Few things are as terrifying as changing from the inside out.

Body horror is one of the most unsettling corners of the horror genre because it takes something familiar, our own bodies, and turns it into something frightening. These stories explore transformation, infection, mutation, obsession, and the terrifying possibility that the thing we trust most can become something we no longer recognize.

From grotesque physical changes to unsettling questions about identity and humanity, these thirteen books deliver nightmares that linger long after the final page.

Welcome to "Under the Skin" books for the Body Horror prompt in the Scaredy Cat Reading Challenge: a year-round horror reading challenge designed to help readers discover every corner of the horror genre.

Looking for the best body horror books? Check out 13 disturbing horror novels featuring mutations, parasites, transformations, and terrifying changes to the human body.

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This post is part of the Scaredy Cat Reading Challenge, a year-round horror reading event featuring prompts inspired by monsters, subgenres, and spooky settings. Browse all of the prompts to discover your next terrifying read.

New to the Scaredy Cat Reading Challenge? You can join in at any time and complete the prompts at your own pace.

What Is Body Horror?

Body horror is a subgenre of horror that explores the fear of the human body changing, breaking down, or transforming in disturbing ways.

These stories often feature:

• Mutations and physical transformations
• Parasites and infestations
• Deadly viruses and infections
• Medical experiments gone wrong
• Disease and decay
• Monstrous anatomy

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13 BODY Horror Books for the Scaredy Cat Reading Challenge

 Nothing Tastes as Good by Luke Dumas

A miracle weight-loss drug promises a new body—because what could possibly go wrong?

Fabulous Bodies by Chuck Tingle 

A grave robber finds out that sometimes dead celebrities really do make comebacks.

youthjuice by E.K. Sathue

The secret to eternal youth is probably disgusting. This book confirms it.

wolfworm by t. kingfisher 

The story blends classic Southern Gothic vibes with historical fiction and elements of folklore, oh, and botflies. 

Afterbirth by Emma Cleary 

Pregnancy is already body horror. This book asks: what if it got worse?

you weren't meant to be human by andrew joseph white

A deeply unsettling exploration of identity, transformation, and the possibility that “human” was never the right label to begin with.

Wife Shaped Bodies By Laura Cranehill

Fungal growths, forced conformity, and the horrifying realization that being a “good wife” may involve considerably more body horror than advertised.

 Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder

One exhausted mom discovers that motherhood may be turning her into an actual animal.

Hazelthorn C.G. Drews

Gothic horror, unsettling transformations, and the creeping suspicion that everything is about to get significantly worse.

Itch! by Gemma Amor

It starts with an itch. Unfortunately, it does not end with simply scratching it.

Queen of Teeth by hailey piper

A woman grows teeth in places where teeth absolutely do not belong. Dentistry has officially entered its villain era.

Chlorine by Jade Song

Competitive swimming, mermaid obsession, and the desire to become something other than human.

Such Sharp Teeth by Rachel Harrison

A woman gets attacked by a mysterious creature and discovers that anger issues can be very literal.

  

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Continue the Scaredy Cat Reading Challenge

Finished your body horror read?

Keep the scares coming by exploring more prompts from the Scaredy Cat Reading Challenge. From haunted houses and witches to ecohorror, gothic fiction, and creature features, the challenge is designed to help horror fans discover new books throughout the year.

Every prompt is another excuse to add terrifying books to your TBR—and another chance to find your next favorite horror novel.

You might also enjoy:

🧙 The Witching Hour  — Witch horror featuring curses, covens, and dark magic.

🏰 Crumbling Castle — Gothic horror where haunted places hold terrifying secrets.

🌲 Grimm Dark — Fairy tale retellings that embrace the horror hidden in classic stories.

🌕 Howl at the Moon — Werewolf horror exploring the monster within.

I Am The Monster Under Your Bed by Emily Zinnikas 

Published September 15th 2026 by St. Martins Press

Something lives under Willa’s bed. As an adult, her fondest childhood memories are of the invisible entity under her bed who taught her how to read. Now thirty-two, Willa is a reclusive but successful painter until a bombshell news report exposes her identity as the controversial survivor of the unsolved Rapture Mystery Slayings, a small-town tragedy that splashed across headlines during her senior year of high school. Six teenagers died in the woods while Willa walked free, and everyone thinks she killed them.

When an old classmate calls about a funeral, Willa reluctantly travels to her sleepy hometown, where the possessed forest that stole her friends looms. The trees whistle for her attention, but she knows better than to listen. And the unexplained knocking from the shadows in the basement of her decaying childhood home is honestly the least of her problems.

As her past pulls her back to the place where she swore she’d never return, Willa is drawn toward the monster she left behind—and becoming the villain her hometown has always believed her to be. 

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I Am the Monster Under the Bed is an ambitious debut that dreams big, and Zinnikas has some nightmares to share.

There is a lot happening here: multiple plot threads, timelines folding in on each other, flashbacks woven throughout, and there are moments where it gets in its own way. I had to have some faith that it would all converge in some mysterious way. 

Willa is an unreliable narrator with survivor's guilt. She's impulsive, possibly a little bonkers, and has childhood trauma dragging her down as well. I actually liked her a lot. 

The supernatural elements in particular feel underexplaned, and left me wanting more. The rules of the monster-verse felt fuzzy, and I kept wanting Zinnikas to slow down and let the weirdness breathe and really show itself. Maybe that readers must fill in the blanks is why it works in the end. 

It is the kind of finale that makes you sit with the book closed for a second because you didn't see it coming, but it lands exactly right. Surprising and satisfying in equal measure, which is honestly harder to pull off than it sounds for a debut. 

Despite the chaos of the middle, even the monster under the bed thinks the ending was worth the wait.

Published March 16th 2026 by French Press Publishing

In a galaxy riven by paranoid greed, profane forces marshal to consume humanity…

- On an abandoned ice moon, broadcasts from a long-dead civilization warp both body and soul.

- On a bizarre medical asteroid, a deranged physician discovers a gruesome “cure” for parasitic infection.

- On a deep space derelict, time becomes utterly meaningless and suffering transcends infinity.

