2026
Strange Girls by Sarvat Hasin Ava and Aliya meet at a small university near London and fall into a kind of friendship that is its own closed world. They are the strange girls; they write stories that bleed into each other; they are each other’s entire point of reference for a few years. The novel moves between two timelines, Aliya’s perspective during their university years and Ava’s a decade later, when they’re thrown back together at a mutual friend’s wedding, and everything that was left unsaid between them starts surfacing. Ava’s life has stalled; Aliya got the book deal they both wanted. The power has shifted, and neither of them quite knows how to stand in it. Hasin writes their friendship — claustrophobic, electric, all-consuming — with exacting precision, and the campus atmosphere has that immersive and tragic quality of a world that felt infinite while you were in it and shrank the moment you left. [The ending lands in the past, at what feels like a tentative, fragile attempt to give the friendship another go … and then it just stops. You already know, from everything you’ve read in the present timeline, that it didn’t take. But you don’t know why, or whether the attempt was halfhearted, or whether the rift was simply too deep. It’s a devastatingly perfect place to end a book.
The Anniversary by Alex Finlay Quinn and Jules are seventeen when their lives collide on May 1st, 1992 — he gets arrested breaking up a fight, she survives an attack by a serial killer who has been striking every May Day for years. The novel then follows them both across the next decade, checking in on each May 1st as they separately try to piece together what happened and why. The structure is interesting in theory, and there’s a lovely warmth in watching these two find their way toward each other over the years. It’s a serviceable thriller with an earnest heart, just not one that surprised me very much. (courtesy Netgalley)
There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm There is a moment in There Is No Antimemetics Division where a character arrives at her job, settles in, and gradually realizes she has been doing this job for decades. She is in charge of things. She has an entire history here. She just can’t remember any of it. That character is Marion Wheeler, Director of the Antimemetics Division, and she is the closest thing the book has to a beating heart. She is driven and capable and fighting a war she can’t remember fighting, against enemies she can’t remember encountering, with colleagues who may or may not still exist. The book lives in that register throughout. A secret organization exists to study and contain entities that protect themselves not through teeth or claws but by making themselves impossible to perceive or remember. Look away and they’re gone. Leave the room and you never knew they were there. The horror isn’t really the monsters. It’s the vertiginous, howling gap where the monsters were. On paper, the premise sounds unwieldy, and the book itself is a bit episodic; it began as installments for an online collaborative horror project called the SCP Foundation, and it reads that way, interconnected short stories rather than a traditional novel, each self-contained, each pulling you a little deeper. Characters are thinly drawn. Plot threads drop away without resolution, which is either a flaw or entirely intentional, given what the book is about. The ending goes big and then bigger, but then, the concept itself is pretty wild, so who am I to nitpick? What I can tell you is that it’s strangely, almost suspiciously easy to lose yourself in. The horror sneaks up on you after you’ve gotten comfortable. You think you have a grasp on how things work. But you really, really do not. What I retained after finishing it was next to nothing, just a simmering smattering of symptoms. Paranoid. Devastated. Destabilized. Whether I’ve forgotten the details because that’s simply how my brain works, or because the book worked exactly as intended, I genuinely cannot tell you. (I’ve been ruminating on this one so much I wrote an entire Rue Morgue column about it in the current issue!)
