so far into the deep, there’s nothing left to fear. There is.
  • Never the Wind, Francesco Dimitri (June 7): A bittersweet gothic fantasy of family, friendship, memory, and the uncanny told from the perspective of a blind teenager in Puglia, Southern Italy, set in the same world as The Book of Hidden Things, perfect for readers of Neil Gaiman, Donna Tartt and Haruki Murakami.
  • Ordinary Monsters, J.M. Miro (June 7): A stunning new work of historical fantasy, Ordinary Monsters introduces readers to the dark, labyrinthine world of the Talents. What follows is a story of wonder and betrayal, from the gaslit streets of London, and the wooden theatres of Meiji-era Tokyo, to an eerie estate outside Edinburgh where other children with gifts – the Talents – have been gathered. There, the world of the dead and the world of the living threaten to collide. And as secrets within the Institute unfurl, Marlowe, Charlie and the rest of the Talents will discover the truth about their abilities, and the nature of what is stalking them: that the worst monsters sometimes come bearing the sweetest gifts.
  • Screams From the Dark: Tales of Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. Ellen Datlow (June 7): A chilling anthology featuring 29 all-original tales of monsters from bestselling and award-winning authors, edited by Ellen Datlow, one of the top editors in horror, and featuring stories from authors like Stephen Graham Jones, Richard Kadrey, Cassandra Khaw, Gemma Files, and more. (A Nightfire title)
  • Blood Mountain, Brenda S. Tolian (June 8): In this mosaic of Southwestern Gothic Horror, a primordial goddess awakens deep within the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The mountain hungers for revenge as invaders leave her emaciated with their greed and brutality. She cries out for blood, infusing the minds of those who do not belong—twisting them outwardly into the dark forms of their true intentions.
  • Boys, Beasts, & Men, Sam J. Miller (June 14): Queer infatuation, inevitable heartbreak, and satisfying revenge seamlessly intertwine in Sam J. Miller (Blackfish City, The Art of Starving)’s long-awaited debut short story collection. Whether innocent, guilty, or not even human, the beings in Miller’s gorgeously-crafted worlds can destroy you—yet leave you longing for them even more.
  • The Hangman Feeds the Jackal: A Gothic Western, Coy Hall (June 14): Elijah Valero is a gunfighter afflicted with terrifying hallucinations, including a pervasive one of The Hangman out to kill him. Dogged by the relentless specter of the Hangman, Valero mistakenly kills innocent victims and is forced to hide in an abandoned monastery for his own safety and for that of others. Once there, he encounters far greater dangers than the imaginary Hangman, and gains a bid for redemption as he faces down some silver-hungry drifters out to terrorize a town for its riches.
  • Diet Riot: A Fatterpunk Anthology, ed. Sonora Taylor & Nico Bell (June 21): It’s time to reclaim the “f” word. Diet Riot is dedicated to empowering fat characters within the horror community. Fat people are often degraded in literature, especially in horror. It’s disheartening to see someone’s natural body be portrayed as disgusting and inherently bad. We aim to give that trope the heartiest “fuck you” that our big selves can muster.
  • The House Across the Lake, Riley Sager (June 21): The New York Times-bestselling author of Final Girls and Survive the Night returns with a new novel of suspense, a tale of voyeurism and suspicion that morphs into a story of guilt, obsession and how looks can be very deceiving.
  • Juniper & Thorn, Ava Reid (June 21): From highly acclaimed bestselling author Ava Reid comes a gothic horror retelling of The Juniper Tree, set in another time and place within the world of The Wolf and the Woodsman, where a young witch seeks to discover her identity and escape the domination of her abusive wizard father, perfect for fans of Shirley Jackson and Catherynne M. Valente.
  • Not Good for Maidens, Tori Bovalino (June 21): ‘Salem’s Lot meets The Darkest Part of the Forest in this horror-fantasy retelling of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market.” They’ll lure you in with fruit and gems and liquor and dancing, merriment to remember for the rest of your life. But that’s an illusion. The market is death itself.
  • This Wicked Fate, Kalynn Bayron (June 21): How much would you risk to save the ones you love? Would you tempt even the most dangerous fate? Bestselling author Kalynn Bayron continues the story of Briseis and her family’s deadly magic in the sequel to This Poison Heart.
  • We Can Never Leave This Place, Eric LaRocca (June 24): A precocious young girl with an unusual imagination is sent on an odyssey into the depths of depravity. After her father dies violently, young Mara is surprised to find her mother welcoming a new guest into their home, claiming that he will protect them from the world of devastation and destruction outside their door. A grotesque and thrilling dark fantasy, We Can Never Leave This Place is a harrowing portrait of inherited grief and familial trauma.
  • The Clackity, Lora Senf (June 28): Reminiscent of Doll Bones, this deliciously eerie middle grade novel tells the story of a girl who must enter a world of ghosts, witches, and monsters to play a game with deadly consequences and rescue her aunt.
  • The Hideous Book of Hidden Horrors, ed. Doug Murano (Jun 28): The horror is closer than you think. From Bram Stoker Award-winning editor Doug Murano and today’s biggest names in dark fiction comes a new vision of terror. It’s lurking under the surface. It’s waiting around every corner. It’s hiding under your bed. it’s buried in the backyard. It’s whispered, implied, unspoken. This is The Hideous Book of Hidden Horrors.
  • Katzenjammer, Francesca Zappia (June 28): Told in chapters alternating between the past and the present, Francesca Zappia weaves a spine-tingling, suspenseful, and haunting YA story about tragedy and the power of memories.
  • Our Crooked Hearts, Melissa Albert (June 28): Secrets. Lies. Super-bad choices. Witchcraft. This is Our Crooked Hearts, a darkly gripping contemporary YA fantasy from Melissa Albert, the New York Times bestselling author of The Hazel Wood.
  • The Path of Thorns, A.G. Slatter (June 28): A gorgeous dark gothic fairy tale from award-winning author Angela Slatter, sure to delight readers of Naomi Novik and Erin Morgenstern.
  • Patricia Wants to Cuddle, Samantha Allen (June 28): Both a queer horror comedy that careens toward a last-girl-standing conclusion and a scathing indictment of contemporary American media culture, Patricia Wants to Cuddle is also a love story: between star-crossed lesbians who rise above their intolerant town, a deeply ambivalent woman and her budding self-actualization, and a group of misfit islanders forging community against all odds.