- And on Earth itself, a lake transforms into pure blood and becomes infested with the hate-filled, eel-like aberrations known as…

The Hematophages.

With this quartet of short stories, Splatterpunk Award winner Stephen Kozeniewski is delighted to welcome newcomers to the brutal universe Sci-Fi and Fantasy Reviewer calls “the gold standard for the Space Horror subgenre.”

Meanwhile, veteran ink surfers will find a treasure trove of new material to broaden their event horizons, including extensive background information from the author and a never-before-published tale of alien terror.

So, strap on your boom suit, ready your eye spoon, and try to prepare yourself for…

Splatterings.

Stephen Kozeniewski (pronounced "causin' ooze key") is a Splatterpunk Award-winning author and two-time World Horror Grossout Contest champion. His published work has also been nominated for the Voice Arts and Indie Horror Book Awards, among other honors. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and their two cats above a fanciful balloon studio.  

Published May 26, 2026 by Poisoned Pen Press

The year is 1635.

Sister Ursula, a young nun fleeing the ruins of her convent, and Elsebeth, a sharp-witted peasant, escape a band of marauding soldiers and disappear into the Bavarian forest. War scorches the land, and no one survives it alone. Amid the devastation, they find something in the arms of a dying the gilded skull of a saint.

It is said that if you reunite the saint's skull with her body, a wish will be granted. Desperate for salvation, and each with secret desires of their own, Ursula and Elsebeth follow a ragged map across the blighted countryside. But darkness follows them. A necromancer, drawn to the relic's power. The saint herself, whispering at night. And as the lines between blessing and curse blur, the women must face a harrowing the magic they seek comes at a cost.

At the journey's end, they'll face an impossible choice—one that could tear apart everything they know… or bind them to each other forever.

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In Bone of My Bone, the Thirty Years' War is never merely a vague historical backdrop. From the opening pages, van Veen establishes the destruction, fear, and complete upending of ordinary life, giving the horror real weight. It's the kind of historical detail that sends you looking things up afterward.

When the horror elements are firing, van Veen absolutely delivers on atmosphere. The necromancy feels eerie and grounded, rooted in the superstitions and religious anxieties of the period, and the gilded skull is its unsettling grinning centerpiece.  The Bavarian Forest setting drips with menace, and the threats surrounding it feel treacherous and urgent. 

My issues were more with the characters and pacing. The opening pulls you in fast, and the premise is strong, but somewhere in the middle, the momentum just stalls out. It picked back up towards the end, but there were definitely points where I found myself reading more out of commitment than interest. I also wanted more from the characters. Ursula and Elsebeth just didn't click for me the way I wanted them to, so I never felt super invested in what happened to them.  

Ultimately, this one hit differently than Blood on Her Tongue. The relationship between Lucy and Sarah was so tightly wound and emotionally raw that the horror felt deeply personal. The dread and the emotional stakes were completely inseparable, so even the quieter moments felt tense. Bone of My Bone has all of van Veen's signature atmosphere and remarkable sense of dread, but without that emotional core at its center, it didn't stick with me quite as much.

Published September 30, 2025 by Tor Nightfire

The next installment in the New York Times bestselling Sworn Soldier series, featuring Alex Easton investigating the dark, mysterious depths of a coal mine in America.

Alex Easton does not want to visit America.

They particularly do not want to visit an abandoned coal mine in West Virginia with a reputation for being haunted.

But when their old friend Dr. Denton summons them to help find his lost cousin—who went missing in that very mine—well, sometimes a sworn soldier has to do what a sworn soldier has to do...

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The third installment in T. Kingfisher's Sworn Soldier series sends Alex Easton somewhere they emphatically do not want to go: America. More specifically, an abandoned coal mine in West Virginia with a unsavory reputation. When their old friend Dr. Denton calls in a favor to help locate his missing cousin, who was last seen heading into that very mine, well, a sworn soldier answers the call.

I've loved following Alex Easton through the crumbling Usher estate and the fog-draped forests of Gallacia, so naturally I was eager to see where Kingfisher would take them next. And I have to say, the setting of What Stalks the Deep is its strongest asset. The darkness is absolute, the walls press in from every direction, and the silence of the mine is almost intolerable. Imagine being underground with tons of rocks between you and the surface. Kingfisher leans into the claustrophobia beautifully, and we experience it alongside Easton.

Kingfisher has always excelled at writing characters who feel lived-in and real, and that hasn't changed. Alex's particular brand of practicality bumping up against the inexplicable never gets old, and watching them navigate the landscape of rural West Virginia with acerbic bewilderment is funny. Angus remains a steadfast, grounding presence, and there's something quietly satisfying about the way these three have settled into each other. If you've come to love these characters across the earlier books, revisiting them is still a joy, even if the horror is light. 

Where What Stalks the Deep loses a little steam, unfortunately, is in the horror itself. The monster at the center of this story never quite reached the level of wrongness that Kingfisher achieved with her possessed hares in What Moves the Dead — that specific, skin-crawling sensation of something familiar twisted just slightly out of true. Once the monster is revealed, it's almost...cute? 

What Stalks the Deep is by no means a bad book. Kingfisher is too skilled a writer for that, and I'll pick up whatever Alex Easton adventure comes next without hesitation. But for me, the Sworn Soldier series has yet to top What Moves The Dead. 

Published July 22, 2025 by Tor Nightfire

A deeply dark academia novel from USA Today bestselling author Cassandra Khaw, perfect for fans of A Deadly Education and The Atlas Six who are hungry for something a little more diabolical.

The Hellebore Technical Institute for the Gifted is the premier academy for the dangerously the Anti-Christs and Ragnaroks, the world-eaters and apocalypse-makers.

Hellebore promises redemption, acceptance, and a normal life after graduation. At least, that’s what Alessa Li is told when she’s kidnapped and forcibly enrolled.

But there’s more to Hellebore than meets the eye. On graduation day, the faculty go on a ravenous rampage, feasting on Alessa’s class. Only Alessa and a group of her classmates escape the carnage. Trapped in the school’s library, they must offer a human sacrifice every night, or else the faculty will break down the door and kill everyone.

