You can (and should) read horror all year long, but there’s something special about cracking open a brand-new scary story when the leaves are changing and the autumnal chill is blowing in. Halloween’s approaching, the days are getting darker, and the siren song of horror is calling us all, so it’s good to be prepared.
As always, this Fall’s publishing calendar brings with it a far-reaching, diverse lineup of new horror books from big names and rising stars, covering everything from ghosts to vampires to retellings of Gothic classics. You definitely won’t be short of stuff to read no matter where you look, but if you ask me, these are the books to get especially excited about this Fall.
Here are 25 horror books we can’t wait to read in the coming months.
Out of the Drowning Deep by A.C. Wise
Release Date: September 3 from Titan
Why We’re Excited: A.C. Wise is one of the most imaginative and ambitious genre writers working right now, with the versatility to deliver everything from compelling retellings of classics to absolutely chilling ghost stories. Now, Wise is back with a story that blends sci-fi, fantasy, and horror into one fascinating package, and we can’t wait to see how she weaves all of these elements into a single narrative.
Publisher’s Description: Scribe IV is an obsolete automaton living on the Bastion, a secluded monastery in an abandoned corner of the galaxy. When the visiting Pope is found murdered, Scribe IV knows he has very little time before the terrifying Sisters of the Drowned Deep rise up to punish all the Bastion’s residents for their supposed crime.
Quin, a recovering drug addict turned private investigator, agrees to take the case. Traumatized by a bizarre experience in his childhood, Quin repeatedly feeds his memories to his lover, the angel Murmuration. But fragmented glimpses of an otherworldly horror he calls the crawling dark continue to haunt his dreams.
Meanwhile in heaven, an angel named Angel hears Scribe IV’s prayer. Intrigued by the idea of solving a crime with mortals, xe descends to offer xyr divine assistance.
With the Drowned Sisters closing in, Scribe IV, Quin, and Angel race to find out who really murdered the Pope, and why. Quin’s missing memories may hold the key to the case – but is remembering worth what it will cost him?
Pay the Piper by George A. Romero and Daniel Kraus
Release Date: September 3 from Union Square
Why We’re Excited: Daniel Kraus has long been one of the most versatile and brilliant voices in horror, and after collaborating with George Romero’s estate on the epic The Living Dead, he’s found another tale from the horror cinema master to bring to the world. The team-up alone is worth the price of admission, but as Kraus readers know, any new novel from his mind is a must-read for horror fans everywhere.
Publisher’s Description: In 2019, while sifting through University of Pittsburgh Library System’s George A. Romero Archival Collection, novelist Daniel Kraus turned up a surprise: a half-finished novel called Pay the Piper, a project few had ever heard of. In the years since, Kraus has worked with Romero’s estate to bring this unfinished masterwork to light.
Alligator Point, Louisiana, population 141: Young Renée Pontiac has heard stories of “the Piper”–a murderous swamp entity haunting the bayou–her entire life. But now the legend feels horrifically real: children are being taken and gruesomely slain. To resist, Pontiac and the town’s desperate denizens will need to acknowledge the sins of their ancestors–the infamous slave traders, the Pirates Lafitte. If they don’t . . . it’s time to pay the piper.
So Thirsty by Rachel Harrison
Release Date: September 10 from Berkley
Why We’re Excited: Rachel Harrison does vampires! After giving us novels about witches (Cackle), werewolves (Such Sharp Teeth), and Satanists (Black Sheep), Harrison is turning her attention to vampire fiction, and her combination of wit and knack for character-driven tension makes it feel like a perfect match.
Publisher’s Description: Sloane Parker is dreading her birthday. She doesn’t need a reminder she’s getting older, or that she’s feeling indifferent about her own life. Her husband surprises her with a birthday weekend getaway–not with him, but with Sloane’s longtime best friend, troublemaker extraordinaire Naomi. Sloane anticipates a weekend of wine tastings and cozy robes and strategic avoidance of issues she’d rather not confront, like her husband’s repeated infidelity.
