Persona (2026) Aoife Josie Clements "This is the best book I've read in years. Clements walks onto the scene with the skill and confidence of an old master; Persona disgusts its reader past endurance, then breaks their heart before they realize what's happening. It brings together everything from the films of Ingmar Bergman to Neon Genesis Evangelion. It's a churning black spiral of misery, nausea, and anxiety, and woven through it all an infinitely fragile thread of human connection. Clements has written the year's great work of literary horror. This is not something to miss."
Herculine (2025) Grace Byron "Byron's debut is a haunting portrait of disaffected, dysfunctional adulthood and the human devastation left behind by fundamentalist Christian upbringing. On its face, Herculine is an almost prototypical novel about a young trans woman trying to make it in New York, but with each new nasty revelation, Byron pulls you deeper into a world of paranoid, self-annihilating horror."
This is My Body (2025) Lindsay King-Miller "A brutal, brilliant story of motherhood, memory, and religion, deviously simple and terribly clever. King-Miller has become one of my must-read authors."
The Butcher's Daughter (2025) Corinne Leigh Clark and David Demchuk "Grisly, spellbinding, and oddly touching . . . Demchuk and Clark get their arms bloody to the elbow reaching deep into the carcass of a story about life at the margins and the gruesome allure of wanton violence."
Motheater (2025) Linda H Codega "With Motheater, Codega weaves a darkly enthralling yarn steeped in loss and rage, deftly spinning Appalachia's past, present, and its rich folkloric tradition into something much more than the sum of its parts."
Coup De Grace (2024) Sofia Ajram "Alienating, exquisite, and disturbing; a poem in blood and concrete."
Nicked (2024) M T Anderson "Witty and deeply affecting, a pointed send-up of power, theology, ownership, and the divine, all executed with masterful flair."
The House of Last Resort (2024) Christopher Golden "Golden has never been better. The hot streak that started with Road of Bones blazes out of control through this stellar, terrifying, and richly layered haunted house story."
Idlewild (2023) James Frankie Thomas "A thoughtful, bittersweet rumination on queer adolescence in post-9/11 America. At once caustically irreverent and deadly serious as only teenagers can be, Idlewild is a confident, heartfelt debut."
The Marigold (2023) Andrew F Sullivan "Sullivan cultivates a truly suffocating atmosphere of economic and social tension, a sense that the world has moved beyond the verge of collapse and into a long, slow slide to oblivion. This is urban horror done right, layered with the cold, unalloyed terror of watching the world crumble in real time. The Marigold is a back-breaker for the genre."