Can they band together and survive, or will the faculty eat its fill?

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I've made no secret of the fact that Cassandra Khaw and I have history. They have a permanent spot on my auto-read list, for better or worse. These Deathless Bones was my introduction. The Salt Grows Heavy was vibrantly weird. And then The Dead Take the A Train with Richard Kadrey showed up and proved that Khaw's particular brand of chaos only gets grittier with a collaborator. I think it's worth stating upfront that I came into The Library at Hellebore with some goodwill because I know anything by Khaw requires a certain mood and commitment. 

The premise is pure, unhinged fun — a school full of the world's most genuinely dangerous kids who could end the world if left unsupervised. Anti-Christs, Ragnaröks, a boy who reads omens in his own entrails. Ya know, just your average kid. On graduation day, the eldritch faculty decide the student body looks delicious, and the school gets turned into a slaughterhouse. The survivors hole up in the library and try not to die while something ancient and hungry hunts them through the aisles. What follows is part melee, part dark academia fever dream, part Khaw being utterly themselves. It is exactly as chaotic as it sounds. 

But the prose! I stand by everything I've ever said about Khaw being a lot. Dense vocabulary, long sentences, writing that demands you gnaw your way through it. Khaw writes like they're conducting a symphony with a chainsaw at a tea party.  If you ever wanted to increase your vocab, it's here. Lush and sharp and genuinely strange, with a quality that makes even the most grotesque moments feel almost beautiful. It makes you feel slightly (okay, completely) unhinged for appreciating it. 

As far as characters go, Alessa is a solid protagonist. Prickly, damaged, dangerous in ways she's still figuring out. The crew she ends up trapped with is where it gets interesting. This is very much a found family situation, except everyone in the family could unmake reality if sufficiently pissed off. I liked them. I wanted more of them, honestly, which leads me to the complaint. Khaw tells this story in fragments which is...not my fav. I wanted more space with everyone trapped in that library than the fractured timeline allowed. It's the kind of structure that warrants a reread... maybe. On the first pass, it just got in its own way.

If you've never read Khaw before, I'd start with one of the shorter stories to calibrate your palate first and decide if you're a fan. But if you already know, The Library at Hellebore is the kind of book that reminds you exactly why you showed up in the first place. It's bloody, it's weird, it's gorgeous, and it's absolutely convinced of its own feral vision. 

Published November 4, 2025 by Berkley 

A woman must confront the evil that's been terrorizing her street since she was a child in this gripping haunted house novel from the national bestselling author of The House That Horror Built and Good Girls Don’t Die.

On an otherwise ordinary street in Chicago, there is a house. An abandoned house where, once upon a time, terrible things happened. The children who live on this block are told by their parents to stay away from that house. But of course, children don’t listen. Children think it’s fun to be scared, to dare each other to go inside.

Jessie Campanelli did what many older sisters do and dared her little brother Paul. But unlike all the other kids who went inside that abandoned house, Paul didn’t return. His two friends, Jake and Richie, said that the house ate Paul. Of course adults didn’t believe that. Adults never believe what kids say. They thought someone kidnapped Paul, or otherwise hurt him. They thought Paul had disappeared in a way that was ordinary, explainable.

The disappearance of her little brother broke Jessie’s family apart in ways that would never be repaired. Jessie grew up, had a child of her own, kept living on the same street where the house that ate her brother sat, crouched and waiting. And darkness seemed to spread out from that house, a darkness that was alive—alive and hungry.

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This is horror tucked inside a monster house, with an entire cosmos pulsing just beneath the floorboards. The house is alive in that constant, watching-you way, crowded with impossible voices and layered tragedy. Cosmic horror often feels vast and distant, but here it’s close. It presses in. It’s slow, suffocating, and painfully personal. The universe doesn’t just fail to care. It mocks.

What hit hardest was the found family at the center of it. These characters are bound together by shared damage, survival, and the kind of loyalty that forms after everyone else has already failed you. The house has taken so much from the neighborhood, and they stay behind to bear witness. To keep watch. To carry the guilt that refuses to be outrun.

Bleak, eerie, and still emotionally cutting.

Published April 9, 2024 by Tor Nightfire

A crew must try to survive on an ancient, abandoned planet in the latest space horror novel from S.A. Barnes, acclaimed author of Dead Silence.

Space exploration can be lonely and isolating.

Psychologist Dr. Ophelia Bray has dedicated her life to the study and prevention of ERS—a space-based condition most famous for a case that resulted in the brutal murders of twenty-nine people. When she's assigned to a small exploration crew, she's eager to make a difference. But as they begin to establish residency on an abandoned planet, it becomes clear that crew is hiding something.

While Ophelia focuses on her new role, her crewmates are far more interested in investigating the eerie, ancient planet and unraveling the mystery behind the previous colonizer's hasty departure than opening up to her.

That is, until their pilot is discovered gruesomely murdered. Is this Ophelia’s worst nightmare starting—a wave of violence and mental deterioration from ERS? Or is it something more sinister?

Terrified that history will repeat itself, Ophelia and the crew must work together to figure out what’s happening. But trust is hard to come by…and the crew isn’t the only one keeping secrets.

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S.A. Barnes catapulted herself onto my must-read list with Dead Silence in 2022.  Space horror isn't something I typically pick up, but I adored her take on an abandoned ghost ship in space. Choosing to read Ghost Station was, therefore, a complete no-brainer for me. 

Set on a remote research outpost far from Earth, Ghost Station follows a team sent to investigate an abandoned space station with a dark history. Psychologist Dr. Ophelia Bray is sent along with them to ensure everyone remains in a good mental state while away. Of course, that makes her the outsider. The crew, who have been on previous missions together, is tense, secretive, and clearly hiding something from Ophelia. 

Ghost Station delivers Barnes' blend of sci-fi horror stout with atmospheric dread, deep psychological apprehension, and a feeling of aloneness.  The tension that Barnes creates in the station and between the characters is prominent. You feel the seclusion, the anxiety, the creeping sense that something is very wrong, even as you still aren't sure what. 

