The Substance gets transported to 1970s Singapore in YA author Lee’s gruesome and evocative adult debut (after The Dark We Know). Contrarian teen Adeline Siow inherited her mother Kim Yen’s ability to summon fire at will, but resentfully lives by her mother’s rules to keep these blazes small and secret. She gets her thrills picking the pockets of customers in her mom’s clothing store and snooping into Kim Yen’s secrets, like her ties to the White Orchid bar, a haunt of the Red Butterfly gang. There, Adeline sees and becomes infatuated with gang member Ang Tian. After a mysterious fire destroys the Siow home and Kim Yen is burned alive, Adeline learns that her mother was the Red Butterfly’s leader. She tracks down Tian, joins the Red Butterflies, and feels a sense of belonging for the first time. Danger arises, however, from rival gang Three Steel, which has begun dealing strange pills that promise to make users beautiful but just as often transforms them into monsters. Adeline is a well-drawn but challenging heroine who constantly lashes out at everyone around her, and the close third-person POV from such a relentlessly prickly perspective can be wearying. However, those seeking a purposefully unlikable narrator and blood-drenched body horror will find much to enjoy. Lee should win a new set of fans with this. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/10/2025 | Details & Permalink

This first of a series exploring humanity’s “communal fears, grief, and passion as we try to protect our natural world” is a triumph. Van Uden (editor of The Off-Season) brings together 23 stellar tales offering creative and varied takes on the book’s themes. Established genre names like Eugen Bacon, Hiron Ennes, and K-Ming Chang appear alongside some impressive relative newcomers, including F.E. Choe and Trae Hawkins. Jennifer Hudak’s exceptional parable “The Colonists” recounts the fate of a human colony on a planet populated by Champignon fungi, who have been crushed in their thousands by colonists who considered them to be “just” plants. Colonist Etan’s discovery that the Champignon are not just sentient but intelligent leads to an unsettling but satisfying conclusion. Another standout is Louis Evans’s “A Seder in Siberia.” In the near future, a family scrounges together seder fare from what remains available (leading to hazelnut matzoh, for example), and, for the first time, the family’s patriarch declines to lead the ritual. As his wife steps in, flashbacks to the man’s past gradually reveal its parallels with the Exodus story. Every entry is equal parts thought-provoking, insightful, and impactful. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

In Trujillo’s equally heady and thrilling sci-fi debut, panic attack–prone mycologist Giovanna Oddó is summoned to a provincial Chilean hospital to consult on a strange case of “lethal blight” believed to be caused by the mushroom Cryptococcus gatti; four workers at a nearby eucalyptus farm have died from inhaling its spores, and another has just come out of a coma. As Giovanna chases a mushroom that is both deadly and highly intelligent, the coma survivor, Pedro, begins spouting cryptic babble that enterprising priest Balthazar frames as prophecy and publishes as The Compendium of Pedro the Vast. Soon, worshippers hail Pedro as “a miraculous Christ.” To this colorfully satiric if occasionally convoluted tale, Trujillo adds a parallel narrative about Pedro’s school-age children, Pato and Catalina, and their struggle to survive while their father’s in the hospital. The plot simmers with violence, including fierce sibling rivalry and political turmoil as Chile is engulfed in protests. As things reach a boiling point, Trujillo makes a meal of the fungilike connections, invisible and tenuous but everywhere, between people, events, past and present, and life and death. It’s a lot to chew on, but Trujillo’s careful attention to detail and Myers’s smooth translation makes it go down easy. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

Allen (Slow Burn) underwhelms a bit in this spooky but familiar account of mysterious occurrences in Appalachia. Recent college dropout Nathan decided to through-hike the Appalachian Trail, hoping to outrun the ghastly creatures that seemed to be trailing him on his college campus. But the hike proves no escape. Instead, through a close encounter with several of these monsters as he tries to rescue a child who’s fallen into danger on the trail, he discovers supernatural abilities of his own when he shape-shifts into a huge, pantheresque monster himself. Worse, his panther alter ego is a powerful attraction for the most dangerous of his kind. Nathan must learn all he can about his heritage, including searching through his memories of his Native American grandmother as quickly as possible if he hopes to stand a chance against the monsters that pursue him. The concept doesn’t feel particularly original and the prose leans distractingly purple at times, but horror fans will find some decidedly creepy scenes if they persevere. It’s a mixed bag. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

Darjani’s Broken Union series debut is an assured space opera with a fascinating, time-bending premise. It opens in the 24th century, with discontented flight officer Ren Yilmaz of the Earth Spaceship Hawking, being dressed down by a commanding officer, who happens to be her ex-husband. Ren considers herself the “classic star that flamed out too early, who gave up on her career, who used words and scowls as armor,” but she remains determined to be “somebody, one day.” When the ESS Hawking unexpectedly jumps 62 years into the future, she gets to see just who she turns out to be, coming face to face with her future self: the confident, happily married, and mysteriously immortal Earth Union Fleet Capt. Karenna Yilmaz. Ren and Karenna clash, but find common cause in fighting Badal, a terrorist group contesting Earth’s control of human colonies. While the military plot is fun, Darjani’s true strength lies in characterization, making both Yilmazes sympathetic but flawed in different ways and mining impressive psychological depth out of their differences and similarities. It’s a promising start. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