Make Me Better by Sarah Gailey Celia has tried MLMs. She has wanted a baby, lost pregnancies, and kept moving forward in the vague way people drift along when they don’t have anywhere in particular to be moving toward. Desperate and tired, she arrives at Kindred Cove, an isolated island community that holds an annual festival for carefully selected outsiders. The island promises healing and transformation and belonging, and Celia is someone who has been trying to build those things for herself for a long time without much luck. You understand immediately why she’s into this place, even as the weirdness and wrongness of her stay becomes weirder and wronger. The book takes its time getting where it’s going, maybe too much time. Multiple POVs and timeline jumps are fine in theory, but layered on top of an already slow burn, they start to feel like obstacles rather than exciting or intriguing texture. Every time I got traction in one thread it would shift, and the momentum would have to rebuild from scratch. The cult mechanics seemed extremely well-researched; the manipulation here is warm and attentive rather than overtly sinister, which is more unsettling, but the repetition of the community’s language and rituals started to work against the book rather than for it. By the end, I wasn’t surprised by where things landed. Celia felt fated for this place from the first page. Whether that reads as tragedy or arrival probably depends on you. (courtesy Netgalley)
Honeysuckle by Bar Fridman-Tell Daye is a girl woven from flowers by Rory’s older sister, who needed the eight-year-old off her back and decided a botanical companion was the solution. It’s a loose reimagining of the Welsh myth of Blodeuwedd, which is a premise I love, and the early sections, where Daye is new and strange and Rory is just a lonely kid, have a pleasantly eerie fairy tale quality. Then Rory grows up and develops feelings for the creature his sister made him, and the book follows that dynamic for a very long time, through many repeated seasonal cycles, and it is slow and it is uncomfortable in ways that did not feel productive or illuminating to me. I understand what it’s doing thematically. I just did not want to be there for it.
The Burial Tide by Neil Sharpson I’ve never read a book of fiction, horror or otherwise, that uses this particular piece of Irish folklore as its central conceit, and The Burial Tide is a hell of an introduction to it. Mara Fitch wakes up inside a coffin, six feet underground, with no memory of who she is or how she got there. She claws her way out and emerges on Inishbannock, a small fog-wrapped Irish island where everyone seems to know her, and nobody seems to want her back. The opening scene yanks you by the collar and you tumble headfirst into the story whether you’re ready or not. From there, it unspools as both a mystery and a folk horror, Mara piecing together her identity while the island’s secrets close in around her, and the creatures that eventually emerge are grotesque and strange, and like many other things in this story, I’ve never encountered their like. Sharpson keeps you uncertain about who to trust right up until the end, and I had a good time with every second of it.
Crossroads by Laurel Hightower The crossroads as a place of supernatural transaction has a long history: Robert Johnson, folk tradition, the idea that where roads meet, something waits for yearning, for blood. Hightower takes that mythology and builds a story of profound grief around it, about a mother two years out from losing her son who returns nightly to his roadside memorial and one evening inadvertently bleeds into the ground there. Short, sharp, effective.
The Estate by Sarah Jost Camille Leray is an art historian who can slip inside a piece of artwork and inhabit the emotional world of the artist at the moment of creation, taking others with her if she chooses, which makes her either the most valuable person in any auction house or the most dangerous, depending on what she finds. After her weird powers lead her to make a call about a piece that costs her her job, Maxime Foucault, an aristocratic heir with a sprawling Brittany estate and a history with Camille, offers her a chance at redemption by authenticating a collection of sculptures by a mysterious vanished artist. The chateau is atmospheric, and the art world details are intriguing, but Camille’s dumb obsession with Maxime, who is fairly transparently a tool from the beginning, drags down everything around it. You spend the book waiting for her to see what everyone else already has, and the patience that requires is not really rewarded. The friendship between Camille and Lila is the more interesting relationship and the one I wished the book had focused on.
The Belles by Lacey N. Dunham Bellerton College in 1951, is all velvet ribbons and strict rules and prestige, and Deena Williams is a working-class girl doing everything she can (kinda on the unethical downlow) to pass as someone who belongs there. She falls in with five other freshmen, and they become the Belles, singled out by the college president’s wife as the most promising—and also kind of the shittiest— girls on campus. There are also disappearances and possibly hauntings! The setup is exactly what dark academia promises and for a while it delivers… the atmosphere is good, the sense of something sinister underneath the propriety is well sustained. But after a while it loses steam or loses its way, or loses something. But Deena herself never quite worked for me, and the mystery, when it finally resolves, doesn’t pay off what the buildup promised. I was rooting for this one. We were all rooting for you!
