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.

Right out of the gate, I loved the tone of the book. The prose is crisp, always a touch playful or glib, and much of the more mundane happenings are clearly drawn from or inspired by the author’s real world experiences. I’ve occasionally written about how the word ‘fun’ is a near-pejorative in literary reviews, but as someone who reads a ton of dark fiction, I really enjoy when something in the genre also makes me laugh. The Fatal Mind flirts with being cozy at times, but never quite crosses that line, and would probably serve as an excellent title for the horror-curious to explore the genre.

Datlow’s newest anthology, Fears: Tales of Psychological Horror, considers the aspect of dread and its influence on our mental state as we experience the world around us.

The core elements of reality TV make great grounds for horror. Questionable motives, real-life situations, narrative arcs, as well and and the winner-take-all nature of the format, really make it an ideal backdrop to get creepy and/or murder-y. In this case, the show is one where a bunch of pretty women compete to marry a very basic Midwestern white dude, though some of contestants may have ambitions beyond making the handsome farmer-pilot from Iowa as happy as a Texas Roadhouse gift card.

‘The overwhelming feeling with this novel is that the author wants to write a spooky story about a group of childhood friends while also penning a modern morality tale about the dangers of purity culture and casual racism. Keeping a foot in each lane, White struggles to drive either narrative at more than a surface level, and the novel feels far short of what it could have been.’

‘For me, I AM AI was less about the nefarious creep of technology and potential negative impacts of generative artificial intelligence than it was about a very realized, widespread hardship that is already well-proliferated today: the near-inescapable compulsion to sacrifice our innate desires and personal ambitions in the name of financial prosperity or security.’

‘Tender Is the Flesh goes hard and gruesome from the outset: in this novel, cows, pigs, poultry, and all other forms of animal life have all been rendered inedible by a virus which kills the humans who consume it, and hence humans simply consume each other. That’s right, Tender Is the Flesh’s premise is a world where humanity is less than three decades removed from the proliferation of mass cannibalism.’

‘Jiang has done something truly masterful here in that she leaves just enough blank space on the pages, and just enough secrets in the novella, for the curious reader to seek layers of meaning which may have not been intended or expected. This is a line only the best authors can walk, and it imbues their fiction with a timelessness and sense of resonance that many readers will find affecting, and the right reader might just call perfect.’

‘What Moves the Dead is an exceptional novel that shows its strengths in the areas that both critical literary circles and the reading public value. However, its roots are in the pulp publications of yesteryear, and for better or worse, these hold firm when tested by the winds of the modern reader.’

Ward understands the human relationships that underlie each passage, and seeds in her characters very real shortcomings that in time bear terrible fruit. The horror here is not fanged and leering, but that which lies at the heart of every person: the capacity to be horrendously cruel for a taste of crude power. It is a book where no one shines, and all victories are hard-won and bloody.

Every character, setting, and arc is an askew, asymmetrical thing that shuffles at the edge of the reader’s perception showing a side that does not match its shadow.