But when they arrive at their rental cottage, it becomes clear Naomi has something else in mind. She wants Sloane to stop letting things happen to her, for Sloane to really live. So Naomi orchestrates a wild night out with a group of mysterious strangers, only for it to take a horrifying turn that changes Sloane’s and Naomi’s lives literally forever. The friends are forced to come to terms with some pretty eternal consequences in this bloody, seductive novel about how it’s never too late to find satisfaction, even though it might taste different than expected.
The Devil By Name by Keith Rosson
Release Date: September 10 from Random House
Why We’re Excited: Keith Rosson’s Fever House was one of the most dynamic, inventive, and thrilling horror readers of 2023, a masterful blend of crime fiction and apocalyptic terror that had us hooked from the first page. Now, we get the sequel, and a full-blown mad world to go with it. If you still haven’t read Fever House, get on that, because we’re betting The Devil By Name is bigger and better.
Publisher’s Description: Five years after the event that drove most of the global population to madness, the world is overrun with the “fevered”–once-human, zombielike creatures drawn indiscriminately to violence and murder. In a campaign to restabilize the country, the massive corporation known as Terradyne Industries has merged with the U.S. government in a partnership of dubious motives, quarantining major American cities behind towering walls and corralling the afflicted there with the hope, they say, of developing a vaccine.
In Portland, where it all began, guilt-ridden detective John Bonner scours the city’s darkest corners for clues to humanity’s redemption. In New England, Katherine Moriarty mourns the devastating losses of her husband and son while in hiding from Terradyne. And across the ocean in France, a sixteen-year-old girl named Naomi Laurent discovers she has a disturbing and powerful gift–which may just be the key to the world’s salvation.
Equal parts gruesome and beautiful, The Devil by Name is a heart-stopping, breakneck saga of survival. As its characters’ paths inevitably collide across the ravaged landscape of a post-apocalyptic America, they are united by the desire to not just escape death but to carve out some way to live anew.
Everything starts and ends in the fever house.
Good Night, Sleep Tight by Brian Evenson
Release Date: September 10 from Coffee House Press
Why We’re Excited: Brian Evenson is one the infest practitioners of the horror short story working in the 21st century, a weaver of unsettling tales that worm into your brain and grow there. If you love horror short fiction, every new Evenson release should be an event, and that means this new collection is something we’ve had on the calendar for a while.
Publisher’s Description: From the “master of literary horror” (GQ) comes a collection of new stories tracing the limits and consequences of artificial intelligence and “post-human” relationships. Populated by twins stepping into worlds of absence, bears who lick their cubs into creation, and artificial beings haunted by their less-than-human nature, each page sketches a world where our all-too-real feelings of isolation and ecological dread take on an otherworldly tinge.
In Good Night, Sleep Tight, Brian Evenson deftly weaves ethical dilemmas, maternal warmth, and echoes of apocalypse into his most tender, disquieting book yet.
Guillotine by Delilah S. Dawson
Release Date: September 10 from Titan
Why We’re Excited: Delilah S. Dawson has been churning out great suspense novels for a while now, and her best work is often laced with rallying cries of societal rage that’s always been bubbling under the surface. With Guillotine, she turns that lens on the uber-rich, and what happens next sounds like bloody fun.
Publisher’s Description: Thrift fashionista Dez Lane doesn’t want to date Patrick Ruskin; she just wants to meet his mother, the editor-in-chief of Nouveau magazine. When he invites her to his family’s big Easter reunion at their ancestral home, she’s certain she can put up with his arrogance and fend off his advances long enough to ask Marie Caulfield-Ruskin for an internship someone with her pedigree could never nab through the regular submission route.
When they arrive at the enormous island mansion, Dez is floored–she’s never witnessed how the 1% lives before in all their ridiculous, unnecessary luxury. But once all the family members are on the island and the ferry has departed, things take a dark turn. For decades, the Ruskins have made their servants sign contracts that are basically indentured servitude, and with nothing to lose, the servants have decided their only route to freedom is to get rid of the Ruskins for good…
Lucy Undying by Kiersten White
Release Date: September 10 from Del Rey
Why We’re Excited: With books like Hide and Mister Magic, Kiersten White established a streak of writing about the familiarly creepy and giving it all her own thrilling spin. Now, White takes on one of the most familiar scary stories of all time with this novel centered on one of the most enduring characters in Dracula.
