Bats – Christian Francis
Creature horror movie novelization
Based on the screenplay for the 1999 film Bats by John Logan.
After a series of savage attacks in a quiet Texan town, the CDC recruits bat specialist Dr. Sheila Casper and her assistant Jimmy to investigate. Teaming up with Sheriff Emmett Kimsey, Sheila soon discovers the killings are being carried out by genetically altered bats. Predators engineered to be smarter, faster, and far more aggressive than nature ever intended.
As the bats spread through the town in massive coordinated swarms, the town descends into blood-soaked panic. With the military preparing to wipe out the entire area to contain the outbreak, Sheila and Emmett race to locate the bats’ underground roost and stop the creatures before they escape into the rest of the country.
Beyond the Graves Waits Mist and Sea – Kathleen Kaufman
Psychological horror
A marine biologist’s search for an undiscovered species of octopus leads her to an isolated island where long-buried memories rise like specters from the deep, intent on dragging her darkest truths to the surface.
Twenty nautical miles off the coast of Boston lies Bell Island, shrouded in fog, mystery, and legend. Historically a refuge for women fleeing the hysteria of the Salem Witch Trials in the 1600s and a way station on the Underground Railroad for runaway slaves in the 1800s, the island is isolated and rumored to be haunted by spirits and other things.
It is to Bell Island that microbial biologist Harper Hafdóttir ventures in search of evidence of a new species of octopus, Thalassa, possibly lurking below the swirling water’s surface. Along with her equipment, and her luggage, Harper carries with her the burden of past trauma and vivid, recurring dreams.
Swept up in unexplained phenomena ranging from increased seismic activity and a boat-capsizing rogue wave to encounters with island creatures that defy explanation, Harper looks to the island’s venerated if mysterious mayor for answers. Lady Loreana Bell comes from a single matriarchal line that has ruled the island for 400 years, and seems to have been expecting Harper’s arrival.
It is within the walls of Bell Manor, its gothic grandeur matched only by the intensity of Harper’s déjà vu, that she discovers the 1690 journal of a young woman in the grips of a religious cult. As a tsunami threatens the island, Harper finds herself on the verge of a revelation that will ultimately unlock the mystery of her haunted dreams and disclose her true purpose on Bell Island.
Chasing the Headless Horseman – J.W. Ocker
Horror nonfiction
Immersive travelogue investigating the town that inspired Washington Irving’s famous short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and dives into the storied history of the Headless Horseman’s stomping grounds. Within the pages you’ll visit the village’s graveyard where Irving himself is buried and explore all the present-day spookiness of one of the strangest towns in the country.
Blending cultural criticism and behind-the-scenes reporting, Ocker uncovers the tensions between tourism and tradition, profit and preservation, fiction and fact. With wit and curiosity, Chasing the Headless Horseman tells the story of how one small town reinvented itself as America’s Halloween capital, complete with statues, street signs, and an 18-foot-tall Headless Horseman.
Deadly Games – Cat Voleur
Slasher horror movie novelization
Based on Scott Mansfield’s original screenplay Who Fell Asleep.
Only he will hear your scream.
A masked killer is stalking the women of a small American town, and each roll of the dice brings another victim closer to death.
When journalist Keegan Lawrence returns home to mourn the murder of her sister, she finds a community gripped by fear. As she reconnects with local police officer Roger Lane and reclusive cinema projectionist Billy Owens, the killings continue and Keegan soon discovers that she has become part of the murderer’s deadly game.
Death in Its Many Forms – S.H. Cooper
Horror collection
Death comes for everyone, but never strikes the same way twice. In these ten tales, it wears many faces, turns homes into haunted places, and often, it is only the beginning.
A young woman pulled from a bog. An office worker straying from routine. An author making deals in the dark.
The Last Heir of Bradbury Manor – Michael Mizov
Gothic horror
Lottie Bradbury hasn’t set foot in Bradbury Manor for twelve years.
Sent away as a child following her mother’s tragic death, she is summoned home in 1919 by the estranged father she barely knows. The once-great estate is failing, burdened by debt, decay, and generations of neglect. Her return comes with a price: an arranged marriage intended to save what remains of the Bradbury legacy.
But Bradbury Manor is not merely old. At night, the house makes itself known. Strange sounds echo through the corridors. Rooms refuse to stay still. Moments slip out of place. The past refuses to remain buried.
