December’s new horror books include polar Gothic, a new Alien tie-in novel, Nigerian coming-of-age intrigue, historical demons, haunted houses galore, and much, 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.
December 2023’s new horror books:
- The Daughters of Block Island, Christa Carmen (Dec 1, Thomas & Mercer): In this ingenious and subversive twist on the classic gothic novel, the mysterious past of an island mansion lures two sisters into a spiderweb of scandal, secrets, and murder.
- Dead Letters: Episodes of Epistolary Horror, ed. Jacob Steven Mohr (Dec 1, Crystal Lake): Brace yourself for Dead Letters, an anthology that resurrects the chilling power of epistolary fiction—where ordinary documents become hidden records of our darkest fantasies and bleakest nightmares.
- Aliens: Bishop, T.R. Napper (Dec 5, Titan): A direct sequel to Aliens and Alien 3—Weyland-Yutani, the Colonial Marines, and Bishop’s creator all pursue the android for the deadly Xenomorph data contained in his brain. Written by T. R. Napper, author of the acclaimed 36 Streets, whose explosive work explores the artificial intelligence and what it is to be human.
- Dazzling, Chikodili Emelumadu (Dec 5, Abrams): A Nigerian girl makes a dangerous bargain with a spirit to bring back her dead father. A boarding school student finds herself heir to the magical and traditionally male Leopard Society. Their destinies and their choices alike set their paths on a dangerous collision course.
- The Folly, Gemma Amor (Dec 5, Polis Books): An ex-con and his daughter move into an abandoned decorative folly on the Cornish coastline to escape their past, but a stranger bearing secrets—and an important message—soon catches up with them. An atmospheric nod to The Lighthouse, with hints of Du Maurier’s Rebecca, played out on a lonely, Cornish backdrop, The Folly is visceral mystery and family drama, a dark examination of love, loyalty, guilt and possession that draws on the very real horror of betrayal by those closest to us, by those we love the best.
- Lumberjack, Anthony Engebretson (Dec 5, Tenebrous Press): Nebraska, 1901. Neville yearns to prove himself a “true man”, but he faces obstacle after obstacle. Along his journey, he meets J. Sterling Morton, an illustrious statesman who could offer Neville the salvation he desires. For Morton suffers at the hands of an elusive demon, one that Neville himself has encountered. Tasked with killing the creature, Neville hopes to rise to the status of legend; but he may just as easily be crushed beneath forces that outmatch him—or become the very monster that he hopes to vanquish—in this grimly comic, thoroughly bloody historical eco-noir tale.
- They Will Dream in the Garden, Gabriela Damián Miravete, trans. Adrian Demopulos (Dec 5, Rosarium): In They Will Dream in the Garden, Otherwise Award-winning author, Gabriela Damián Miravete elaborates the disconcerting experience of living as a woman in Mexico—a territory characterized by its great contrasts, from violence and activism to affectionate and communal resistance: flowers that arise from the earth to expand the cosmic consciousness of those who take it, nuns who create artifacts so that their native languages do not perish, a memorial for the victims of femicide that the State controls, but whose old guardian wants to turn into a laboratory to return their lost future…
- Transcendental Mutilation, Ryan Harding (Dec 5, Death’s Head Press): A trio of young people stranded on an uncharted island discover its sickening secrets. A man contracts a degenerative disease through a webcam encounter. An office worker follows the object of his affection into a mysterious club where life, death, and anatomy have no limits. A reforming necrophiliac struggles to maintain the illusion of normalcy in a new relationship. A woman awakens with other captives in the basement of a madman using them to attract impossible prey. A decade after the infamous Genital Grinder, Ryan Harding returns with ten more stories, collected for the first time–including the Splatterpunk Award-winning tales “The Seacretor” and “Angelbait”–which plunder the depths of depravity and obsession, yielding offenses and transformations of the flesh never before seen or carved. His first solo work in years dissects its themes and characters alike in a sublime autopsy worthy of the hardcore horror pantheon. Even the vomitorium has its philosophy, and the keys to revelation are all serrated.
- Where the Dead Wait, Ally Wilkes (Dec 5, Atria): An eerie, atmospheric Polar Gothic following a Victorian explorer in search of his lost shipmate and his own redemption—from the author of the “vivid, immersive” (The Guardian) horror novel All the White Spaces.
