Haven is a mindfully-written and masterful haunted house story that uses its characters to their full effect. Once you’ve gotten to know the Bakers and seen them to the crossroads where redemption and despair intersect, the mysteries inherent to Aunt Gussie and her strange old lakehouse reach out and drag them along another route entirely. Equal parts Shirley Jackson and Joyce Carol Oates, Haven succeeds at being both human and haunted, and Mia Dalia has made an immediate fan out of me.

This Thing is Starving is a deeply impressive debut, and a remarkably powerful and well-constructed narrative about the hardships visited upon women. Told through the eyes of a house full of ghosts and a threadbare family, Aislin does an excellent job of connecting the reader with the characters, and a major strength of the novel is how real it makes their pain and discomfort visible without being indulgent or exploitative.

The Children’s Horror reminded me of the incredible power of a child’s mind to steamroll borders … All in all, it’s a fantastic collection, and I think very promising step up for Patrick Barb.

Echo is a very solid novel that carries many moments of genuine creepiness. While the story meanders a little bit in the middle, with Sam chasing down a few too many dead-ends and red herrings for my taste, but the ambitious central narrative and excellently-written characters make this something to overlook.

The Croning features one of the most memorable opening chapters I’ve encountered in recent memory: a grimly whimsical (and slightly horny) retelling of Rumpelstiltskin, in which a royal spy tracks the fabled bargainer to a hinterland and finds that his quarry serves an esoteric deity called Old Leech. The strange god is a primordial cosmic entity who exists in some unknowable outer darkness but regularly makes their presence felt on Earth. The spy returns to his queen with the dwarf’s name, but when the fated day comes round, the hard-won knowledge has no effect, and the imp takes the queen’s child and then brings her and the spy to a bloody end.

In All the Fiends of Hell, Nevill launches his horror show on page one, spending little time on the events that preceded the apocalypse in either reference or return. The new world is ominous and still, and those that dwell in it are ill-equipped to parse the mysterious dangers that confront them. Nevill's hallmarks are here: the steady, introspective, reflective nature of his protagonist; the immutable and almost incomprehensible creatures that defy ready visualization; the escalating helplessness of those pitted against them…

Slewfoot is a wonderful tale that lives to subvert expectations, feeling more like a darkly whimsical fable than a horror novel, and tinged with elements of legal drama and romance which round out a remarkably original novel. Brom's vision, patiently revealed, is one of depth, promise, and refreshing originality among the wider fiction about this historical period. Though ready for a popular audience, this novel touches literary elements, wisely and thoughtfully engaging the topics of belief, faith, trauma, and belonging. 

‘Billed as ‘found fiction,’ this collection elects to shape the narrative format rather than the thematic content of the stories within, presenting each entry as material records detailing separate (mostly horrific) narratives that are preserved in 9-1-1 calls, oral history transcriptions, police reports, forum posts, video game walkthroughs, SMS texts, as well as more familiar literary staples like journals, letters, and newspaper clippings.’

‘Episode Thirteen is the story of a cable network ghost hunting show that lifts its plot outline and setpieces from found footage horror films, then presents the result of this as a distinctly engaging and surprisingly original horror novel. It’s quite a feat, taking two widely derided horror property staples and reimagining them as something that mutes the most common criticisms of its components. Frankly, I’m surprised to find that more writers haven’t made a tilt at this particular windmill, as it now feels like a very promising course after seeing what DiLouie has done here.’

‘Collage Macabre is an elegant and incisive anthology that showcases some of the best young talent in speculative fiction today. Spanning eighteen stories and as many authors, the collection tries on all manner of form and circumstance with the only true unifying element being that each tells the story of a creator.’