July

  • Lure, Tim McGregor (July 1): In the chapel of a forsaken fishing village on another world’s shore, the seawashed bones of old gods hang from the rafters. When a new god drifts into the bay, the menfolk fear nothing as they reach for their spears, but capturing Her may be their last act of reckless bravado. Her very presence brings dissent and madness. Her voice threatens to tear the starving, angry community apart. Setting a siege of relentless horror against the backdrop of brine and blood, Lure blurs the line between natural disaster and self-destruction.
  • Florida Woman, Deb Rogers (Jul 5): A gleefully dark and entertaining debut for fans of Kevin Wilson and Karen Russell, about one young woman’s sensational, sinister summer at a Floridian wildlife center for exotic monkeys, where all is not what it seems.
  • Frightmares, Eva V. Gibson (Jul 5): In a Florida tourist trap, a summer acting job turns into a real-life horror show when a cast member turns up dead—then disappears. This nail-biting story is perfect for fans of Fear Street!
  • The Pain Eater, Kyle Muntz (Jul 5): Two brothers from Michigan are reunited after the death of their father. They’ve never been close, but now they have to live together—and it gets more difficult when one discovers a strange creature, vomited from the body of a dead cat. A creature that eats human pain. It feels good: too good. Soon he wants to hurt himself more, just so the pain can be taken away. But the more the creature becomes a part of his life, the more he damages everything around him.
  • The Pallbearers’ Club, Paul Tremblay (Jul 5): A cleverly voiced psychological thriller about an unforgettable—and unsettling—friendship, with blood-chilling twists, crackling wit, and a thrumming pulse in its veins—from the nationally bestselling author of The Cabin at the End of the World and Survivor Song.
  • The Ruins, Phoebe Wynne (Jul 5): A suspenseful, feminist Gothic coming-of-age tale with shades of Patricia Highsmith, Rebecca, and Atonement, pitched against the sun-soaked backdrop of a summer holiday on the French Riviera.
  • Ghostflowers, Rus Wornom (Jul 8): A Southern Gothic about a young waitress in 1970s Virginia who meets her immortal true love, a vampire.
  • The Ghost That Ate Us: The Tragic True Story of the Burger City Poltergeist, Daniel Kraus (July 12): A fictionalized true crime novel that follows the author as he unravels the hauntings and murders at a Burger City franchise off I-80 in Iowa, using footnotes, news quotes, crime-scene photos, and survivor interviews.
  • Our Wives Under the Sea, Julia Armfield (Jul 12): By turns elegiac and furious, wry and heartbreaking, Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea is a genre-bending exploration of the depths of love and grief at the heart of a marriage.
  • They Drown Our Daughters, Katrina Monroe (Jul 12): For fans of Jennifer McMahon and Silvia Moreno-Garcia comes a haunting and atmospheric new novel from debut author Katrina Monroe. They say Cape Disappointment is haunted. That if you can hear the call of the water, it’s already too late…
  • Three Days in the Pink Tower, EV Knight (Jul 12): Josey Claypool begins the summer before her senior year at a carnival, where a fortune teller with milky-white eyes gives her a foreboding tarot reading. She’s spooked, but nothing could prepare her for the following day when two strange men show up at her front door. Josey is kidnapped at gunpoint and brought to a pink cabin in the woods where she is held prisoner. In her darkest moment, the fortune teller appears and gives her a deck of tarot cards, which she must cast and interpret in a fight for her life. In this work of speculative autofiction, award-winning author EV Knight reclaims the narrative of her own past in an exploration of trauma, agency, and survival.
  • The Transgressionists and Other Disquieting Works, Giorgio De Maria (Jul 12): Giorgio De Maria distinguished himself as one of Italy’s most unique and eccentric weird fiction masters. Available in English for the first time, this collection contains two novellas, two short stories, and a dystopian teleplay, “The Appeal,” which the post-cyberpunk novelist Andrea Vaccaro has lauded as “worthy of the best episodes of Black Mirror.”
  • Wake the Bones, Elizabeth Kilcoyne (Jul 12): Elizabeth Kilcoyne’s Wake the Bones is a dark, atmospheric debut about the complicated feelings that arise when the place you call home becomes hostile.
  • What Moves the Dead, T. Kingfisher (Jul 12): From the award-winning author of The Twisted Ones comes a gripping and atmospheric retelling of Edgar Allan Poe’s classic “The Fall of the House of Usher.” (A Nightfire title)
  • Black Mouth, Ronald Malfi (Jul 19): Perfect for fans of Stephen King’s IT, a group of friends return to their hometown to confront a nightmare they first stumbled on as teenagers in this mesmerizing odyssey of terror.
  • The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Jul 19): From the New York Times bestselling author of Mexican Gothic and Velvet Was the Night comes a dreamy reimagining of The Island of Doctor Moreau set against the backdrop of nineteenth-century Mexico.
  • Dead Water, C.A. Fletcher (Jul 19): On the edge of the Northern Atlantic lies a remote island. The islanders are an outwardly harmonious community—but all have their own secrets, some much darker than others. And when a strange disorder begins to infect them all, those secrets come to light. Ferry service fails and contact with the mainland is lost. Rumors begin to swirl as a temporary inconvenience grows into nightmarish ordeal. The fabric of the once tight-knit island is unnervingly torn apart—and whatever the cause, the question soon stops being how or why it happened, but who, if anyone, will survive.
  • Death by Landscape, Elvia Wilk (Jul 19): What happens when research becomes personal, when the observer breaks through the glass? Through the eye of the fan, this essay collection delves into literal and literary world-building projects–medieval monasteries, solarpunk futures, vampire role plays, environments devoid of humans–bridging the micro and the macro and revealing how our relationship to narrative shapes our relationships to the natural world and to one another.
  • Just Like Home, Sarah Gailey (Jul 19): A darkly gothic thriller from nationally bestselling author Sarah Gailey, perfect for fans of Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House as well as HBO’s true crime masterpiece I’ll Be Gone in the Dark–with a twist ending that no one can predict.
  • Mary: An Awakening of Terror, Nat Cassidy (Jul 19): Nat Cassidy’s debut horror novel Mary blends Midsommar with elements of American Psycho and a pinch of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark as a middle-aged woman explores her connection to an infamous serial killer. (A Nightfire title)
  • Other Terrors: An Inclusive Anthology, ed. Vince A. Liaguno & Rena Mason (Jul 19): An anthology of original new horror stories edited by Bram Stoker Award winners Vince Liaguno and Rena Mason that showcases authors from underrepresented backgrounds telling terrifying tales of what it means to be, or merely to seem, “other.”
  • Rabbits in the Garden, Jessica McHugh (Jul 19): At twelve years old, Avery Norton had everything: a boyfriend who was also her best friend, the entirety of Martha’s Vineyard as her playground, and her very own garden to tend. By thirteen, it was all over. The discovery of a secret crypt in the basement starts the Norton family down many unexpected avenues, including one that leads to Avery’s arrest for murder and her subsequent imprisonment in Taunton State Lunatic Asylum. Set in 1950s Massachusetts, Rabbits in the Garden follows Avery Norton’s struggle to prove her innocence, exact her revenge, and escape Taunton with her mind intact.
  • Skin Grows Over, Lucy Elizabeth Allan (Jul 19): A young woman who has never learned how to grieve begins to come apart following the loss of the one friend who truly understood her. A mysterious and obsessive Humanist celebrant prepares to perform the most important funeral of her life. A world-weary and weather-beaten museum custodian resigns herself to hosting a mysterious ceremony that goes against everything she believes in. Connecting the three of them, a centuries-old bog mummy, hovering around it all, watching, waiting to be put to rest.
  • We Will Rise, Tim Waggoner (Jul 19): In Echo Hill, Ohio, the dead begin to reappear, manifesting in various forms, from classic ghosts and poltergeists, to physical undead and bizarre apparitions for which there is no name. These malign spirits attack the living, tormenting and ultimately killing them in order to add more recruits to their spectral ranks. A group of survivors come together after the initial attack, all plagued by different ghostly apparitions of their own. Can they make it out of Echo Hill alive?
  • Into the Sublime, Kate A. Boorman (Jul 26): A new YA psychological thriller from the author of What We Buried about four teenage girls who descend into a dangerous underground cave system in search of a lake of local legend, said to reveal your deepest fears.
  • Nightmare Fuel: The Science of Horror Films, Nina Nesseth (Jul 26): In Nightmare Fuel, Nina Nesseth uses her background in biomedical science to explain the mechanics of what makes what we see on the screen so terrifying and what goes on behind the scenes to create the horror in the first place. With spotlight features of some of horror’s most popular films—from classics like The Exorcist to modern hits like A Quiet Place—and interviews with producers, film historians, and creature creators, Nightmare Fuel is both an in-depth dive into the science of fear, and a celebration of the genre. (A Nightfire title)
  • Old Country, Matt Query & Harrison Query (Jul 26): Based on the Reddit sensation, a horror thriller about a former Marine and his wife who buy a perfectly secluded ranch, only to discover it’s haunted by a malevolent spirit.
  • The Witchery, S. Isabelle (Jul 26): A bewitching YA debut by S. Isabelle, perfect for fans of Maggie Stiefvater, Zoraida Córdova, and Leigh Bardugo!