The House of Whispers by Laura Purcell I keep waiting for another Laura Purcell novel to jazz me up the way The Silent Companions did, and, sadly, this one is not it. Hester arrives at Morvoren House in Cornwall to care for the now mute and partially paralyzed Miss Pinecroft, finding a household of superstitious staff performing rituals and muttering about fairies and whatever lurks in the caves beneath the house. The second timeline takes us back forty years to Louise Pinecroft’s childhood, watching her family succumb to consumption while her father fills those same caves with sick prisoners for his experiments in sea air as a cure. The bones of a good Gothic novel are all here: Cornwall, caves, fairy folklore, a woman with a terrible secret locked inside her, but it never quite happened for me. The atmosphere is present without being immersive, the characters present without being compelling.
Where Are You Really From by Elaine Hsieh Chou “The decision to try for beauty meant I could also fall short of it, which would be more painful than not trying at all.” That line is from somewhere in this collection, and I can’t recall exactly where, or who said it, or why, but it doesn’t matter because as soon as I read it, I just knew this book was going to be practically perfect. Seven stories, each one its own strange world. A mail-order bride arrives from Taiwan, packed in a cardboard box. Two teenage girls plot to kill and cook their downstairs neighbor. A father reconnects with his estranged daughter by sneaking onto the set of her film as a background extra. And then there is “You Put a Rabbit on Me,” in which an American woman moves to Paris to find herself and instead finds her French doppelgänger — someone closer to who she always wanted to be — and I laughed out loud and felt a little sick and then wanted to immediately read it again. Elaine Hsieh Chou writes with ruthless precision, funny and dark and strange and occasionally disturbing, and every story goes somewhere different than you thought, delightfully unpredictable. If you like fiction that is funny and dark and unsettling, uneasefully human, this is your book.
The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue Rachel is a broke university student in Cork working at a bookstore when she meets James, and they fall into one of those friendships that immediately swallows everything else. They move in together, they scheme together, they enable each other’s worst impulses with tremendous enthusiasm. When Rachel develops a crush on her married English professor and James helps her devise a plan to seduce him at a bookstore reading, it backfires in a sadlarious kind of way that changes everything and sets the rest of the novel in motion. O’Donoghue is very good at writing people who are making genuinely bad decisions for reasons you completely understand, and the friendship between Rachel and James is the kind where you lose the ability to talk each other out of anything, which is both the best and worst thing about it. My one complaint — and it is a small (?) one in a book I loved —is that James spends a fair amount of the book as the gay best friend, the comic relief, and sometimes it’s written so broadly that when you laugh you start to feel a little bit like part of the problem.
Little Wild by Laura Evans opens with an hourly countdown to Joanie’s arrival at Snare House, and that structural conceit captures the obsessive, breathless quality of Margaret’s inner life perfectly. She has been living as a ward of Joanie’s family, in love with her in the way that has nowhere to go in 1937 Suffolk. When they’re discovered together, Margaret is banished to her father’s cabin in the woods, and the book shifts a fair bit of strangeness — magpies, inherited magic, the shadow of her mother’s fate, dreams she wakes from with dirt on her feet. The forest atmosphere is poetic and beautiful, and Evans writes the creeping unease of Margaret’s isolation wonderfully. But the book never quite commits. The magic stays ambiguous in ways that feel less like deliberate restraint and more like uncertainty about what the story actually is, and by the end, it has neither gone far enough into the dark nor resolved enough of what it set up. Margaret’s obsession with Joanie is vivid and consuming, but Joanie herself barely registers, which makes it hard to know how seriously to take the love story at the center of everything. A gorgeous idea, imperfectly executed. (courtesy Netgalley)
