…even if I don’t have time/energy for full reviews.
Looking for some terrifying, not exactly fully-resolved, horror involving monsters… and some of them are of the human kind? Laurel Hightower’s Below is an icy winter tale of getting lost, being hunted, and maybe finding yourself along the way. Maybe.
Skyla Dawn Cameron’s Dweller on the Threshold is a wonderful, unique haunted house tale (set during Covid-19–best literary reason I’ve ever seen for why someone can’t just leave the haunted house) that held me spellbound. Don’t worry–the cats stay safe! It’s my favorite haunted house tale.
Skyla Dawn Cameron’s Watcher of the Woods is a tale of two out-of-sorts lesbians at a haunted cabin-in-the-woods. Will the “vacation” solve their relationship problems? Haunting and scary with some fascinating turns to it!
Check out a great urban fantasy series by Michelle Manus, starting with Guardian of Chaos. I’ve read the first two books so far and look forward to continuing!
I’m a sucker for deep-space horror, and S.A. Barnes’s Dead Silence is an excellent entry into that field! I’ll never get tired of the “crew finds derelict spaceship and horror ensues” plot.
Paul Cooley’s The Black is the start to a really fun bio-horror series about drilling too deep beneath the ocean’s floor for oil… and what we might find instead.
After that last entry, I had to check out Cooley’s Derelict series, which is about… you guessed it… attempting to salvage a derelict spaceship. I’m on book four of the series right now and loving it.
You can definitely tell I’ve been going for deep-space sci-fi lately, because next is Joshua James’ Saturn’s Legacy series. Action-packed and really creative!
Tim Lebbon’s The Last Storm is a tense end-of-the-world tale in which the world finds itself mighty short on water, and one woman’s special inherited ability might be the answer. If she doesn’t go insane first, and if her father’s enemy doesn’t kill her.
Deanna Raybourn’s Killers of a Certain Age definitely doesn’t fit the theme of the rest of this post, but I urge you to give it a read. A group of female killers is getting on in years and planning their retirement… when it turns out that their employer has something else in mind.
The Grace of Sorcerers, by Maria Ying, is the start to a fabulous and highly unusual series about sorcerers, demons, and love. (Content note for explicit sex.)
Hailey Piper put out Even the Worm Will Turn, a sequel to her fabulous cosmic horror tale, “The Worm and His Kings.” I highly recommend re-reading the first book before reading this one or you may get a little lost. Totally worth the extra time!
T. Kingfisher’s A House with Good Bones is a wild horror tale about a mother who seems to have… changed.
Mariko Koike’s The Graveyard Apartment is a moody, scary tale of an apartment building that borders on a graveyard, and one family that decides the asking price is too good to pass up.
Mira Grant’s Unbreakable is a story of what a world with Magical Girls in it might really be like. And it isn’t all sunshine and roses.
I was extremely sad when the Kate Daniels series by Ilona Andrews came to an end. So imagine how happy I was to see that there’s a new Kate Daniels series starting with Magic Tides! It’s set a little later than the original series, in a different location, but has all the wonderful things we’ve come to love about the setting and characters.
The “Alien” franchise never gets old for me, and I love Mary SanGiovanni’s entry: Alien: Enemy of my Enemy. It’s everything you could want from an Alien novel!
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