Publisher’s Description: Her name was written in the pages of someone else’s story: Lucy Westenra was one of Dracula’s first victims.
But her death was only the beginning. Lucy rose from the grave a vampire and has spent her immortal life trying to escape from Dracula’s clutches–and trying to discover who she really is and what she truly wants.
Her undead life takes an unexpected turn in twenty-first-century London, when she meets another woman, Iris, who is also yearning to break free from her past. Iris’s family has built a health empire based on a sinister secret, and they’ll do anything to stay in power.
Lucy has long believed she would never love again. Yet she finds herself compelled by the charming Iris while Iris is equally mesmerized by the confident and glamorous Lucy. But their intense connection and blossoming love is threatened by outside forces. Iris’s mother won’t let go of her without a fight, and Lucy’s past still has fangs: Dracula is on the prowl once more.
Lucy Westenra has been a tragically murdered teen, a lonesome adventurer, and a fearsome hunter, but happiness has always eluded her. Can she find the strength to destroy Dracula once and for all, or will her heart once again be her undoing?
Not a Speck of Light by Laird Barron
Release Date: September 10 from Bad Hand Books
Why We’re Excited: Through books like The Imago Sequence, Occultation, and The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, Laird Barron has become a recognized master of short stories and novellas, a masterful weaver of the cosmic and the pedestrian into tales of slow-burning terror. Now, Barron is back with a brand-new collection and horror readers everywhere won’t want to miss it.
Publisher’s Description: It’s about to get very dark. Bram Stoker Award-winning author Laird Barron returns to the dark and dreadful with his fifth horror collection, which weaves sixteen weird tales into a mosaic of the bloody and the macabre.
Bring a flashlight and a book of matches.
Where we’re going, there’s not a speck of light.
A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enriquez
Release Date: September 17 from Hogarth Press
Why We’re Excited: With Our Share of Night, Mariana Enriquez found droves of new readers and established herself as one of the most compelling and important voices in modern literary horror. Now, after that sweeping epic of horror, she’s back with a collection of 12 stories showcasing her singular approach to dark tales.
Publisher’s Description: On the shores of this river, all the birds that fly, drink, perch on branches, and disturb siestas with the demonic squawking of the possessed–all those birds were once women.
Welcome to Argentina and the fascinating, frightening, fantastical imagination of Mariana Enriquez. In twelve spellbinding new stories, Enriquez writes about ordinary people, especially women, whose lives turn inside out when they encounter terror, the surreal, and the supernatural. A neighborhood nuisanced by ghosts, a family whose faces melt away, a faded hotel haunted by a girl who dissolved in the water tank on the roof, a riverbank populated by birds that used to be women–these and other tales illuminate the shadows of contemporary life, where the line between good and evil no longer exists.
Devils Kill Devils by Johnny Compton
Release Date: September 24 from Nightfire
Why We’re Excited: Compton’s The Spite House is an absolutely captivating, layered, devious little book that just keeps unspooling new levels of terror, which means we were always going to be eager to read his follow-up. Now, we get Devils Kill Devils, which sounds even more ambitious than Spite House, and should serve as a reminder that Compton is one of the best rising voices in horror.
Publisher’s Description: Sarita has been watched over by a guardian angel her entire life. She calls him Angelo, and keeps him a secret. But secrets can’t stay buried forever…
When Angelo murders someone she loves, Sarita begins to see what’s really been lurking in the shadows surrounding her. And she will have to embrace the evil within if she hopes to make it out alive.
The Hitchcock Hotel by Stephanie Wrobel
Release Date: September 24 from Berkley
Why We’re Excited: I love a horror novel with a great high-concept hook, and as a Hitchcock fan myself, the books don’t get much better than the one at the heart of Stephanie Wrobel’s new novel. It’s a great idea, sure to be full of Easter eggs from Alfred Hitchcock’s works, and we’re looking forward to a book that would make the master of suspense proud.
