This September, dozens of new horror releases will hit bookshelves from some of the biggest names in the game and some of the newest voices in the genre, all of them worthy of your attention.

It’s a month so full of great new scary books that 10 titles wouldn’t cut it, so enjoy this double-sized helping of our Most Anticipated Horror Books for September 2026. 

Blacktail by Scott Hawkins (September 1)

It’s difficult to describe Scott Hawkins’ blockbuster novel The Library at Mount Char, a phantasmagoria of conceptual brilliance that’s part dark fantasy, part cosmic horror, part something else entirely. The same holds true of his long-awaited follow-up. Featuring talking animals, forest gods, and much more, this is a dark descent into an invented world that both fits inside our own and swallows it whole, and will no doubt rank as one of the most imaginative novels you’ll read this year.

Kiss Slay Replay by Rachel Harrison (September 1)

Every new Rachel Harrison novel is an event, an occasion for one of horror’s best to explore yet another subgenre or conceptual hook. This time, though, Harrison’s doing a lot of things her readers love – a destination setting, a female protagonist at a crossroads in life, and so on – with two different hooks. Kiss Slay Replay isn’t just a slasher set at a wedding. It’s a time loop slasher set at a wedding.

The Eye of Goliath by Diego Muzzio (September 1)

The English-language debut of a rising Argentinian genre star, The Eye of Goliath is a new spin on the classic Jekyll and Hyde story, following a doctor from Scotland in 1920 who takes on a new patient just returned from an island off the coast of Argentina, roiling with madness and brutality. It’s a very good time for new twists on foundational horror texts, and this one carries the recommendation of no less an icon than Mariana Enriquez, so you can bet I’ll be reading it.

All Hallows Eve ed. by Ellen Datlow (September 8)

If you see Ellen Datlow’s name on a horror anthology, pick it up. The doyenne of modern horror short fiction editing returns with a new collection featuring some of horror’s best writers spinning their ultimate Halloween tales. Stephen Graham Jones, Nathan Ballingrud, Josh Malerman, Clay McLeod Chapman, John Langan and more all lent their voices to this one, so it’s a must-have for Halloween reading.

Pictures of You by Josh Malerman (September 8)

The first Malerman novel since Incidents Around the House, Pictures of You begins with a woman named Emily who, abducted after a night out, finds herself trapped in a room where her only contact with the outside world seems to be a mysterious silhouette on the other side of an empty picture frame. Who is the strange shape and woman’s voice on the other side of the frame? If Emily’s going to find out, she must first reckon with the idea that she might be trapped inside someone else’s art. It’s a conceptually daring new outing from one of horror’s brightest lights.

We Turn Gruesome At Night by Eric LaRocca (September 8)

The second book in LaRocca’s Burnt Sparrow Trilogy, We Turn Gruesome At Night picks up the action a decade later, as the surviving characters from the last novel dig deeper into Burnt Sparrow’s dark history, secrets, and threats. I’m hesitant to say more for those who perhaps haven’t read the first book in this series yet, but reading LaRocca burst out of his novella-length shell and into something so expansive has been a joy so far, and I can’t wait to go back.

In These Gilded, Ghostly Hearts by Gwendolyn Kiste (September 15)

One of the most accomplished and compelling horror writers of her generation takes on a haunted house sequel to The Great Gatsby in this new novella. Set decades after the original classic novel, Gwendolyn Kiste’s story picks up as Mel, the daughter of Daisy Buchanan, goes in search of answers after her mother’s death, and finds her ghost trapped in the derelict mansion of Jay Gatsby. To save her mother, Mel will have to go deep into the past, uncovering old secrets and wounds, and picking apart one of the most famous literary legacies of all time. 

Rooted by Leopoldo Gout (September 15)

Leopoldo Gout is one of the most exciting voices in the Latine Horror space, and Rooted is the latest dark tale to emerge from his imagination. The book follows Aurora, an art lawyer who’s succeeded in bringing a legendary Aztec God’s likeness back to Mexico City. But the moment she lands back in her home country, something isn’t right, because it turns out some old gods still hold power. I love any book with a plot like this, and when it comes from a writer like Gout, I’m especially excited.

The Rouse by China Mieville (September 15)

If there’s any book on this list that slightly intimidates me in a very exciting way, it’s this novel, marking the long-awaited return of speculative fiction legend China Mieville. Clocking in at more than 1200 pages (not a typo!), the book is described as “at once an encyclopaedic and multitudinous saga of a bloody century and the intimate story of two lives, their loves, regrets, and secrets—and a terrifying journey into infinite mystery.” That’s really all I need to know, and I’m ready to get lost in one of Mieville’s worlds again. 

This Movie Doesn’t End the Way We Want by Hailey Piper (September 15)

Three decades ago, three friends walked into a movie theater. Only one came out. So begins the latest from horror superstar Hailey Piper, the story of the lone survivor of that strange night, the movie that caused it, and the mystery that sends Val McQueen diving back into the darkness. I will read anything Hailey Piper writes, and you should too. The fact that it’s a cursed movie story is the cherry on top. 

Incarnate by Alma Katsu (September 22)

Alma Katsu’s latest is a dive into the darkness of social media, deepfakes, AI, and more, all wrapped up in a modern spin on The Picture of Dorian Gray. Incarnate follows Dorothy, a failed influencer who, through her new job working for a deepfake coder, realizes she finally has the chance to create the online persona of her dreams. But that creation has consequences, and when they turn violent, Dorothy takes a journey that might make her wish she’d never wanted to be seen at all. One of the most detail-focused and narratively gifted writers working in the genre right now, Katsu’s always worth reading, and I can’t wait to see where she takes this one.

The Man in the Watch Still Visits Me At Night by Joshua Chaplinsky (September 22)

Joshua Chaplinsky is one of the most daring horror writers at work right now, and his latest book continues that trend. Set in and around the dilapidated Vogel House, The Man in the Watch Still Visits Me at Night is the story of how the title being, a strange malevolent entity which calls the house home, affects the lives of three different women who might be living in three different worlds. It’s a dark descent in the Weird from one of the weirdest (complimentary) doing it right now. 

Mazywood by Tananarive Due (September 22)

Tananarive Due builds horror novels like cathedrals, digging deep into the many branches of her narratives to find their dark heart, which means Mazywood has all the makings of a book we can get happily lost in. The novel follows a Black filmmaker named Johnny who returns to the mountain home of his grandmother, an actress in Hollywood during the Golden Age who built a career despite the prejudices of the era. Johnny hopes to reconnect to his family history and retreat from the world, but what he finds instead is generational trauma rooted in a bargain his grandmother struck decades ago. If you’ve read Due’s stories like “Incident at Bear Creek Lodge,“ you know she’s been building this world for a while, and now we all get to experience it. 

Our Cut of Salt by Deena Helm (September 22)

The story of three generations of Palestinian women and the one haunted house that unites them all, Our Cut of Salt marks Deena Helm’s debut, and it’s already built a ton of buzz. The book follows Marina, who is determined to return to her grandmother’s former home, a home the family hasn’t seen since the Nakba drove them out decades earlier. What she finds instead is a nightmare, and what we’ll find, hopefully, is a Palestinian horror gem that’s already garnering loads of praise. 

Traps and Spectres: Stories by Philip Fracassi (September 22)

The author of Boys in the Valley, Gothic, and more, Philip Fracassi’s been building a reputation and a massive catalog of work for quite a while now, and it’s time for some of the most exciting pieces of that work to find a new home in this fiction collection. Featuring both short stories and novellas, this is an exciting cross-section of Fracassi’s chilling gifts, whether you’re new to his work or you’ve been around for years. 

