All the New Horror Books Coming in September 2023

September’s new horror books include a haunted house with a very stubborn occupant, a set of records that open a portal to the land of the dead, a brackish tale of a lost child and transformative grief, an anthology of short, scary tales from Indigenous authors, a story of a family homecoming gone hellishly wrong, Lonesome Dove but make it horror, Japanese feminist horror in translation, and much, 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.

September 2023’s new horror books:

• Who Haunts You, Mark Wheaton (Sept 2, Off Limits Press): High school senior Rebecca “Bex” Koeltl is just trying to make it to graduation. But when her fellow seniors begin dying in seemingly unrelated incidents, Bex uncovers disturbing connections between their deaths, including that the teens believed they were haunted by long-dead relatives their own family members swear never existed. After Bex is visited by a malevolent specter of her own, she realizes she has to get the bottom of this horror before she’s its next victim…
• Black Cats and Exit Wounds, P.A. Sheppard (Sept 4, Raven Tale): The sequel to Ashtrays and Kittens is a gripping tale of brotherhood, retribution, and the internal battle between good and evil. Will Cat and Levski overcome the darkness that seeks to consume them, or will their relationship succumb to the darkness unleashed? Find out in this thrilling page-turner that will leave you breathless until the very last page.
• Grave Expectations, Alice Bell (Sept 5, Vintage): How do you solve a murder when the ghost of a 17-year-old keeps telling you you’re doing it wrong? Claire Hendricks is a hapless 30-something true crime fan treading water in the gig economy working as a medium. When she is invited to an old university friend’s country pile to provide entertainment for a family party, her best friend Sophie tags along. In fact, Sophie rarely leaves Claire’s side, because she’s been haunting her ever since she was murdered at the age of 17.
• Holly, Stephen King (Sept 5, Scribner): Holly Gibney, one of Stephen King’s most compelling and ingeniously resourceful characters, returns in this thrilling novel to solve the gruesome truth behind multiple disappearances in a midwestern town.
• It Found Us, Lindsay Currie (Sept 5, Sourcebooks): From the author of Scritch Scratch and The Girl in White comes a new spooky middle grade mystery about a girl detective who must decode a series of ominous clues tied to a century-old tragedy to find a missing teenager before it’s too late…
• Kill For Love, Laura Picklesimer (Sept 5, Unnamed): A searing satirical thriller about Tiffany, a privileged Los Angeles sorority sister who is struggling to keep her sadistic impulses—and haunting nightmares of fire and destruction—at bay. After a frat party hookup devolves into a bloody, fatal affair, Tiffany realizes something within her has awoken: the insatiable desire to kill attractive young men.
• Rainbow Filth, Tim Meyer (Sept 5, Ghoulish Books): Rainbow Filth is a weirdo horror novella about a small cult that believes a rare psychedelic substance can physically transport them to another universe.
• Schrader’s Chord, Scott Leeds (Sept 5, Nightfire): After his estranged father’s mysterious death, Charlie Remick returns to Seattle to help with the funeral. There, he discovers his father left him two parting gifts: the keys to the family record store and a strange black case containing four ancient records that, according to legend, can open a gate to the land of the dead. When Charlie, his sister, and their two friends play the records, they unwittingly open a floodgate of unspeakable horror. As the darkness descends, they are stalked by a relentless, malevolent force and see the dead everywhere they turn. With time running out, the only person who can help them is Charlie’s resurrected father, who knows firsthand the awesome power the records have unleashed. But can they close the gate and silence Schrader’s Chord before it’s too late?
• The September House, Carissa Orlando (Sept 5, Berkley): A woman is determined to stay in her dream home even after it becomes a haunted nightmare in this compulsively readable, twisty, and layered debut novel.
• The Sight, Melanie Golding (Sept 5, Crooked Lane Books): As a child, Faith acquired the ability to see when and how people would die—a “gift” she neither wanted nor could get rid of. After foreseeing a family tragedy and being ostracized, Faith learns to control her visions, and returns to perform in her family’s traveling carnival. But when an unruly customer attacks her, she has a vision in full view of a crowd. She is banned from the carnival she loves—and loses her only source of income to support her dying mother. Desperate to support her mother and with only one friend standing by her, she sees no reason to continue hiding her ability and goes to dangerous lengths to earn money. But when she sees herself in a man’s future death, Faith must face her own fears of her powers and tune into her gift to fight against a future that would ruin her life—and end someone else’s.