August

  • The Book Eaters, Sunyi Dean (Aug 2): Out on the Yorkshire Moors lives a secret line of people for whom books are food, and who retain all of a book’s content after eating it. To them, spy novels are a peppery snack; romance novels are sweet and delicious. Eating a map can help them remember destinations, and children, when they misbehave, are forced to eat dry, musty pages from dictionaries. Devon is part of The Family, an old and reclusive clan of book eaters. Her brothers grow up feasting on stories of valor and adventure, and Devon—like all other book eater women—is raised on a carefully curated diet of fairytales and cautionary stories. But real life doesn’t always come with happy endings, as Devon learns when her son is born with a rare and darker kind of hunger—not for books, but for human minds.
  • The Devil Takes You Home, Gabino Iglesias (Aug 2): From Bram Stoker, Anthony, and Locus award-nominated author Gabino Iglesias comes a genre-defying thriller about a father desperate to salvage what’s left of his family, even if it means a descent into violence–both supernatural and of our own terrifying world.
  • Haunted Tales: Classic Stories of Ghosts and the Supernatural, ed. Lisa Morton & Leslie S. Klinger (Aug 2): Following their acclaimed Ghost Stories and Weird Women, award-winning anthologists Leslie S. Klinger and Lisa Morton present a new eclectic anthology of ghosty tales certain to haunt the reader long past the closing page.
  • Small Angels, Lauren Owen (Aug 2): A wedding in a small English village attracts a malicious spirit, forcing deep secrets to surface—a hypnotic tale of sisterhood, first love, and hauntings.
  • The Wild Hunt, Emma Seckel (Aug 2): A transporting, otherworldly debut of a young woman’s fated return to a wind-battered island off the coast of Scotland, and the dark forces—old and new—that she finds there.
  • Hell Hath No Sorrow Like a Woman Haunted, R.J. Joseph (Aug 7): A fierce collection of tales exploring the varying experiences of Black women in horrific circumstances. Sometimes the victim, sometimes the monster, and often a little of both…
  • These Fleeting Shadows, Kate Alice Marshall (Aug 9): The Haunting of Hill House meets Knives Out in a bid for an inheritance that will leave Helen Vaughan either rich… or dead.
  • The Women Could Fly, Megan Giddings (Aug 9): Reminiscent of the works of Margaret Atwood, Shirley Jackson, and Octavia Butler, a biting social commentary from the acclaimed author of Lakewood that speaks to our times—a piercing dystopian novel about the unbreakable bond between a young woman and her mysterious mother, set in a world in which witches are real and single women are closely monitored.
  • Anybody Home?, Michael Seidlinger (Aug 16): A seasoned home invader with multiple home invasions under their belt recounts their dark victories while offering tutelage to a new generation of ambitious recruits.
  • Demon Dagger, Russell James (Aug 16): A Demon Hunter with a gift that becomes a curse. A Demon that hunts the hunter. A thrilling tale of darkness and vengeance for fans of the TV series Supernatural.
  • The Honeys, Ryan La Sala (Aug 16): From Ryan La Sala, the wildly popular author of Reverie, comes a twisted and tantalizing YA horror novel set amidst the bucolic splendor of a secluded summer retreat.
  • Second Spear, Kerstin Hall (Aug 16): The thrilling sequel to The Border Keeper. After surviving the schemes of a vengeful goddess and learning some shattering truths about her former life, the warrior Tyn feels estranged from her role guarding her ruler. Grappling with knowledge of her identity, she unleashes her frustrations on all the wrong people. When an old enemy returns wielding an unstoppable, realm-crushing weapon and Tyn is swept up in the path of destruction, she must make a choice about who she is and who she wants to be.
  • This Appearing House, Ally Malinenko (Aug 16): A Monster Calls-esque story navigating the effects of trauma and illness, this middle grade novel follows a girl and her best friend who get trapped inside a haunted house that turns out to be a lot more than what it seems.
  • Queer Screams, Abigail Waldron (Aug 17): Offering a fresh look at the horror genre’s queer roots, this book documents how diverse stories have provided an outlet for queer people—including transgender and non-binary people—to find catharsis and reclamation. Freaks, dolls, serial killers, telekinetic teenagers and Final Girls all have something to contribute to the historical examination of the American LGBTQ+ experience. Ranging from psychiatry to homophobic fear of HIV/AIDS spread and, most recently, the alienation and self-determination of queer America in the Trump era, this is a look into how terror may repair a shattered queer heart.
  • Clown in a Cornfield 2: Frendo Lives, Adam Cesare (Aug 23): Cesare’s killer clown returns in the sequel to his Bram Stoker Award-winning novel Clown in a Cornfield.
  • Darling, Mercedes M. Yardley (Aug 23): Cherry LaRouche escaped the claws of Darling, Louisiana at sixteen. When she is forced to return after her mother’s death, Cherry and her children move back into her childhood home where the walls whisper and something sinister skitters across the roof at night. While Cherry tries to settle back into a town where evil spreads like infection, the bodies of several murdered children turn up. When Cherry’s own daughter goes missing, she’s forced to confront the true monsters of Darling.
  • Let No One Sleep, Juan José Millás (Aug 23): After Lucía loses her job at an IT firm, she has a vision of her future career as a taxi driver, brought on by the intoxicating opera floating through her apartment’s air vent. She obtains her taxi license and meets the neighbor responsible for the music. Calaf is the man’s name, which also happens to be the name of the character in Puccini’s Turandot and the bird Lucía received on her tenth birthday from her long-since-dead mother. When he moves out of her building, Lucía becomes obsessed, driving through Madrid and searching for him on every corner, meeting intriguing people along the way. What follows is a phantasmagoria of coincidence, betrayal, and revenge, featuring Millás’s singular dark humor.
  • Reluctant Immortals, Gwendolyn Kiste (Aug 23): From three-time Bram Stoker Award–winning author Gwendolyn Kiste comes a novel inspired by the untold stories of forgotten women in classic literature—from Lucy Westnera, a victim of Stoker’s Dracula, and Bertha Mason, Mr. Rochester’s attic-bound wife in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre—as they band together to combat the toxic men bent on destroying their lives, set against the backdrop of the Summer of Love, Haight-Ashbury, 1967.
  • Ricky’s Hand, David Quantick (Aug 23): From the Emmy Award-winning writer of Avenue 5, Veep, and The Thick of It comes a funny, violent and thought-provoking horror story like nothing you’ve seen before.
  • Girls From the County, Donna Lynch (Aug 25): You’ve heard of country girls, and city girls, but what of the forgotten girls from the in-between space of the county? Confronting the things too wild for urban areas, and too methodically malevolent for the countryside, girls from the county are often dismissed by popular narratives, left to solve riddles of grief and rage for themselves. Known for weaving folk horror with confessional poetry, unflinching true crime approaches with myth and fable, contemporary appetites with gothic literature, award-winning author Donna Lynch has composed a lyrical reconstruction for readers to navigate the lives—and deaths—of girls from the county.
  • God’s Leftovers, Grant Wamack (Aug 26): A young couple, a religious man, a gritty rapper, and a sublime videographer get stranded together in the desert. Little do they know, they’ll cross paths in a bloody fashion with one another as well as a hippie cult that has a fetish for the flesh. Welcome to the Valley of Fire, where sex magic, psychedelics, ancient tongues, and old gods reign supreme.
  • Magnum Opus, Caitlin Marceau (Aug 30): Charlotte Curran is willing to do whatever it takes to make sure her newest book is a bestseller… even if that means murdering her best friend. Nobody suspects her of killing renowned author Kim Lavoie, but when Charlotte starts seeing Kim everywhere she turns, she quickly realizes it’s more than just her guilty conscience haunting her. With each passing day, Kim’s judging gaze grows more difficult to escape. Magnum Opus is a dark look at the price of fame and the legacy we leave behind.
  • Number One Fan, Meg Elison (Aug 30): On her way to a speaking engagement, bestselling novelist Eli Grey gets into a cab and accepts a drink from the driver, trusting that everything is fine. She wakes up chained in the stranger’s basement. With no close family or friends expecting her to check in, Eli knows she needs to save herself. She soon realizes that her abduction wasn’t random, and though she thinks she might recognize her captor, she can’t figure out what he wants. Her only clues are that he’s very familiar with her books and deeply invested in the fantastical world she creates. What follows is a test of wills as Eli pits herself against a man who believes she owes him everything—and is determined to take it from her.
  • Stinetinglers: All New Stories by the Master of Scary Tales, R.L. Stine (Aug 30): From New York Times bestselling author R.L. Stine, the master of horror for young readers, comes ten new stories that are sure to leave you shivering. Laced with Stine’s signature humor and a hefty dose of nightmarish fun, Stinetinglers is perfect for fans of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and Stine’s own Goosebumps books. These chilling tales prove that Stine’s epic legacy in the horror genre is justly earned. Dive in, and beware: you might be sleeping with the lights on tonight!
  • Suburban Hell, Maureen Kilmer (Aug 30): Bad Moms meets My Best Friend’s Exorcism in this lite-horror-comedy about a group of women in the Chicago ‘burbs, whose cul-de-sac gets a new neighbor: a demon.