Worry Box by Chris Panatier (September 22)

Chris Panatier is one of the most gifted horror writers working today, and it feels like he’s on the cusp of an even bigger audience. To help that along, we have Worry Box, a psychological horror novel that follows a family who moves into a new home, the foster child they’re about to officially adopt, and that child’s intrusive thoughts as they turn stranger, more violent, and harder to control. I don’t know much more about the book than that, but I can’t wait to find out more, because I know what Chris Panatier can do.

Crone by Keith Rosson (September 29)

Few writers have ever merged horror and crime fiction as effectively as Keith Rosson. Now, the author of Fever House and Coffin Moon takes on witches with Crone, the story of an ex-detective turned gang enforcer who, in trying to solve the murder of his boss, unearths secrets leading to his daughter’s disappearance a decade ago, and beyond. Apart from having my favorite cover on any horror novel this year, this is also one of my most-anticipated reads of 2026, full stop. 

Nightjars by Michael Wehunt (September 29)

Michael Wehunt is a stirringly original voice in modern horror, and after his banger debut novel The October Film Haunt, he’s back to take on vampires. Nightjars follows Luke, a divorcee who’s suddenly wrapped up in a mystery, backed up by old photographs he doesn’t remember, that connects him back to his murderous father. Is Luke a blood-draining monster like his Dad, despite all the years he’s worked to put that behind him, or is he something else? This book explores that journey, and I can’t wait to take the plunge. 

Something Followed Us Home ed. by Cynthia Pelayo (September 29)

If you want a who’s who of the Latine Horror world right now, all in short story form, don’t miss this anthology. Edited by the great Cynthia Pelayo (fresh off the triumph of It Came From Neverland), this book brings together some of the best Latine authors in genre fiction right now, from Mariana Enriquez to Leopoldo Gout to Pelayo herself, all of them telling horror stories built around their heritage. I got an early peek, and it’s a must-have. 

Trad Wife by Sarah Langan (September 29)

If there’s a single book over the last, say, three months or so that’s come up again and again in horror lit spaces where I roam as an absolute must-read book, it’s this one from multi-Stoker-winning legend Sarah Langan. The book, as the title suggests, follows a “trad wife” influencer who presents her seemingly idyllic life to millions of fans online every day. It also follows the journalist who visits that influencer, intending to find the secret behind all of her success, and finds something more horrifying than she could have imagined. This one seems destined for best of the year lists at the end of 2026, so pick it up early so you can be part of the conversation. 

The post Time Loops, Dark Gods, and More: A Massive Guide To The Most Anticipated Horror Books of September appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

In the real world, however, each of these five novels was deeply influenced by the time during which they were written, with Pargin bringing up the edgy cynicism of the ’90s Clinton era which informed John Dies at the End and the post-9/11 paranoia from the first sequel.

This willingness to engage with the current zeitgeist may result in some interesting continuity issues when you consider that these characters have remained more or less static for nearly three decades at this point, but it also means that each novel in the series has something unique to say about the state of the world despite a consistent core of dick jokes and Lovecraftian terror. I bring this up because I honestly thought that, after five completely unique books (featuring situations ranging from apocalyptic zombie outbreaks to perception-altering parasites), there couldn’t possibly be any more interesting ideas left for Pargin to explore in the strange town of Undisclosed.

That’s why I was so surprised when There Are No Giant Crabs in This Novel: A Novel of Giant Crabs turned out to be such a fresh genre-bending romp even if it can’t help but revisit some familiar concepts from the series’ past.

In Pargin’s latest cheekily titled story, we once again follow Dave, his girlfriend Amy and their best friend John as they become embroiled in an interdimensional mystery. This time, a “log” of compressed human body parts inexplicably materializes on the snowy front lawn of an Undisclosed resident during a particularly bad winter, leading the cops to call in the local paranormal “experts” for help. It doesn’t take long for things to escalate as opposing forces in an interdimensional war attempt to fight over our main characters’ attention in a gnarly conflict involving mind control, genetic predestination and, unsurprisingly, gigantic crabs.

As is usually the case with Pargin’s books, the supernatural part of the story is merely an over-the-top setup meant to ease you into a discussion about real-world issues and the occasional instance of potty humor. While I won’t spoil the deeper themes behind the interdimensional shenanigans here, suffice to say that the series once again hits the nail on the head when it comes to getting to the bottom of current societal issues while still feeling like a legitimately interesting cosmic horror yarn.

The narrative never gets bogged down with ham-fisted messaging or soap-box monologue moments (something that Pargin has struggled with in some of his other book series), as our main characters are well-developed enough to feel more like real people instead of avatars meant to parrot a certain point of view. Not only that, but the story itself is still genuinely entertaining even if you remove the social commentary motivating it, especially since it’s only during the latter half of the book that the mechanical assassins and dystopian alternate universes start to make sense.

The jokes also remain delightfully crude as they’ve always been, though I appreciate how many of the gags tie back to established character traits and how our characters see the world. For instance, the entire subplot about how a mutant lizard creature may or may not be one of our main characters in disguise manages to explore Dave’s codependency issues without ever feeling like a downer therapy session. In fact, the jumping between different points of view is one of the novel’s most consistent sources of humor, especially when John’s sections feel like they came from a completely different style of book – though the excerpts from Dr. Marconi’s publications remain the most fascinating segments of the story.

One strange aspect of the reading experience comes from how Pargin deals with callbacks to the rest of the series. For instance, while I’m aware that each of these books is meant to be a standalone adventure that can be read without knowing anything about the other novels, it feels a little strange that the characters don’t seem to notice how the mechanism through which one of the main villains is purifying his reality seems eerily similar to a plot point from the original John Dies at the End.

That being said, most of these inconsistencies can be excused due to the fact that the characters themselves admit to playing fast and loose with continuity in order to avoid legal trouble. I also appreciate existing references to the other books like how the group occasionally alludes to Dave’s hilarious double life as the local BATMANTIS??? cryptid, an idea that was introduced nearly a decade ago in What the Hell Did I Just Read?.

As I mentioned earlier in this review, I had already reached a point where I was unsure about where Pargin could take this story next if he chooses to continue the John, Dave and Amy series. And while I thoroughly enjoyed this new entry in the long-running franchise, it was only when I reached the final pages of the latest release that it dawned on me how the standalone nature of each novel, combined with the excellent character work that has been there from the very beginning, make each new book feel less like an additional chapter in an over-arching story and more like simply catching up with good friends that you haven’t seen in a while.

There Are No Giant Crabs in This Novel occasionally stumbles, with the narrative recycling some of the interdimensional and interpersonal drama from previous books and having less to say about the nature of American poverty due to the crew’s newfound stable employment, but there’s more than enough heart behind this eldritch horror-comedy to keep you coming back for more absurdist humor and over-the-top gore page after page.

That’s why I’m of the opinion that Pargin can keep this series going for as long as he wants. Or at least for as long as he can before the human race inevitably evolves into monstrous crustaceans.

There Are No Giant Crabs in This Novel is available now for pre-order and will be hitting store shelves on November 3, 2026.

The post ‘There Are No Giant Crabs in This Novel’ Review: Another Excellent Cosmic Horror-Comedy by Jason Pargin appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Written by R.L. Stine with illustrations by Joe Simko, the Craniacs line has launched with the first two books: Escape from Chrome Dome and Revenge of the Rhinobino.

Publisher Simon Spotlight previews, “Readers decide their own fate in the interactive middle grade series inspired by the collectible trading cards of the same name.”

In each interactive book in the Craniacs series, it’s up to the reader to make the correct choices and outlive the competition.