This thrilling horror outing from DeMeester (Such a Pretty Smile) blends queer romance and supernatural vengeance across three timelines, all of which revolve around the Dark Sisters, an urban legend haunting the small town of Hawthorne Springs. In the 1750s, Anne, a widow skilled in herbal medicine, is forced to flee into the woods with her daughter, Florence, amid widening accusations of witchcraft. There they discover a mysterious tree that Anne recognizes as possessing “ancient power.” In the 1950s, Mary, a deeply frustrated housewife, falls in love with kindred spirit Sharon, but their forbidden affair ends tragically. And in the early 2000s, Camilla, a teenager whose father is the pastor of the powerful, cultlike church that presides over the town with an iron fist, discovers that she is deeply linked to the Dark Sisters. DeMeester’s electrifying prose conjures three wonderfully complex female leads, though Camilla’s voice feels just a tad less developed than the other two women. After a somewhat slow start, the novel hits its stride at the halfway point, from which it gallops along to a breathtaking conclusion in which the three timelines converge and the heroines face down a generational evil. Grotesque, weird, and entirely unflinching, this tale of female empowerment packs a punch. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

After 25 years, Cook returns to the grim world of his cult classic Chronicles of the Black Company series (last visited in Soldiers Live) with an exhilarating spin-off launch. The focus is on the next generation of an elite group of mercenaries that doubles as “a sad, constantly squabbling, dysfunctional makeshift family.” Seeking a degree of safety and a chance to regroup, the Company heads to its old refuge of Hsien in the Land of Unknown Shadows. Once there, however, they are treated as a threat by Hsien’s warlords, who fear that members of the Company plan to become Shadowmasters, “wicked and capricious sorcerer-kings” who once ruled the city. Cook’s characteristically luminous prose elevates the ensuing military fantasy drama (“We chip off the jagged edges and polish up the rest of our memories... thus do we create nostalgia for a place that never really was”). This volume also makes clear that there are plenty of fascinating corners of this sprawling world left to explore, especially given a reference to the “ten thousand examples of evil behavior” not yet recorded in the Company’s annals. Cook’s cadre of fans will find this well worth the wait. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

The latest suspenseful thriller from World Horror Convention Grand Master Award winner Campbell (The Incubations) drips with insinuated supernaturalism that makes its drama all the more unsettling. Jude and Thom Clarendon are doting grandparents to six-year-old Dean. They’re dismayed to discover that Dean’s parents, Allan and Coral, have, since their move to a new home in Barnwall, on the eastern coast of England, abruptly changed their parenting style, including removing Dean from school for home instruction heavily steeped in strict Christian theology. Jude investigates the history of Dean’s new neighborhood, disturbed to discover that it was once the site of a Viking slaughter of children, and that Dean’s house’s previous owners tortured and dismembered their adopted son while “attempting to purge him of wickedness.” This morbid discovery serves as a chilling recontextualization for Dean’s new imaginary friend, a decapitated boy. Campbell plays his cards close to the vest, enjoining the reader to judge whether Dean’s home is truly haunted by a malignant supernatural influence or whether his grandparents are giving in to paranoia when they resort to desperate measures to “save” him. The result is sure to please readers who like their horrors open to speculation. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/26/2025 | Details & Permalink

A woman who has spent her life in the horrifying shadow of a haunted house is tormented by death, paranoia, and shocking personal revelations in this spooky but familiar domestic horror drama from bestseller Henry (The House That Horror Built). As a child, Jessie Campanelli dared her younger brother, Paul, to go into the dilapidated and reportedly haunted McIntyre House, the site of a slaughter years earlier, only for Paul to never return. Shattered by his disappearance, Jessie’s family disintegrates, leaving her in the care of Ted Dobrowski, single father to bad boy Alex. Jessie grows up and attempts to leave behind the horrors of the past to start a new family—until the McIntyre House begins claiming new souls, dragging Jessie back to its dusty, rotten innards as she tries to end the house’s reign of terror before it claims yet another life dear to her. Atmospheric and full of dread, the novel shines when it focuses on the tensions and terror inherent to Jessie’s family dynamics. Well-trod haunted house story beats frequently give way to cliché, however. It’s a mixed-bag. Agent: Lucienne Diver, Knight Agency. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 09/26/2025 | Details & Permalink

Bestseller Blake (The Atlas Six) serves up a lightly satirical and somewhat drawn out feminist horror novel about the extreme toll that comes from trying to “have it all.” It follows Sloane, a sociology professor who’s returning to work after being home with her infant daughter for 18 months, and Nina, a sophomore at Sloane’s university who’s rushing the most sought-after sorority on campus, referred to only as the House. Sloane struggles with feeling as though she has abandoned her daughter and still doesn’t have enough time or brainpower to devote to her work, including her new position as faculty adviser to the House. Nina, meanwhile, yearns for the clout that comes from membership in the House, whose sisters are the most successful and beautiful girls on campus. There’s a lot of delicate buildup hinting at the House’s hidden darkness, but it takes a frustratingly long time to amount to anything. Instead, much of the book is taken up by philosophizing that covers what is essentially feminism 101—from the Madonna/whore dichotomy to the rise of tradwives—which may be enlightening to younger readers encountering these concepts for the first time, but to most will feel familiar and obvious. Fortunately, the bloody payoff, when it finally arrives, is well worth the wait. There’s nothing groundbreaking here, but Blake’s fans will find plenty to hold their attention. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 09/26/2025 | Details & Permalink