September

  • Crom Cruach, Valkyrie Loughcrewe (September 2): A distinctly Irish anxiety piece about the reluctant future and repressed past of a country trying to shrug off the shackles of colonialism, wrapped in the shiny black leather of Giallo and written in a poetic style fit for the fog-shrouded mysticism of the emerald isle.
  • Bad Dolls, Rachel Harrison (Sept 6): In this stunning new audio-only collection of four horror stories, award-winning author Rachel Harrison explores themes of body image, complicated female friendship, heartbreak, and hauntings.
  • Carnosaur, Harry Adam Knight (Sept 6): First published in 1984, six years before Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, Harry Adam Knight’s Carnosaur is a gory dinosaur-filled romp sure to delight fans of ’80s paperback horror fiction.
  • Fairy Tale, Stephen King (Sept 6): Legendary storyteller Stephen King goes deep into the well of his imagination in this spellbinding novel about a seventeen-year-old boy who inherits the keys to a parallel world where good and evil are at war, and the stakes could not be higher—for their world or ours.
  • Gallows Hill, Darcy Coates (Sept 6): The Hull family has owned the Gallows Hill Winery for generations, living and working on the beautiful grounds where they grow their famous grapes. Until the night Mr. and Mrs. Hull settle down for the evening… and are dead by morning. When their daughter, Margot, inherits the family business, she wants nothing to do with it. The winery is valued for its unparalleled produce, but it’s built on a field where hundreds of convicts were once hanged, and the locals whisper morbid rumors. They say the ground is cursed. It’s been more than a decade since Margot last saw her childhood home. But now that she’s alone in the sprawling, dilapidated building, she begins to believe the curse is more than real―and that she may be the next victim of the house that never rests…
  • Medusa’s Ankles, A.S. Byatt (Sept 6): Medusa’s Ankles celebrates the very best of A. S. Byatt’s short fiction, carefully selected from a lifetime of writing. Peopled by artists, poets, and fabulous creatures, the stories blaze with creativity and color. From ancient myth to a British candy factory, from a Chinese restaurant to a Mediterranean swimming pool, from a Turkish bazaar to a fairy-tale palace, Byatt transports her readers beyond the veneer of the ordinary—even beyond the gloss of the fantastical—to places rich and strange and wholly unforgettable.
  • Our Shadows Have Claws, ed. Amparo Ortiz & Yamile Saied Méndez (Sept 6): A YA horror anthology featuring monsters and specters from Latinx folklore, from el Chupacabra to La Llorona, the vampire and werewolf, the pombero and Nahuelito, and beyond.
  • The Gathering Dark: An Anthology of Folk Horror, ed. Tori Bovalino (Sept 6): A cemetery full of the restless dead. A town so wicked it has already burned twice, with the breath of the third fire looming. A rural, isolated bridge with a terrifying monster waiting for the completion of its summoning ritual. A lake that allows the drowned to return, though they have been changed by the claws of death. These are the shadowed, liminal spaces where the curses and monsters lurk, refusing to be forgotten. Hauntings, and a variety of horrifying secrets, lurk in the places we once called home. Written by New York Times bestselling, and other critically acclaimed, authors these stories shed a harsh light on the scariest tales we grew up with.
  • Song of the Red Squire, C.W. Blackwell (Sept 6): North Carolina, 1949. When agricultural inspector Charlie Danwitter is sent on a special assignment to bucolic Ashe County, he expects an easy job cataloging heirloom apple varieties. However, when the local farmers grow suspicious of his motives, Charlie finds himself in far more trouble than he bargained for. In an attempt to salvage his assignment, he follows a mysterious woman deep into the beating heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains to a long-forgotten village where harvest rituals are rooted in bizarre Old World customs—and discovers that some traditions are better left in the past.
  • Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke And Other Misfortunes, Eric LaRocca (Sept 6): Dark, disturbing, cutting-edge horror from an astonishing new voice. The viral sensation that everyone is talking about. Sadomasochism. Obsession. Death. A whirlpool of darkness churns at the heart of a macabre ballet between two lonely young women in an internet chat room in the early 2000s—a darkness that threatens to forever transform them once they finally succumb to their most horrific desires. What have you done today to deserve your eyes?Devastating, deeply disturbing and beautifully written horror from one of the genre’s most cutting-edge voices.
  • The Weight of Blood, Tiffany D. Jackson (Sept 6): New York Times bestselling author Tiffany D. Jackson ramps up the horror and tackles America’s history and legacy of racism in this suspenseful YA novel following a biracial teenager as her Georgia high school hosts its first integrated prom.
  • Dark Observation, Catherine Cavendish (Sept 13): In the dark days of war-torn London, Violet works in Churchill’s subterranean top secret Cabinet War Rooms, where key decisions that will dictate Britain’s conduct of the war are made. Above, the people of London go about their daily business as best they can, unaware of the life that teems beneath their feet. Night after night the bombs rain down, yet Violet has far more to fear than air raids. A mysterious man, a room only she can see, memories she can no longer trust, and a best friend who denies their shared past… Something – or someone – is targeting her.
  • The Depths, Nicole Lesperance (Sept 13): A tropical island full of secrets. Two Victorian ghosts, trapped for eternity. And a seventeen-year-old girl determined not to be next. After she suffers a near-fatal freediving accident, seventeen-year-old Addie tags along on her mother’s honeymoon to a private island where she unearths dark secrets — wandering ghosts, bloodthirsty flowers, and a deep pool where no one feels pain — before realizing the island might not be willing to let her go.
  • Fellstones, Ramsey Campbell (Sept 13): Fellstones takes its name from seven objects on the village green. It’s where Paul Dunstan was adopted by the Staveleys after his parents died in an accident for which he blames himself. The way the Staveleys tried to control him made him move away and change his name. Why were they obsessed with a strange song he seemed to have made up as a child? Now their daughter Adele has found him. By the time he discovers the cosmic truth about the stones, he may be trapped. There are other dark secrets he’ll discover, and memories to confront. The Fellstones dream, but they’re about to waken.
  • Full Immersion, Gemma Amor (Sept 13): A traumatized woman with amnesia finds her own dead body and sets out to uncover the truth of her demise in a race against time, sanity, crumbling realities and the ever-present threat of the Silhouette.
  • Lucky Girl, How I Became a Horror Writer: A Krampus Story, M. Rickert (Sept 13): A novella told across several Christmases, rooted in loneliness and horror and the ever-lurking presence of Krampus written by World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson Award-winning short fiction author M. Rickert.
  • The Stars Did Wander Darkling, Colin Meloy (Sept 13): A suspenseful and atmospheric middle grade horror set in 1980s Oregon, perfect for fans of Stranger Things, Neil Gaiman, and Margaret Peterson Haddix, from New York Times bestselling author and the Decemberists’ lead singer/songwriter Colin Meloy.
  • The Talosite, Rebecca Campbell (Sept 13): It’s 1916, during the First World War, in an alternate world where resurrection is possible. Anne Markham, the daughter of a celebrated neurologist, is reusing the bodies of the dead, combining them into new forms and sending them back into combat, building creatures so complex, and so enormous, that they can encompass all of the fallen
  • Daphne, Josh Malerman (Sept 20): Horror has a new name: Daphne. A brutal, enigmatic woman stalks a high school basketball team in a reimagining of the slasher genre by the New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box.
  • Direwood, Catherine Yu (Sept 20): In this YA gothic horror novel, 16-year-old Aja, whose sister Fiona disappears when a strange weather event isolates their town, must put her trust in a vicious but alluring vampire if she wants to see her sister again.
  • Ghost Eaters, Clay McLeod Chapman (Sept 20): For fans of Grady Hendrix and Paul Tremblay, this terrifying supernatural page-turner explores ghosts, grief, and god complexes.
  • Necroscope II: Vamphyri!, Brian Lumley (Sept 20): The fear level rises in this new edition of book two of Brian Lumley’s Necroscope series, which blends disturbing horror and thrilling spycraft into a gripping whirl of terror and suspense! Necroscope II: Vamphyri! is the second volume in a powerful series that has enthralled millions of readers with its very different look at vampires and vampire hunters, at the dead and the living and the worlds they share. (A Nightfire title)
  • No Gods For Drowning, Hailey Piper (Sept 20): The gods have fled. Monsters threaten to invade the city of Logos, hunting mankind as they did in the olden days. In the midst of it all, a serial killer has begun ritually sacrificing victims–to lure the gods back and stop the imminent destruction, or for a more sinister purpose? Lilac Antonis wants to stop the impending destruction of her city by summoning her mother, a blood god–even if she has to slit a few throats to do it. But evading her lover Arcadia and her friends means sneaking, lying, and even spilling the blood of people she loves. Alex and Cecil of Ace Investigations have been tasked with hunting down the killer, but as they close in–not knowing it is their close friend they’re hunting–the detectives realize the gods may not have left willingly, and must uncover the truth before Lilac summons the wrong god, who may have come back just to destroy them all. Set in an alternate reality which updates mythology to near-modern day, No Gods For Drowning is part hunt for a serial killer, part noir detective story, and unlike anything you’ve ever read before.
  • This is Where We Talk Things Out, Caitlin Marceau (Sept 21): This Is Where We Talk Things Out follows the gut-wrenching journey of Miller and her estranged mother, Sylvie, who have always had a tense relationship. A cross between Stephen King’s Misery and Stephanie Wrobel’s Darling Rose Gold, This Is Where We Talk Things Out explores the horror of familial trauma, mother-daughter relationships, and what happens when we don’t let go.
  • The Butcher, Laura Kat Young (Sept 27): A suspenseful small-town horror novel of oppression, heartbreak and buried anguish – Shirley Jackson meets Never Let Me Go with the wild west setting of Westworld.
  • The Haunted History of Invisible Women: A Collection of True Ghost Stories, Andrea Janes & Leanna Renee Hieber (Sept 27): Andrea Janes, owner of Boroughs of the Dead in Manhattan, and Leanna Renee Hieber, an award-winning author of historical gothic fiction, are teaming up to write a collection of ghost stories that tackle the tragic history of women who were invisible in mainstream society—widows, spinsters, servants and other working women. With firsthand accounts of ghostly encounters and historical research, The Haunted History of Invisible Women is both spine-tingling and thoughtful—a page turner that will stay with you long after you’ve closed the book.
  • House of Hunger, Alexis Henderson (Sept 27): A young woman is drawn into the upper echelons of a society where blood is power, in this dark and enthralling gothic novel from the author of The Year of the Witching.
  • The House in the Orchard, Elizabeth Brooks (Sept 27): When a World War II widow inherits a dilapidated English estate, she uncovers a diary written by an adolescent girl named Maude Gower. Looking for answers, she begins reading, only to unravel more questions about the mysterious past and many secrets hidden deep within the walls of Orchard House. With each psychologically gripping turn, Elizabeth Brooks masterfully explores the blurred lines between truth and manipulation, asking us who we can trust, how to tell guilt from forgiveness, and whether we can ever really separate true love from destruction.
  • Isolation: The Horror Anthology, ed. Dan Coxon (Sept 27): A chilling horror anthology of 20 stories about the terrifying fear of isolation, from modern masters of horror including Tim Lebbon, Paul Tremblay, Joe R. Lansdale, M.R. Carey, Ken Liu and many more.
  • It Looks Like Us, Alison Ames (Sept 27): Shy high school junior Riley Kowalski is spending her winter break on a research trip to Antarctica, sponsored by one of the world’s biggest tech companies. She joins five student volunteers, a company-approved chaperone, and an impartial scientist to prove that environmental plastic pollution has reached all the way to Antarctica, but what they find is something much worse… something that looks human.
  • Leech, Hiron Ennes (Sept 27): A surreal and horrifying debut from author Hiron Ennes, Leech combines parasitic body horror with gothic family drama in a post-post-apocalyptic masterpiece that defies our understanding of identity, heredity, and bodily autonomy.
  • Motherthing, Ainslie Hogarth (Sept 27): A darkly funny domestic horror novel about a woman who must take drastic measures to save her husband and herself from the vengeful ghost of her mother-in-law.
  • One Dark Window, Rachel Gillig (Sept 27): Elspeth needs a monster. The monster might be her. For fans of Uprooted and For the Wolf comes a dark, lushly gothic fantasy about a maiden who must unleash the monster within to save her kingdom. But the monster in her head isn’t the only threat lurking.
  • Perfect Union, Cody Goodfellow (Sept 27): When Drew married Laura, he also married into the Kowalski family. But on a trip with his twin brothers-in-law into the backwoods of northern California to find their abusive, estranged mother, buried secrets will be revealed, threatening his fragile marriage and his sanity.
  • Split Scream Volume One, Carson Winter & Scott J. Moses (Sept 27): Dread Stone Press presents SPLIT SCREAM, a new Horror Novelette Double Feature. This is Volume One. Grab some popcorn, turn the lights low, and don’t be afraid to scream.
  • We Spread, Iain Reid (Sept 27): The author of the “evocative, spine-tingling, and razor-sharp” (Bustle) I’m Thinking of Ending Things that inspired the Netflix original movie returns with a mind-bending and chilling novel about the power of loneliness on a person’s psyche.