In Escape from Chrome Dome, a looming volcano eruption leads to a flaming-hot competition in the skull-shaped Chrome Dome…

When the ultra-futuristic planet Futerra and the Stone Age–style Retrovia smashed together, they formed one world with two very different populations who must find a way to live in peace. Their solution? The Chrome Dome, where danger is the name of the game and kids compete in wild and wacky challenges to settle domestic and interplanetary disputes.

It’s a battle to the fiery, lava-filled death when a giant volcano on Retrovia is about to explode and destroy the entire planet. The winner will have to get past the hot-snot-dripping, pointy-toothed Boarger, scale the Slippery Sock Slide of Ultimate Shame, traverse the Exploding Toilets of Doom obstacle course, and pass the Excuse Me, Your Zip Line Is on Fire challenge.

And then in Revenge of the Rhinobino, a school field trip ends in a high-stakes game of cat and mouse with a dangerous beast…

The kids of Futerra and Retrovia are taking a break from Chrome Dome challenges to pile on the skull buses for a school trip to the skull dogs eating contest on Boney Island. By the end of the competition, every single skull dog on the island has been eaten. Unfortunately, the local beast Rhinobino loves snacking on skull dogs, and with none left, he’s ready for his second favorite food: Craniacs! Making it to safety means getting past other dangerous cranimals: saber-toothed hamsters, lava lizards, a Bonosaurus Rex, and more!

Grab your copies of the Craniacs books over on Amazon today!

The post R.L. Stine’s ‘Craniacs’ – Brand New Interactive Middle Grade Series Launches With Two Books appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Variety details in their exclusive report, “the approximately 800-page book will take place in 1988, in the immediate aftermath of the original film, which famously ended with the death of Jake Gyllenhaal’s titular Donnie Darko, a Southern California teen who spends the better part of the movie in a dreamlike state while anticipating the end of the world.”

Even more exciting here is that Richard Kelly is planning to use the upcoming sequel novel as the springboard to bring Donnie Darko back to the screen with future film projects.

“According to Kelly, the book sequel is the first step in a larger plan to make multiple Donnie Darko film sequels,” Variety details. “The filmmaker’s goal is to have this novel adapted into an animated/motion-capture movie and then continue the story with a live-action project that jumps 28 years into the future.”

Donnie Darko: The Philosophy of Time Travel takes place in the 14 months after Donnie Darko’s death, while a potential movie sequel to come in its wake would take that huge leap forward in time and bring the main cast of the 2001 movie back together on screen.

“My caveat with doing a real sequel was that I want to reunite the original cast, and I want to take it onto a gigantic scale and that takes time and it has a price tag and it’s hard to pull this off because it’s multiple movies,” Kelly tells the outlet. “It’s this big, gigantic, unwieldy thing that I have to sort of wrestle into submission. But in my mind, that’s what it should be. Just given the way this movie has connected with people for so long. So I’ve set out to just build the whole thing out and map the entire thing out, knowing that there’s a lot of challenges associated with doing that.”

Kelly continues, “I think what I realized as the story got bigger and bigger and bigger is that I needed to go back in time and away from the sequel, and tell the story of what happens in the 14 months after Donnie’s death, like immediately after his death, because there’s so much essential information in that section of the sequel. And in my mind, I was like, why don’t I actually put together a novel and just publish that part of the sequel as a novel, so that I can release it into the world, and that will set the ship on its voyage to wherever this goes. And so this, in my mind, is the final puzzle piece to launching this sequel and to see what becomes of it.”

Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko did get a movie sequel back in 2009 with S. Darko, though that much-maligned movie was famously made without the involvement of creator Richard Kelly.

Donnie Darko: The Philosophy of Time Travel is being published by Range Literary Publishing.

Learn more over on Variety.

The post ‘Donnie Darko: The Philosophy of Time Travel’ – Richard Kelly’s Official Sequel Novel Coming Soon appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Ronin is the first book released by Cinevere’s Midnight Pulp, expanding the popular streaming service’s footprint into publishing. Grab your physical or digital copy from Amazon now!

In Ronin, “Meet Seph. Seph is a badass outsider hero for a f*cked-up, rabid, and gruesome world. All her life, she has scraped by, choosing to fight to live over ending up on some mutant cannibal’s dinner table. When she is assigned a big score to escort a truckload of trafficked sex workers across the country, she fends for her life… and the lives of her priceless cargo. Accepting the seemingly impossible quest was the easy part of the mission. Seph never knows when she will come face-to-face with randy rape riders, monstrous mutants, and feral forest folk.

“Will anybody make it out in one piece? Not if Seph has her say!”

“I am very excited to see where this new venture takes me. My story, Ronin, pays homage to the sensational, over-the-top grindhouse and exploitation films that I love watching, so Midnight Pulp makes perfect sense for me and my story,” previews author Oscar Brady.

Midnight Pulp. Read something strange.

The post ‘Ronin’ – Midnight Pulp’s First Original Novel Is Available Now appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

What he didn’t know was the direction the fourth book would take, at least until he found himself on Craig’s set in the fall of 2023, watching his characters walk off the page and into live-action for the first time. 

“I think there would be a fourth book. I don’t think it would be what it is [without the movie],” Cesare told Bloody Disgusting. “It was basically standing in fake Kettle Springs outside Winnipeg and being like, ‘I should write a book about this!’ [laughs]” 

The result is Lights! Camera! Frendo!, which takes the action back to Kettle Springs, Missouri, with a twist: This time, the new wave of Frendo the Clown killings is focused on a feature film production based on the crimes committed in the first book. It was a chance for Cesare to dig into his own experiences of seeing his creation come to life, but it was also a chance to go back to Kettle Springs with an entirely different lens. 

“I wanted to find a way to thread the needle of not betraying that core ideology of the books, but still make it be about film production and making a movie and the ups and downs,” Cesare said. “It’s not a full satire. I have books that are like that, and I love that genre. I like poking fun at film and film thought and film people, but I don’t think this book does that. I think this book is a different kind of thing.”

With Cesare’s original Final Girl, Quinn Maybrook, out of the picture, the new book focuses instead on the young woman playing Quinn for the movie: Sabrina Alvarez, a virtual unknown handpicked to lead a potential new horror franchise. That makes her a fish out of water who offers a fresh perspective not just on the production of the movie, but on Kettle Springs itself, mirroring Quinn’s experience in the first Clown novel. It’s a side-by-side comparison that’s there by design, to play with the expectations of longtime readers.

“It maps almost exactly onto the first book,” Cesare said. “It is the exact same length. It’s down to within 100 words. I basically just looked at the structure of [Clown in a Cornfield] and was like, ‘What works here? How can we do similar things, but just at every corner when you’re almost expecting it to do one thing, it does a slightly different thing, but it still maps on?’ I’m still trying to play the game of remaking, quote-unquote, the first book, but it doesn’t match up at all. Sabrina feeds into that. It’s the guessing game. There are a lot of returning characters, and Sabrina is the Quinn of this book.”

From there, Lights! Camera! Frendo! keeps taking familiar ingredients from the first book – including returning characters Rust Vance and Cole Hill, who are still major players in the Kettle Springs community – and spinning them out in new ways, all while telling the story of a film production through the actors, the crew, even the craft service workers. In discussing inspirations for the book, which range from slashers like All The Boys Love Mandy Lane to Bud Boetticher’s Westerns, Cesare singled out Ti West’s X, with its serious approach to film production amid a slasher narrative, as a major touchstone.

“I don’t like when stories like this don’t take the craft part of it seriously enough or don’t take the minutiae of it seriously enough, which I think is where I think this has similarities with X,” Cesare said. “If I’m going to do this, I’m going to make it feel like you’re really on a set. As quick as some of that stuff goes by, there are all these other ideas in the book; I wanted those pieces to feel real.”

