Set in a postapocalyptic compound founded by a group of male mycologists whose idealistic dream of using fungi to detoxify the Earth has twisted into something dark, Cranehill’s lyrical and disquieting debut combines myth, science, and gorgeously rendered body horror. The men’s original wives, the Foremothers, have been taken over by a fungal plague, but the men use their spores to create new women with their faces as replacements. These fungi-human hybrids are expected to shave off the fungal growths every morning to maintain their wife-shaped bodies. They’re also forbidden from touching one another lest the plague spread or venturing into the toxic woods surrounding the compound. Heroine Nicole, raised to two years old (the age when women marry) in strict isolation, is married off to 66-year-old Silas the day her mother dies and is expected to fill the hole left by Pamela, his first wife, despite feeling trapped and repulsed by him. Meanwhile, she develops an erotic fixation on the rebellious Teaghan, who refuses to shave her mushrooms, touches Nicole freely, and encourages her to question all she’s been taught. Cranehill’s prose is stunning, rendering Nicole’s physical and emotional landscape—and the bizarre topography of her skin—lush, verdant, and strange. Frequent dream sequences add to the slippery, surreal feeling of the plot. Fans of feminist horror won’t want to miss this. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Bruce (At the Bottom of the Garden) declares this riveting paranormal thriller her “love letter to gothic storytelling, salty waves, and strong-willed girls with nowhere to go.” In 1910 on the mysterious island of Margaret’s Keep, headstrong Charlotte North, the privileged but emotionally abused daughter of a wealthy shipowner and his laudanum-addicted wife, gets caught up in a passionate maelstrom when a handsome new pastor, Jasper Hill, takes up residency on the island with his wife. Their arrival comes just before an uncanny earthquake splits the island’s ancient monument, Margaret’s Tower, asunder and Charlotte’s disastrous crush on Jasper slips into fatal obsession amid subsequent poltergeist activities that plague the island. Bruce toggles between Charlotte’s lovelorn perspective, Jasper’s torment over his lust, and the refreshingly sensible narration of the island’s schoolmarm Ruth, who is escaping her own troubled past. Richly atmospheric and peopled with exquisitely delineated characters, including Hill’s tepid wife and Charlotte’s dysfunctional Edwardian family, the novel builds to a genuine shocker of an ending. Readers will be hooked. (May)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

The world ends in an eerie neon glow in this wonderfully weird fairy tale from Grimes (Glass Stories). An inexplicable solar storm wipes out the electric grid and strands narrator Jane at her grandmother’s remote cabin in the woods under a series of blazing auroras. Girded by practical folk wisdom, Grandma is quick to adapt to this new world order, banding with her handful of far-flung neighbors (most of whom suspect her of witchcraft) to pool skills and resources, while Jane wallows in fear and confusion. Still, she reluctantly follows Grandma’s instructions, however nonsensical they seem. The one thing she won’t do is visit the cellar below the cellar, a mysterious subterranean space that, Jane assumes, contains horrors she dare not even imagine. Grandma insists that only through visiting this subcellar will Jane finally be ready to embrace her destiny. This central metaphor feels elastic and expansive even after the truth of the eponymous space is revealed. Grimes conjures a world that is simultaneously vast, mysterious, and fully lived in, replete with idiosyncratic folk horror elements including sentient dolls, a little girl with uncanny abilities, and a traveling pastor who captures demons in bottles. Meanwhile, Jane’s fretful but matter-of-fact narration of increasingly enchanted circumstances adds humor. Kelly Link fans won’t want to miss this. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Leckie (Lake of Souls) returns to the setting of her Hugo and Nebula award-winning Imperial Radch series for this striking standalone novel, which travels far from the heart of the Radch empire to the backwater ice planet of Aaa. Aaa doesn’t even have its own star. Its single city, Ooioiaa, is dominated by groups arguing about how best to practice the idiosyncratic local religion, and a lone Radch ship supports its uninterested Radchaai governor, Charak Svo. It’s also home to one extremely rich man, Serque Tais, who is dying. When one of the religious groups successfully convinces Governor Charak that Serque should become the final living saint seated in the Temporal Location of the Radiant Star, Charak fails to foresee that the transfer of Serque’s wealth and power will destabilize Aaa’s social order. But she has bigger problems: the Radch has abruptly cut communications and stopped sending ships, and without their cargo, everyone in Ooioiaa will starve. Composed almost entirely of side characters, this perfectly showcases Leckie’s tremendous talent for finding small, tender, human stories even in the most expansive of settings. It’s an unexpected and delightful turn for the series. Agent: Seth Fishman, Gernert Co. (May)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