Here's where it went wrong for me. There's a lot of telling, not showing, in this book.  Granted, there's a lot of backstory to get through, but so much of it is given to us in the form of Ophelia's inner monologue. Ophelia is deeply unreliable with herself while trying to portray herself to her team as a reliable psychologist. She second-guesses every sensation, every memory, every emotional reaction. While I understand the results, it was exhausting to read. I wanted more horror, less emotional vacillation.

While Ghost Station didn’t absolutely blow me away, it definitely kept me interested in some of the mysteries and had some really creepy moments. If you’re into slow-burn sci-fi horror with great atmosphere and unreliable characters, it's worth a read. It just didn't quite make it into the territory of Dead Silence.

Horror never really sleeps. It waits, it watches, and every new year it finds fresh ways to crawl back into our lives.

Horror in 2026 is shaping up to be a feast of unease, monsters both intimate and enormous, and stories that crawl under your skin. These are books that lean into dread, obsession, grief, and the kind of fear that lingers long after the last page. Not just monsters in the dark, but the slow realization that the dark has been there the whole time, waiting.

This list gathers 26 of my most anticipated horror books arriving in 2026 that promise to unsettle and occasionally break your heart. Whether you crave haunted houses, cosmic weirdness, slashers with teeth, or stories that blur the line between fear and heartbreak, 2026 has something waiting to ruin your sleep in the best possible way. Turn the page carefully. 

Wolf Worm by T. Kingfisher

Something darker than the devil stalks the North Carolina woods in Wolf Worm, a new gothic masterpiece from New York Times bestselling author T. Kingfisher.

The year is 1899 and Sonia Wilson is a scientific illustrator without work, prospects, or hope. When the reclusive Dr. Halder offers her a position illustrating his vast collection of insects, Sonia jumps at the chance to move to his North Carolina manor house and put her talents to use. But soon enough she finds that there are darker things at work than the Carolina woods. What happened to her predecessor, Halder’s wife? Why are animals acting so strangely, and what is behind the peculiar local whispers about “blood thiefs?”

With the aid of the housekeeper and a local healer, Sonia discovers that Halder’s entomological studies have taken him down a dark road full of parasitic maggots that burrow into human flesh, and that his monstrous experiments may grow to encompass his newest illustrator as well.

Wife Shaped Bodies by Laura Cranehill

Sorrowland meets Manhunt in this literary horror debut in which an isolated newlywed—covered in mushroom growths like all the other wives in her community—strikes a precarious balance between following her husband’s strict rules and pursuing an intense connection with a woman who makes her question everything.

Forbidden from leaving her house from girlhood until marriage, Nicole has only her mother's lessons and what she can see from her bedroom window to draw on in forming her view of the world, and of herself. Taught that the mushrooms which cover the women in her village are repulsive and dangerous, she conforms to a rigid set of rules to protect herself and those around her.

When her wedding day arrives, Nicole moves from one prison to another—an empty mansion on the very outskirts of town belonging to the husband she’s been promised to since birth. As she haunts the edges of Silas's unknowable life and decaying home, maintaining control over her own transforming body becomes increasingly impossible. And when another wife with rebellious tendencies pays Nicole an unexpected visit, something within her cracks open. Their furtive explorations yield confusing answers, unearthing the long-buried secrets of the generations of resentful brides that came before. Unmoored, angry, and at last awakened, Nicole must reckon with who she really is, and perhaps, give in to what she truly wants.

Raw, visceral, and relentless, Wife Shaped Bodies is an exploration of gender, power, and community through the lens of mycological body horror and an ode to the unsettling beauty of the natural world.

Morsel by Carter Keane

The Blair Witch Project meets The Ritual, with a generous helping of The Menu, in Morsel, a delicious folk horror novella perfect for fans of T. Kingfisher, Cassandra Khaw, and Paul Tremblay.

Lou did what the children of parents with back-breaking, poor paying jobs are supposed to do; pulled up her bootstraps, went to college, and got an office job with coworkers who won’t stop talking about their multi-level marketing scheme disguised as self-betterment.

Determined to lift her ill mother out of poverty before it's too late, and in the spirit of climbing the corporate ladder, Lou accepts an assignment in the rural hills of Ohio. She quickly finds herself stranded in the middle of nowhere with a sabotaged truck, a dog she’s determined to keep safe, and something stalking her through the ancient Appalachian woods.

If she can’t escape the woods in time, she’ll come face to face with the fact that her job isn’t the only thing that wants to eat her alive.

Morsel is a chilling testament to the burden of generational poverty and the all-consuming nature of capitalism, where the monster and the monstrous, in the end, are not the same.

Dead First by Johnny Compton (February 10, 2026 by G.P. Putnam's Sons)

From the Bram Stoker award-nominated author of The Spite House comes a bone-chilling new novel about a private investigator hired by a mysterious billionaire to discover why he can’t die.

When private investigator Shyla Sinclair is invited to the looming mansion of mysterious Texan tycoon Saxton Braith, she’s more than a little suspicious. The last thing she expects to see that night is Braith’s assistant driving an iron rod straight through the back of his skull. Scratch that—the last thing she expects to see is Braith’s resurrection afterward.

Braith can’t die, it turns out, but he has no explanation for his immortality, and very few intact memories of his past. Which is why he wants to pay Shyla millions to investigate him, and bring his long-buried history to light. 

Shyla can’t help but be intrigued, but she’s also trapped by the offer. Braith has made it clear that he knows she’s the only person he can trust with his secret, because he knows all about hers. 

Bold, atmospheric, and utterly frightening, Johnny Compton’s Dead First is spine-chilling supernatural horror about the pursuit of power and the undying need for reckoning.

I'll Watch Your Baby by Neena Viel (May 26, 2026 by St. Martin's Griffin)

From the Bram Stoker award-nominated author of The Spite House comes a bone-chilling new novel about a private investigator hired by a mysterious billionaire to discover why he can’t die.