Lights! Camera! Frendo! and its promotional tour are Cesare’s primary focus for the next few weeks, but it’s far from the only major project on his plate. His cosmic horror creature feature Junction Row, which he co-wrote, just premiered at Fantasia Fest earlier this summer, and Clown in a Cornfield 2 is now officially headed for film production, though Cesare noted he can’t say much about it yet other than what’s already been announced.

In the book world, reprints of his earlier novels, including Zero Lives Remaining, Video Night, and more, are on the way from Union Square & Co. in the coming months. And in early 2027, the author takes on vampires with Bloodsick, a new novel that takes him away from the slasher movie world and into the world of bloodsuckers. Set in New England, the book follows what happens when a centuries-old vampire awakens from hibernation in the modern world, and the first place he visits just happens to be a party house full of teenagers.

“I wanted to play classic with it. I think that’s part of the fun is what stuff from vampire lore I leave in and what I take out, which, spoiler alert, I put a lot in,” Cesare said. “I love that kind of stuff. I love the destroying a town vampire thing. It’s just a little bit Salem’s Lot. It’s a little bit 30 Days of Night. It’s also got that body horror element and sexual element to it. It is still a YA novel, but that’s how I pitched it to my editors.”

There is no shortage of new projects for Adam Cesare fans to enjoy, but if you’ve read this far, you’re probably ready to ask one final question: What about Clown in a Cornfield 5? As with every book in the series, Cesare ends this novel with plenty of possibilities for where the narrative could go next, but in the book’s afterword, he also notes that this might be the end of Frendo the Clown…at least for a little while. 

“I literally put a winky face emoji in there,” Cesare said with a chuckle. “I think we’ve been on an every two-year schedule, like clockwork. Literally every August, every two years- 2020, 2022, 2024, 2026- a Clown in a Cornfield book has come out for four cycles of that. I think if there is going to be another one, it’s going to have at least a year of space. It’s going to break the two-year cycle in order to feel different. That’s all I can say and all I want to say about that.”

Clown in a Cornfield 4: Lights! Camera! Frendo! is now available wherever you get your books.

The post Adam Cesare on ‘Clown in a Cornfield 4,’ Upcoming Vampire Novel, and Stepping Back from Slashers (For Now) appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

“An unprecedented year-long publishing event,” Clive Barker’s Library of the Dead is being made available exclusively through Kickstarter, where it has almost instantly smashed through its $25,000 fundraising goal. At this time, the fundraiser is already up to $62,000!

The team previews, “For decades, Clive Barker has redefined horror with stories that blend terror, beauty, mythology, and imagination like no other writer. Now, one of the genre’s most influential voices returns with Library of the Dead, an ambitious new three-book anthology that marks Barker’s long-awaited return to the short fiction that first established him as a master of modern horror.

“From Clive Barker Ink and Ensata Press, Library of the Dead is a year-long celebration of Clive Barker’s new work and extraordinary legacy. Across brand new stories and out-of-print gems curated for the first time, Barker revisits the themes that have captivated readers for generations: obsession, mythology, beauty, and unimaginable horror. Each volume is further enriched with haunting black-and-white illustrations and poetry created by Barker himself and wrapped in breathtaking new cover artwork that bring Barker’s newest nightmares vividly to life.”

The project is highlighted by three books under the Library of the Dead banner:

• Fear Eternal
• Pyres of Bedlam
• Dark Descents

“Edited by Barker’s long-time collaborators, Phil and Sarah Stokes, the trilogy of books represents Barker’s most significant return to original horror in years with a collection that explores familiar Barker themes,” the official press release details this afternoon.

The Kickstarter campaign also offers an extraordinary selection of exclusive companion pieces created specifically for this event. Fans can add a new and beautifully produced Books of Blood Remastered Edition, a premium two-volume leather-bound omnibus of the landmark six volume collection that launched Barker’s career, complete with new illustrations accompanying stories including Rawhead Rex, The Midnight Meat Train, and The Forbidden.

The campaign also features limited-edition collectibles, including The Art of Clive Barker Portfolio, a premium collection of fine art prints based on the original artwork in the books created by Barker, alongside the stunning Library of the Dead Book Coffin, an ornate stone bookcase and display piece inspired by Barker’s artwork and designed to house the entire collection.

“I’m profoundly excited by all that Library of the Dead offers, and the freedom that I now have to present it to you with Kickstarter,” explained Clive Barker. “It’s going to be a blast for us all, my friends!”

Throughout the campaign, supporters will also unlock stretch goals, exclusive editions, original artwork, and additional surprises, making Library of the Dead an evolving publishing event that extends far beyond the books themselves. Learn more over on Kickstarter.

These new works from Clive Barker are expected to begin shipping in 2027.

The best part of this whole announcement? Clive Barker says in a statement, “After a period of ill health, I am celebrating my full recovery and excited to be generating new work.” He adds that he has “reawakened” his “creative passion for unapologetic, terrifying horror fiction.”

The post Clive Barker Returns With Brand New ‘Library of the Dead’ Horror Anthology Novels appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Though its roots will always lie in the story of a masked killer in a clown costume slaughtering people in brutal ways, Cesare’s three previous books in the series each reached for different subgenres, giving the author a chance to play with conspiracy thrillers, folk horror, and more while still playing with the slasher elements that made the first book and its subsequent film adaptation such a hit. 

Which is why, at first glance, the fourth Clown book, Lights! Camera! Frendo!, might seem like a little bit of a step backwards. Trust me when I tell you it’s an illusion.

By stepping back to where it all started with the story of an in-universe movie adaptation, Cesare’s not only able to look at his own series in a new way, but push his instincts for classic slasher storytelling in new directions, creating a book that’s both a blast to read and a reflective trip down memory lane for longtime readers.

With Quinn Maybrook dead (or is she?) after the events of the third book, the new film shifts the action to a new final girl, the one playing Quinn Maybrook in the first movie based on the Kettle Springs Massacre. Sabrina Alvarez is a nobody, an actor plucked from obscurity to play Quinn alongside a cast of other, more established young actors in supporting roles. When we meet her, she’s still learning the ropes, trying to build up her toughness with the goal of pleasing big-shot director David Frank Hansen, and earning the respect of her co-stars. 

To make things even more intimidating, the cast and crew have descended on the real Kettle Springs for on-location shooting, where survivors of the original massacre and its brutal aftermath still remember exactly what happened. Characters like Rust Vance, Cole Hill, and Jerri Shaw, all major players in previous books, are hanging around the production with their own roles to play off-screen, which means that Sabrina really has to get it right if she wants to please everyone.

But of course, you can’t please everybody, especially whoever’s trying to sabotage the movie, leaving a trail of bodies in their wake.

One of the great strengths of the Clown sequels thus far has been Cesare’s ability to deliver the slasher goods while also reaching outside of the comfort of the formula to try new things. Lights! Camera! Frendo! is, conceptually at least, a creative obstacle in that path. How do you do something new when you’re literally taking your readers and your characters back to the story that started it all, as the cast and crew of the new film, including Cole as a producer and Jerri hanging around the shoot, try to restage the life-changing slaughter that forms the basis for the movie? How does talking about all the deaths from the original book, then dramatizing them, make for a sense of newness? 

Cesare finds a way, and that way is paved with his own reflections on exactly where the story’s gone so far and what that means. This is a writer who just watched a film adaptation of his own story, with all the compromises and tweaks and new directions that entails, reflecting on who exactly gets to tell this story and why.

