Category: The Fright Stuff

So you were all just going to let me sleep on the queer “I’d do anything to be a flesh eating mermaid. Anything” horror book, huh? To be honest, I have no idea how Chlorine slipped under my radar, but as a girl who has wished on more than one occasion that she could fling herself into the ocean, sprout gills, and consume unwary sailor folk, I am so glad that I know about it now. Because that’s all that Ren Yu wants, really: to become a mermaid. (And feast on the flesh of tasty sea goers.) She’s already a swimmer, whose love of being in the water butts up against the expectations that she’ll use her skill at swimming to advance in life. Get into a good college on an athletic scholarship. Be successful — a state of being highly defined by everyone in Ren’s life except herself. When really all she wants is to escape from landlocked concerns and sink deep into the ocean until she’s nothing but fins and teeth. She wants to be free, and she’ll stop at nothing to make it happen.

Monstersona is the kind of mad scientists, monsters, and government conspiracies romp that you won’t want to miss. It’s about 16-year-old Riley, who lives in Little Brook, Maine — headquarters of Titan Technologies. She wakes up one night to find her town on fire and full of monsters. With her dog in tow, Riley beats feet out of town, stopping just long enough to scoop up a passenger from the roadside: Aspen, Riley’s crush and quite possibly the only other survivor of the fire. The two girls set off on a dangerous cross-country journey to try and reach Riley’s father in Oregon, but nothing about the fire or the now-destroyed Titan Technologies is what it seems to be. And neither is Aspen. If Riley wants to survive long enough to see her father again, she’s going to have to get to the bottom of the shadowy conspiracy she’s found herself enmeshed in. No matter how terrible the truth may be.

This is my romance-meets-horror addition to this week’s list, because there’s been some Chatter lately (or so the internet tells me) devaluing romance in comparison to other genre fiction. And since it is frowned upon to fight strangers from the internet in a Walmart parking lot, I’m just going to point out, not for the first time, that romance and horror can not only peacefully coexist, but actually make rather spectacular bedfellows. As it were. Something Freydis Moon understands very well, as evidenced by their newest book Heart, Haunt, Havoc about a trans exorcist, Colin, who was hired to deal with what seemed like a standard domestic haunting. Only to find that the home in question, owned by the handsome Bishop Martinez, may prove more of a challenge than Colin first anticipated. It’s awash in restless spirits, drawn by the house’s dark, heartbreaking past. As he navigates the horrors of the house and his budding romance with its owner, Colin finds himself digging into secrets that Bishop would rather forget, further muddying an already messy supernatural situation.

If short fiction is your horror form of choice, this week’s first pick is for you! I love this debut collection from Isabel Yap. I know I’m a sucker for collections in general, but this one really was an instant favorite. I’m pretty sure that “Good Girls,” which kicks off the whole collection with a horrifying bang, has imprinted itself on my brain permanently. The 13 stories of Never Have I Ever, inspired both by urban legends and the folklore of the Philippines, span the whole range of speculative genres, from sci-fi to horror to fantasy, to form a haunting, surreal collection that you won’t soon forget.

Y’all know I love horror retellings of the Countess Bathory legend. What can I say: I see a beautiful, evil monster woman and I fall in love. Now, obviously I know that legend is not history, and that the real Bathory was more maligned than malicious, but that doesn’t stop me from enjoying books like Kulski’s Fairest Flesh, which marries the Bathory legend with the kind of bloodshed and dark magic that only the most brutal (and therefore the best) of Grimm’s fairy tales can provide. If you’re looking for a stunner of a debut novel that takes a well known horror story and actually manages to make it even more horrifying, Fairest Flesh is the one for you!

Intended as an expansion on the theme of “otherness” the began in the Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women anthology, Tortured Willows is a companion poetry anthology featuring the work of four Southeast Asian horror writers. The anthology focuses specifically on exploring the symbolism of the willow, and its associations with femininity, desire, death and rebirth. If you enjoyed Black Cranes, and the follow-up nonfiction collection, Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women in Horror, I highly recommend picking up this next installment.

This is the most recent title on this week’s list, and if you haven’t added She is a Haunting to your TBR yet, I highly recommend that you do! When Jade agreed to return to Vietnam to visit with her estranged father in hopes of persuading him to release the college funds that he promised her, she thought the hardest part would be pretending to enjoy herself while pretending to be someone she’s not. Just five weeks playing happy family at the house he’s restoring, and she’ll be able to walk away with her education funded. But there’s something undeniably wrong with the house — the strange noises, the alarming number of creepy bugs, the beautiful ghost that keeps trying to warn her not to eat. And if Jade can’t uncover the house’s secrets in time, this family vacation might be her last.