• Snarl, John Boden (Sept 5, Dead Sky Publishing): Marlin Stains is a lonely man who is filled with words. Words that he longs to share with the world but so far only shares with himself. He has over 300 notebooks brimming with them in his trailer room. A wood-paneled tomb of prose and syllable. Marlin Stains killed his brother in the womb, buried his father when he was a young man and now, a bit older, he watches the same monster devour his mother. While grappling with this, he experiences a combination of exchanges and events that point him on a new trajectory with an outcome that is both expected and anything but.
• The Spirit Bares Its Teeth, Andrew Joseph White (Sept 5, Peachtree Teen): New York Times bestselling author Andrew Joseph White’s explosive gothic horror, set in an alternate Victorian England where mediums control the dead. London, 1883. The Veil between the living and dead has thinned. Violet-eyed mediums commune with spirits under the watchful eye of the Royal Speaker Society, and sixteen-year-old Silas Bell would rather rip out his violet eyes than become an obedient Speaker wife. According to Mother, he’ll be married by the end of the year. It doesn’t matter that he’s needed a decade of tutors to hide his autism; that he practices surgery on slaughtered pigs; that he is a boy, not the girl the world insists on seeing. After a failed attempt to escape an arranged marriage, Silas is diagnosed with Veil sickness—a mysterious disease sending violet-eyed women into madness—and shipped away to Braxton’s Finishing School and Sanitorium. The facility is cold, the instructors merciless, and the students either bloom into eligible wives or disappear. When the ghosts of missing students start begging Silas for help, he decides to reach into Braxton’s innards and expose its guts to the world—if the school doesn’t break him first.
• There’s No Way I’d Die First, Lisa Springer (Sept 5, Delacorte): A spine-tingling contemporary horror novel that follows a scary-movie buff as she hosts an elaborate Halloween bash but soon finds the festivities upended when she and her guests are forced to test their survival skills in a deadly game, from debut author Lisa Springer.
• Through Legend They Fall, Rachel Pendley (Sept 5): As Ferrin Grey returned home from the horrors of war, his people hailed him a hero while the ghosts of his sins screamed monster. Now he is dying, infected with an unknown disease that eats him away little by little, piece by piece. Karmic retribution for his grisly acts of war. When the ruler of a foreign nation unleashes a terrifying beast in Ferrin’s homeland, he finds himself thrust back into a world he was so desperate to leave behind. To end this nightmare, he must kill both creature and king but ill omens warn him of the future as demons resurface from his past, turning the hunter into the hunted. And if these monsters were to catch this rotting soldier, then death will be the least of his troubles.
• What Doesn’t Kill You, Ken Brosky (Sept 5, Timber Ghost Press): Valerie Miller and her younger brother have spent their entire lives in the dreary town of Seven Sisters, where most people are resigned to a bleak future of debt and despair. But when a mysterious woman with a dark past arrives, she brings with her a gift that could transform the town’s fortunes – and the lives of Val and Danny. Part creature-feature, part survival story, What Doesn’t Kill You will keep you on the edge of your seat as Val and Danny fight for their lives and all of Seven Sisters.
• Last Stay, Brennan LaFaro (Sept 7, D&T Publishing): John and Faye Parker own a motel in the middle of the desert. The business is bleeding them dry, but they’re stuck with the floundering roadside destination. Meanwhile, Morgan Rose and her two best friends, fresh out of college, embark on a cross-country road trip, careening toward an inevitable confrontation at the Parker Motel. To stay afloat, the Parkers enter the business of life and death, but how long can they put off the judgment that comes with their choices? Enjoy your night… it might just be your Last Stay.