Is it the actor who wants to do the lead role justice, the survivors who want to try to rebuild their lives while honoring what happened before, the writer who’s constantly reshaping his own creation? The book never veers all the way into metafiction, nor does it pivot to Hollywood satire, but with wit and wisdom, Cesare explores all the juicy nooks and crannies of these questions, while delivering another runaway train of a slasher story. 

I’m a little bit of a mark for these books, I’ll admit, in part because Cesare’s knowledge of the slasher genre is vast and nuanced. He’s the kind of writer who could fire off a new slasher story based on the tried and true formulas in a heartbeat, and that kind of comfort in the space lets him push further, break the formula apart, turn it around so we can look at it from new sides.

The kills in Lights! Camera! Frendo! reflect this, as Cesare plays with our expectations to create new, brutal ways for his characters to die, while infusing each new death with meaning, ratcheting up the tension, until the third act explodes in tense uncertainty. As a fellow slasher devotee, it kept me guessing, and that’s saying something. 

If you’ve followed the Clown in a Cornfield saga up to now, you probably don’t need me to convince you that you should pick up the next installment, but that doesn’t change how much fun it is. Lights! Camera! Frendo! both fits right into the larger series and pushes its boundaries with a jolt of fresh creativity that hits like a knife in the dark. It’s a blast.

Lights! Camera! Frendo! is now available wherever books are sold as of today, August 18.

The post ‘Clown in a Cornfield 4: Lights! Camera! Frendo!’ Review: A Bloody Return to Kettle Springs appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

But even that’s not the end of what Wendig is after here. The Calamities, like many of Wendig’s best books, is a vast machine laden with mythology and secrets just waiting to be uncovered, and along the way, Wendig’s straightforward entry point into the world morphs into an epic laden with monstrous, deliciously menacing energy. 

Mourning Mayne is returning home at the behest of his father, the imposing and powerful Hadrian Mayne, for reasons he doesn’t yet know. Born into one of the most prominent “Fiend” (read = humans with ancient demon blood) families in North America, Mourning’s spent much of his adult life partying, trying to stay away from his father’s spiderweb of machinations in world politics, industry, and society. But something is different on this visit home.

Mourning’s father seems different, distracted, and soon Mourning is swept up in a massive conspiracy that threatens the entire power structure of the Fiend families around the globe. With those he truly cares about in danger, Mourning has no choice but to dig deeper into the mysteries of his family, but what he finds will threaten more than just the Fiends. 

The very concept of the Fiends, who function as both a global concern interwoven into the halls of power and as a fascinating cross between medieval feudalism and the American Mafia, might be our way into the story, but it’s not the real spine of it. That comes when Mourning’s journey moves outward, away from the Mayne family home and into a vast conspiracy thriller featuring a freelance soul-buyer, a eunuch enforcer in service to one of the smaller Fiend families, an old flame, and a young nonbinary person swept up in dark forces they don’t understand.

Each of these characters brings their own perspective and life to the story, and they add dynamism and warmth to this dark tale, particularly when it comes to the way Wendig builds out his world. 

Because our way in to The Calamities is Mourning, who knows all the traditions and lore in which he was raised already, Wendig does not spoonfeed all the rules and hierarchies of this world to us in the form of long exposition drops. Instead, we get to know the world of the Fiends slowly, in a narrative that puts the characters first. Strange new terminology drops into conversation, planted like a dark seed that will sprout and fruit in later chapters. Allegiances emerge slowly, shift quickly, and pivot based on emotional decisions, not necessarily political ones. It’s a great way to lay out a world like this, and Wendig’s ability to lace the book with lore without ever grinding the narrative to a halt for page after page of explanation keeps The Calamities moving. 

Through books like The Book of Accidents, Wanderers, and more, Wendig has proven adept at marshalling a vast cast of characters through a story of epic scope, but The Calamities is only the first step of this particular journey. The overall saga, known as The Fiends, will run into a second book, and this installment ends with a hell of a cliffhanger, setting characters off on new paths as larger evils lurk.

That means that, in the grand scheme of the story, this is actually a ramp-up, a long climb to a big reveal that also functions as an addictive introduction to a world and a set of characters. There’s something remarkably intimate about this book, despite the grandness of its plot, and that comes from Wendig exploring, with no reservations, what happens when bad people are trying to do the right thing. Mourning and his friends and allies are literally born this way, their demon blood coaxing things out of them that mere mortals couldn’t dream of, and the choice put to these characters is not whether or not they’ll stay evil or do good, but how they’ll use their gifts in a world that’s already gone to Hell (not quite literally, in this case).

These questions hang over the whole book like smoke, and they infuse The Calamities with even more compelling layers. This is a sharp, witty, absorbing novel from one of our finest genre writers, and it moves like a bat out of Hell. 

The Calamities is available August 18 wherever books are sold. 

The post ‘The Calamities’ Book Review: Horror Meets ‘Succession’ In Chuck Wendig’s Demonic Epic appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

In addition to the TV series was an ancillary line of YA novels. Think Goosebumps, except here the show preceded the books. While most of the entries were original, there was the occasional novelization. Naturally, the intended audience is also young; however, these stories remain worthwhile reads, even if you’re well past the target age.

Submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society, here are ten Are You Afraid of the Dark? stories that can only be found in the books.

The Tale of the Shimmering Shell

In The Tale of the Shimmering Shell, written by David Cody Weiss and Bobby JG Weiss, Glynis is spending her summer at a beach house with her father, her stepmother, and her stepbrother. Early on, though, it’s made clear that Glynis is unhappy with this new family arrangement. So much so that she accidentally made everyone disappear; the strange shell she found granted her wish.

And little does Glynis know that same shell housed an evil entity: Typhon from Ancient Greek mythology. It’s only once Glynis works with her stepbrother, as well as the neighborly mermaid in charge of keeping Typhon imprisoned, that the old threat finally stays a thing of the past.

Midnight Society member Sam (played by Joanna Garcia in the series) served up this offering about wishes. Although, the wish part here is so small in the grand scheme of things. The Tale of the Shimmering Shell, like the majority of these books, ultimately has big ideas that would have never been feasible in the original TV show. This is a fantastical story that can only be told with the kind of production and effects that the classic Are You Afraid of the Dark? couldn’t provide.

The Tale of the Souvenir Shop

Betty Ann (Raine Pare-Coull) dropped this exciting slice of underworld horror. In Alice Eve Cohen‘s The Tale of the Souvenir Shop, Julianna, her parents, and her younger sister, Emily, stop at the worst tourist trap imaginable: the Self-Guided Volcanic Cave Tours. But while the parents get themselves lost for most of this tale, the daughters end up being sealed inside a giant snow globe, then sent to the story’s equivalent of Hell.

The culprit behind the snow-globing is the owner of the caves’ souvenir shop, although he’s been working under duress for the last ten-plus years. A bad deal with a subterranean society of modern yet cruel cyclopes, and the fact that he’s working to save his granddaughter, is why he involved Julianna and Emily. When the cyclopes refuse to make good on their end of the deal, though, it’s up to the two main characters, plus the granddaughter, to save themselves.

This adventurous tale boasts another high concept that would have required a lot of special effects. The last act alone has the three main characters escaping their one-eyed captors via a toy car!

The Tale of the Mogul Monster

In The Tale of the Mogul Monster (also written by the Weisses), snowboarder Dee was dealt a bad hand; he’s rich now only because his parents died. So even though he’ll never have to worry about student loans, having friends who actually like him, and not just his money, proves difficult. This issue plays out as Dee and two of his hangers-on get lost outdoors.

An off-course excursion at a snow resort leads to avalanches and injuries. Making matters worse, the main character then suspects he’s being followed by the Bigfoot-like monster said to live around these parts.