Motherhood is a central theme in V. Castro’s frightening yet hopeful story of grief, anger, and generational trauma. The Haunting of Alejandra is told through the history of a family cursed by a monstrous creature from beyond our world, who feeds on the pain and suffering of the families it stalks through the generations. But Alejandra doesn’t know about the monster or the curse, all she knows is that she feels haunted. Both by the life she lives but no longer wants, and by a spectral figure in white who encourages her darkest, saddest thoughts. As she struggles to learn more about herself and her history in order to try and heal, Alejandra finds a legacy of sorrow and loss. A line of ancestors who suffered tragedy, oppression, and cruelty, leading back and back into the past. But alongside their grief, Alejandra also finds their strength, and the means to fight back against the monster before it can consume her and everyone she loves.

I hope y’all are ready for some body horror, because Katrina Monroe didn’t come to play with her newest book, Graveyard of Lost Children. She begins the novel by putting a body horror twist on birth and then builds on it as Olivia struggles, first with the changes to her body after giving birth to her daughter Flora, and then with the certainty that her body is dying when she becomes convinced that her baby has been replaced with a creature that is slowly draining her life with every feeding. Changeling lore intersects with a heavy discussion of postpartum depression and the societal pressures around being not just a “good” mother, but a “happy” mother. No one can see the horror that Oliva sees, no one seems to see her wasting away. But they see that she’s not as happy as she “should be” now that she’s a mother. They don’t see the black-haired woman who’s dogging her steps, they just see a woman wracked with paranoia and fear. But Olivia can see the woman, and so could Olivia’s mother, Shannon. If Olivia wants to protect herself and her daughter, she will have to seek the black-haired woman out where she lives, and confront a past full of silence and family secrets.

Told from two perspectives across two timelines, Such a Pretty Smile covers a span of 15 years in the lives of Caroline and her 13-year-old daughter, Lila. In 2004, Caroline is a young artist weighed down by her duty to her dying father and the overbearance of her fiancé, an insecure man who is supposed to be in love with her but seems more interested in suppressing her talents in favor of his own career. In 2019, Lila is struggling with societal and parental expectations, the neglect of her distant father, and her own developing sexuality. When Lila’s growing resentment and unrequited feelings start to manifest in strange and frightening ways, she begins to clash with the fragile façade of a life that Caroline has constructed to protect them both. And in doing so, she opens the door to a darkness in Caroline’s past that threatens both their lives.

Cale Dietrich’s The Pledge kicked off our year of slashers back in February with a delightfully classic slasher setup: a masked murderer on the loose on a college campus. Someone is picking off the frat boys of Monroe University. Sam already survived one murderous masked killer on a spree — in fact he was the survivor of a long night of terror that left his friends dead and Sam’s life in ruins. College was supposed to be his chance to start over. He can have a new life and, thanks to his fraternity, a new group of friends. A brand new beginning. Until, that is, one of his frat brothers is found dead. It’s the first death in a violent spree that, to Sam’s horror, seems to have been inspired by the one that haunts him. If Sam wants to protect his new life, and the lives of his new friends, he’ll have to work fast to identify the killer before his bloody history repeats itself.

Make sure you add Kalynn Bayron’s forthcoming slasher, You’re Not Supposed to Die Tonight to your TBR, because it’s going to be the perfect summer horror read. Take it to the lake! What could go wrong? Horror fan Charity scored the perfect summer job when she got cast to play the “final girl” in an interactive attraction based on the classic slasher, Curse of Camp Mirror Lake. It’s a full-contract experience where guests pay to immerse themselves in scenes from the film. The more frightening the better. Until the last weekend of the season when things at Camp Mirror Lake take a deadly turn, leaving Charity and her girlfriend Bezi fighting to survive the unknown killer that’s picking off Charity’s fellow cast members one by one.

I’m so excited for There’s No Way I’d Die First. What can I say? I’m a horror child from Stephen King country, and I love a scary clown. When Noelle Layne uses her horror movie expertise to throw the biggest, most exclusive Halloween bash for her senior class, she expects the night to go down in history as one of the best parties of her high school career. Not one of the most deadly. That is, until the knock-off creepy clown that she hired puts an ax in one of her guests, and a serious wrinkle in her party plans. As the night descends into terror, Noelle will have to rely on everything she’s learned from a lifetime of watching horror movies if she wants to be the Final Girl in her own personal slasher film.