As Lottie is drawn deeper into her family’s history, she uncovers a pattern stretching back centuries-one marked by unexplained deaths, buried betrayals, and a curse that never truly ends. It simply passes from one generation to the next.
Everyone expects her to take her place. To continue what came before.
Caught between the expectations of her father, the promise of a future beyond the estate, and the growing realization that something is terribly wrong within Bradbury Manor, Lottie must decide how much of the truth she is willing to uncover, and what it may cost her when she does.
The closer she gets to the answers, the harder it becomes to tell whether she is exposing the darkness surrounding her family or being led deeper into it.
Love Never Dies: Romance in Horror Movies – Emma Cole
Horror non-fiction
If Sinners and The Mummy taught Emma Cole anything in the year she spent bingeing scary movies, it’s that we love to swoon, sweat, and scream. We seem to crave the uncanny and the transgressive. Emma would know: Her day job as a Harlequin book editor revolves around steamy stories that ruffle feathers and rip bodices. In Love Never Dies, she shows how our favorite horror films flirt with familiar tropes and themes to give us romantic subplots that are just as spine-tingling.
Emma takes readers behind the scenes of films like Tod Browning’s Dracula and Josh Ruben’s Heart Eyes, exploring how and why movies blur the lines of horror and romance. The books dives into:
- The “Dark Moment” and how it signals an HEA (Happily Ever After)
- Why not having a lover (spoiler alert) saved Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode in Halloween
- Rosemary’s Baby, Interview with the Vampire, and Gothic horror’s comeback
- How romance, especially monster romance, is often a stand-in for uncomfortable truths
From vampires and monsters to slashers and psychological thrillers, Love Never Dies explores the enthralling nature of horror romance films that are full of heart. It’s just that sometimes, those hearts are on the outside.
The Man of Wind and Moss – Alex Gonzalez
Supernatural horror
Six college friends head out for a weekend getaway in the woods and end up making supernatural deals to survive.
Marco Wonder is about to turn 30, and he hates it.
Without job prospects, without a girlfriend, without a sustainable future, he desires something to anchor him, to give him direction in life. Unlike his brother, who found his purpose by returning to Puerto Rico to discover himself, Marco has no such aspiration to return to his roots. Instead, Marco decides to risk it all and confess his love for his best friend Pansy during the last hurrah before their college friend group continue on their separate ways through life.
Except, he’s worried Pansy isn’t interested. She’s also pregnant, and an item with her on again, off-again
boyfriend Dean. But as Marco joins his friends for a weekend getaway to a cabin in upstate New York, they will soon discover a demonic creature older than forest, waiting to give direction to those who find themselves lost, for a bloody cost.
As the group crumbles apart because of sexual escapades, misplaced confessions, and eerie mishaps, they soon find themselves at the mercy of the Man of Wind and Moss. After a heinous and tragic ordeal, only Marco, Pansy, and their friend Sasha, a witchy and headstrong academic, survive.
But their trauma does not end when they are released from the forest. Unbeknownst to Marco, Sasha may have made an impulsive decision to save them all. Because Dean also returns from the woods… Only he’s a little tweaked …missing some fingers…missing his eyes…and driven by the Man of Wind and Moss to enact its bloody purpose.
The Memory Tree – Heather Davey
Gothic horror
A family in modern day England find their new home beset by the terrifying ghosts of the past.
When her husband, Ben, takes on his first parish in the rural community of Hope-under-Barrow, Kate Greenwood feels like it could be a fresh start for the family. But from the moment they arrive, something just feels off. It could be the locals, with their strange rituals and rites. Or it could be the yew tree which stands in a graveyard bordering their garden, whose presence brings headaches, visions and disturbing, unfamiliar memories that do not belong to Kate.
As she investigates the strange things happening to her, Kate begins to delve into the history and memories of Hope-upon-Barrow, and the more she uncovers, the more she risks losing herself to something deadly and ancient.
Newbourne Park – Jennifer Thomas
Supernatural horror
After years of caring for her dying mother, Martha Shaw feels empty, exhausted, and far older than her twenty-six years. So when her brother invites her to a weekend getaway at the opulent, two-hundred-acre country estate where his friend works, Martha reluctantly agrees. After all, what’s the harm? The owners and all their staff will be gone. Security cameras will be off. The house will be theirs. For the first time in years, Martha might actually have fun.
And it is fun, taking advantage of the historic mega-mansion and its vast grounds. Martha begins to feel human again. But when night falls, the rightful master of Newbourne Park returns, and she’s not alone. Suddenly, being caught trespassing is the least of their worries, because what steps out into the moonlight is something vicious. And hungry.