October

  • If Only a Heart and Other Tales of Terror, Caleb Stephens (Oct 3): If Only a Heart and Other Tales of Terror is a visceral collection of thirteen stories that explore what happens when we open ourselves to others and dare to let them in. There are monsters on these pages, yes, ones whose teeth cut deep, but never as deep as the teeth of the monsters in the mirror.
  • A Study in Ugliness & Outras Histórias, H. Pueyo (Oct 3): Ghosts and weird mourners, horrible teenagers and disgraceful instructors. Haunted prisoners and seafolk taken from the shore. H. Pueyo’s evocative writing takes notice that the dead, like memories are often closer than we think, and the guilty are often ignorant of the damage done and astonished when they themselves suffer. This debut collection offers Pueyo’s stories in both English and Portuguese to celebrate the author’s heritage. 
  • All These Subtle Deceits, C.S. Humble (Oct 4): Lauren Saunders moved to Black Wells, Colorado to escape a toxic relationship that stole three years of her life. But her hopeful optimism of a fresh start is dashed after a brutal, supernatural attack sends her screaming from a nightclub into the cold, winter night. Her journey toward recovery leads her to the doorstep of William Daniels—a professional spiritual intercessor and occult consultant. Together they will descend into an occult labyrinth of dark forces and oppressive spirits.
  • The Black Maybe: Liminal Stories, Attila Veres (Oct 4): Every so often a new horror writer bursts onto the scene with a book that is so dazzlingly original, so bone-chillingly terrifying, that it instantly alters the landscape of contemporary horror fiction. Hungarian author Attila Veres’ debut collection The Black Maybe is one of those books, now in English for the first time.
  • Castle Rock Kitchen, Theresa Carle-Sanders (Oct 4): Explore 80 classic and modern recipes inspired by Stephen King’s Maine, featuring dishes from the books set in Castle Rock, Derry, and other fictional towns—with a foreword from the legendary author himself.
  • Concerning Those Who Have Fallen Asleep, Adam Soto (Oct 4): A collection of short stories moving through time and place, exploring the spaces where we haunt each other and ourselves through our choices, our institutions, and our dreams.
  • Curse of the Reaper, Brian McAuley (Oct 4): Scream meets The Shining in this page-turning horror tale about an aging actor haunted by the slasher movie villain he brought to life.
  • The Cursed Earth, D.T. Neal (Oct 4): Set deep in the forests and hills of Pennsylvania, The Cursed Earth hurls readers headlong into the heart of a cosmic folk horror nightmare in a town ruled by the enigmatic La Signora Grigia—the psychedelic Grey Lady—where gangsters, partygoers, investigators, and sinister cultists clash in the midst of the wild festival atmosphere. Who is the Grey Lady, and can outsiders ever hope to survive for long in Lynchburg?
  • It Rides A Pale Horse, Andy Marino (Oct 4): From a new star in horror fiction comes a terrifying novel of obsession, greed, and the shocking actions we’ll take to protect those we love, all set in a small town filled with dark secrets.
  • Jackal, Erin E. Adams (Oct 4): A young Black girl goes missing in the woods outside her white Rust Belt town. But she’s not the first—and she may not be the last…
  • Lute, Jennifer Thorne (Oct 4): The Wicker Man meets Final Destination in this atmospheric, unsettling folk horror novel about love, duty, and community. (A Nightfire title)
  • Malice House, Megan Shepherd (Oct 4): New York Times bestselling author Megan Shepherd (The Madman’s Daughter) weaves a complex tale of dark magic and family secrets when a woman attempts to settle the estate of her father, an acclaimed horror novelist. Perfect for fans of Lovecraft Country, Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House, and The Babadook.
  • Such Sharp Teeth, Rachel Harrison (Oct 4): A young woman in need of a transformation finds herself in touch with the animal inside in this gripping, incisive novel from the author of Cackle and The Return.
  • The Witch in the Well, Camilla Bruce (Oct 4): The Witch in the Well is a dark Norwegian thriller from Camilla Bruce, author of You Let Me In.
  • October’s End: Halloween Horror Stories, Kevin Lucia, Jeremy Bates, and Jason Parent (Oct 7): Three leading voices in modern horror take us on a journey through Halloween in the infamous town of Clifton Heights.
  • The Dark Between The Trees, Fiona Barnett (Oct 11): An unforgettable, surrealist gothic folk-thriller with commercial crossover appeal from a brilliant new voice. 1643: A small group of Parliamentarian soldiers are ambushed in an isolated part of Northern England. Their only hope for survival is to flee into the nearby Moresby Wood… unwise though that may seem. Seventeen men enter the wood. Only two are ever seen again, and the stories they tell of what happened make no sense. Stories of shifting landscapes, of trees that appear and disappear at will… and of something else. Something dark. Something hungry. Today, five women are headed into Moresby Wood to discover, once and for all, what happened to that unfortunate group of soldiers. They’re ready for anything. Or so they think.
  • Ghosts of the Forbidden, Leanna Renee Hieber (Oct 11): When newly unemployed writer Lillian Anders tries to escape her personal demons by running off to Glazier’s Gap for a writer’s conference hosted by a reviving Gothic romance publisher, she lands right in the middle of her own Gothic novel. Her life begins eerily reflecting one of the early-’70s “women running from houses” books in the publisher’s archive. Striking 19th Century ghosts haunt darkened halls and carriage-house mirrors, startling Lillian with dangerous secrets. As a hungry, violent force lurks in the mountains and the abandoned silver mine, Lillian’s presence rekindles old flames and reopens aching wounds. When charming journalist Nathaniel Lynd arrives in town, he and Lillian forge an immediate bond when intimate memories surface from another century. Evil forces that killed star-crossed lovers in the past seek to destroy Lillian and Nathaniel in the present. It will take fortitude, ingenuity and unexpected help from the strange town itself to make sure the demons of the past don’t destroy a passionate future; destined to set old wrongs right.
  • Ghostwritten, Ronald Malfi (Oct 4): Four brand-new horror novellas from “a modern-day Algernon Blackwood” all about books, stories, manuscripts – the written word has never had sharper teeth…
  • The Hollow Kind, Andy Davidson (Oct 11): Andy Davidson’s epic horror novel about the spectacular decline of the Redfern family, haunted by an ancient evil. From the author of The Boatman’s Daughter, The Hollow Kind is a jaw-dropping novel about legacy and the horrors that hide in the dark corners of family history. Andy Davidson’s gorgeous, Gothic fable tracing the spectacular fall of the Redfern family will haunt you long after you turn the final page.
  • Lilith – Hollywood Monsters, Dana Fredsti (Oct 11): Quirky, fast-paced modern horror in the vein of Supernatural, Lucifer, True Blood, and Evil. Lee Striga is an actress, movie stuntwoman, and demon hunter. Fresh from filming Voodoo Wars in New Orleans, Lee returns to Los Angeles. Back at the Katz Family stunt ranch she finds animals of all kinds taking refuge on the grounds, and the supernatural creatures who populate Hollywood on edge to the point of violence. People are vanishing without a trace, and clues lead to a legendary mansion famous for its horrible deaths—the location for Lee’s next film job.
  • Little Eve, Catriona Ward (Oct 11): Winner of the Shirley Jackson Award for best novel and the August Derleth Prize for best horror novel, Little Eve is a heart-pounding literary gothic with a devastating twist. (A Nightfire title)