Publisher’s Description: Alfred Smettle is not your average Hitchcock fan. He is the founder, owner, and manager of The Hitchcock Hotel, a sprawling Victorian house in the White Mountains dedicated to the Master of Suspense. There, Alfred offers his guests round-the-clock film screenings, movie props and memorabilia in every room, plus an aviary with fifty crows.
To celebrate the hotel’s first anniversary, he invites his former best friends from his college Film Club for a reunion. He hasn’t spoken to any of them in sixteen years, not after what happened.
But who better than them to appreciate Alfred’s creation? And to help him finish it.
After all, no Hitchcock set is complete without a body.
Kill Your Darling by Clay McLeod Chapman
Release Date: September 24 from Bad Hand Books
Why We’re Excited: Clay McLeod Chapman is a great excavator of grief as a vehicle for horror, and now the author of What Kind of Mother and Ghost Eaters is back with a novella about a man literally excavating his own grief in an effort to find a satisfying story. If you loved What Kind of Mother, you’ll want to check out this story of parenthood, loss, and searching for closure.
Publisher’s Description: The body of Glenn Partridge’s 15-year-old son was discovered in a vacant lot nearly forty years ago. The police are still no closer to finding the murderer decades later.
Glenn refuses to let the memory of his son fade—or let anyone else within this small working-class community forget. His long-suffering wife signs him up for an amateur fiction-writing workshop at the local library, just to get him out of the house and out of his own head.
Rule number one: Write what you know—so Glenn decides to share his son’s story. The class offers him a chance to make sense of a senseless crime and find the fictional closure life never provided. But as Glenn’s story takes on a life of its own, someone from the past is compelled to come out of hiding before he reaches…
The End.
TRVE CVLT by Michael Bettendorf
Release Date: September 25 from Tenebrous Press
Why We’re Excited: If you’re looking for a change of pace this fall, Tenebrous Press has you covered with this “gamebook” that allows you to choose your own path through a horrific, black metal-laden scenario. If you ever wished your horror novels had more than one ending, now’s your chance to make that real.
Publisher’s Description: You wake up with a brutal hangover, but that can’t crush your spirits: you’ve been invited to take back the drum throne for Abyss, the cult band you co-founded.
It means setting aside a turbulent history with Abyss’ vocalist, Austin. You aren’t sure if he’s invited you back to bury the hatchet or if he’s just desperate because infamous black metal legends Waste Doctrine are rolling through town. They’ve given you the opportunity to open for them and maybe, finally, get the hell out of this nowhere town.
The promise of the upcoming gig doesn’t come without its share of hurdles, though. Austin’s hellbent on creating a ritualistic experience out of the performance, turning the abandoned roadhouse he’s chosen as a venue into a bloody, occult nightmare.
Yes, it’s black fucking metal, but is it too far?
Only you can decide.
Necrology by Meg Ripley
Release Date: September 24 from Creature Publishing
Why We’re Excited: Certain horror concepts are always rich veins, and exploring the legacy of the Salem Witch Trials is one of them. This book from Meg Ripley promises to do that while also layering in dark, fascinating worldbuilding centered on a secretive social order that’s about to be upset in some terrifying ways, and we can’t wait to see where it goes.
Publisher’s Description: In a fantastical aftermath of the Salem Witch Trials, magical women known as the Dirty have signed a contract swearing off their innate magic in exchange for freedom from violence by non-magical Freemen. Two hundred years later, in a Catskills orphanage, headmistress Whitetail has sprouted antlers-proof of a violated contract. When her wealthy benefactor visits, proposing marriage, her appearance sparks abuse. Rushing to her teacher’s defense, eight-year-old Rabbit curses the Beard dead, and Whitetail’s arrested on trumped-up charges.
As Whitetail awaits her trial and execution, Rabbit is groomed as the Freemen’s star witness and learns of the terrifying reality to which they aspire. With her magic at stake and a loose tooth in her mouth, Rabbit has little left to lose. And a revolution to gain.