- Heavy Oceans, Tyler Jones (Dec 7, DarkLit Press): The Mist meets Succulina in a vicious fisherman’s tale of a world flipped upside down in a fever dream of strange discoveries, blood, and mayhem.
- Never Dead, Joe Scipione (Dec 8, Wicked House Press): After a series of grave robberies in the 1920’s goes unsolved until reporter Michael Jacobs follows a new thread. He gets too close to the truth and becomes part of the story he is looking to write. At the same time, wealthy businessman Edmund Creighton organizes a group of equally wealthy families and individuals in the Chicago area to finance illegal experiments in the basement of his mansion. These experiments require the presence of recently dead bodies. By the time these dark secrets are uncovered, it may be too late for the truth to make any difference.
- Epiphany, J.V. Gachs (Dec 9, Off Limits Press): When pregnant Estela learns that her wife Eva has hanged herself from an oak tree, she can’t believe she would have done so voluntarily. Eva, a journalist obsessed with the crimes of the so-called Garden of Horrors, was about to release a podcast about the convicted killer, Coral, who always maintained it wasn’t her who slaughtered her family and her missing newborn, but an evil forest spirit. As Estela dives deep into the recordings, emails, and letters from Eva’s investigation, in Coral’s retelling of the murders, she will be forced to face a simple question that could cost her life as well as her unborn baby: Do you believe in magic?
- The Plastic Priest, Nicole Cushing (Dec 15, Cemetery Dance): When the soul has been thoroughly poisoned, the body must abandon it. Everything feels unreal afterwards, but plastic heads shed no tears. Bram Stoker Award® winning author Nicole Cushing offers an excursion into the Weird, a quiet novella of a madwoman in a mad town, as an Episcopal priest grapples with the meaning of faith, reality, and if there is anything real to either of them, at the end of it all.
- Three Sixes and a Forked Tongue or Cold Medicine and a Liar, James Tyler Toothman (Dec 21, Millions of Colors): The year is nineteen seventy one. Lost deep in the woods of West Virginia, two childhood friends discover a book that dismantles and unravels everything they once considered reality, And when an enigmatic stranger rolls into their small coal mining town in the back of a Rolls Royce, the teenagers are plunged deep into a world of drugs, sex, music, and violence. Together, the two friends confront the forces of good and evil head on – the unwitting pawns of an eternal game played without rules or directions. Feverish, satirical, and deliciously dark, Three Sixes and a Forked Tongue is an offbeat, coming-of-age, face-melting novel unlike anything you’ve read before.
- Children of the Dark, Jonathan Janz (Dec 29, Cemetery Dance): Fifteen-year-old Will Burgess is used to rough times. Abandoned by his father, son of a drug-addicted mother, and charged with raising his six-year-old sister, Will has far more to worry about than most high school freshmen. Will’s troubles, however, are just beginning. Because one of the nation’s most notorious criminals—the Moonlight Killer—has escaped from prison and is headed straight toward Will’s hometown. And something else is lurking in Savage Hollow, the forest surrounding Will’s rundown house. Something ancient and infinitely evil. When the worst storm of the decade descends on Shadeland, Will and his friends must confront unfathomable horrors. Everyone Will loves—his mother, his little sister, Mia, and his friends—will be threatened. And very few of them will escape with their lives.
- God Machine, Greg F. Gifune (Dec, Cemetery Dance): In a hotel room on Cape Cod, a troubled young prostitute brutally takes her own life, leaving cryptic clues as to why written in blood on the walls. When head of hotel security and former cop Chris Tallo finds her savaged body, he sets out to discover why the woman committed suicide in such a vicious manner. Saddled with a drinking problem, and already emotionally destroyed and grieving the loss of his daughter, killed in Iraq five years earlier, his search lures him into a disturbing underworld populated by those who trade in black magic, pain and death.
- Strange Tales of Terror, ed. Eugene Johnson (Dec, Cemetery Dance): There are strange horrifying events that happen in this world and the next. Situations that can not be defined by reality. In this book you will find such accounts told by some of the most influential authors of today as they pay homage to the horror genre from the 1950 to now which has nurtured their inner darkness!
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