Nightjars – Michael Wehunt
Vampire horror
On a rainy night, Luke Oshel gets stood up halfway through dinner. But before his date walks off to the bathroom and never returns, she leaves an old photograph under her napkin: Luke as a child, a dead body in the shadows of his bedroom, and a terrifying masked man. He has no recollection of this event.
Then more photos disrupt his life – Luke posing with murder victims, covered in blood – and he falls back into the deep paranoia and repressed memories he’s tried to leave behind. All the drugs and alcohol, therapy, and hypnosis sessions have never conquered his deepest fear: that he hasn’t escaped the hidden legacy of his late father, who killed his victims by blood loss. But now there is a new string of serial killings, and the evidence all points to Luke.
As his journey to uncover the truth unfolds in the North Georgia Appalachians, a threat arises that will risk everything he holds close, including his ex-wife and their young daughter. Now Luke must chase his father’s darkness through a centuries-old secret and learn what monsters truly are. And decide if he’s one of them.
The Ship of Death – Kyle Winkler
Supernatural horror
Cole and Lorraine playtest board games for some extra cash as they save up to buy a home. But after a series of bizarre coincidences, and signing a strange NDA, the couple finds on their porch a mysterious indie developer’s tabletop role-playing game called The Ship of Death.
The game relies heavily on the players’ imaginations, and takes up an ever-growing amount of space: in their kitchen, and in their minds.
As its true sinister nature becomes clearer, and its forces capture more in its web, the boundary between the game and reality begins to dissolve, and the pair are instructed to possess a stranger’s soul.
Silent Nightmares – Chuck Palahniuk & Michael Bailey (editors)
Ghost horror anthology
Tales centered around the longest nights of the year, with modern horror authors paying homage to the time-honored Victorian tradition of ghost stories.
Great writers of centuries past like Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, and Bram Stoker understood that darkness is always hiding amid the holiday cold and cheer, revealing sinister secrets. That in the stillness of winter, when the world is wrapped in a blanket of snow, the festive spirit masks the lurking horrors that dwell beneath the surface.
From haunted halls to malevolent delights, from vengeful spirits of the past to creatures lurking in the shadows, expect to encounter beings that celebrate the season in frightful ways in this Victorian-inspired horror anthology.
The Siren – Tomi Adeyemi
Dark academia horror
When Emery steps foot onto Dartmouth’s campus, she knows what she has to do: keep her scholarship, take her meds, and pray no one ever finds out about the past she left behind.
But that all changes when Emery meets an intoxicating girl named Roux, her disarming stepbrother named Eli, and the mystical band of girls Roux calls “The Sirens.” Each Siren is as beautiful as the last, and their lives on campus are shrouded in extravagance and secret parties.
Before the girls became Sirens, they were outcasts, yet under Roux, their wildest dreams come true. When Roux offers Emery the chance to join them, Emery will do whatever it takes to make it in.
The Sisters of Crimson House – Melissa Anderson Sweazy
Psychological horror
One woman from a long line of psychics will do anything to save her family legacy and the haunted house she grew up in from an entity threatening to destroy everything she’s built.
Every house has its secrets.
Charley Bryde is miserable in a house filled with magic. The only woman in a long line of famous psychics to not inherit the family gift, she spends her days inside Crimson House, the coveted family mansion in Memphis, Tennessee, living in the shadows of her talented older sister, Miranda. But when a shocking tragedy scatters the Brydes across the globe, Charley is forced to grow up on her own, and fast. As the money runs dry and Charley’s ownership of Crimson House is put at risk, she’s left with no other option; turn the manor into a haunted attraction and start representing the family brand with lies, cons, and expertly read tarot cards.
When a skeptic starts targeting Charley for the fraud that she is, she’ll stop at nothing to save the family legacy. But the skeptics’ arrival cracks something open in Charley that the Brydes wanted to remain buried. Deep. And when Miranda shows up unannounced after eight years away, the two will come to realize that Crimson House, and their own family, hold secrets even the greatest psychics couldn’t foresee. Secrets that will threaten to destroy them.
Something Followed Us Home – Cynthia Pelayo (editor)
Horror anthology
Latiné horror anthology where each story reimagines immigration, colonization, faith, and folklore as the fears we inherit and carry across borders and generations.
