This Month in New Horror Books: July 2020

This Month in New Horror Books: July 2020

This Month in New Horror Books: July 2020 - 316

July 2020 is a big month for horror fiction – some of the biggest names in horror have new books out this month (including Stephen Graham Jones, Paul Tremblay, Rory Power, Danielle Vega, and Josh Malerman), and a number of up-and-coming authors are hitting shelves as well (including Alexis Henderson, John Fram, Alex North, and S.A. Hunt). Read on for all the new horror books on sale this month!

Also, a note: we’re continuously updating release dates and newly announced books both here and on our 2020 horror releases master post.


July’s new horror titles

July’s new horror titles:

  • A Peculiar Peril, Jeff Vandermeer (Jul 7): This is the Southern Reach trilogy author Jeff Vandermeer’s first foray into fiction for younger readers. A Peculiar Peril is the first in a two-volume dark fantasy series about family secrets in a war-torn alternate Europe.
  • The Bright Lands, John Fram (Jul 7): Think Friday Night Lights, but with a horror twist. Joel escaped his insular, conservative hometown years ago, but when his brother disappears he’s lured back to unravel a mystery the town has tried its hardest to ignore.
  • Burn Our Bodies Down, Rory Power (Jul 7): Power’s first novel, Wilder Girls, was a body horror bonanza, and for her next novel, she turns to dark family secrets, generational trauma, and a troubled mother-daughter relationship to generate her scares.
  • The Patient, Jasper DeWitt (Jul 7): DeWitt cut his horror teeth in the r/NoSleep subreddit, and in his debut novel, he tells the story of an overconfident psychiatrist who’s determined to treat an untreatable patient, a man who’s driven every previous employee of the asylum where he’s held to madness or suicide.
  • The Shadows, Alex North (Jul 7): North’s second novel (after 2019’s creepfest The Whisper Man) is about Charlie Crabtree, a creepy teenager who confirms everyone’s worst fears by committing murder – and then disappearing. Now, Paul, who was friends with both Charlie and his victim, must return to his hometown to care for his aging mother, but a copycat crime puts the town on edge.
  • Survivor Song, Paul Tremblay (Jul 7): Modern horror master Tremblay (The Cabin at the End of the World, Growing Things) takes on the zombie novel in a fast-paced, heart-pounding, all-too-timely thriller about a woman trying to keep her pregnant friend alive in a rapidly crumbling society suffering from a viral plague.
  • The Unleashed, Danielle Vega (Jul 7): This sequel to The Haunted finds the devastating events at Steele House gone but not forgotten. Hendricks is trying desperately to pretend that everything is normal, but when she summons what she thinks is the spirit of a dead friend, she realizes that nothing will ever be the same.
  • The Only Good Indians, Stephen Graham Jones (Jul 14): One of 2020’s biggest horror releases is this exquisitely-written standalone horror novel. Ten years after an elk hunt went wrong, four friends find themselves hunted by someone or something who knows what they did.
  • Wonderland, Zoje Stage (Jul 14): Stage’s novel follows a family that moves to a rural town and finds themselves stalked by something in the woods. Motherhood never looked so terrifying.
  • Alpha Omega, Nicholas Bowling (Jul 21): Billed as Stranger Things meets Black Mirror and Ready Player One, this novel tracks a bloody catastrophe at a private school, where the one person who might be able to stop it is lost in a MMO virtual reality game.
  • I Come With Knives, S. A. Hunt (Jul 21): The second book in Hunt’s series and the sequel to Burn The Dark finds our YouTube witch-hunter heroine Robin battling a powerful coven, a serial killer, and a cabal of magicians.
  • Jennifer Strange, Cat Scully (Jul 21): In this illustrated YA horror debut, Cat Scully tells the story of a teenage girl who’s a magnet for ghosts – and needs to figure out what they want from her before it’s too late.
  • Shadow Garden, Alexandra Burt (Jul 21): A psychological/domestic horror-thriller that tells the story of a family’s descent into madness, this one’s being compared to Rebecca and “The Yellow Wallpaper,”
  • The Unidentified, Colin Dickey (Jul 21): Dickey’s work is non-fiction, but any aficionado of the macabre would be remiss not to pick it up. His previous book, Ghostland, was a cultural history of ghosts and hauntings in America, and with The Unidentified, he sets his sights on cryptids, UFOs, lost societies, and other fringe beliefs, and what they tell us about humanity and culture.
  • The Year of the Witching, Alexis Henderson (Jul 21): A buzzy dark fantasy debut set in a puritanical society where a young woman discovers her own dark powers and her connection to the beings in the forbidden woods beyond town.
  • Malorie, Josh Malerman (Jul 21): Malerman’s much-anticipated sequel to Bird Box promises to reveal what happened to Malorie, Boy, and Girl years after the events of the first novel.
  • Flyaway, Kathleen Jennings (Jul 28): Jennings’ novella has been compared to Karen Russell in its slipstream gothic creepiness. When a young woman receives a letter from a long-vanished brother, she starts to question what happened to her family, with plenty of curses, monsters, and unsettling delights along the way.

As always, if we missed anything, let us know in the comments!

View our 2020 new horror release masterlist here, and view previous monthly new releases posts here.



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4 thoughts on “This Month in New Horror Books: July 2020

  1. Since you focus on novels in your selection of upcoming horror fiction, I’ll add a collection of short stories : “Aftermath of an Industrial Accident” by Mike Allen.
    Journalist and editor of Clockwork Phoenix he is a writer of poems and (mostly) short fiction, which tends to be weird horror with shades of dark fantasy.
    Quite unique and kind of “trippy”. Out on 7/7/2020.

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