  • Mothwoman, Nicole Cushing (Oct 11): From Bram Stoker Award-winning author Nicole Cushing comes a novel about family, grief, aliens, mental illness, trauma, sexism, the Mothman legend, Covid, and the encroachment of unreality into American political life. Mothwoman combines the style and playful dark satire of A Sick Gray Laugh with the grimness and relatively quick pace of Mr. Suicide.
  • Saturnalia, Stephanie Feldman (Oct 11): Donna Tartt meets Jeff VanderMeer in this literary horror novel set in Philadelphia during a city-wide solstice celebration, in which an exile from an elite social club comes into possession of an alchemically-created being.
  • The United States of Cryptids: A Tour of American Myths and Monsters, J.W. Ocker (Oct 11): Welcome to the United States of Cryptids, where mysterious monsters lurk in the dark forests, deep lakes, and sticky swamps of all fifty states. From the infamous Jersey Devil to the obscure Snallygaster, travel writer and chronicler of the strange J. W. Ocker not only uncovers the bizarre stories of these creatures but investigates the ways in which communities have embraced and celebrated their local cryptids. Whether you believe in Bigfoot or not, this fully illustrated compendium is a fun, frightening, fascinating tour through American folklore and history, exploring not just the stories we tell about monsters but also what stories of monsters say about us.
  • When The Night Bells Ring, Jo Kaplan (Oct 11): Two climate refugees descend into an old mine where they find a settler’s diary that whispers of horrors haunting the ghost town, only to realize that the caved-in tunnels are haunted still…
  • Crime Scene, Cynthia Pelayo (Oct 13): Cynthia Pelayo sings a song for the least of us, the victim we want to forget as soon as possible, the one who disappeared before ever really appearing. With a fairy tale gaze and a heart bigger than the world, her siren song insinuates itself past our defenses, past the hardened calluses and apathy we’ve erected to protect ourselves from the everyday horror of another missing girl.
  • Blood Country, Jonathan Janz (Oct 18): In the second book of Janz’s Raven series, the vampires have transformed a four-story school building into their fortress, and they’re holding Dez’s ex-girlfriend and Iris’s young daughter captive. To save them, Dez and his friends must risk everything. They must infiltrate the vampires’ stronghold and face unspeakable terrors.
  • Close to Midnight, ed. Mark Morris (Oct 18): Close to Midnight is the third volume in an annual, non-themed horror series of entirely original stories, showcasing the very best short fiction that the genre has to offer, and edited by Mark Morris. This new anthology contains 20 original horror stories, 16 of which have been commissioned from some of the top names in the genre, and 4 of which have been selected from the 100s of stories sent to Flame Tree during a 2-week open submissions window.
  • Dark Matter Presents: Human Monsters, ed. Sadie Hartmann and Ashley Saywers (Oct 18): Not all monsters are fantasy. Some are very real, and they walk among us. They’re our friends, family, neighbors, and co-workers. They’re the people we’re supposed to trust… and they know it. Contained within this anthology are 35 never-before-published works by supremely talented authors and best-selling novelists. Brace yourself for the unexpected and unimaginable horror of…human monsters. 
  • Gargantuana’s Ghost, Patrick Barb (Oct 18): Living in a society conditioned to fear him, young Antoine Santiago rides the New York subway and communes with the dead. With a love of history inherited from his late father, the city’s storied past is now the only friend to this loner obsessed with a long-forgotten legend about the life and tragic death of a fabled giant ape. Equal part horrifying and heartwarming, this dark fantasy novella from Patrick Barb is a love letter to New York and an ode to society’s outsiders.
  • If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe, Jason Pargin (Oct 18): The fourth book in New York Times bestseller Pargin’s John Dies at the End series.
  • Sebastian, P.D. Cacek (Oct 18): The son of a world-renowned photographer, Morgan Riley is familiar with his mother’s creative eccentricities. Having been the subject of one of her photographic series, he knows all too well how focused she can become with a new project. So he’s not overly concerned when his mother shows him her newest series that spotlights a small, featureless white plastic manikin the size of a two-year-old child that his mother has named Sebastian. However, as Morgan watches his mother’s obsession with the manikin grow, he begins to question her sanity and fear for her safety…
  • Soft Places, Betty Rocksteady (Oct 18): Soft Places is a novella / graphic novel hybrid. Johnna is found naked, wandering the streets with a mysterious head injury. Seemingly psychotic, she’s forced into the care of perverted psychiatrist Dr. Gonne. She must escape his clutches and return to a strange place she only half-remembers.
  • Uncanny Times, Laura Anne Gilman (Oct 18): The year is 1913. America—and the world—trembles on the edge of a modern age. Political and social unrest shift the foundations; technology is beginning to make its mark. But in the shadows, things from the past still move. Things inhuman, uncanny. And the Uncanny are no friend to humanity.
  • Where Black Stars Rise, Nadia Shammas & Marie Enger (Oct 18): A horror graphic novel about two women who find themselves pulled into a terrifying world by a cosmic entity beyond their understanding. (A Nightfire title)
  • Halloween Beyond: Piercing the Veil, Lisa Morton, Lucy A. Snyder, and Kate Maruyama (Oct 21): When the Halloween Beyond stores appear across America, they intertwine the lives of three visitors in a web of mystery and magic.
  • A Child Alone With Strangers, Philip Fracassi (Oct 25): A kidnapped child’s otherworldly abilities alert him that there is something sinister lurking outside the farmhouse he’s been imprisoned in, and only he possesses the key to communicate with it.
  • How to See Ghosts & Other Figments, Orrin Grey (Oct 25): A new collection from the author of Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales and Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts. Orrin Grey returns with eighteen haunting stories of the strange and supernatural.
  • Sign Here, Claudia Lux (Oct 25): A darkly humorous, surprisingly poignant, and utterly gripping debut novel about a guy who works in Hell (literally) and is on the cusp of a big promotion if only he can get one more member of the wealthy Harrison family to sell their soul.
  • Beach Bodies, Nick Kolakowski (Oct 31): This billionaire’s luxury doomsday bunker has everything: spectacular ocean views, a full-service kitchen, three bedrooms, a broadband connection, and concrete thick enough to keep any kind of horror out. Today, the bunker’s caretakers are about to discover those concrete walls are good—too good—at keeping them trapped with the horrors inside. Twenty feet below the world’s most beautiful beach, they’ll face the ultimate evil—one that transcends death itself.
  • Cassandra’s Typewriter, Andrew McRae (October): This genre-busting tale takes a dark look at the ability of art and its creators to mold society while cautioning against the deification of perceived heroes. Rife with dark humor while delivering an ominous message for humankind, the novella revolves around the lives of a vile, reclusive author whose once-groundbreaking work has been long forgotten and the intrepid reporter assigned with securing the interview of his lifetime.