Something followed us home. It crawled in with our prayers, slipped into our beds, watched from mirrors, waited in water, and learned our names.
Gathering chilling work from some of today’s most acclaimed Latiné voices, this horror anthology moves through haunted households, brutal landscapes, sacred spaces turned dangerous, and bodies claimed by forces both ancient and intimate. The dead murmur behind locked doors. Bones rebuild themselves under merciless suns. Love becomes a doorway for demonic hunger. Blood, devotion, and memory intertwine as the past presses back with teeth.
Something Followed Us Home is an unnerving, visceral, and impossible-to-shake collection that proves that what is carried forward does not remain quiet, and what follows us rarely leaves without taking something in return.
Twisted Pike – David Barnett
Folk horror
The remote village of Withered Hill harbours dark secrets. Outsiders are not welcome, but a film crew descends. Their producer Rob claims they intend to make a low-budget horror movie: Twisted Pike. In truth, the cameras are a front for something infinitely more sinister.
They haven’t come to capture fictional nightmares. They have come to raze Withered Hill to the ground – and obliterate everyone who calls it home.
If Withered Hill falls, the ancient gods sleeping beneath the soil will finally awaken. And their wrath won’t stop at the village borders.
The Unhaunting – Micaiah Johnson
Haunted house horror
At the end of the Civil War, a daughter of the Confederacy made what she thought was an innocent wish: to build a house where nothing bad could happen. But peace came at a price, and one hundred and seventy years later Shantell and her friends are about to discover where all that darkness ended up.
When Shantell’s best friend, Avery, tells her he has inherited a house big enough to make their dreams of a sanctuary come true, she’s too cautious to be optimistic. A lifetime of loss – her father to the Iraq war, her brother to police violence, and her mother to suicide – has taught her cynicism, and even though Avery swears the house has never experienced a tragedy, she goes along expecting everything from black mold to evil spirits.
But not only is the house in better shape than they’d expected, it makes them better too: Shantell’s anxiety stops flaring up; terminally shallow Avery is suddenly capable of deeper emotions; and Tobias, Avery’s older brother and the contractor for the job, even quits chain smoking.
There’s an eeriness to the calm, and it’s almost a relief when they realize they do not walk alone in Abernathy House. If nothing bad has ever happened here, where are all these ghosts coming from? As they dig into the house’s history, Shantell, Avery, and Tobias discover that there’s only one thing worse than a house that’s haunted: a house that desperately wants to be.
Whispers of the Pale Witch – S.A. Sizemore
Witch horror – Book 1 of Beckett Coven
After the sudden death of her great-aunt, Kylie Beckett lands her dream job as a forensic photographer in the small seaside town where she was born.
But once there, a series of murders and the dark truth about her family’s past forces Kylie to harness unconscious powers to protect her newfound family from the murderous Pale Witch of Salem, Massachusetts, and keep a dangerous relic from the unstable witch before she unleashes a demon on Salem once again.
Wither – Dan Warner
Technology horror
The algorithm has a will of its own.
We were obsessed with technology. Now, technology is obsessed with us.
Before he went off the grid, Mick had a plan: get a high-powered job, escape flyover country, and leave his past behind.
Then he met Regression. A black-box technology that builds a person’s perfect digital twin. Every piece of data. Every secret. Every mistake. The greatest invention since fire. And Mick gets to test it out in a remote Ozark town.
A year later, Mick is clawing his way out of the woods, haunted by the act of violence that sent him into hiding. But when he gets back to Bloom, Missouri, he finds a ghost town with cars still in the driveways and cans in the cupboards, like everyone just walked away. Mick will leave, too, as soon as he finds his girlfriend, Alison, earns forgiveness, and finds Regression before it finds him first.
Xyster: Download the Dead 2 – Stephen Barnard
Halloween horror – Book 2 of Download the Dead
A year on from the catastrophic events of October 2025, Halloween has been abolished worldwide, and any ownership of the malicious eBook Download The Dead is regarded as an act of terrorism.
Yet, there are still those who harbour it, or crave a peek inside its despicable pages.
And there are those who stumble across it unwittingly.
Isaac Morton is gifted a second-hand laptop for his eighteenth birthday. When he and his friends fire it up, they discover files on there that no one should read.
What follows results in their entire village being placed under quarantine, and marks the arrival of a sinister entity that has torn through the veil between the living and the dead before.
Cornelius Xyster revelled in his kills last Halloween. This year, he has a more ominous agenda.