• The Black Lord, Colin Hinckley (Sept 12, Tenebrous Press): Eddie’s parents may be arguing about the disappearance of his infant brother Danny, but Eddie’s facing a terror all of his own. There’s a strange figure outside that claims it has Danny safe and sound—all Eddie needs to do to get his brother back is open that window. Eddie’s father is filled with guilt over his relationship with his own lost brother. His mother has been abandoned to navigate her grief and terror alone. And his grandmother carries a disturbing, all-too-relevant truth about their shared family history. As minutes tick by and hope for Danny grows ever smaller, the very fabric of their world disintegrates, welcoming eldritch terrors of unspeakable provenance to their doorstep. The family is losing a decades-long struggle against an entity that is not of this world, and its hunger threatens to swallow them whole.
• The Collector, Laura Kat Young (Sept 12, Titan Books): A frightening dystopian horror novel where grief is forbidden and purged from the mind – a nightmarish mix of 1984 and Never Let Me Go.
• The Graveyard Shift, Maria Lewis (Sept 12, Datura Books): When a horror-loving radio show becomes the stage of a gruesome murder, its host Tinsel Monroe is put next on the killer’s list… A fast paced, thrilling murder mystery novel, paying homage to slasher films of the 90’s, The Graveyard Shift is the perfect Halloween read for fans of Riley Sager and Grady Hendrix.
• Hemlock Island, Kelley Armstrong (Sept 12, St. Martin’s Press): Laney Kilpatrick has been renting her vacation home to strangers. The invasion of privacy gives her panic attacks, but it’s the only way she can keep her beloved Hemlock Island, the only thing she owns after a pandemic-fueled divorce. But broken belongings and campfires that nearly burn down the house have escalated to bloody bones, hex circles, and now, terrified renters who’ve fled after finding blood and nail marks all over the guest room closet, as though someone tried to claw their way out… and failed. When a crew visits the island to investigate, there are tensions and secrets, whispers in the woods, and before long, the discovery of a hand poking up from the earth. Then the body that goes with it… But by that time, someone has taken off with their one and only means off the island, and they’re trapped with someone—or something—that doesn’t want them leaving the island alive.
• Monstrous, Jessica Lewis (Sept 12, Delacorte): Forced to spend her summer in her aunt’s strange small town, a teen girl discovers dark secrets hidden in the woods. From the author of Bad Witch Burning comes another pulse-pounding novel perfect for fans of Supernatural and Lovecraft Country.
• Nails and Eyes, Kaori Fujino, trans. Kendall Heitzman (Sept 12, Pushkin Press): Tense, subtly disturbing Japanese literary horror perfect for fans of Tender is the Flesh and The Vegetarian. An unforgettably creepy child narrator weaves uncanny tales about her new stepmother in this feminist horror novella + short story collection that introduces a unique new voice in Japanese literature.
• No Child of Mine, Nichelle Giraldes (Sept 12, Poisoned Pen Press): Essie Kaur, a fiercely independent woman whose only soft spot is her husband, Sanjay, never imagined herself as a mother. It was never a part of the plan. But then she finds out she’s pregnant. As her difficult pregnancy transforms her body and life into something she barely recognizes, her husband spends the nights pacing in the attic, slowly becoming a stranger, and the house begins to whisper. As Essie’s pregnancy progresses, both her and Sanjay’s lives are warped by a curse that has haunted her family for generations, leaving a string of fatherless daughters in its wake. When she’s put on bedrest, Essie trades the last aspects of her carefully planned life for isolation in what should be a welcoming home, but she isn’t alone. There’s something here that means to take everything from her…
• The Otherwoods, Justine Pucella Winans (Sept 12, Bloomsbury): Some would call River Rydell a ‘chosen one’: born with the ability to see monsters and travel to a terrifying spirit world called The Otherwoods, they have all the makings of a hero. But River just calls themself unlucky. When River’s only friend (and crush) Avery is kidnapped and dragged into The Otherwoods by monsters, River has no choice but to confront the world they’ve seen only in their nightmares-but reality turns out be more horrifying than they could have ever imagined. With only their cat for protection and a wayward teen spirit as their guide, River must face the monsters of The Otherwoods and their own fears to save Avery and become the hero they were (unfortunately) destined to be.