November

  • White Horse, Erika T. Wurth (Nov 1): A gritty, vibrant debut from Erika T. Wurth about an Indigenous woman who must face her past when she discovers a bracelet haunted by her mother’s spirit.
  • The World We Make, N.K. Jemisin (Nov 1): N.K. Jemisin’s Great Cities Duology, which began with The City We Became and concludes with The World We Make, is a masterpiece of speculative fiction from one of the most important writers of her generation.
  • Aliens: Vasquez, V. Castro (Nov 8): A groundbreaking Latinx Aliens novel by a rising star Latina author, featuring the fan-favorite character PFC Jenette Vasquez from the hit movie Aliens and the family she is forced to leave behind.
  • Breakable Things, Cassandra Khaw (Nov 8): The first short story collection from the author of Nothing But Blackened Teeth.
  • Desert Creatures, Kay Chronister (Nov 8): In a near-future American Southwest, seething with poison and horrors, Magdala needs healing in the holy city of Vegas. Having kidnapped a priest at gunpoint, she’ll find her salvation or die trying.
  • A Different Darkness and Other Abominations, Luigi Musolino (Nov 8): This brilliant new collection showcases the best short stories and novellas of one of Italy’s leading horror writers, now available in English for the first time. Set among the plains and mountains of Musolino’s native Piedmont and drawing on Italian folkloric traditions, these tales may have an Italian flavor to them, but the strangeness and horror they explore are universal.
  • The Hollows, Daniel Church (Nov 8): In a lonely village in the Peak District, during the onset of a once-in-a-lifetime snow storm, Constable Ellie Cheetham finds a body. The man, a local ne’er-do-well, appears to have died in a tragic accident: he drank too much and froze to death. But the facts don’t add up: the dead man is clutching a knife in one hand, and there’s evidence he was hiding from someone. Someone who watched him die. Stranger still, an odd mark has been drawn onto a stone beside his body. The next victims are two families on the outskirts of town. As the storm rises and the body count grows, Ellie realizes she has a terrifying problem on her hands: someone – or some thing – is killing indiscriminately, attacking in the darkness and using the storm for cover. The killer is circling ever closer to the village. The storm’s getting worse… and the power’s just gone out.
  • In the Devil’s Cradle, S.L. Edwards (Nov 8): Senator William Esquival is in a rush to save his family’s life. Fleeing political persecution, William takes his family from the capital and flees to the family stronghold of Rio Rojo, a town known as the birthplace of William’s ancestor, a powerful former dictator whose legacy haunts the nation of Antioch. But even as the Esquival family seeks refuge, the country continues to fray around them. As Antioch bleeds, ancient hatreds, secrets, and ghosts pour from its wounds.
  • Into the Forest, ed. Lindy Ryan (Nov 8): Edited by Lindy Ryan with an introduction by Christina Henry, this collection brings together some of today’s leading voices of women-in-horror as they pay tribute to the Baba Yaga, and go Into the Forest.
  • A Sliver of Darkness: Stories, C.J. Tudor (Nov 8): The debut short-story collection from the acclaimed author of The Chalk Man, hailed as “Britain’s female Stephen King” (Daily Mail), featuring eleven bone-chilling and mind-bending tales. Time slips. Doomsday scenarios. Killer butterflies. C. J. Tudor’s novels are widely acclaimed for their dark, twisty suspense plots, but with A Sliver of Darkness, she pulls us even further into her dizzying imagination.
  • Rootwork, Tracy Cross (Nov 15): Set in a small Louisiana parish in 1889, deep in the segregated South, Rootwork follows school-age sisters, Betty, Ann, and Pee Wee during one life-changing summer when the three of them head off to stay with their hoodoo-practicing aunt, Theodora, a powerful woman feared by the local townspeople. She teaches the girls the secrets of her craft, like how to make “hot foot powder” and how to whip up some “goofer dust” to get back at an enemy. The girls delight in their harmless hoodoo adventures until a tragic event involving the town’s racist sheriff promises to change their lives forever. A story of love and redemption, Rootwork explores the strength of family and the darker side of the heart.
  • Strega, Johanne Lykke Holm, translated by Saskia Vogel (Nov 15): Powerfully inventive and atmospheric, a modern gothic story of nine young women sent to work at a remote Alpine hotel and what happens when one of them goes missing
  • Wayward, Chuck Wendig (Nov 15): The sequel to the national bestseller Wanderers, the instant classic that “takes science, politics, horror, and science fiction and blends them into an outstanding story about the human spirit in times of turmoil, claiming a spot on the list of must-read apocalyptic novels” (NPR)
  • Wicked Little Things, Justin Arnold (Nov 15): When his cousin is murdered, recently outed 16 year old Dane Craven, is forced to return to his unbearably small hometown of Jasper Hollow. It would be easy enough for him to keep his head down if it weren’t for three inescapable facts. One, Dane is a witch with fiery powers he can barely control. Two, he’s been claimed by a coven of fashion forward ‘mean girls’ desperate to give him a makeover. And three, Dane is pretty sure he’s responsible for the death of his cousin. Wicked Little Things is a spooky, campy, horror complete with mystery, romance, and a whole lot of sass. It’s Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina meets Caleb Roehrig’s The Fell of Dark.
  • Hares in the Hedgerow, Jessica McHugh (Nov 22): The highly anticipated sequel to Rabbits in the Garden from 2x Bram Stoker & Elgin Award nominee Jessica McHugh, Hares in the Hedgerow leads Sophie Francis on a disturbing and transformative journey to expose and harness the darkness in the roots of her family tree.

