This Month in New Horror Books: August 2022

August is here, and it’s an exciting month in horror! Look out for new books from authors like Gabino Iglesias, Gwendolyn Kiste, Megan Giddings, Adam Cesare, Meg Elison, R.L. Stine, and many more.

From Nightfire this month, we have a beautiful new paperback edition of Brian Lumley’s Necroscope, the modern classic of vampire horror. If you’ve never met Harry Keogh, now’s the perfect time.

Also, a note: we’re regularly updating release dates and newly announced books both here and on our 2022 horror releases master post. (Missed last year’s list? Right this way!)

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August’s new horror titles:

• 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…
• Ricky’s Hand, David Quantick (Aug 9): 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.
• 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.
• Ashthorne, April Yates (Aug 23): A romantic Gothic treat perfect for fans of Sarah Waters and The Haunting of Bly Manor, Ashthorne is the debut novella by Derbyshire author April Yates, who was inspired to tell this story by the Ice Age art carved into the walls of local caves.
• 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.
• 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.

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

View our 2022 new horror release masterlist here, and view previous monthly new releases posts here.

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