Marla by Jonathan Janz Marla Gorman is the local legend of King’s Branch, Indiana — the strange girl who never leaves the creepy Gothic house she shares with her mother, spotted staring from her bedroom window at the exact moment murders begin to occur around town. The setup is all small-town atmosphere and creeping dread, and the elusive figure at the window…very much 1980s pulp horror energy, which I mean descriptively rather than as a complaint (except that the 1980s also had a particular way of writing women and about women that I found myself bumping up against here. The male gaze is present and accounted for.) Marla herself remains frustratingly opaque, her motivations, her history, the why of what she is, and I kept wanting the book to give me more of her rather than more of the men trying to figure her out. A fun romp of a horror novel that I wished had trusted its central character a little more. (courtesy Netgalley)
The Unknown by Riley Sager In 1926, five women vanished from New Avalon, a remote Vermont island that had been home to a commune of spiritual mediums. Their dresses were found hanging from an oak tree, no bodies, and to this day, no explanation. A century later, struggling actress Marin Keane (whose only screen credit is an eczema cream commercial) unexpectedly lands a lead role in a film about the disappearances, opposite legendary actress Violet Wright and under the direction of Ronan Peters, who insists his actresses actually live amongst each other on the island for a week — period clothing, no electricity, no phones — to prepare for their roles. Things are awkward and uncomfortable before the freaky stuff even starts happening. Daisy Rue was one of the women who vanished in 1926, and her diary entries run alongside Marin’s increasingly panicked present, the two timelines mirroring each other in increasingly unsettling ways. I’ve been let down by Sager’s last few books, so it was a relief to find this one working. The eerie island atmosphere is thick and sustained, the twists piled up in ways I didn’t see coming, and Marin, ambitious but naive, vulnerable, and surrounded by people she can’t quite trust or read, is easy to root for. A return to form! (courtesy Netgalley; pub date August 4, 2026)
Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker Lee Turner has just killed his college roommate (or thinks he has, the details are blurred and bloody ) and flees to his father’s remote house in Japan, a place hidden by sword ferns where the bedroom window is not always a window and a woman with a sword keeps appearing in the yard. In 1877, Sen is a young samurai’s daughter hiding in the same house, doing terrible things to earn her father’s approval. The two timelines circle each other and eventually collide, and the Japanese mythology woven through it gives the whole thing a haunting, otherworldly texture. A few chapters from the end, something shifts, becomes more mythological, stranger, and I feel like I should have seen it coming, but I absolutely did not. Still a little confused about Hina, but I don’t think that’s entirely the book’s fault?
The Season of Sinking by Daphne Woolsoncroft Imogen Bly returns to her lakeside Washington hometown after her mother’s sudden death, joining her twin sister Amelia to pack up the family house, and almost immediately starts sensing that something is wrong — that someone is watching her, that her mother’s death wasn’t accidental, that the town is keeping secrets. There’s a third narrator running through the book, anonymous, watching Imogen from the shadows, and I guess that part kinda works. But the weird writing kept pulling me out of it. Coffee does not dance down a hallway. (Drift, waft, sure.) A small voice does not shine like the sun. (WTF?) There is too much smirking, particularly from men, and at one point a character says, “I just want to get out of this place and never come back,” like a cranky child who has been told she cannot have dessert. Ugh. Reading this book was mostly painful.
Please Enjoy Your Stay by Tara Goedjen Mia was thirteen when her cousin was murdered at an Austrian castle, and her testimony put the killer away. A decade later a true crime podcast starts poking holes in the case, and Mia returns to the castle — now being converted into a luxury hotel — working undercover as a nanny while she reinvestigates. The story moves between timelines and incorporates podcast excerpts alongside the main narrative, which gives it a neat, layered quality. The castle atmosphere felt pleasantly moody, and the mystery unspools at a decent pace. I don’t remember much of it now, but I was clearly entertained while I was in it, because I noted it as 4 stars.
…and that’s it! I don’t think I’ve been reading as much these past few months as I usually do. But that’s fine! I’ve been working on other things, and sometimes that’s just the way it goes.
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