Coup De Grace by Sofia Ajram
Release Date: October 1 from Titan
Why We’re Excited: Sofia Ajram is an exciting rising voice in the genre, and this book sounds like a wonderful next step in her evolution as a creator. An infinite subway station, a suicidal man looking for a way out that never comes, hints of something darker in the margins? Sign us up.
Publisher’s Description: Vicken has a plan: throw himself into the Saint Lawrence River in Montreal and end it all for good, believing it to be the only way out for him after a lifetime of depression and pain. But, stepping off the subway, he finds himself in an endless, looping station.
Determined to find a way out again, he starts to explore the rooms and corridors ahead of him. But no matter how many claustrophobic hallways or vast cathedral-esque rooms he passes through, the exit is nowhere in sight.
The more he explores his strange new prison, the more he becomes convinced that he hasn’t been trapped there accidentally, and amongst the shadows and concrete, he comes to realise that he almost certainly is not alone.
I’ll Be Waiting by Kelley Armstrong
Release Date: October 1 from St. Martin’s
Why We’re Excited: Kelley Armstrong is always an author to watch, and I’ll Be Waiting sounds like it won’t disappoint. Every new layer in the description for this book promises another level of terror, another rich vein of grief and mystery to tap. If this is all in the description, what can we expect to find in the actual book? You can bet we’ll be reading to find out.
Publisher’s Description: Nicola Laughton never expected to see adulthood, being diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis as a child. Then medical advances let her live into her thirties and she met Anton, who taught her to dream of a future… together. Months after they married, Anton died in a horrible car crash, but lived long enough to utter five words to her, “I’ll be waiting for you.”
That final private moment became public when someone from the crash scene took it to the press–the terminally ill woman holding her dying husband as he promised to wait for her on the other side. Worse, that person claimed it wasn’t Anton who said the words but his ghost, hovering over his body.
Since their story went public, Nicola has been hounded by spiritualists promising closure. In the hopes of stopping her downward spiral, friends and family find a reputable medium–a professor of parapsychology. For the séance, they rent the Lake Erie beach house that Anton’s family once owned.
The medium barely has time to begin his work before things start happening. Locked doors mysteriously open. Clouds of insects engulf the house. Nicola hears footsteps and voices and the creak of an old dumbwaiter…in an empty shaft. Throughout it all she’s haunted by nightmares of her past. Because, unbeknownst to the others, this isn’t her first time contacting the dead. And Nicola isn’t her real name.
That’s when she finds the first body….
The Narrows by Ronald Malfi
Release Date: October 8 from Titan
Why We’re Excited: Ronald Malfi is one of our finest practitioners of small town horror, to the point that he literally wrote the book (Small Town Horror) on it. Now, Malfi is back with another tale of a town haunted by an ancient evil, and if you’ve been waiting for a time to get on board with his work, consider this your introduction.
Publisher’s Description: In the aftermath of a terrible storm, the town of Stillwater, Maryland tries to recover what it has lost. From flooded roads and houses, to ruined businesses—the residents of the town begin to clean up and return to normal.
In the midst of the clear up, people begin to see things. Matthew Crawly spies his father in the woodlands above the Narrows, but that cannot be possible; Maggie Quedentock nearly hits a child with her car, only to find an empty road lying before her; and in the middle of it all, Sergeant Ben Journell is thrust into an impossible investigation. Animals are being slaughtered, their brains systematically removed from their bodies. Something is happening to the town of Stillwater…something dark and ancient and evil has its grip on everyone.
The saying goes, still waters run deep, but no one in Stillwater is prepared for just how deep they run, and no one can possibly be ready for what they might find when they reach the bottom of the gray waters of the Narrows.
All The Hearts You Eat by Hailey Piper
Release Date: October 15 from Titan
Why We’re Excited: Rachel Harrison’s not the only horror star taking on vampires this year. Hailey Piper, fresh off the triumph of last year’s A Light Most Hateful, is also trying her hand at the subgenre, and the sheer force of her imagination makes this one a must-read. Piper’s proven she can do everything from deeply human ghost stories to all-out cosmic horror madness, so we can’t wait to see how she handles this.