If you haven’t had the pleasure of reading any of Gemma Amor’s work before, I highly recommend starting with her 2020 folk horror novel, White Pines. It has all the things that make folk horror so compelling: a remote, isolated town with a secretive history and a penchant for old traditions; a protagonist whose life is in disarray, making them uniquely susceptible to what is about to happen to them; a bit of cult activity (are you even having fun if no one’s in danger of being inducted into a mysterious cult?); and a slow, spiraling descent in which the character’s perception of reality begins to distort. Ah. That’s the good stuff. Megan, the main character of White Pines, suddenly inherits a cottage in the Scottish Highlands, and since her marriage has just fallen apart, she makes the decision to move to the small community while she works out what to do next. But the longer she stays at the cottage, the less real the world around her begins to feel, and the more it becomes apparent that there’s something very wrong with the village and the nearby island with its eerie white trees.

If you’re looking for a folk horror novel that’s not centered on European folklore, I highly recommend grabbing a copy of Rin Chupeco’s The Sacrifice. I really enjoyed this book, which deftly marries action scenes with the eerie ominousness of folk horror, while also offering a blistering commentary on both historical and modern colonialism in Southeast Asia. On the surface, the island of Kisapmata seems like a perfect oasis of white sand and green jungle. But the legends tell another story, one of sleeping gods and tormented ghosts. The locals know well enough to steer clear of Kisapmata, so when an overbearing team of Hollywood producers and their entire crew descend on the island with the intention of monetizing its tragic past, the only local who steps in to try and protect them from Kisapmata’s dangers is Alon, a teen who knows the island better than anyone living. But even Alon’s knowledge of Kisapmata and its secrets may not be enough to protect the crew from the island’s curse. Or its hunger.

I would like it to be noted that I have gone (nearly) a whole calendar year without pestering you (again) to read Slewfoot. But it’s spring and I’m back on my bullshit folks, so listen up: NATURE. Nature is at the heart of this delightful, witchy, folklore-ish/adjacent book that you should definitely all be reading. Fantastical and horrifying, Slewfoot is a dark, magical story about how monsters and witches are made. When Abitha is widowed suddenly by a suspicious accident, she finds her self desperately trying to hold on to her freedom in the midst of a pious and patriarchal society that would rather see her tucked neatly under the thumb of another man. Enter Slewfoot, a newly woken forest spirit who, like Abitha, is searching for his place in the world, for good or for evil.

Alma Katsu really is the undefeated champion of historical horror. And, of course, the novel that she’s best known for is The Hunger, a story as much about desperation and superstition as it is about cannibalism. I don’t really have to tell you much about the plot of The Hunger. Most folks are familiar with the doomed Donner Party who, with their great journey West already having been plagued by a string of disasters, become stranded in the Sierra Nevada range and find themselves in a situation where survival seems increasingly unlikely. But inThe Hunger it’s not just the weather threatening their lives. Something has been stalking the Donner party for miles. Something hungry. And it’s been picking them off, one at a time, sowing fear and suspicion in its wake.

Adding to this week’s mini-theme of weird plagues: returning to Cleveland for the first time in years, Phoebe Shaw is catapulted back to the summer of 1980 when the girls of Denton Street were suddenly struck by an alarming illness that caused their bodies to literally corrode, becoming rusted, jagged, metallic things that mirrored the collapse of the industrial city around them. The Rust Maidens. Told in alternating timelines between Phoebe’s past and her present, Kiste’s The Rust Maidens is a chilling, grotesque work of body horror about the tragedy of a dying city, and the people left behind. At its heart is the hidden secret behind the illness of the Rust Maidens; a mystery that Phoebe must unravel if she hopes to protect herself and those she loves.

2018 was also the year that Lily Anderson gave us Undead Girl Gang, and introduced readers to her brilliant blend of horror and humor. When Mila’s best friend Riley dies suddenly, along with two mean girls from their school, in what appears to be a suicide pact, Mila does the only thing she can to prove that it’s not true: she raises the dead. With some lip gloss and an ancient grimoire, Mila brings both Riley and the two girls, June and Dayton, back to life so she can discover the truth about their suspicious deaths. Only, none of the girls can remember who killed them. Now Mila has three undead teens on her hands, all with unfinished business to attend to, and only seven days to solve the mystery of their deaths before they crawl back into their graves, leaving their murderer free to kill again.