• Promise, Christi Nogle (Sept 12, Flame Tree Press): Promise collects Christi Nogle’s best futuristic stories ranging from plausible tech-based science fiction to science fantasy stories about aliens in our midst: chameleonic foils hover in the skies, you can order a headset to speak and dream with your dog, and your devices sometimes connect not just to the web but to the underworld. These tales will recall the stories of Ray Bradbury, television programs such as Black Mirror and The Twilight Zone, and novels such as Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin or Under the Skin by Michel Faber. They are often strange and dreadful but veer towards themes of hope, potential, promise
• The Promise of Plague Wolves, Coy Hall (Sept 12, Nosetouch Press): Austria, 1686: two plagues rage in the countryside. One plague is smallpox, a torturous disease that ravages the body, turning homes into tombs. The other ailment is more mysterious, a scourge of occult origin, a plague that ravages the mind and consumes the soul. Here the deepest horrors are made manifest. Here the dead walk the shadowed wood. Here a spirit and its brood of changelings emerge from the earth to feed. Into this malefic maelstrom enters Dorin Toth, famed occultist and investigator. Accompanied by his faithful greyhound, Vinegar Tom, Toth must find the source of the eldritch epidemic. Will Toth and Tom prevail against the blights that they uncover? Or will the dark storm of ghosts consume them?
• Rouge, Mona Awad (Sept 12, S&S/Marysue Ricci Books): From the critically acclaimed author of Bunny comes a horror-tinted, gothic fairy tale about a lonely dress shop clerk whose mother’s unexpected death sends her down a treacherous path in pursuit of youth and beauty. Can she escape her mother’s fate—and find a connection that is more than skin deep?
• The Stranger Upstairs, Lisa M. Matlin (Sept 12, Bantam): Most people wouldn’t buy an infamous murder house to renovate for fun… but Sarah Slade is not most people. With every passing moment, Sarah’s life spirals further out of control—and with it, her sense of reality. But as she peels back the curling wallpaper and discovers the house’s secrets, she realizes that the deadly legacy of Black Wood House has only just begun.
• A Sword of Bronze and Ashes, Anna Smith Spark (Sept 12, Flame Tree Press): A Sword of Bronze and Ashes combines the fierce beauty of Celtic myth with grimdark battle violence. It’s a lyrical, folk horror high fantasy. Kanda has a good life until shadows from her past return threatening everything she loves. And Kanda, like any parent, has things in her past she does not want her children to know. Red war is coming: pursued by an ancient evil, Kanda must call upon all her strength to protect her family. But how can she keep her children safe, if they want to stand as warriors beside her when the light fades and darkness rises?
• What Kind of Mother, Clay McLeod Chapman (Sept 12, Quirk): A modern Southern Gothic horror about a palm reader who becomes involved in a mind-bending missing-child case with a shocking twist you won’t see coming.
• What Stalks Among Us, Sarah Hollowell (Sept 12, Clarion): From Sarah Hollowell, author of A Dark and Starless Forest, comes a spine-tingling, deliriously creepy YA speculative thriller about two best friends trapped in a corn maze with corpses that look just like them.
• Your Lonely Nights Are Over, Adam Sass (Sept 12, Viking): Scream meets Clueless in this YA horror from Adam Sass in which two gay teen BFFs find their friendship tested when a serial killer starts targeting their school’s Queer Club.
• The Murmurs, Michael J. Malone (Sept 14, Orenda Books): A young woman starts experiencing terrifying premonitions of people dying, as it becomes clear that a family curse known only as The Murmurs has begun, and a long-forgotten crime is about to be unearthed…
• The Caretaker, Cass Clarke (Sept 15, Hear Us Scream): Cara, an overworked ICU nurse, could think of one million other things to do than sort through her dead mother’s house. Still, she’s here, cleaning a home she thought she abandoned long ago. Of course, it doesn’t take Cara long before she stumbles upon her mother’s buried secrets and becomes curiously stuck with a haunted hospice bed. Roping in her ride-or-die cousin Dylan and witchy ex-girlfriend Beth into the proceedings, Cara unwittingly drags her beloveds into a gauntlet of horrors. Best described as Motherthing meets Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Caretaker is a raw story of grief that seeks to break as many hearts as it heals.