Publisher’s Description: Ivory’s life changes irrevocably when she discovers the body of Cabrina Brite on the sands of Cape Morning, along with a mysterious poem. How did she die, and why does it seem she was trying to swim to Ghost Cat Island, the center of so many local mysteries?
Desperate to uncover the answers surrounding Cabrina’s death, and haunted by her discovery, Ivory begins to see the pale ghost of Cabrina, only to shake it off as a mere hallucination. But Ivory is not alone. Cabrina’s closest friends have also seen a similar apparition, and as they toy with occult possibilities, they begin to unravel the truth behind Cabrina’s death.
Because Cape Morning isn’t a ghost town, but a town filled with ghosts, and Ivory is about to discover just what happens when you let one in.
American Rapture by C.J. Leede
Release Date: October 15 from Nightfire
Why We’re Excited: C.J. Leede’s Maeve Fly was the best horror debut I read in 2023, so her follow-up is an automatic must for me this year. And with a concept like this one, American Rapture seems primed to be one of the most talked-about genre releases of 2024.
Publisher’s Description: A virus is spreading across America, transforming the infected and making them feral with lust.
Sophie, a good Catholic girl, must traverse the hellscape of the midwest to try to find her family while the world around her burns. Along the way she discovers there are far worse fates than dying a virgin…
The end times are coming.
Catherine the Ghost by Kathe Koja
Release Date: October 15 from Clash
Why We’re Excited: Honestly, you had me at “gothic punk remix” of Wuthering Heights, but throw in a writer like Kathe Koja turning her high-powered imagination on said remix, and I instantly want to know more. Catherine the Ghost is a book brimming with potential, whether you loved Bronte novels, ghost stories, or both.
Publisher’s Description: Cathy Earnshaw. Catherine Linton. Mother. Daughter. They never saw each other alive. In Catherine the Ghost these two young women confront loss, captivity, and the dark edge of eternity itself, to claim their full existence and share their power. With hauntings that escape the page and passion that bleeds them red, Koja crafts a tale that transcends the material plane as an eerie comfort that ghosts keep loving long past the grave.
This modern gothic punk remix of Emily Bronte’s classic Wuthering Heights is a ghost story told from the POV of Catherine Earnshaw’s restless spirit from beyond the grave.
Rest Stop by Nat Cassidy
Release Date: October 15 from Shortwave
Why We’re Excited: The author of Mary and Nestlings is back with a new novella, and it sounds like the perfect thing to read all in one sitting as you clutch the pages tight. If you know Nat Cassidy’s work, you know he’s an expert at merging visceral visuals with deeply human fear, and Rest Stop feels like a great sandbox for that skill.
Publisher’s Description: A young musician finds himself locked inside a gas station bathroom in the middle of the night by an unseen assailant, caught between the horrors on the other side of the door and the horrors rapidly skittering down the walls inside.
Absolution: A Southern Reach Novel by Jeff VanderMeer
Release Date: October 22 from MCD
Why We’re Excited: We thought the Southern Reach Trilogy was done. We were wrong. The very fact that Absolution exists is reason for VanderMeer fans to be counting the days until its release, but the promise of not one, not two, but three new Area X expeditions in one book is what puts it over the top. We can’t wait to go back.
Publisher’s Description: When the Southern Reach trilogy was first published a decade ago, it was an instant sensation, celebrated in a front-page New York Times story before publication, hailed by Stephen King and many others. Each volume climbed the bestseller list; awards were won; the books made the rare transition from paperback original to hardcover; the movie adaptation became a cult classic. All told, the trilogy has sold more than a million copies and has secured its place in the pantheon of twenty-first-century literature.
And yet for all this, for Jeff VanderMeer there was never full closure to the story of Area X. There were a few mysteries that had gone unsolved, some key points of view never aired. There were stories left to tell. There remained questions about who had been complicit in creating the conditions for Area X to take hold; the story of the first mission into the Forgotten Coast–before Area X was called Area X–had never been fully told; and what if someone had foreseen the world after Acceptance? How crazy would they seem?
Structured in three parts, each recounting a new expedition, Absolution is a brilliant, beautiful, and ever-terrifying plunge into unique and fertile literary territory. There are some long-awaited answers here, to be sure, but also more questions, and profound new surprises. It is the final word on one of the most provocative and popular speculative fiction series of our time.