I’ve had Premee Mohamed’s novella on my reading list ever since I first laid heart eyes on that gorgeous cover. Neon Hemlock really hits it out of the park with the books they publish, and And What Can We Offer You Tonight is no exception. Also, how could I possibly say no to a dark, dystopian story of murder, resurrection, and revenge? Jewel is a courtesan whose friend is violently murdered by a client. But when, by some mysterious circumstance, her friend doesn’t stay dead, the two set out to extract some much deserved vengeance on a cruel and unjust future. But revenge is a blade that cuts both ways, and both friends will find themselves questioning just how far they’re willing to go.

Did someone say “enthusiastically gross (complementary) trans body horror that will make you gag?” Part of the retro horror-inspired Rewind-or-Die novella series, Eve Harms’ Transmuted is about Isa, a minor celebrity whose fans helped to fundraise her gender affirming facial reconstruction. But Isa sacrificed her surgery funds to try and save her dying father. Now, sans funds and trapped between her followers’ expectations and her crushing gender dysphoria, she risks it all on an extremely suspect ad offering a free, experimental feminization treatment to willing volunteers. What ensues is a tale of transformation, both desired and monstrous, as, in the hands of the gruesome Dr. Skurm, Isa goes from satisfied patient to mutant. Isa is becoming less human by the minute, and if she can’t find out why it’s happening, and what Skurm has done to her, she may be stuck that way forever.

Talk about classic, “haunted” house horror. Just reading the synopsis makes me positively giddy, so I really need to pop this creepy, queer horror novella to the top of my reading list. In The House of Little Bones, horror author Davis Lansdown has…well basically David has an awful, really bad, not good time, from what I can tell. He’s exiled himself to a remote house on the moors to write and to escape a scandal involving a liaison with his publisher’s son. But things are not as peaceful (if desolate) as they seem at Bone Hollow. Something restless and hungry moves beneath the ground, and it’s set its sights on David. Add to that fraught mix David’s castoff lover Luca, who soon becomes obsessed with Bone Hollow’s dark and tragic history, and you’ve got yourself a story of secrets and curses that may itself end in tragedy. Only one way to find out!

In the dying city of Elendhaven, on the edge of the sea, a monster stalks the shadows and does his master’s bidding. A creature in the shape of a man but who cannot die like one, twisted by magic and shaped by his master’s cruel cunning. Together they will have their revenge on Elendhaven, no matter the cost. This novella, y’all. It’s just so dark and strange and magical, like all the best fairy tales should be. I loved the relationship between the two leads, and the tense, disturbing feeling of their salt-coated city by the sea. If you’ve never read The Monster of Elendhaven, but you love fairy tale-esque books that mix horror and fantasy, magic and monsters, be sure to add this to your TBR

When it comes to fairy tales that are far darker on consideration than they may first appear, nothing says “yikes” like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. And apparently Cina Pelayo agrees, because her novel Children of Chicago puts a horror genre twist on an already horrifying tale of child abduction and murder (I mean, the children of hamelin were never seen again, so I guess that’s not technically murder…but he did something with them and that something might have been murder. Or cannibalism. LOTS of cannibalism in fairy tales.) Pelayo’s retelling is set in Chicago, where Detective Lauren Medina is on the trail of a brutal serial killer known as the Pied Piper, who targets children. When a murdered teenager is found floating in the same lagoon where Medina’s sister’s body was once found, she has no doubt that the killer is the Piper, and he’s come back for what he’s owed. What Lauren owes him.

Now She is Witch has only been published in the UK thus far, so to partake in Kirsty Logan’s new book, you will have to import yourself a copy. But hey, Blackwell’s (linked above) ships internationally for free, and I have a feeling this book will be more than worth the international shipping times if you happen to live outside the UK, as I do. Now She is Witch isn’t inspired by a specific story, but the storytelling is the heart of this novel, told in Logan’s haunting fairy tale-esque style. It’s about two characters: Lux, who has lost everything to the cruelties and suspicions of the world and has been cast out, and Else, who finds Lux alone in the woods after her life has been burnt to ashes. But Else didn’t stumble upon Lux by chance. She’s on the trail of a man who needs killing for what he did to her, and Lux has a particular affinity for poisons. Together, they hunt him northward, surrounded on all sides by danger and dark secrets.

Did I decide on this week’s topic just so I could expound (again) on the perfection that is The Salt Grows Heavy. No. I mean, mostly no. But there’s no denying that, when it comes to fairy tale horror, this grim and gruesome yet oddly hopeful Little Mermaid-inspired novella from Cassandra Khaw sets a whole new bar. Think Little Mermaid but if the Prince was an asshole, Ariel was a prisoner, and as revenge, she gave birth to a couple of kids who literally ate the entire kingdom. As one does. And instead of sticking around to join in the buffet, she sets out on the road with a strange but charming Plague Doctor. The two stumble upon a super creepy village, deep in the forest, with a bunch of kids who make Children of the Corn look friendly, and they’re being governed by three ghastly Surgeons. When the Plague Doctor reveals that the Surgeons have a dark, violent secret that is a part of the Doctor’s own past, the two travelers find themselves attempting to unravel the Surgeons’ powers and put an end to their terrible work.

