Happy new year, horror fans! Hopefully you got some scary books over the holidays, or at least some gift certificates (I’m always happy to help you spend them!) This month, we’ve got new fiction from V. Castro, Christopher Golden, Kristi DeMeester, John Darnielle, Seanan McGuire, and more!
Also, a note: we’re continuously 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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January’s new horror titles:
- 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.
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.