Memorials by Richard Chizmar
Release Date: October 22 from Gallery
Why We’re Excited: Richard Chizmar has been building a resume as one of horror’s indispensable writers for years now, and Memorials feels like it might be his Blair Witch Project, a story of wayward youths encountering dark forces in the woods. Look closer, though, and you’ll see that Chizmar is using familiar elements to get at something deeper and darker, something all his own, and we’re ready to learn more..
Publisher’s Description: 1983: Three students from a small college embark on a week-long road trip to film a documentary on roadside memorials for their American Studies class. The project starts out as a fun adventure with long stretches of empty road and nightly campfires where they begin to open up with one another.
But as they venture deeper into the Appalachian backwoods, the atmosphere begins to darken. They notice more and more of the memorials feature a strange, unsettling symbol hinting at a sinister secret. Paranoia sets in when it appears they are being followed. Their vehicle is tampered with overnight and some of the locals appear to be anything but welcoming. Before long, the students can’t help but wonder if these roadside deaths were really random accidents…or is something terrifying at work here?
The Queen by Nick Cutter
Release Date: October 22 from Gallery
Why We’re Excited: Ever since The Troop became a viral sensation, Nick Cutter has been one of the hottest horror authors on the planet, and The Queen looks to continue that streak. Set across a single day, it’s Cutter’s latest visceral thrill ride that hopes to take you deep inside a horrific, transformative experience for a young person, one you won’t soon forget.
Publisher’s Description: On a sunny morning in June, Margaret Carpenter wakes up to find a new iPhone on her doorstep. She switches it on to find a text from her best friend, Charity Atwater. The problem is, Charity’s been missing for over a month. Most people in town–even the police–think she’s dead.
Margaret and Charity have been lifelong friends. They share everything, know the most intimate details about one another…except for the destructive secret hidden from them both. A secret that will trigger a chain of events ending in tragedy, bloodshed, and death. And now Charity wants Margaret to know her story–the real story. In a narrative that takes place over one feverish day, Margaret follows a series of increasingly disquieting breadcrumbs as she forges deeper into the mystery of her best friend–a person she never truly knew at all…
Dead Girls Don’t Dream by Nino Cipri
Release Date: November 12 from Henry Holt & Company
Why We’re Excited: Nino Cipri’s new book sounds like a tremendous exercise in woodland folk horror, one of my favorite subgenres, but it’s more than just creepy trees. Dead Girls Don’t Dream has the makings of a truly emotional chiller capable of punching you right through the heart. We’ll be picking this one up and seeing just how deep it goes.
Publisher’s Description: There are rules for Voynich Woods: Always carry a whistle. Never go alone. Always come home before dark. And if anyone calls your name, don’t answer. Because everyone who wanders from the path is never seen again.
Except for Riley Walcott.
Riley knows better than to stray from the trail in the woods behind her uncle Toby’s house. But her little sister Sam breaks the rules in pursuit of a local legend, so Riley chases after her and discovers a knife-wielding figure and a waiting grave.
Madelyn lives deep in the forest. Subject to her mother’s strict rules, she’s forbidden from leaving home or using her magic–but one night, she risks everything to help a stranger who’s lost in the woods.
Riley is murdered in a strange ritual, Madelyn uses her magic to resurrect her, and their lives are immediately entwined in the gnarled history of Voynich Woods. Riley, who feels trapped in her small town but too afraid to leave, was never a believer, but now the evidence is taking root under her skin. Madelyn has the scars to prove how terrible magic can be, and longs for a life beyond her mother’s grasp. As the legends become all too real, Riley and Madelyn must confront their deepest fears to uncover the truth about Voynich Woods.
Matthew Jackson is a pop culture writer and nerd-for-hire who’s been writing about entertainment for more than a decade. His writing about movies, TV, comics, and more regularly appears at SYFY WIRE, Looper, Mental Floss, Decider, BookPage, and other outlets. He lives in Austin, Texas, and when he’s not writing he’s usually counting the days until Christmas.