With one friend badly hurt, and another acting like a selfish coward, Dee’s odds of surviving the harsh and cold wilderness seem low. However, the pro shredder who went missing out here—turns out he rejected his fame and chose to live among these civilized Bigfeet—comes to his rescue.

One overlooked aspect of Are You Afraid of the Dark? is the characters. Yes, their designs are more simple than complex, but the writers were still decent about fleshing out these young protagonists in peril. The books do more of the same, albeit to a greater extent. They can afford to look beneath the surface a little longer.

The Tale of the Curious Cat

The Tale of the Curious Cat (written by Diana G. Gallagher) is a story from Betty Ann, and out of everything here, it feels the most like an episode of the show. A teen named Natalie is always giving in to her nagging curiosity and then not owning up to the consequences. Usually, though, her worst trait causes minimal damage. That is until she meets Wanda, a strange and rather vengeful merchant at the town fair.

Despite the “do not touch” sign put in plain sight, Natalie messed with Wanda’s enticing cat statuette. Except, it wasn’t the object that came to harm; Wanda’s real cat, Shadow, got scared by the girl and ran out in front of a moving car. This freak occurrence led to Shadow’s death, as well as the unrelenting curse placed upon Natalie, her young sister, and any others caught in the protagonist’s orbit.

This tale, like plenty of others in Are You Afraid of the Dark?, features a very harsh lesson that only the supernatural could deliver. From her sister withering to nonexistence to her friends nearly dying, Natalie gets an unmistakable message about her thoughtless behavior.

The Tale of the Restless House

John Peel a.k.a. “Nicholas Adams” provided the inspiration for 2024’s Tarot. He also wrote books for Doctor Who, Carmen Sandiego, Eerie, Indiana, and various Star Trek franchises. In his second-ever Are You Afraid of the Dark? contribution, Peel tossed a group of unsuspecting kids into a temporal anomaly.

In another Sam-narrated story, a prank on an unpopular classmate goes terribly wrong. Kendra and her pals tricked Adam into going into the creepiest place in the neighborhood: the old Hawkins House. In due time, they embark on a trip that defies all logic. The characters are trapped inside this living house, which punishes them whenever they try to leave, or rewards them whenever they accept their fate. In their travels across time, they encounter saber-toothed cats, dinosaurs, and trigger-happy Revolutionary War soldiers.

The supposed scaredy-cat of the group isn’t the nerdy Adam, but rather his would-be pranksters. All except Kendra, who realizes her friends are losers and Adam is actually pretty cool. Finally, once they all understand the house is alive and is simply trying to make friends in its own weird way, the group finds a way back to their time. Oddly enough, Adam and Kendra step foot back inside, even though they’re free, and befriend the not-so-malevolent Hawkins House. That way, there should be no more incidents like this one.

The Tale of the Stalking Shadow

The Tale of Stalking Shadow unearthed the tragic history of one town. In this other Sam story, Vailmonton owes a lifetime of gratitude to Mrs. Vailmon, hence the residents always going out of their way to help her. If not for that old woman’s philanthropy, the town wouldn’t have survived its hardships.

An old caregiving program for Mrs. Vailmon was recently reinstated, and Hadley jumped at the opportunity to sign up. Mind you, her motives aren’t entirely altruistic; she wants comfort and answers that only this old woman can provide. But as she digs into the town’s origins, Hadley reveals a disturbing truth. There’s also the monstrous shadow creature that has manifested from Mrs. Vailmon’s years’ worth of guilt.

While the Weisses’ morality tale doesn’t absolve Vailmon of her wrongdoing, they do grant her some leniency in the end. Most of which comes from Hadley, a girl who contemplated all sides of the story.

The Tale of the Ghost Riders

John Vornholt didn’t write the scariest story, but at the same time, The Tale of the Ghost Riders centers on grief and anger. Both of those feelings are frightful and confusing for any young person. Here, one boy is given a second chance after nearly losing his soul.

According to narrator Gary (Ross Hull), Josh has a lot to be mad about. His older brother and his father are dead, and his family farm now belongs to the town baron, Henry Akers. Josh, along with his friend Carlos, then uses the local legend of the Ghost Riders to scare Akers. The only problem is, the Ghost Riders are real—and they’re prepared to add Josh to their herd, so long as he continues to act out and go down the same road as his late brother.

The stereotype of Native Americans as mystical beings is in use here, yet the story’s key message is still worth some consideration.

The Tale of the Virtual Nightmare

This spin on the body snatcher idea, courtesy of Ted Pedersen, has a computer geek learning the importance of screen time management. In The Tale of the Virtual Nightmare, Gary warned of what might happen if someone became too reliant on technology.

Sam (no, not that Sam) loves computer games, and his latest obsession almost culminates in a total invasion. It all began with Sam acting differently; he’s cleaned up, more social, and generally not the Sam who Cady had come to know and care about. Yet once Cady looks into her bestie’s bizarre behavior, she discovers the source of that sudden switch.

Cady learns that Sam has been replaced with a cyber version of himself, and this impostor plans on doing the same process to everyone else at school. It’s only once Cady enters the computer world and joins forces with the real Sam that the villains return to the virtual realm, at least for the time being.

The Tale of the Deadly Diary

Brad and Barbara Strickland thought up a story that would have also been prime material for a screen adaptation. In Betty Ann’s The Tale of the Deadly Diary, Beth is, like many kids her age, fed up with her little sister. Not only does Beth despise Karen’s constant snooping, but she blames her for their parents’ divorce. After Karen leaks the embarrassing details of her big sis’ diary to the whole school, albeit inadvertently, Beth tears up what she once considered her best friend.

Soon enough, Beth wanders into that mysterious shop run by a recurring character from Are You Afraid of the Dark?: Dr. Vink “with a vuh-vuh-vuh“! He gives Beth a brand-new personalized diary that makes its entries come true. Unfortunately for everyone, a made-up story intended to scare the prying Karen becomes too real; Beth wills horrible goblins into existence.

The Tale of the Deadly Diary neither goes as far with the manifesting diary concept as it could have, nor does it quite resolve the tension between the siblings, but it does boast a notably sinister appearance from fan-favorite villain Dr. Vink.

The Tale of the Sinister Statues

In that first novel, The Tale of the Sinister Statues, Gary kicked things off with a story that may as well have come from the TV series. Here we have Brianne and Dustin, siblings who don’t get along, on account of their very different attitudes. While Brianne likes to joke around with her friend, Tim, Dustin is more uptight. He has to be with a sister like his.

At the museum, Tim’s immaturity gets him in trouble—this time with the ominous curator named Dr. Stone. To avoid any legal action, Stone has Tim stay behind to work off his punishment. That was the last time he was also seen. Pretty soon, Brianne and Dustin uncover what Stone has been doing at the museum; he’s using people’s energy to make inanimate things, like statues of a gargoyle and Anubis, come to life. Luckily, Anubis is a judge of what’s right and wrong, and he turns on Dr. Stone. The Egyptian god then sets everything straight, including returning Tim to his normal form.

What it lacks in potential body horror, The Tale of the Sinister Statues makes up for in weird science. The final product indeed becomes less and less scary, due to its overexplained story, but it’s also never dull. It’s a good way to begin one’s journey into the Are You Afraid of the Dark? books.

The post 10 ‘Are You Afraid of the Dark?’ Stories That Exist Only In The Classic Book Series appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Three years ago, I reviewed the Blade Runner RPG and praised it for that exact specificity, but was concerned about the idea of maintaining a campaign where you are essentially playing the evil system of power oppressing Replicants. The recently released Replicant Rebellion supplement for the game flips the script on the setup, casting the players as freedom fighters pushing back at the system of repression. It’s an interesting exercise in reframing the game’s laser-focused mechanics to give you a fresh perspective on such an iconic world.