• The Dogcatcher, Sean Patrick Carlin (Sept 16, DarkWinter Press): Sean Patrick Carlin’s debut novel, an occult horror/dark comedy in the spirit of Shaun of the Dead, begins with a trio of college students savagely mauled on a hiking trail coming home from the bar. The next night, a pair of high-school sweethearts is stalked and massacred at a state park. Something monstrous lurks in the woods of Upstate New York, setting the idyllic Finger Lakes community of Cornault on edge.
• Apparitions, Adam Pottle (Sept 19, Dark Hart): A nameless Deaf teen escapes his father’s basement after years of imprisonment. Bloody, alone, and without language, he stumbles through the Saskatchewan prairies and lands in a psychiatric facility, where he meets Felix, another Deaf teen. Felix—cunning and ambitious—teaches the nameless narrator Sign Language and begins to mold the abused teen’s mind. But mold into what?
• Black Sheep, Rachel Harrison (Sept 19, Berkley): A cynical twentysomething must confront her unconventional family’s dark secrets in this fiery, irreverent horror novel from the author of Such Sharp Teeth and Cackle.
• Candelaria, Melissa Lozada-Oliva (Sept 19, Astra House): Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents meets Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Author of Dreaming of You Melissa Lozada-Oliva delivers an unsettling, raucous debut novel written with tongue-in-cheek humor and sharp cultural criticism that unearths one troubled family’s legacy, feasting on diasporic identity politics and examining the limits of bodily autonomy and the dangers of wanting to belong at any cost.
• Dark Woods, Deep Water, Jelena Dunato (Sept 19, Ghost Orchid Press): A dark fantasy tale inspired by Slavic folklore, Dark Woods, Deep Water is the debut novel by Croatian author Jelena Dunato. Set in an intricately imagined world that staggers the line between fairytale and brutality, this novel will appeal to fans of Katherine Arden and Naomi Novik, as well as lovers of classic Gothic fiction.
• Greyhowler, Sarah Day (Sept 19, Underland Press): Rhia is a Courier, a transient messenger who freely travels the land without calling any town or port home. The job suits her, for in a land ruled by the Temple, it is difficult to find your own way, especially when you have a Talent. Rhia’s is water, and when she arrives in distant Cerretour to deliver a message, she finds a village wracked with suffering. The well is dry. It hasn’t rained. The only person who can save these villagers is missing. At night, a strange creature prowls the prairie. The villagers have a name for it: greyhowler. Rhia knows it by a different name: the lusus mendace, the predator of lies. It is a monster created by Temple Priests to scare the initiates and acolytes. It knows deceit. It knows fear. It hunts those who harbor lies in their hearts. Is it hunting her? Is it hunting someone in the village? Is it nothing more than a myth, a tale meant to scare children? All Rhia knows for certain is she may be the only person who can save these people. But doing so means accepting what she swore she would never be . . .
• Never Whistle at Night, ed. Shane Hawk and Theodore Van Alst, Jr. (Sept 19, Vintage): A bold, clever, and sublimely sinister collection of horror, fantasy, science fiction, and gritty crime by both new and established indigenous authors that dares to ask the question: “Are you ready to be un-settled?”
• October Screams: A Halloween Anthology, ed. Kenneth W. Cain (Sept 19, Kangas Khan Publishing): A Halloween anthology of all-new stories from some of the best horror writers today, including Brian Keene & Richard Chizmar, Gemma Amor, Kealan Patrick Burke, Clay McLeod Chapman, Philip Fracassi, Gwendolyn Kiste, Todd Keisling, and many more.
• Red Rabbit, Alex Grecian (Sept 19, Nightfire): Written with the devilish cadence of Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians and the pulse-pounding brutality of Nick Cutter’s Little Heaven, Red Rabbit is an epic adventure of luck and misfortune, where death is always just around the bend. Sadie Grace is wanted for witchcraft, dead (or alive). And every hired gun in Kansas is out to collect the bounty on her head, including bonafide witch hunter Old Tom and his mysterious, mute ward Rabbit. Racing along the drought-stricken plains in a stolen red stagecoach, they encounter monsters more wicked than witches lurking along the dusty trail. But the crew is determined to get that witch, or die trying.
• The World Wasn’t Ready for You, Justin C. Key (Sept 19, Harper): Black Mirror meets Get Out in this gripping story collection reminiscent of the work of Octavia E. Butler, which deftly blends science fiction, horror, and fantasy to examine issues of race, class, and prejudice—an electrifying, oftentimes heartbreaking debut from an extraordinary new voice.
