Recently arrived horror fiction
Brutal murders in the Hebrides, a Korean love story gone wrong and British folk horror highlight our recent horror arrivals.
Saltwash by Andrew Michael Hurley
Tom, who is facing a terminal cancer diagnosis, travels to the decaying and tide-threatened village of Saltwash to meet his penpal Oliver, who is also facing death. An unlikely locale for a holiday, Tom soon faces a surreal nightmare - a group obsessed with ritualistic 'washing', an ancient salt-water purging meant to scrub away the sins and physical ailments of the dying. Hurley adds to his back catalogue of folk horror with this creepy gothic psychological exploration of a community that survives on trading in secrets and absolution.
The haunting of Paynes Hollow by Kelley Armstrong
When Sam Payne’s estranged grandfather dies, she is shocked to inherit a valuable lakefront property in Paynes Hollow on the shores of Lake Ontario. The catch? She must live in the abandoned family cottage for 30 days. This is a psychological minefield for Sam; she hasn't been back since she was a child, when she witnessed her father burying a body, an event that led to his suicide. At the cottage Sam faces not only the memories and realities of her childhood trauma, but the possibilities that her increasing nightmares and paranoia are indications of something darker lurking.
The buffalo hunter hunter by Stephen Graham Jones
The trend of 'indigenous revenge horror' is revitalising the genre and Stephen Graham Jones is an author at the forefront, using the European invasion and colonisation of North America as a vehicle to explore the horrors of ecological devastation and genocide. Good Stab is a Blackfeet man who became a vampire after the Marias Massacre in Montana Territory that lead to the death of over 200 people. Now, in 1912, he tells his story to a Lutheran priest.
The staircase in the woods by Chuck Wendig
In 1998, during a camping trip five high school friends find a literal staircase to nowhere in the forest. One friend, Matty Shiffman, climbed it, jumped off the top, and vanished. The staircase then disappeared. Twenty years later, the group of scarred and broken adults is summoned back by Nick, the only friend who never stopped searching - the staircase has returned. The friends must climb it together to find Matty, but they discover that the stairs lead to a shifting, malevolent "House of Memories" that physically manifests their deepest traumas, guilts, and secrets. Wendig mixes visceral body horror with 'malevolent architecture' and inspiration from classics such as IT to create a terrifying and psychologically horrifying story.
Dam finds her boyfriend, Gu, murdered on the street by loan sharks. Rather than call the police, she carries his body home, cleanses him, and begins to eat him—an act they had once promised each other to ensure they would never be parted. Sold as Romeo & Juliet meets The Vegetarian, Choi Jin-young uses the genre as a way to comment on bone-grinding poverty and inherited debt in South Korea.
Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet
On the remote Hebridean island of Benbecula, in 1857, angus MacPhee, a troubled and violent young man brutally murdered three members of his family, leaving his siblings questioning if they could have prevented the tragedy. Five years later older brother Malcolm lives as a pariah in his family's isolated 'skullhouse', increasingly alcoholic and unstable and recounts the events leading up to the tragedy. Much like Burnet's Booker Prize nominated His Bloody Project, Benbecula is grim and dour, made even more so by the real life inspirations.
When local drug dealers threaten his incarcerated mother, Arthur Oakes and five of his fellow Rackham College students summon the fabled dragon King Sorrow from the nether. But dragons strike a hard bargain, and Arthur and his friends soon discover they must name a sacrifice for King Sorrow every year, or risk being the dragon's snack themselves. With plenty of hidden Easter eggs and nods to Hill's famous father, King Sorrow is a fast paced and thrilling work of horror fantasy that mixes dark academia with lighter moments, romance and the occult.
The Visitor by Rebecca Starford
When her parents die in the Queensland outback in mysterious circumstances, Laura, her husband and daughter return to Australia from London to renovate and sell her parent's home. However, the house seems to hold it's own memories and grudges. As Laura unearths her parents' unsettling obsession with the outback and deals with a nosy neighbour who has wormed her way into family affairs, her grip on reality begins to fray. In this 'Australian gothic' or 'Outback noir', Rebecca Starford writes about the ghosts of family secrets and the haunting of estrangement as equally unsettling as poltergeists and spooks.