After a brief history lesson about the Blade Runner timeline, you’re introduced to the Replicant Underground, a decentralized network of crews that all work for the same cause. It’s a drastic change from playing as a Blade Runner, allowing you to finally fight the injustice that keeps the replicants down.

Instead of reporting to the police force like in the base game, as a member of the underground you’ll report to a handler who gives you your mission briefings that come from the unseen leadership.

From Blade Runner to Rebel Operative

What’s cool about the player sections of the book that explain your role in the rebellion is that it’s written in a voice that is meant to lightly mimic recruitment information, speaking to you, the player, as though you’re being inducted into the group through this rulebook. Aside from a few pages that are inspired by zine culture, it’s still laid out in pretty standard rulebook fashion that matches the base game, but it’s a nice touch that sells the fantasy a bit more.

Given that you’re using different archetypes as members of an underground resistance than you would as an investigator, Replicant Rebellion contains a handful of new character classes for you to choose from. When you’re creating your character, you’re given the option of being either one of two models of replicant or a human, and that choice will be important in coloring your character.

Classes in Year Zero-based games have always felt a little less consequential to me, but there’s a decent variety here to give you something to work off of when you start thinking about who you want to be.

The best part about character creation in this new version of Blade Runner is that, as a distributed network of agents, you all have other lives that you’re living before you’re activated by the underground. Not only do these provide great flavor for the action, as it’s really fun to play out the scene where you’re going about your regular life and get the coded message to report for duty, but there are also mechanical repercussions for your choice as well. This supplement still uses the base game’s concept of tracking time through shifts, carefully regulating the way you spend your time each day, and in order to keep your cover, you need to make sure you spend at least one shift a day doing business as usual.

Building a Life in the Shadows

If you’re lax on your responsibilities, the noose starts to tighten as you get closer to being identified as a member of the rebellion. Time management is one of my favorite mechanics that this game uses, so adding this extremely character-focused wrinkle to the game just adds that much more texture. A critical moment where you have to decide between an urgent objective and keeping up with your cover is rife for drama, giving GMs a perfect way to put the screws to their players.

Maintaining your normal life will give you Cover Points, while helping the rebellion will give you Rebel points. These are the two currencies that allow you to improve your character, giving you the ability to purchase new specialties or improve your skills, respectively. I love it when level-up mechanics can come from different activities in this way, as forcing you to make a narrative decision for mechanical benefit creates a nice tension in the choices you make as you evolve both your character and the overarching narrative.

Since your resistance group is technically a criminal organization in the eyes of the law, things aren’t going to be easy for you as mission preparations get underway. Each day has four shifts, and you can visit one location per shift, but movement between places can require rolls that can have dire consequences. There’s also a table of encounters that the GM can pull from to complicate things for players, whether that’s someone from their cover life showing up or a Blade Runner walking into the scene.

Doing illegal activities in public can raise your Heat, which will slowly ratchet up the danger for players as it climbs as a consequence of your actions. Increases in Heat can cause various types of rolls to be given disadvantage, making any move you make more challenging. Certain areas will count as home turf, where Heat is considered to be one level lower, while others are hot zones that act as one higher, making you think carefully about every step you make during your operations.

A Campaign Built Around High Stakes Operations

Much like the base game, a lot of the action will be talking to people or staking out locations, but inevitably things are likely to get violent. In order to keep that fresh, there are a couple of new weapons that this new book adds, along with updates to the rules for autofire weapons. It’s not the most substantial part of the book, but it’s there if you need something more unique and want to have a stat block prepared for it.

The real draw of the book is the GM section, which gives you a wealth of resources to use Replicant Rebellion’s new structure and focus. With how much you’ll be pushing your contacts to help set up your missions, the book thankfully lays out a web of NPCs that you can reach out to, each with their own background and use case.

My favorite was the explosives expert named Gimmick whose expertise is simply listed as “watching the world burn.” There’s just enough information about each of them that it’s easy to slip into the character after reading their background, making it easy for GMs to populate the game with compelling personalities that your players will latch on to.

Not only is there good advice for creating your own adventures, but there’s also a series of five prewritten operations that build into a campaign for you to run your players through. These are the real meat of the book, taking up about a third of the page count. While it includes standard prep elements like maps and NPCs associated with the mission, the coolest thing about these is the timelines provided, giving each mission a ticking clock that the GM can use to put pressure on the players.

Why Replicant Rebellion Improves on the Base Game

As I mentioned, the Blade Runner RPG has a shift system used to keep track of time, and each mission has a series of events that happen at specific shifts if the players don’t take action to prevent them. They’re all pretty drastic turning points for the narratives they are trying to tell, giving you a natural pacing mechanism to keep the action moving towards its thrilling climax.

While there is a lot of detail that’s provided for the setup of the mission, it’s the type of setup that leaves a lot of room for the players to come up with their own plans. There are plot points for the players to experience and discover, but the book doesn’t have one specific solution that the players are required to use to solve the operation’s problems. They almost feel like Hitman missions, with a playground of characters and locations that operate on their own logic, waiting for the players to figure out the best place to jam a wrench in the machinery to bring it all crashing down in their favor.

The five missions provide a decent variety of mission types, not only keeping things fresh for players but demonstrating to GMs the kinds of new operations they can plan for themselves.

As much as I love the neo-noir detective vibe of the base game, I think Replicant Rebellion reworks the system to tell the type of adventures I find more compelling to both run and play. Cyberpunk games seem built for stories of fighting back against systems of power, and the tense structure of Blade Runner’s ruleset allows you to easily create adventures that feel cinematically-paced with daring plans and thrilling twists.

Even though you’re fighting for the right side this time, there’s still plenty of morally compromising decisions for your characters to make, bringing the best parts of Blade Runner stories to the forefront. It’s an impressive example of recontextualizing a very specific game that improves upon the original, making for a great book that complements, but doesn’t replace, the base game.

Follow along for more Tabletop Terror, highlighting roleplaying games new and old. 

The post ‘Blade Runner RPG: Replicant Rebellion’ Turns the Cyberpunk Classic Into a Resistance Thriller appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Based on its blurb—“Nine teenagers enter an abandoned cemetery […] Before the night is over, most of them will die“—it was pretty clear what Joyride was emulating, not to mention cashing in on. Keep in mind, though, not a lot of publishers back then were as quick to follow the lead (not counting novelizations of slasher movies, of course). So, at the very least, this was a unique literary venture for its time.

Even better, it rivals some of the best one-and-done slasher movies from that same time period.

Joyride was originally released under Ronald Francis Patrick’s nom de plume of Stephen Crye. Before the author introduced the world to that bloodthirsty, cemetery-lurking killer named Cleats, Patrick wrote about another disturbed individual who worked around corpses. Patrick’s previous novel, Beyond the Threshold (1978), centered on the macabre proceedings, as well as sexual fluidity, of a mortician. Indeed, this is a sleazy and repugnant story, but at the same time, the way Patrick considered queer sexuality is still worth reading. Of particular interest is the novel’s sympathetic portrayal of its gay side character:

“Cleats stood back and watched without expression as the multiple wounds in her throat began to spurt in giant pulsating arcs…”

Meanwhile, Joyride has a less complex narrative. It also trades complicated characters for more cursory ones; in lieu of some interesting roles, there’s now a whole cast of paper-thin players who practically walked in off the sets of the most straightforward ‘80s slasher movies. All the requisite archetypes are in attendance here: the jock, the brain, the mean girl, the virgin, the loose girl, the loser, and the younger sibling (really a cousin) who tagged along on the wrong night.