December

  • Mine: An Anthology of Body Autonomy Horror, ed. Roxie Voorhees & Nico Bell (Dec 1): Bodily transformation. Possession of the body. Forced disembodiment. A baby consumes its mother in utero. Unrealistic postpartum expectations turn deadly. A witch avenges the voiceless. These 16 original horror stories explore the ownership and control—or lack thereof—that we have over our bodies. All profits from this anthology go to National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) to support reproductive freedom, access to birth control and abortion care, paid parental leave, and protection from pregnancy discrimination.
  • The Gravity of Existence, Christina Sng (Dec 5): A collection of tiny terrors from Bram Stoker Award ® winner Christina Sng. The Gravity of Existence is a weight lifted, a monster freed, a princess with sneakers, a spell for a better world. From one of the leading voices in dark verse, this collection delights in the misunderstood, putting a new spin on werewolves, basilisks, sirens, ghosts, aliens, pandemics, fairy tales and myths. Sng gives new voice to classic heroines and the result is terrifying, magical, and fantastic.
  • All the Prospect Around Us, C.S. Humble (Dec 6): Upon their arrival to Black Wells, CO, a mysterious symbol seen on the sign of a homeless panhandler leads two young men down into the town’s darkest secrets and toward a harrowing, supernatural event that will threaten the soul of one and the life of the other. Book 2 in the Black Wells series.
  • Bad Dolls, Rachel Harrison (Dec 6): In this stunning new collection of four horror stories, award-winning author Rachel Harrison explores themes of body image, complicated female friendship, heartbreak, and hauntings.
  • A History of Fear, Luke Dumas (Dec 6): Grayson Hale, the most infamous murderer in Scotland, is better known by a different name: the Devil’s Advocate. The twenty-five-year-old American grad student rose to instant notoriety when he confessed to the slaughter of his classmate Liam Stewart, claiming the Devil made him do it. When Hale is found hanged in his prison cell, officers uncover a handwritten manuscript that promises to answer the question that’s haunted the nation for years: was Hale a lunatic, or had he been telling the truth all along? A History of Fear is a propulsive foray into the darkness of the human psyche, marrying dread-inducing atmosphere and heart-palpitating storytelling.
  • The House on the Brink, John Gordon (Dec 6): Originally published for teenage readers, The House on the Brink (1970) has earned a reputation over the years as a classic of ghostly fiction in the M. R. James mode that will appeal to readers old and young alike. Long out of print and scarce on the secondhand market, John Gordon’s chilling novel returns at last to haunt a new generation of readers.
  • Out of Aztlan, V. Castro (Dec 6): An ancient goddess rises up from an inverted temple in a lake of blood to purify the earth. Two pearl divers plot revenge against the Spanish merchants who enslave them. A mutant species of jellyfish fueled by garbage heaps wreaks havoc on beachgoers. Aided by mermaids, a pirate known as The Scorpion and her all-female crew challenge a corrupt king. And back on dry land, a mother avenges the daughters of her community with a very special batch of ancho chili salsa. V. Castro’s spirited characters come alive in her uniquely playful, fiery style, from a vengeful lobster to a mother willing to put her life on the line for justice. In these and other stories, the descendants of Aztlan—the mythical homeland of the Aztec people—work to overthrow their oppressors and usher in the dawn of a new world.
  • Extinction Hymns, Eric Raglin (Dec 15): A vengeful owl haunts the man who poached her. A desperate entrepreneur holds a ghost hostage for profit. An addict finds hope and terror in an imprisoned angel. A father and son search their dying world for something to eat other than human flesh. Eric Raglin, author of Nightmare Yearnings, returns with his second collection of horror and weird fiction. Strange, terrifying, and tender, these eighteen stories explore what happens when extinction comes for us all.
  • The Best Horror of the Year Volume Fourteen, ed. Ellen Datlow (Dec 20): From Ellen Datlow (“the venerable queen of horror anthologies”–New York Times) comes a new entry in the series that has brought you stories from Stephen King and Neil Gaiman comes thrilling stories, the best horror stories available.
  • Holy Ghost Road, John Mantooth (Dec 20): Some roads are haunted by the past. Some by ghosts. Some are even haunted by demons. The one Forest must travel is haunted by all three. When she discovers Pastor Nesmith praying to a demonic entity in her family’s barn, Forest knows she must run. Enraged at the possibility of having his true allegiance exposed, Nesmith pursues Forest as she flees on foot, hoping to reach the one person who will believe her—her grandmother. Unfortunately, Granny is forty miles away, and Forest has no car, no phone, and no friends. To reach her, Forest will have to learn to see the world true, even as the demonic and the sacred wage war for her soul.

Did we miss anything? Which 2022 horror books are you most excited for?


Join Us by the Fire...

Join Us by the Fire...


32 thoughts on “All the Horror Books We’re Excited About in 2022

  1. This is an impressive and long list. You might probably add Richard Thomas new collection *Spontaneus Human Combustion* wich is announced to be published on March 22.
    Still hoped, Nathan Ballingrud’s novel would be published next year, but new fiction by Hailey Piper is always welcome.
    Thanks for doing these lists.

  2. Woohoo, lots of reading ahead! Since Tor Nightfire posted such a lovely review of my book IT WILL JUST BE US last year, I thought I’d mention that my next one, WHEN THE NIGHT BELLS RING comes out in October.

  3. Hi Emily! Huge and impressive list. May I add a title coming from Journalstone? Ghostflowers, by myself, Rus Wornom, publishing July 8, 2022. Hit up Scarlett Algee and she’ll be able to send you an official description. Thanks!

      1. Hi again, Emily! I just wanted to give a little update about the release date for EVERY CRAWLING, PUTRID THING, which has been confirmed as April 8, 2022. 🙂 Thanks again for including me!

  4. Fantastic list, Emily! Would it be super cheeky of me to suggest CAMP HORROR, an anthology featuring LGBTQIA+ horror authors and edited by Roxie Voorhees and Spencer Hamilton, coming from my small press Blood Rites Horror next May? Would be an honour to see it here!

  5. Hey, great list! You should add The Wasp Child by Rhiannon Rasmussen, a YA sci-fi horror novella coming out June 6th, 2022!

  6. Love this list! My novella Gargantuana’s Ghost was announced this week, coming from Grey Matter Press’s new Emergent Expressions line in August 2022.
    “Gargantuana’s Ghost is a dark urban fantasy that investigates secret histories, the hardships of aging, racial inequity, and the unlikely friendships that emerge from tragedy. Essentially a love letter to New York City, Patrick Barb’s novella features a shy Afro-Puerto Rican history buff who forms an improbable bond with the ghost of a giant ape that haunts the Brooklyn subway and the young girl from the ape’s past—now a frail geriatric—who holds all of its benevolent memories for an otherwise callous humanity”

    It’s King Kong meets the Sixth Sense, and I’d be honored to have it included. http://greymatterpress.com/emergent-expressions-series-2022/

  7. Some more additions:
    The Keeper by Tananarive Due 9/27
    Where Night Cowers by Matthew M. Bartlett 9/?
    Snarl by John Boden 11/?
    Bridge of Souls by Sandy DeLuca & Greg F. Gifune 8/?
    The Man in the Field by James Cooper 6/?

  8. Hello! I work at a library in East Peoria, IL (Fondulac District Library) — been there for going on 25 years now. I also write paranormal nonfiction; I sit in dark, spooky places so you don’t have to, then I come out and tell you all about it. My most recent book, Days of the Dead: A Year of True Ghost Stories, has just won first place in the Bookfest Awards.
    My upcoming book will expand my horizons a bit — it’s a collection of true crime stories with associated hauntings. Even better, it’s the first in a planned series. Grave Deeds and Dead Plots: Vol. 1, Fifty Shades of Red will be released soon, by Crossroad Press. I don’t yet have release date info for it, but I’m awfully excited. I’d be thrilled to be included on this list. Thanks so much!
    Oooh ooh ooh! And my friend Jay Bonansinga has a new book out too, called Saint Oswald. That should also go on the list, please and thank you.

  9. Awesome list, looking forward to a few of these. A new horror novel by T Kingfisher is always a treat!

  10. Thank you so much for compiling this list, Emily!! I have combined your massive horror lists from 2020 to 2022 and am slowly and happily making my way through all of the books. I’ve really enjoyed most if not all of the books I’ve read. I love how there are so many new to me authors and also genre mashups included in your lists.

    I really appreciate all of the time and energy that must have gone in to compiling these lists. Thank you so much for your hard work – it is greatly appreciated 😊

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