A woman leading a routine life is pushed by circumstance to violent extremes in this impressively subtle and slow-burning psychological chiller from Knútsdóttir (The Night Guest). Unnur is a 33-year-old business analyst living in Reykjavík when the unexpected appearance of a cat in her apartment turns her life upside down. The cat, whose name is Io, belongs to Ásta, an emotionally frail student who comes to claim her when Unnur responds to a lost pet notice on Facebook. Ásta believes that Io has sought refuge with Unnur because she doesn’t like Ásta’s new live-in boyfriend, Ragnar, and when she and Unnur discover that Io has just given birth to a kitten, they decide not to move her. So begins an unusual friendship in which Ásta drops by Unnur’s apartment several times a week, ostensibly to check on Io, but increasingly to confide intimacies about her life. Though Unnur projects a placid exterior, Knútsdóttir makes it clear that she’s a pressure cooker of building emotions, stoked by frustrations with work and her married lover. When the abusive Ragnar tries to end Ásta’s relationship with Unnur, she defends them both in a violent manner that is viscerally shocking despite being foreordained by the novel’s prologue. Anyone looking for character-driven horror with a very sharp edge will be thrilled. (May)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Vibbert (Gallatic Hellcats) nimbly takes on the trope of an otherworldly hive mind seeking to understand, or perhaps take over, the human world in this clever novella. Rising from the ocean floor, the hive starts to colonize “the up-world.” It learns to build “domes that push against the sky” and “to harden clay with bone and spit” and wreaks metaphysical havoc as it crafts “new concepts to understand the ocean of the universe.” The first human to observe the hive is Debbie Jabrowski, an astronomer who notices some weird signals in a dataset and alerts colleagues that something extraterrestrial is trying to communicate with Earth. Soon the nightly news is abuzz with speculation and tourists flock to the supposed alien landing site. Chapters toggle between the first person plural perspective of the hive mind (“Do we remember the pink sunset on bone-white columns? Or do we merely remember our progenitor remembering their progenitor remembering it?”) and human witnesses to it, including a street vendor, Osvaldo, who willfully ignores rumors of the invasion. Vibbert uses this structure to build a sense of ambient dread as she contrasts the experiences of individuals and the collective. The result is biting social critique with a hopeful slant. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Tewari’s bold debut reimagines the Portuguese attacks on South India in the 16th century as a vivid historical fantasy about resistance, sacrifice, and the cost of freedom. Abbakka Chowta was never meant to rule, and has instead spent years training to be a warrior on behalf of her sister, the future queen of Ullal. But tragedy strikes, and Abbakka is abruptly thrust onto the throne. With the threat of war mounting from the Porcugi, sea monsters that are half human and half snake, Abbakka is forced into a strategic marriage with the raja of a neighboring kingdom in hopes of saving Ullal. Abbakka battles her grief as she navigates a political minefield and intense court intrigue. Amid everything, Abbakka finds herself caught between two men, her charming yet spineless husband and her general, who hides his feelings behind his sense of duty. The book gets off to a somewhat slow start and there’s less battlefield action than readers might expect, but Tewari’s lush worldbuilding shines and, once the pace picks up, it’s easy to root for the fiercely loyal and determined Abbakka along her epic journey. The result is a vibrant homage to the warrior queen that should win Tewari many fans. Agent: Jennifer Azantian, Azantian Literary. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

The impending end of the world compels an older gay couple to take one last road trip in this melancholy outing from bestseller Klune (The House in the Cerulean Sea). A black hole has been inexorably approaching Earth’s solar system; roughly a month remains before it swallows the planet. After 40 years together, Don and Rodney have experienced countless highs and lows, and they face the coming apocalypse with relative equanimity. Nevertheless, they have a promise they need to keep in Washington State, so they set out from Maine in their dilapidated RV. The book plays out as an idiosyncratic travelogue as, along the way, they meet and swap stories with other people bracing for the end, including a nuclear family in Vermont whose kids don’t know what’s going on, the denizens of a hippie commune in Ohio, and a gun-happy young woman in South Dakota. The story is driven more by character than plot, proving the adage that what truly matters is not what happens but how it happens: Earth can be neither saved nor escaped; all Rodney and Don can do is choose how to spend their final moments. When the motive for their road trip is finally revealed in a bit of tragic backstory, the novel only gets heavier and more poignant. It’s both beautiful and bittersweet. Agent: Deidre Knight, Knight Agency. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Bizarre creatures herald the end of the world in Bower’s powerfully unsettling debut. They attack from seemingly nowhere, patchwork creatures that look “like someone had stapled different parts of a body together, paperclipping on ears, fingers, all of them backward or twisted, wrong.” Protagonist Sara’s family ran from the city the night these so-called witches appeared, and they have been running ever since, guarding themselves with wards made using herbs and running water. These are the only things that prevent the witches from tearing them apart, but these protections don’t hold forever. Thus far, the family has avoided contact with other survivors, but when an injured girl, Parsley, appears outside the circle of protection offered by the wards, Sara convinces her family to let her stay. The presence of another girl her age breaks up the monotony of Sara’s chores and caring for her younger siblings. But trust does not come easy in a world wracked by monsters, and confiding in Parsley comes with serious risks. Bower conjures a nightmare from the bones of the familiar, and the witches are made all the creepier for the mystery surrounding their origins. T. Kingfisher fans will eat this up. Agent: Kelly Karczewski, UTA. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Chen (A Quantum Love Story) shows off his worldbuilding chops in this ingenious 24th-century space opera. Humanity is now in contact with multiple intelligent extraterrestrial life-forms, including the Lumersians, whose bodies are comprised of “planes of pink light” and who have shared their knowledge of photonic energy to help humans harness that volatile power source. Starship Horizon captain Demora Kim was among the first to encounter the Lumersians, and developed a close relationship with one photonic being, whom she nicknamed Chuck and considers a hero. The novel opens with Kim’s exit interview, a part of her forced retirement from the Galactic Cluster Fleet as a result of a decision to disobey orders. The plot then flashes back to explain what happened before the “incident at Base Theta Seven,” including Kim’s struggles to make a photonic engine functional at the request of her superiors, who hope to use it as a weapon in an ongoing war. Chen takes impressive care presenting nonhuman characters, showcasing their often baffled perspectives on humanity. These skillful character portraits make it easy to get sucked into their far-future plight. Readers are sure to be hooked. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/13/2026 | Details & Permalink