• Brute: Stories of Dark Desire, Masculinity & Rough Trade, ed. Steve Berman (Sept 20, Lethe Press): What happens when we go looking for trouble? Delights or dismay? Many horror stories and films begin with this premise, as do plenty of hook-ups. When you can’t sleep and begin browsing Grindr or Scruff, why not invite the guy without a face pic who has been taunting you to come over? Dancing at the club? The fierce-looking man gesturing with a shake of his head to the back alley door seems promising. How about picking up a hitchhiker late at night on a lonely road? The allure of trouble is not only the forbidden fruit at the finale but the pleasure of abandoning good judgment for this win. And one of the more enticing pursuits for us sodomites is rough trade, those men, young and old, who could answer one wrong move on your part with violence. The stories in Brute are a collection of some things old, some things new, some things scary, and some things to leave you black and blue.
• You Are My Sunshine and Other Stories, Octavia Cade (Sept 21, Stelliform Press): Sometimes change can hurt. This collection of short stories traces the growing pains of a new world, beginning with the death throes of our current way of life and ending with a world transformed by science and technology, and by grief, hope, love, and humanity’s will to transform. This is a collection that will both tear you apart and tend to your wounds. Cade’s stories are informed by science, tracing the biological and emotional threads that bind us, human and non-human alike. You Are My Sunshine and Other Stories is a promise of what worlds are possible if we allow ourselves to change.
• And Then She Fell, Alicia Elliott (Sept 26, Dutton): A mind-bending, razor-sharp look at motherhood and mental health that follows a young Indigenous woman who discovers the picture-perfect life she always hoped for may have horrifying consequences.
• Black River Orchard, Chuck Wendig (Sept 26, Del Rey): A small town is transformed by dark magic when a strange tree begins bearing magical apples in this new masterpiece of horror from the bestselling author of Wanderers and The Book of Accidents.
• The Black Tree Atop the Hill, Karla Yvette (Sept 26, CLASH): The Black Tree Atop the Hill is set in an alternate American old-west that is hauntingly familiar yet strangely off-putting. This is a story about believing in intuition against the rain, about the violence of nature and of those who inflict it. Gothic gardeners explore the question of nature’s home in a progressing world, leaving readers with conflicting resolutions and twisty insides.
• Cold, Black, & Infinite: Stories of the Horrific and Strange, Todd Keisling (Sept 26, Cemetery Dance): Down here in the dark lies a vast and twisted landscape where the wicked, wistful, and profane coalesce. This is where the lonely and lost face their demons, where anxious paranoias are made manifest, and where mundane evil wears a human face. For readers, the sixteen stories found within Cold, Black, & Infinite serve as a harrowing glimpse into the nightmarish imagination of Todd Keisling, Bram Stoker Award-nominated author of Devil’s Creek and Scanlines.
• Find Him Where You Left Him Dead, Kristen Simmons (Sept 26, Tor Teen): Kristen Simmons’s masterful breakout horror novel that’s “Jumanji but Japanese-inspired” (Kendare Blake) about estranged friends playing a deadly game in a nightmarish folkloric underworld.
• The Grimmer, Naben Ruthnum (Sept 26, ECW Press): The small-town mysteries of John Bellairs are made modern with a dash of Stranger Things in this spine-tingling supernatural horror-thriller. Bringing together scares, suspense, and body horror, The Grimmer is award-winning author Naben Ruthnum’s first foray into the young adult genre. This gripping ride through the supernatural is loaded with vivid characters, frightening imagery, and astonishing twists, while tackling complex issues such as grief, racism, and addiction.
• Hot Iron and Cold Blood: An Anthology of the Weird West, ed. Patrick R. McDonough (Sept 26, Death’s Head Press): Herein find legendary masters of anomalous Western and Horror stories— along with a posse of budding word-slingers— who all bring you an electrifying and frightening collection of extraordinary tales set in the Old West and beyond. So, mount your saddle-horse and join this gang of rogue authors for a ride down dark trails of terror and unsettling thoroughfares that lead deep into strange, nightmarish territory.