When private investigator Shyla Sinclair is invited to the looming mansion of mysterious Texan tycoon Saxton Braith, she’s more than a little suspicious. The last thing she expects to see that night is Braith’s assistant driving an iron rod straight through the back of his skull. Scratch that—the last thing she expects to see is Braith’s resurrection afterward.

Braith can’t die, it turns out, but he has no explanation for his immortality, and very few intact memories of his past. Which is why he wants to pay Shyla millions to investigate him, and bring his long-buried history to light. 

Shyla can’t help but be intrigued, but she’s also trapped by the offer. Braith has made it clear that he knows she’s the only person he can trust with his secret, because he knows all about hers. 

Bold, atmospheric, and utterly frightening, Johnny Compton’s Dead First is spine-chilling supernatural horror about the pursuit of power and the undying need for reckoning.

Hex House by Amy Jane Stewart (April 28, 2026 by Titan Books)

A feverishly told, dark and unsettling Scotland-set fairy-tale about a safe haven for women which transforms them into vessels of revenge, perfect for fans of T. Kingfisher, A. G Slatter and Julia Armfield

ELLY

Elly is running. Pregnant and still in her wedding dress, she flees the cottage that her new husband has rented for their wedding night. Because he’s not what people think he is – and she knows that, one day, he’ll hurt her in a way she can’t fix. Freezing and lost in the dead of night, Elly begins to lose hope.

A woman in the woods alone is never the beginning of the story. It’s usually the end.  

So, when a beautiful house appears out of nowhere and a woman beckons her inside, it almost feels too good to be true.

Welcome to Hex a refuge, a home, a sanctuary. A place that can only be found by those who truly need it; a place that promises to teach Elly how to access a power more incredible – and more terrifying – than anything she could have imagined. 

SIOBHAN

Four years after Siobhan meets Elly at Hex House, her life is in ruins. Once a promising filmmaker invited to the house to make a documentary with her brother, Theo, she’s given up on her dream after witnessing unspeakable horrors there. Now, she spends her time drinking too much, toying with an older man in increasingly dangerous ways, and trying to get Theo to speak to her again. She ignores the scar on her stomach that never fully heals.

That is, until someone reaches out with news about Hex House that could change everything.

And Siobhan knows, deep down, that she was always destined to return.

Turn Off The Light by Jacquie Walters (March 3, 2026 by Mulholland Books)

Two women living centuries apart are bound by the same dark secret in this haunting horror novel by Jacquie Walters, author of Dearest and “a talent to watch” (Sarah Langan).

The Devil enters through doors left open…

On the isolated Eastern Shore of Virginia, Edith is a healer, a woman of knowledge—and a woman watched. Shadows move where they shouldn’t. Whispers creep through the dark. Terrified she has opened her home to the Devil, Edith makes a desperate choice.

Claire doesn’t believe in ghosts—until she returns home to care for her dying father and finds her childhood house… listening. As one sleepless night bleeds into the next, she becomes convinced something is stirring beneath the floorboards. Something that has waited a long time to rise.

Is the house haunted? What compels this lurking darkness? As the danger mounts, Edith and Claire will discover they’ll need each other to survive. But they are separated by four hundred years. And time is running out for them both.

The Seventh Sister by Dawn Kurtagich (April 7, 2026 by Thomas & Mercer)

From the author of The Madness comes a haunting folk horror fable of lost sisters, old gods, and the terrible power of belief left to rot in the woods.

After the tragic death of their parents, the seven Ward sisters are sent to live with their grandmother on the remote forest island of Beltane, a place suspended between time and shadow. What begins as an attempt to mend their fractured lives soon twists into a waking nightmare, where grief bleeds into childhood fantasy and ancient rites awaken a dark and eerie devotion to Daudir, the Forgotten God of the Wood.

When another cruel tragedy strikes, the sisters are left to fend for themselves, learning to live with death as a constant, lurking presence. The fragile world they’ve carved splinters beneath the weight of isolation, and the forest around them grows restless…

Years later, a cryptic letter summons the surviving sisters home. Drawn back into the wild embrace of their dangerous faith, they confront a truth more terrible than memory, and the dreadful secret that waits, silent and sentient, in the depths of the all-seeing trees.

This lyrical and haunting folk horror explores how trauma can root itself in the soil of childhood, how love can curdle into obsession, and how gods, especially forgotten ones, never stay buried for long. But at its heart, it’s about how they fracture, survive, return, and reckon with what they’ve made together.

Aubrey Wants to Die by Pip Knight (March 3, 2026 by Hanover Square Press)

Love is hard. Being undead is harder ... Dolly Alderton meets True Blood in this dark, funny hell of a story

Aubrey is not what she seems. She's young, beautiful, romantic, obsessive and ... a vampire. All she wants is to be human again, and failing that, she wants to die. But the problem is, she can't. Not by stake through the heart or holy water or crucifix or garlic or fire. And she'd know, she's tried every method ... Twice.

So she's stuck here on this earth, all alone. Even the vampire who made her this way - an aristocratic douchebag called Oscar - has abandoned her.

But everything changes when one fateful night, she meets Jonathan. He's everything Aubrey's ever dreamed of, and what's more, he's her soulmate. Her Bella-Edward story. For the first time in 150 years, she has a reason to hope - eternal life might be bearable after all. So when Jonathan unexpectedly breaks up with her, she'll do anything to get him back.

But that's the exact moment Oscar swoops back into her life. And he has other plans for her. Soon, she's thrown into a world of glamour, glitter, blood and hedonism, a world that has her questioning everything she knows to be true-about life, but also about herself. A world where nothing is simple ... And no-one is safe, either.

A Plagued Sea by Kim Bo-Young (August 11, 2026 by Tor Nightfire)

First the flood

Next the sickness

Last the change

Visionary Korean author Kim Bo-young unleashes a Lovecraftian nightmare of infection, transformation, and abomination.

“[Kim Bo-young's] fiction is a breathtaking piece of a cinematic art.” ―Bong Joon-ho, Academy Award-winning director of Parasite

While waiting for a train to Haewon, an isolated Korean seaside village, bodyguard Mu-young gets a disaster alert on her phone. TVs throughout the station report breaking news of a massive earthquake on the eastern coast. Despite the danger, Mu-young boards the train with her she’d rather face the earthquake than leave the girl in her mother’s care. That choice haunts her for the rest of her life.

