This month’s new horror books include a Black frontierswoman with a deadly secret, a dystopian bureaucracy, mermaid horror, all manner of haunted houses, a smorgasbord of short story collections, and much more.
These monthly lists are derived from my annual masterlist, but I’ve gotten a good amount of feedback saying the smaller lists are helpful reminders and easier to digest–they can all be found here. And as always, you can view the full 2023 list right here.
March 2023’s new horror books:
- The Eater of Gods, Dan Franklin (Mar 1, Cemetery Dance): Dan Franklin’s debut supernatural thriller is a tale of grief, of loneliness, and of an ageless, hungry fury that waits with ready tooth and claw beneath the sand.
- Hospital, Han Song (Mar 1, Amazon Crossing): A twisted, wildly imaginative tale of one man’s mysterious illness and his journey through a dystopian hospital system.
- Mothered, Zoje Stage (Mar 1, Thomas & Mercer): From the USA Today bestselling author of the international sensation Baby Teeth comes a claustrophobic psychological thriller about one woman’s nightmarish spiral while quarantined with her mother.
- Every Woman Knows This, Laurel Hightower (Mar 3, Death Knell Press): Dive in for Hightower’s most beloved short stories, all brought together in one collection which includes five brand new tales. Navigate the stormy waters of womanhood with caution as you are about to experience the horrors that every woman knows.
- The Shadow Galaxy, J. Dianne Dotson (Mar 3, Trepidatio): Among these pages, Dotson captures the longing, regrets, and dreams of those living by the sea, such as in “One Evening in Fogvale.” In “RODER,” a young woman risks her life to help find a robot who captured her heart. “Topaz Sundered” explores an exoplanet mining expedition gone horribly wrong. In “The Queen and the Mountain Laurel,” a young Appalachian girl teaches her father an important lesson with the help of mountain spirits. The poem “Obsidian” eviscerates with raw pain from betrayal. Dotson weaves these and many other tales and poems of mysticism, exploration, horror, pain, nostalgia, and wonder, for no shadow can exist without light.
- The God of Endings, Jacqueline Holland (Mar 7, Flatiron): By turns suspenseful and enchanting, this breathtaking first novel weaves a story of love, family, history, and myth as seen through the eyes of one immortal woman.
- A Man Among Ghosts, Steven Hopstaken (Mar 7, Flame Tree Press): After a near-death experience, David finds himself haunted by ghosts in the old Victorian house he is renovating. These tortured souls beg for his help and offer him protection from a demonic presence that wants David dead for a crime he doesn’t remember committing. Even more surprising, he soon learns these are spirits of people who are not yet dead. Is this real, is he hallucinating, or is someone trying to drive him insane? As his paranoia ramps up, he discovers the truth is even more bizarre. The haunting won’t stop until he kills a man named “Fitz.”
- Monstrilio, Gerardo Sámano Córdova (Mar 7, Zando): Grieving mother Magos cuts out a piece of her deceased eleven-year-old son Santiago’s lung. Acting on fierce maternal instinct and the dubious logic of an old folktale, she nurtures the lung until it gains sentience, growing into the carnivorous little Monstrilio she keeps hidden within the walls of her family’s decaying Mexico City estate. Eventually, Monstrilio begins to resemble the Santiago he once was, but his innate impulses—though curbed by his biological and chosen family’s communal care—threaten to destroy this fragile second chance at life.
- My Dear Henry: A Jekyll & Hyde Remix, Kalynn Bayron (Mar 7, Feiwel & Friends): In this gothic YA remix of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, a teen boy tries to discover the reason behind his best friend’s disappearance—and the arrival of a mysterious and magnetic stranger—in misty Victorian London.
- The Trees Grew Because I Bled There: Collected Stories, Eric LaRocca (Mar 7, Titan): A beautifully crafted, devastating short fiction collection from the Bram Stoker finalist and author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke and Other Misfortunes. Includes an introduction from acclaimed bestselling author Chuck Wendig.