I read the original Carmilla for the first time last year and absolutely loved it, so obviously I was over the moon when I found Amy Chu and Soo Lee’s new graphic novel inspired by Le Fanu’s novella. Chu and Lee’s adaptation is set in New York in the ’90’s during the Lunar New Year, and blends elements of Le Fanu’s Carmilla with Chinese folklore to tell a story of murder, infatuation, and deadly secrets. Athena is a social worker on the trail of a murderer who’s been killing homeless LGBTQ+ women in the city. The murderer’s trail leads her to a nightclub called Camilla’s in her own neighborhood with a mysterious reputation, and Athena soon finds herself falling for a beautiful young woman named Violet who may just be the killer’s next victim.

Gosh, the synopsis of The Fell of Dark is giving me nostalgic, Buffy-esque feels, and I love it — vampires, a hellmouth nexus of mystical energy, a little bit of apocalypse flair for flavor. Ah, memories. But something tells me I’m having more fun with this than August, who hated living in a vampire town even before some random undead guy rolled up with a cryptic warning about the end of the world. And yeah, the guy’s hot. And mysterious, which arguably makes him even more hot. But he’s just dropped Auggie into the middle of a nightmarish scenario where some old and deadly power is threatening to destroy the world unless Auggie can find some way to stop it. And he may be the only one who can.

Okay, so this is where I have to pull my “if it’s vampire, it’s technically horror” get out of jail free card and give it a wave, because Dead Collections is not horror in the frightening sense. It is, in fact, more of a fantasy novel with a central love story and an undead/paranormal twist. But I’m including it anyway! If you want to argue about it, you can find me on Twitter, as long as Twitter still exists by the time this newsletter reaches you. Or you could take my word for it when I say that this novel about a trans archivist vampire named Sol falling in love with a widow named Elsie is a beautiful story about navigating grief, hate, and stigma to find love and joy in a world that seems fundamentally opposed to letting you have either. And yes, it’s a different kind of vampire story than the other two on this list, but an extremely important one given current events.

Also, there’s ghosts.

Yes, I’m talking about Leech again. No, I’m not apologizing because I love this book so much and I want everyone to read it. Leech is a queer medical Gothic horror novel set in a fictional Northern town locked in the depths of a terrible winter that keeps the residents trapped in their homes out of fear of the deadly cold. In the estate that overlooks the town, the house doctor has died violently by his own hand, and it’s up to the newly arrived Doctor, a member of the Institute just like the deceased, to discover the cause. In fact, all of the bodies of the Interprovincial Medical Institute are doctors, because for centuries the Institute has been systematically replacing all the unreliable human doctors with its superior bodies, whose mind(s) can overcome any challenge or puzzle the Institute might encounter. Until they can’t. Because the parasitic creature that our Doctor discovers lurking in the cold might finally be a problem beyond the Institute’s ability to solve.

Inspired by the story of Henrietta Lacks and a long and terrible history of medical experimentation on Black bodies, Lakewood begins with death and debt. Lena drops out of college after her grandmother dies in a bid to help support her family as they navigate the debts revealed by her grandmother’s passing. When a high paying job opens up in the little, isolated town of Lakewood, Michigan, promising not only a place to live but also full coverage of medical expenses, the offer is too good to refuse. The only catch? Lena can never tell anyone, friend or family, about the strange experiments she’s being paid to undergo. She’s been told that the work being done at Lakewood could have massive, positive impacts on the world. But the longer the testing goes on, and the risks of participation increase, Lena will have to make a choice between her family’s financial security and her own life.

Dana Schwartz’s Anatomy is a YA historical medical horror novel with a Frankenstein twist. A bit of gothic romance, a whole heap of body horror, and piles of dead bodies. What’s not to love? Hazel Sinnett’s only desire in life is to be a surgeon, healing bodies and maybe even finding a cure for the terrible Roman Plague that claimed her older brother’s life. She will do whatever it takes to overcome the barriers in her way, even dressing as a boy in order to attend classes on anatomy. When her ruse is discovered, however, Hazel finds herself thrown out of the classroom, leaving her no choice but to continue her studies of the human body in private. By any means necessary.