Three years later, Haewon Village is home to horrors. The earthquake unleashed an ancient plague that transforms its victims into fishy monsters, and the government’s lockdown has cut off any hope for help. Mu-young’s niece is dead, and all that’s left for her is to hunt villagers who break isolation. When an officious bureaucrat from Seoul arrives in the village, he stirs up even deeper trouble. Will Mu-young survive? Does she even deserve to?

Headlights by CJ Leede (June 9, 2026 by Tor Nightfire)

Every instinct tells him to run. Every memory tells him he can’t.

Special Agent Daniel Stansfield is ready for a change. Burnt out and defeated by the job, it’s his last day with the FBI. But before he can turn in his badge, he’s summoned back to Denver, the city he ran from four years ago, with a chilling message: it's happening again.

Seemingly innocent people are waking up on the side of the highway, with no memory of how they got there, wearing the skin of victims they've allegedly never met. And they each share one haunting detail: a strand of a stranger’s hair is tied around their tongue.

Now Daniel is pulled back into the gruesome cycle, and every clue leads him deeper into the shadows of his own past. He will have to confront the ghosts of his traumatic childhood and face what’s been hunting him all along— before he and the people he loves become the next victims.

Perfect for fans of The Shining and Longlegs, bestselling author CJ Leede’s Headlights is a pulse-pounding hunt across the frozen wilderness of Colorado.

The Temptation of Charlotte North by Camilla Bruce (May 19, 2026 by Del Rey)

A rebellious young woman desperate to escape her predetermined life joins forces with an unlikely ally—a sinister spirit—in this dark gothic fantasy from the acclaimed author of At the Bottom of the Garden .

Be careful what you wish for. It might come true....

In 1910, on a small, remote island that boasts more sheep than people, life does not hold a lot of promise for spirited Charlotte North. Her only escape from both this insular community and a family who does not understand her seems to be through marriage—an institution she is not at all eager to join, given the unhappiness of her parents' own union. Plus, eligible suitors are few and far between, which is why Charlotte has fallen hard for one the few outsiders to join their community in recent the handsome—and likewise unhappily married—new priest.

And then an ancient tower once rumored to have imprisoned a witch—or an unfaithful wife—crumbles, and releases . . . something. A restless spirit that knocks inside the walls and sends household objects flying. A spirit that seems to have an affinity for Charlotte herself. Though many on the island are terrified of this new interloper, Charlotte sees in it potential. Power. And perhaps even a way to get everything she has most wanted out of life.

Bed Rot Baby by Wendy Dalrymple (February 10, 2026 by Quill & Crow Publishing House)

Her life is falling apart… like, literally.

Being a sugar baby isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. After a failed art career and a failed relationship, Baby has lost her way. She’s adrift in the post-Y2K, pre-Facebook world and stuck in her Florida hometown, selling stolen goods online and working as a sugar baby. Even though she’s hustling hard, there’s still never enough money to pay the bills, and her long-suffering roommate is ready to put her out on the streets. One night after a bad date with her sugar daddy, Baby is assaulted by a mysterious woman in a parking lot. The attack leaves her disoriented and exhausted, so Baby takes to her bed to lie there and rot, like, for real. With every passing day, Baby’s looks and health decline in strange and horrific ways. Soon, it becomes apparent that the strange woman who assaulted her had something to do with her declining state. Baby needs to find her attacker, reclaim her life and her beauty, and get her shit together once and for all. But at what cost?

Bed Rot Baby is a pink horror meditation of self-discovery through self-destruction, and the real cost of self-image, self-esteem, and beauty.

Trad Wife by Saratoga Schaefer (February 10, 2026 by Crooked Lane Books)

A ‘traditional wife’ influencer allows a demonic creature to impregnate her in this unnerving horror novel, perfect for fans of Nightbitch and Mary, from the author of Serial Killer Support Group.

Every #tradwife needs a baby. She’ll get one at any cost.

When Camille Deming isn’t cooking, cleaning, or homesteading in her picture-perfect country farmhouse, she’s posting about her tradwife lifestyle for her online followers. She takes inspiration from other tradwives on social media, aspiring to be like them, but Camille’s missing a key a baby. And contrary to what she posts online, things with her husband Graham have been strained. Pressured by her eager followers, Camille fears that without a baby, her relationship will suffer and her social media will never grow out of its infancy.

When Camille discovers a mysterious, decrepit well in the wheatfield behind her house, she makes a wish for a baby. Afterwards, she has unsettling experiences that she convinces herself are angelic in nature, and when she’s visited one night by a strange creature, her wish comes true. 

Camille’s pregnancy announcement gets more engagement than anything she’s ever posted—so what if Graham’s reaction is lukewarm? Camille’s life is finally falling into place. Never mind that her pregnancy is developing freakishly rapidly and she’s suddenly craving raw meat. Being a traditional wife is worth it.

Rosemary’s Baby for the digital age, this disturbing horror novel is one you’ll want to devour in just one bite.

Body Count by Codie Crowley (May 5, 2026 by Disney-Hyperion)

In this sapphic slasher novel, Sundae Valentine made a deal with a monster in Wildwood, N.J., when she was a child, and barely escaped with her life. Six years later, Sundae’s braving Wildwood again for a killer beach party to celebrate prom with the cheerleaders and the football team. But the monster is back, too, and this time he’ll stop at nothing to make sure she pays her debts.

We Call Them Witches by India-Rose Bower (April 7, 2026 by Poisoned Pen Press)

Most people have been devoured by the eldritch creatures, but Sara and her family have been fighting for survival, armed with their knowledge of folklore and pagan rituals - the only weapon that seems to work against these monsters.

And then a young woman, Parsley, comes out of nowhere into Sara's life. Found in their garden, they have no idea where she is from.

Sara and Parsley begin to fall in love, but disaster strikes when Sara’s brother Noah is taken by the creatures.