- XCRMNTMNTN, Andrew Hilbert (Mar 7, Ghoulish Books): THIS IS NOT A PORNOGRAPHY. When a pile of shit from space lands near a renowned filmmaker’s set, inspiration strikes. Take a journey up a cosmic mountain of excrement with the director and his film crew as they ascend into madness led only by their own vanity and obsession. This is a nightmare about creation. This is a dream about poop. This is a call to arms against vowels. This is XCRMNTMNTN.
- Feed Them Silence, Lee Mandelo (Mar 14, Tordotcom): Lee Mandelo dives into the minds of wolves in Feed Them Silence, a novella of the near future.
- A Manual for How to Love Us, Erin Slaughter (Mar 14, Harper Perennial): A debut, interlinked collection of stories exploring the primal nature of women’s grief—offering insight into the profound experience of loss and the absurd ways in which we seek control in an unruly world.
- The Memory Eater, Rebecca Mahoney (Mar 14, Razorbill): A teenage girl must save her town from a memory-devouring monster in this piercing exploration of grief, trauma, and memory, from the author of The Valley and the Flood.
- Piñata, Leopoldo Gout (Mar 14, Nightfire): A Head Full of Ghosts meets Mexican Gothic in Piñata, a terrifying possession tale by Leopoldo Gout.
- Suburban Monsters, Christopher Hawkins (Mar 15, Coronis): The house at the end of the block with the overgrown lawn. The darkened store window in a forgotten corner of the shopping mall. The colorful characters of a children’s TV show. What dark secrets do they hide? From award-winning author Christopher Hawkins come thirteen tales of the horrors lurking right next door.
- Beasts of 42nd Street, Preston Fassel (Mar 17, Cemetery Dance): From the award-winning author of Our Lady of the Inferno comes another tale of New York in the Bad Old Days: a saga of murder, bloodshed, and betrayal set against the backdrop of Times Square at the height of its decadence and depravity.
- Imago and Other Transformations, Erica Ruppert (Mar 17, Trepidatio Publishing): In the twenty-one stories in Imago and Other Transformations there is faith, found and lost again. There are eldritch horrors and profane rituals. And there are characters caught in circumstances they thought they could control. A woman discovers the cost of the magic to resurrect her lost child. A husband struggles against hungry, old gods to win back his missing wife. A child wields a dangerous power his mother had long hoped to harness for her own. Plagues spread. Cities crumble. And the world that ends for some still goes on…
- Sleep Alone, J.A.W. McCarthy (Mar 18, Off Limits Press): For the past six years, Ronnie has worked selling merch for a perpetually touring band. Late nights, sweaty clubs, dingy motel rooms, endless roads—as rough as it’s been, there is no other way of life for this band of hungry succubi leaving bodies in their wake. Until she meets the enigmatic Helene. Helene is just as restless, just as lonely, and just as full of secrets. With Helene in tow, Ronnie and the band make their way across the Pacific Northwest, trying to outrun not only their mistakes, but the mysterious disease stalking the band, a disease that devours succubi from the inside out. The hunger is as endless as the road, but maybe Ronnie doesn’t always want to sleep alone
- A Dark Corner, Celia Dale (Mar 21, Valancourt Books): First published in 1971, Celia Dale’s A Dark Corner is a chilling work of domestic horror that shows how true evil often lurks closer than we think, perhaps even just behind our neighbor’s lace curtains…
- A Helping Hand, Celia Dale (Mar 21, Valancourt Books): First published in 1966, Celia Dale’s A Helping Hand is a chilling work of psychological terror that explores the true evil that often lurks just behind a respectable façade.
- Lone Women, Victor LaValle (Mar 21, One World): Blue skies, empty land—and enough room to hide away a horrifying secret. Or is there? Discover a haunting new vision of the American West from the award-winning author of The Changeling. Told in Victor LaValle’s signature style, blending historical fiction, shimmering prose, and inventive horror, Lone Women is the gripping story of a woman desperate to bury her past—and a portrait of early twentieth-century America like you’ve never seen.
