When the end of the world as we know it comes about in Rumaan Alam’s gripping third novel, Leave the World Behind, the two families brought together in the indulgent surroundings of a Long Island country retreat feel, well, uneasy. There’s no big moment, no flash of white light, alien […]
Read MoreHorror
Ruthie Fear, Maxim Loskutoff
In Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, young Ruthie Fear sees an apparition: a strange, headless creature near a canyon creek. Raised in a trailer by her stubborn, bowhunting father, Ruthie develops a powerful connection with the natural world but struggles to find her place in a society shaped by men. As she […]
Read MoreThe Only Good Indians, Stephen Graham Jones
This book follows four childhood friends ten years after an elk hunt gone wrong. Some of them leave the rez, while others stay, and the spirit of Elk Head Woman is seeking revenge against them all. The book has blood and gore, thrilling chase scenes and suspenseful psychological horror. But […]
Read MoreFungoid, William Meikle
When the end came, it wasn’t zombies, asteroids, global warming or nuclear winter. It was something that escaped from a lab. Something small, and very hungry. It starts with deadly rain that delivers death where it falls, but soon the whole planet is under threat as the infection spreads, consuming […]
Read MoreMexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia
It’s difficult to highlight the eco-horror in this one without spoiling the twist, but suffice it to say, the Doyles have a hefty supernatural secret. In Mexican Gothic, the horror isn’t in nature turning against people but is in the way that extraction of natural resources helps entrench colonial powers […]
Read MoreHollow Kingdom, Kira Jane Buxton
Hollow Kingdom is a humorous, big-hearted, and boundlessly beautiful romp through the apocalypse and the world that comes after, where even a cowardly crow can become a hero. Goodreads Reviews Back to GoodReads
Read MoreSisyphean, Dempow Torishima
With this stellar debut volume–a “mosaic novel” depicting a world of infinite biomorphic perversity that feels at once surreal yet authentic; estranging yet welcoming; otherwordly yet familiar–Dempow Torishima gives the world a book of fantastika with very few literary precedents. –Paul Di Filippo, Lotus Mag …Frankly, this is in line […]
Read MoreThe Girl in Red, Christina Henry
Between climate change and the fear of impending war, civilization’s collapse feels closer every day. In her latest novel, The Girl in Red, Christina Henry explores what comes after society falls apart. –Paste Magazine Goodreads Reviews Back to GoodReads
Read MoreBy the Feet of Men, Grant Price
The world’s population has been decimated by the Change, a chain reaction of events triggered by global warming. In Europe, governments have fallen, cities have crumbled and the wheels of production have ground to a halt. The Alps region, containing most of the continent’s remaining fresh water, has become a […]
Read MoreMetro 2033, Dmitry Glukhovsky
The year is 2033. The world has been reduced to rubble. Humanity is nearly extinct. The half-destroyed cities have become uninhabitable through radiation. Beyond their boundaries, they say, lie endless burned-out deserts and the remains of splintered forests. Survivors still remember the past greatness of humankind. But the last remains […]
Read MoreThe Migration, Helen Marshall
Marshall is painting on a large canvas here and her style is unabashedly baroque: the novel is characterized by a high level of drama, intensity, and movement, including a repeated motif of flooding, raging waters that claim (or threaten to claim) various characters over the course of the narrative. Climate change […]
Read MoreMoon of the Crusted Snow, Waubgeshig Rice
With winter looming, a small northern Anishinaabe community goes dark. Cut off, people become passive and confused. Panic builds as the food supply dwindles. While the band council and a pocket of community members struggle to maintain order, an unexpected visitor arrives, escaping the crumbling society to the south. Soon […]
Read MoreCompulsory Games, Robert Aikman
Aickman’s superbly written tales terrify not with standard thrills and gore but through a radical overturning of the laws of nature and everyday life. His territory of the strange, of the “void behind the face of order,” is a surreal region that grotesquely mimics the quotidian: Is that river the […]
Read MoreThe Merry Spinster, Mallory Ortberg
Unfalteringly faithful to its beloved source material, The Merry Spinster also illuminates the unsuspected, and frequently, alarming emotional complexities at play in the stories we tell ourselves, and each other, as we tuck ourselves in for the night. Goodreads Review Back to GoodReads
Read MoreDevil’s Day, Andrew Michael Hurley
The new gothic accepts input from many sources: from industrial archaeology to ecofiction, from contemporary nature writing to the brutalism associated with film-maker Ben Wheatley or novelist Ben Myers. It draws as much from children’s fiction, folk music and horror cinema of the 1960s and 70s as it does from more traditionally […]
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