They set out to find him, across a landscape of merciless terror, haunted by death.

But can Parsley truly be trusted in a world where humanity is as scarse as humans themselves?

The Unheld by Luke Larken (August 25, 2026 by Hyperion Avenue)

A girl in the Montana territory sets out to find her father after he is carried off by an otherworldly creature in this atmospheric horror Western.

Charlie’s life is a lonely one. While other twelve-year-olds are in school, she spends her days skinning the animals her mercurial father hunts in the wild woods just outside their cabin. And the woods and its twisted creatures—an owl with four wings, a boar with two heads, a fox with gills—are becoming stranger by the day.

One night, a nightmarish beast neither animal nor human appears and drags Charlie’s father into the wilderness. To find him, she enlists the aid of two unlikely allies also in search of the beast: an Englishman with a connection to a mysterious occult society and a Northern Cheyenne policeman exiled for a crime he didn’t commit. Yet as she and her allies prepare for a confrontation with the Beast, Charlie must decide if her father, a brusque man who has always withheld his affection, is ultimately worth saving.

The Unheld is an unsettling and soulful horror novel about loneliness, human connection, and how we find each other in a world that seems designed to alienate. With this assured debut, Luke Larkin marks his arrival in the genre and proves the American frontier still harbors untapped stories in its shadows.

She Made Herself a Monster by Anna Kovatcheva (February 10, 2026 by Mariner Books)

A heady, dark-hued Gothic gem of a debut in nineteenth-century Bulgaria, a self-proclaimed vampire slayer—actually, a traveling con artist—joins forces with a teenage girl to create a monster deadly enough to vanquish their own demons. 

We make monsters in order to destroy them. For thousands of years, we’ve named witches and burned them, suspected demons and exorcised them. When crops die and children fall ill, who better to blame than a monster?

In nineteenth-century Bulgaria, Yana rides from one desolate town to the next, staging grisly displays while the villagers animal corpses in the public square, eggs filled with blood in the chicken coop. She tells the stricken villagers stories of vampires that stalk the night. Then Yana eliminates the threat, and leaves seeds of hope in her wake.

The village of Koprivici, however, is plagued by exceptional illness and misfortune, its children rarely surviving infancy. There, Yana meets a headstrong orphan who the villagers blame for their curse. As Anka approaches womanhood, the village Captain is grooming her for marriage against her will. Anka is powerless against him—that is, until Yana arrives. Together, the orphan and the vampire slayer hatch a to conjure a monster so vile, it might provide cover for Anka to escape. But their plan quickly takes on a horrifying life of its own...

Inspired by Slavic folklore, She Made Herself a Monster concocts a clever mix of witchery, ghost stories, heresy, and deception to spin a feminist fable about agency and the power of collective action. It is a haunting and astoundingly cathartic tale of two women who will stop at nothing to take control of their fate. 

May The Dead Keep You by Jill Baguchinsky (April 21, 2026 by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)

There’s nowhere Catie East would rather be than the redwood forest that surrounds her family’s unusual historic home, the Heights.

She prefers being alone in the forest. People are…complicated. But when a scientist and his son move into the estate’s cottage, planning to study the woods around them, the boy catches Catie’s eye. And when a dead woodpecker miraculously comes back to life in his precious hands…he captures her heart.

Necromancy isn’t the only strange thing happening in the Heights. There’s an unfamiliar face in the mirror. Blood on the floors. Eyes in the wallpaper. And the men around her—including her once-sweet nature boy—are becoming something else. Something possessive and frightening. Something violent.

As the Heights’s dark history starts to come to light, Catie discovers that the home she loves is imbued with pain. And even though the pain isn’t her own, it will corrupt her and the people around her all the same—unless she can stop it.

A story about breaking cycles of abuse and overcoming generational trauma, May the Dead Keep You is an edge-of-your-seat listen—equally horrifying, heart-wrenching, and hopeful.

I Know a Place by Nat Cassidy (May 5, 2026 by Shortwave)

There are locations in this world where the light doesn’t seem to reach. Where, no matter how illuminated the place might be, shadows creep in too strongly to fight back.

A suspiciously empty gas station rest stop in the middle of the night, littered with googley eyes... A doctor’s office, where a bottle of booze and a tear-stained folder wait on the desk... A tech millionaire’s haunted kitchen... A Bible-quoting ventriloquist’s dingy apartment... A yoga retreat in the middle of the desert, silent except for the screaming...

These supernatural and sinister locations are your destination, and bestselling author Nat Cassidy will be your guide. Featuring the Bram Stoker Award–nominated, critically acclaimed novella Rest Stop (one of Esquire’s Best Horror Books of 2024), along with a number of other original short stories, some which have never been published before, I Know A Rest Stop and Other Dark Detours is a travelogue down twisting side streets and through alleyways where the darkness has eyes...and teeth.

Let’s hope you make it home in one piece—if the ghosts, gory visions, and splatterpunk nightmares don’t get you first.

Bone of My Bone by Johanna Van Veen (May 26, 2026 by Poisoned Pen Press)

The year is 1635.

Sister Ursula, a young nun fleeing the ruins of her convent, and Elsebeth, a sharp-witted peasant, escape a band of marauding soldiers and disappear into the Bavarian forest. War scorches the land, and no one survives it alone. Amid the devastation, they find something in the arms of a dying the gilded skull of a saint.

It is said that if you reunite the saint's skull with her body, a wish will be granted. Desperate for salvation, and each with secret desires of their own, Ursula and Elsebeth follow a ragged map across the blighted countryside. But darkness follows them. A necromancer, drawn to the relic's power. The saint herself, whispering at night. And as the lines between blessing and curse blur, the women must face a harrowing the magic they seek comes at a cost.

At the journey's end, they'll face an impossible choice—one that could tear apart everything they know… or bind them to each other forever.

The Way It Haunted Him by Laura R. Samotin (June 9, 2026 by Titan Books)

A terrifying and powerful dark academia novel about Jewish folklore, grief, and other things locked in the archives. Perfect for fans of T. Kingfisher, Tori Bovalino and Sunyi Dean.