• The Invisible World, Nora Fussner (Sept 26, Vintage): A gothic, ghostly horror novel set on a paranormal investigations TV show, with an ensemble cast each grappling with their own desires and doubts and the disturbing consequences of suppressing them.
• Pre-Approved for Haunting: And Other Stories, Patrick Barb (Sept 26, Keylight Books): In this new collection, Patrick Barb explores themes of family found and lost, media consumption and the dangers of runaway nostalgia, the supernatural in our lives, and the impact of violence in both the long- and short-term. From rural backwoods to Park Slope brownstones, Barb’s characters face impossible, awful situations, testing their inner strength and understanding of reality. Covering quiet horror, weird fiction, supernatural horror, slasher horror, topical dark fiction, and more, these stories spotlight supposedly familiar terrors and fears in new and unexpected ways.
• Who I Lost, I Found, Eden Royce (Sept 26, Broken Eye Books): Who Lost, I Found is a collection of Black Southern speculative tales from author Eden Royce, who weaves together subgenres like a sweetgrass basket: Southern Gothic, weird fiction, dark fantasy, and folk horror. All inspired by her Gullah Geechee heritage and its cautionary stories, and the hoodoo that runs throughout, whether everyone acknowledges it or not.
• Impulses of a Necrotic Heart, Red Lagoe (Sept 29, Death Knell Press): Dive into the darkest depths of the human heart, into the places where we keep ghosts and grief, obsession and revenge, and monsters-both otherworldly and human. The heart rots with every trauma, with every wrongdoing. And if we’re not careful, the necrosis invades. It has spread across these fifteen tales of horror, ranging from sci-fi to supernatural, psychological to body horror. None of which are for the faint of heart. Follow a lonely astronomer with a heart condition as he navigates a world on the brink of apocalypse. Palpate the grief of a father, clinging to hope as he follows an apparition into the woods. Cringe as beasts crawl from the chest of a young girl, seeking vengeance on those who’ve wronged her. Check your pulse before jumping into these horrors of the heart.
• Body of Work, ed. C.Z. Tacks (Sept 30, Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild): Body of Work gathers science fiction, fantasy, and horror from new voices and Australian luminaries, exploring the body – how we live in it, how we die in it, and how we transform it.
• Only the Living Are Lost, Simon Strantzas (Sept 30, Hippocampus): Canadian writer Simon Strantzas has long been recognized as one of the most dynamic voices in contemporary weird fiction. Gifted with a prose style that can evoke both terror and wonder, he endows his stories with an emotional resonance that sets them apart from much of the work in this field. In this new collection, Strantzas presents eleven tales, long and short, that display the wide array of motifs he utilizes. “In the Event of Death” tells of what a man finds when he explores his dead mother’s house. “Circle of Blood” is one of several stories that distinctively fuse a hard-boiled crime scenario with the weird. “Antripuu” relates what four hikers find in a remote forest. “Clay Pigeons” is an expansive novella set in Port Said, drawing upon the tradition of film noir in its suggestion of horrors amidst the parched desert of Egypt.
• Being Dead, Richard Leise (Sept, Brigids Gate Press): A novel of striking literary power and psychological suspense, Being Dead brilliantly subverts the conventions of the traditional ghost story… On Christmas morning, 1982, nine-year-old Jude Bendz survives the shocking death of his twin sister, Mary. Bewildered by grief, Jude finds comfort when, miraculously, Mary’s ghost appears, her spirit quickly informing a series of fantastic apparitions through which her life – and death – come into clearer focus. Problems soon arise, however, when his sister, promising salvation, places him at the center of a wide, yet narrowing plot that increasingly puts his life in danger, creating for Jude a blueprint that blurs the line between truth and revenge, love and hate, an account that threatens to shatter their family’s perfect image.
• Skin Thief, Suzan Palumbo (Sept, Neon Hemlock): The stories in this collection of dark fantasy and horror short stories grapple with the complexities of identity, racism, homophobia, immigration, oppression and patriarchy through nature, gothic hauntings, Trinidadian folklore and shape shifting. At the heart of the collection lie the questions: how do we learn to accept ourselves? How do we live in our own skin?

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