January
It Will End Like This, Kyra Leigh (Jan 4): For fans of The Cheerleaders and Sadie comes a propulsive thriller that reminds us that in real life, endings are rarely as neat as happily ever after. A contemporary take on the Lizzie Borden story that explores how grief can cut deep.
Luckenbooth, Jenni Fagan (Jan 4): A bold, haunting, and startlingly unique novel about the secrets we leave behind and the places that hold them long after we are gone, a “quintessential novel of Edinburgh at its darkest.” (Irvine Welsh)
The Unfamiliar Garden, Benjamin Percy (Jan 4): Award-winning author Benjamin Percy delivers both a gripping science fiction thriller and a dazzling examination of a planet—and a marriage—that have broken.
Where the Drowned Girls Go, Seanan McGuire (Jan 4): The next addition to Seanan McGuire’s beloved Wayward Children series. There is another school for children who fall through doors and fall back out again. It isn’t as friendly as Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children. And it isn’t as safe.
Antifa Splatterpunk, ed. Eric Raglin (Jan 6): Sixteen horror writers explore fascism’s many terrors: police wielding strange bioweapons against the public, white supremacists annihilating their enemies through dark magic, and TV personalities vilifying all who defy the rising fascist tide. But these stories are resistance: Nazi-killing demons, Confederate-slaying witches, and everyday people punching fascists in the teeth. Among the gore is a glimmer of hope that one day this monster will return to its grave and never rise again.
The Girl in the Corn, Jason Offutt (Jan 11): Thomas teams up with the girl in the corn to save her world⎯and his⎯only to realize that he may not be able to distinguish good from evil before evil swallows them whole.
Quantum of Nightmares, Charles Stross (Jan 11): A unique blend of espionage thrills and Lovecraftian horror, Hugo Award-winning author Charles Stross’s Laundry Files continues with Quantum of Nightmares.
The Stars Are Not Yet Bells, Hannah Lillith Assadi (Jan 11): Through the scrim of fading memory, an elderly woman confronts a lifetime of secrets and betrayal, under the mysterious skies of her island home. Darkly romantic and deeply haunting, The Stars Are Not Yet Bells pulls us into a story of the tantalizing, faithless relationship between ourselves and the lives and souls we leave behind.
The Bookkeeper’s Skull, Justin D. Hill (Jan 18): More spine-chilling tales set in the Worlds of Warhammer.
Mestiza Blood, V. Castro (Jan 18): A short story collection of nightmares, dreams, desire and visions centered around the Chicana experience. The stunning, star-reviewed V. Castro weaves urban legend, folklore, life experience and heartache in this intimate anthology of modern horrors.
The Night, Rodrigo Blanco Calderon, trans. Daniel Hahn & Noel Hernández (Jan 18): Recurring blackouts envelop Caracas in an inescapable darkness that makes nightmares come true. Real and fictional characters, most of them are writers, exchange the role of narrator in this polyphonic novel. They recount contradictory versions of the plot, a series of femicides that began with the energy crisis. The central narrator is a psychiatrist who manipulates the accounts of his friend, an author writing a book titled The Night; and his patient, an advertising executive obsessed with understanding the world through word puzzles.
Such a Pretty Smile, Kristi DeMeester (Jan 18): A biting novel from an electrifying new voice, Kristi DeMeester’s Such a Pretty Smile is a heart-stopping tour-de-force about powerful women, angry men, and all the ways in which girls fight against the forces that try to silence them.
Trouble the Waters: Tales from the Deep Blue, ed. Sheree Renée Thomas, Pan Morigan, & Troy L. Wiggins (Jan 18): A new anthology that gathers the tidal force of bestselling, renowned writers from Lagos to New Orleans, Memphis to Copenhagen, Northern Ireland and London, offering extraordinary speculative fiction tales of ancient waters in all its myriad forms.
The Wakening, JG Faherty (Jan 18): A team of paranormal investigators, a priest and a defrocked priest with a dark secret join forces to combat of a vengeful ancient demon, and the evil spreading throughout a small New York town.
Beulah, Christi Nogle (Jan 25): Beulah is the story of Georgie, an eighteen-year-old with a talent (or affliction) for seeing ghosts. Georgie and her mother and sisters are making a new start in the small town of Beulah, Idaho where Gina’s wealthy friend Ellen has set them up to help renovate an old stone schoolhouse. Georgie experiences a variety of disturbances—the town is familiar from dreams and she seems to be experiencing her mother’s memory of the place, not to mention the creepy ghost in the schoolhouse basement—but she is able to maintain, in her own laconic way, until she notices that her little sister Stevie also has the gift. Stevie is in danger from a malevolent ghost, and Georgie tries to help, but soon Georgie is the one in danger.
Dead Silence, S.A. Barnes (Jan 25): Titanic meets The Shining in this SF horror in which a woman and her crew board a decades-lost luxury cruiser and find the wreckage of a nightmare that hasn’t yet ended. (A Nightfire title)
Devil House, John Darnielle (Jan 25): From John Darnielle, the New York Times bestselling author and the singer-songwriter of the Mountain Goats, comes an epic, gripping novel about murder, truth, and the dangers of storytelling.
Into the Midnight Void, Mara Fitzgerald (Jan 25): Fans of Holly Black and Kendare Blake will obsess over the conclusion to this deliciously dark YA fantasy duology! Emanuela has finally gotten what she’s always wanted. Since escaping her catacomb prison, she’s become the supreme ruler of everything under the veils. Finally, she has the power to throw aside senseless, old traditions and run things exactly the way they should be. But when cracks in her magic start to show, Emanuela begrudgingly allies herself with her enemies, including her frustratingly alluring archnemesis, Verene. Together, they discover deeper truths about the mysterious blood magic Emanuela and Verene both wield.
Road of Bones, Christopher Golden (Jan 25): An American documentarian travels a haunted highway across the frozen tundra of Siberia in New York Times bestselling author Christopher Golden’s Road of Bones, a “tightly wound, atmospheric, and creepy as hell” (Stephen King) supernatural thriller.
The Transgressionists and Other Disquieting Works, Giorgio De Maria (Jan 25): Giorgio De Maria distinguished himself as one of Italy’s most unique and eccentric weird fiction masters. Available in English for the first time, this collection contains two novellas, two short stories, and a dystopian teleplay, “The Appeal,” which the post-cyberpunk novelist Andrea Vaccaro has lauded as “worthy of the best episodes of Black Mirror.”
Burn the Plans, Tyler Jones (January): From Tyler Jones (author of Criterium, The Dark Side of the Room, and Almost Ruth) comes Burn the Plans, a collection featuring fourteen tales of supernatural suspense. Featuring thirteen short stories and one novelette, Burn the Plans is a relentless journey into the dark places we end up when all of our plans go wrong.
Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters, John Langan (January): John Langan’s long out-of-print first collection, in a beautiful new edition.