"It's real. You'll see."

Michael Stein arrives at the Schechter Institute for Judaic Studies battered and broken after the death of his boyfriend seven months prior. Blaming himself for the accident that killed him, Michael has come to the Institute to complete his boyfriend's dissertation as part of his effort at repentance. While Michael's own past leads him to condemn superstition as a way to mask prejudice and old-fashioned beliefs, his boyfriend's research argues that the folktales told in the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe were based in truth, and that demons and other creatures walked the earth, wreaking havoc on peoples' lives.

Instead of the Institute's infamous archivist, Michael is met by his grandson, Jacob Schechter, who has taken over the archive after his grandfather's death. A firm believer in the existence of the supernatural, Jacob explains that the archive plays host to a coterie of household demons. Michael insists that he is a skeptic, but strange and frightening occurrences plague his research, causing Michael to question both his sanity and his view of the world.

To cope with his guilt, grief, and the terrifying shadows following him, Michael must reckon with the events leading up to his boyfriend's death—and his role in it—by trusting the enigmatic Jacob to help uncover the truth. As untangling the mysteries of the past bring Jacob and Michael closer together, their respective secrets threaten to tear them apart. Because Michael is not the only one with darkness on his conscience, and if he and Jacob discover the truth of each other, only one of them may survive the fallout.

You Did Nothing Wrong by CG Drews (March 17, 2026 by St. Martin's Press)

A relentless, horror-inducing psychological suspense for fans of The Push and Baby Teeth by New York Times bestselling author CG Drews.

Single mother Elodie’s life has become a fairy tale. She’s met Bren, equal parts golden-retriever devoted and sinfully handsome. He’s whisked her and her autistic son, Jude, to the crumbling family house he’s renovating. She has a new husband, a new house, and a new baby on the way. Everything is perfect.

Then Jude claims he can hear voices in the walls. He says their renovations are “hurting” the house. Even Elodie can’t ignore it–something strange is going on. The question is, is it with the house, or with her son?

Then the one secret Elodie has been hiding is revealed, and no one is safe anymore.

A pulse-pounding, clever take on the haunted house novel, You Did Nothing Wrong examines the complexities of motherhood and the twisted bonds of family as it races to its shocking ending.

The Sea Hides Its Dead by Megan Bontrager (July 14, 2026 by Run For It)

The Descent meets The Ritual in a cult aquatic horror about a group of academics trapped in a sea cave who must reckon with eldritch horrors as they are forced to atone for their greatest sins.

ATONE OR DIE.

Grad student Caro has no idea what she wants to do with her life, but when an opportunity arises to act as a research assistant on an anthropological expedition for her professor and lover, Edward Beck, she doesn't hesitate.

Beck assembles a team of academics and professionals to study the ancient sea-based Cult of the Leviathan, and the expedition descends into the sea caves where the cult are said to have dwelt.

But when the cave entrance collapses, trapping them inside, the expedition will find they are not alone in the darkness. Surrounded by strange artefacts and scattered bones, an ancient trial has been set in motion. One by one, the members of the expedition will be tested and forced to atone for their greatest sin. . . or die.

The Winter Folk by Jen Julian (July 21, 2026 by Run For It)

A woman returns to the mysterious lodge in the woods where she once worked, and to the inscrutable creature that bound her there, in this haunting Appalachian gothic horror from singular voice Jen Julian. Perfect for fans of Alix E. Harrow and T. Kingfisher.

This is the story of Moth, who earned her name working for the Winter Folk.

Every year, the Winter Folk gather at a secret lodge in the Appalachians, a place known as Deerhaven, refuge for the time-worn and weary. As a child, Moth heard warnings from her mother: They are heartless, wild creatures—and they got no concern of us. At twenty-one, Moth is a college dropout, indebted, impoverished, and desperate for better things. She falls instantly for Deerhaven’s beautiful antlered host, the mild-mannered Mr. Oslin. When he offers her a housekeeper’s contract—one wish granted for a winter of service—she signs without question.

But Deerhaven is a dangerous place. Staff must follow strict rules or else face dire consequences, and the guests can be unpredictable and savage. And yet, Moth endures, enticed by a rumor that Mr. Oslin is looking for a protégé. A singular worker who would stay with him forever and be transformed.

Decades later, Moth returns to Appalachia with her husband and teenage daughter. She can't shake the feeling that she needs to return to Deerhaven, which banished her twenty years ago. As she hunts for a way in, her haunting memories and harrowing experiences come roaring back — her friends and rivals, her growing obsession with Mr. Oslin, and her mysterious exile.

A door exists in the dark of the woods. After so long away, what has Deerhaven become?

The Halls of the Dead by S.M. Hallow (August 18, 2026 by Harper Voyager)

A queer, gothic horror romance set in a necromancy-tinged London, sure to entrance fans of The Death of Jane Lawrence and Mexican Gothic.

London, December 1849­

Irene Shallcross Haley has dedicated her life to necromancy, a forbidden, reviled art that is passed along through sentient grimoires bound in human skin. With her undead husband St. John—a marriage of kindred spirits and platonic convenience—she has been protecting the knowledge of generations of witches that came before her. Like any magic, it has come at a her reputation, her relationship with her sister, and her soul. But when Irene’s love, Agnes, is hanged for witchcraft, Irene refuses to let Agnes be one more thing that is taken from her.

A true resurrection has not been achieved in two thousand years, but Irene is determined. With the help of St. John, Irene bangs on the doors of the Halls of the Dead, demanding the third part of their triumverate back…or did she? Because the Agnes that awakens comes with both a hunger for raw flesh and a malignant ghost tied to her soul.

Necromancy is the art of saying no—no, I won't let you go; no, I won't let you be destroyed—and Irene’s work is not yet done. She must find a way to bring Agnes back to her true self, she must navigate her feelings for her resurrected lover as well as St. John, and she must do all of this without catching the attention of Sir Silas Underhill, the man who sentenced Agnes to death.

Death is not the end of love. But Irene may realize it can actually be the beginning. 

Looking for more? Check out the full list of 2026 releases here.