- Muckross Abbey and Other Stories, Sabina Murray (Mar 21, Black Cat): From a twisted recasting of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, to an actor who dies for his art only to haunt his mother’s house, to the titular “Muckross Abbey,” an Irish chieftain burial site cursed by the specter of a flesh-eating groom—in this collection Murray gives us painters, writers, historians, and nuns all confronting the otherworldly in fantastically creepy ways. With notes of Wharton and James, Stoker and Shelley, now drawn into the present, these macabre stories are sure to captivate and chill.
- The Shoemaker’s Magician, Cynthia Pelayo (Mar 21, Agora Books): A fabled lost movie. An increasing body count. How much do you risk for art? The second book in Pelayo’s Chicago Saga, following Children of Chicago.
- The Strange, Nathan Ballingrud (Mar 21, Gallery/Saga Press): 1931, New Galveston, Mars: Fourteen-year-old Anabelle Crisp sets off through the wastelands of the Strange to find Silas Mundt’s gang who have stolen her mother’s voice, destroyed her father, and left her solely with a need for vengeance. At once evoking the dreams of an America explored in Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and the harder realities of frontier life in Charles Portis True Grit, Ballingrud’s first novel is haunting in its evocation of Anabelle’s quest for revenge amidst a spent and angry world accompanied by a domestic Engine, a drunken space pilot, and the toughest woman on Mars.
- Soft Targets, Carson Winter (Mar 22, Tenebrous Press): Two tragedy-obsessed office workers discover that reality itself is fluid and choose to test its boundaries with increasing violence.
- Abnormal Statistics, Max Booth III (Mar 23, Apocalypse Party): Suburban decay, familial horror, bleak lullabies. Abnormal Statistics is the debut story collection from Max Booth III. Bad times are waiting for you. Featuring 10 reprints and 3 stories original to this collection (including a brand-new novella called “Indiana Death Song”).
- The Seething, Ben Monroe (Mar 23, Brigids Gate Press): A family’s relocation looked like a chance to relax and regroup—but as they settle into their new home, teenage Kimmie Barnes’ special senses make her the target of something primordial, evil, and utterly malign.
- Chlorine, Jade Song (Mar 28, William Morrow): In the vein of The Pisces and The Vegetarian, Chlorine is a debut novel that blurs the line between a literary coming-of-age narrative and a dark unsettling horror tale, told from an adult perspective on the trials and tribulations of growing up in a society that puts pressure on young women and their bodies… a powerful, relevant novel of immigration, sapphic longing, and fierce, defiant becoming.
- Greymist Fair, Francesca Zappia (Mar 28, Greenwillow Books): The villagers of Greymist Fair know that the woods are a dangerous and magical place, and that they should never set foot off the road. But when a young tailor discovers a body, her search for the culprit reveals even more strange and dark happenings around her town. From acclaimed author Francesca Zappia, Greymist Fair is a suspenseful and inventive YA murder-mystery infused with magic and inspired by the lesser-known fairytales of the Brothers Grimm.
- A House With Good Bones, T. Kingfisher (Mar 28, Nightfire): A haunting Southern Gothic from a bestselling master of suspense, A House With Good Bones explores the dark, twisted roots lurking just beneath the veneer of a perfect home and family.
- In Nightfall, Suzanne Young (Mar 28, Delacorte): In the quaint town of Nightfall, Oregon, it isn’t the dark you should be afraid of—it’s the girls. The Lost Boys meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer in this propulsive novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Treatment.
- The Keep Within, J. L. Worrad (Mar 28, Titan): Set hundreds of years after the events of Pennyblade, a theatre manager/bastard brother of the king deals with rumours of a very real folktale murderer and a building whose very existence corrupts the minds of those who see or hear about it.
- White Cat, Black Dog, Kelly Link (Mar 28, Random House): Seven ingeniously reinvented fairy tales that play out with astonishing consequences in the modern world, from one of today’s finest short story writers—MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellow Kelly Link, bestselling author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Get in Trouble.
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