Patrick did his homework with Joyride; the novel never feels like it was written by someone who had never seen a slasher, much less hated them. If he did object, that sentiment didn’t come across in the writing. There is, though, that proclivity to explain the killer, as opposed to keeping him or her an enigma. Some movies do the bare minimum for backstories, such as only sharing a campfire tale in the beginning. This book, on the other hand, goes that extra mile by devoting half of itself to the antagonist’s origins.

Upon first read, it seems as if Joyride lacks a compelling villain. After all, Cleats—whose nickname comes from his choice of footwear—is yet another slasher killer born from abuse, hardship, and humiliation. By now that kind of origin story has been exhausted in the genre. However, all those extensive flashbacks to Cleats’ past make this novel somewhat different from the average ‘80s slasher.

Immediately setting Joyride apart from the likes of Halloween and Friday the 13th is its opening scene. Teens caught in mid-coitus are a popular choice for first victims, whereas this novel opted for a less probable target. Wandering into the story’s dreaded destination, ahead of the human targets, is a plump dachshund who, unfortunately, doesn’t stand a chance against Cleats. One’s own tolerance for animal cruelty in fiction will be tested here, as the novel doesn’t relent when it comes to describing that poor pup’s demise. This early display of Cleats’ ferocity is possibly too much for the average slasher fan; even the human deaths aren’t as meticulously told. So, skipping the prologue would be understandable if someone wants to be spared the gory details.

Joyride forgoes further appetizers and serves up the main course with readiness. Several unsuspecting high schoolers soon roll up to the deadest part of town, searching for fun in the least likely of places. Their choice of hangout spot makes zero sense, but Cleats is like any other territorial murderer; he can’t kill if they don’t come. In this case, they come of their own accord—two cars worth of hormonal, adolescent quarries enter the beast’s lair without even an old-timer around to warn them. With the gate now suddenly closed, leaving proves difficult.

Patrick dishes out the death almost instantly, before then tapering off until the third act. In a bit of a twist, though, Joyride subverts expectations by disposing of the ostensible final girl ahead of everyone else; a goody-goody gets the first taste of Cleats’ fury after she hightails it for the cemetery’s entrance/exit. From there it’s anyone’s guess as to who’s next on the kill list—is it the amorous couple who disappeared for a quickie, or is it that slovenly glutton who goes by the nickname of “Twinkie”? Surely Patrick wouldn’t allow any harm to befall the youngest of the bunch.

“Priscilla’s jaws flapped uncontrollably but emitted no sound as she watched her boyfriend’s skin sizzle and pop like frying bacon.”

Reading horror, versus watching horror, forces one to sit with certain imagery and thoughts. This is very true of Cleats’ murders. Patrick, like other authors, is enthusiastic about the ways in which these characters perish. What would have been over in mere seconds on screen is now prolonged on paper. “Agonizing” is a good way of summing up the kills here. As one would expect from a tawdry ‘80s horror paperback, the sexual parts range from titillating to plain uncomfortable.

While there isn’t a lot of substantial food for thought in Joyride, it does offer the theory that monsters aren’t born—they’re made. Robert, before he became known as Cleats, was once a teenager who grew up around death. And having been raised in the mortuary business, Robert would have naturally developed a different outlook on life. He knew of the inevitability of death, the fleetingness of everything, better than anyone his age. So when Robert was adamant about giving his classmate a love letter, because he was afraid of never seeing her again after graduation, it stood to reason that his fear was based on firsthand knowledge that people can’t wait around for life to happen. In his point of view, lives often ended without warning and without closure. 

“His trembling fingers slid across the wet pulp of shredded flesh that dangled from his exposed jaw…”

Cleats’ backstory is nothing unprecedented. Boy wants girl, girl doesn’t want him. Boy is bullied, bullies take things too far. Internal loathing is then manifested as a horrific disfigurement. It’s a formula still in use today. In Joyride, though, that process of going from outcast teen to madman is laid out more hurriedly. The inclusion of Robert’s specific home life, which includes his being a caregiver to a cruel, disabled father, does at least add more grounds for his dramatic transformation. However, this isn’t the sort of novel where everything will, or has to, make sense all the time. Most likely, readers are going to be more invested in Cleats’ story rather than Robert’s.

The abrupt jumps to the past are perhaps unnecessary, and they can make it hard to stay focused on the current events. Then again, Joyride has barely a plot to begin with. Its strong suits are really those scenes of violence and luridness, all of which are written with gusto.

Most slasher fiends will prefer to watch, not read, stories of stalking killers, dead teenagers and growing body counts. Yet if they ever want to switch things up, especially with a novel that feels and acts like a classic slasher, then Joyride is absolutely a trip worth taking.

Fathom Press resurrects Joyride on August 20, featuring a new introduction by Will Errickson.

The post Forgotten ’80s Slasher Novel ‘Joyride’ Is Finally Back In Print This Month appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Which is why it’s so disappointing that Sager’s latest, The Unknown, doesn’t quite work for me. Like some of his best works (The Only One Left comes to mind), it’s a parallel journey of past and present, set in a compelling locale and featuring a cast of distinct characters. It’s also got a Hollywood horror hook that feels exactly like my cup of tea, but the more I read, the more frustrated I became. This is one of those thrillers that’s so laden with exposition and twists that, by the end, it’s a gnarled knot of information rather than a story, even if it does retain Sager’s inherent attention to craft and narrative propulsion. 

Marin is a struggling actress, waiting tables between auditions for commercials and obscure plays, so it’s a big surprise for her when she gets a face-to-face audition with Ronan Peters, the hottest of Hollywood’s hotshot young directors. Even more surprising, Marin gets the part! She’s going to be a major character in a new horror film by Ronan Peters, co-starring one of her idols, the legendary Violet Wright. 

Because the film is based on a real set of mysterious disappearances on an island in Vermont, Ronan aims for immersiveness and decides that his cast should spend a week on the island itself, New Avalon, where an arms manufacturer once built an estate now said to be haunted by the women who vanished there. With no electricity, no phones, and no modern clothes, Marin and her co-stars will live, rehearse, and immerse themselves in the world of New Avalon in 1926, essentially becoming the vanished women they’re set to play onscreen. 

This is perhaps my favorite setup in any of Sager’s books, a meta-story about actors living out their own American Picnic at Hanging Rock for the sake of cinematic authenticity, and of course you can see where this is going. One by one, the cast starts disappearing, a medical emergency strands the whole crew on the island, and Marin, equipped with no context but a diary written by one of the vanished 1926 women, is forced to dig deep into the island’s secrets in a search for answers.

There are seances, and storms, and dark pasts, and all the wonderful, simmering substance we’ve come to expect from Riley Sager. The first half of this book is a banger, driven by Sager’s trademark lightning pace, and even when it started to go off the rails, I found myself reading late into the night, unable to put the book down until I figured out where Sager was going. 

It’s tricky, of course, to explain why the back half of a book doesn’t work without delving into spoilers, but I’ll do my best. Because of the mystery surrounding the original 1926 disappearances, and the immersive environment Ronan hopes to create for his cast on the island, The Unknown spends much of its narrative questioning how much of what’s happening is real, and how much is part of the immersive experience. Characters bicker over whether or not a planchette is actually moving during a seance; they trade secrets about dead loved ones; they debate the merits of seeking help versus waiting things out.

At the center of it all is Marin, with a past of her own that motivates her in particular to seek out answers, and while that part works, the answers she eventually finds simply don’t. The novel, driven by Sager’s crystal-clear prose and always-dynamic pacing, builds up a very solid head of steam as Marin narrates, laying out the central questions in a setup for the third act, when Sager will unspool what’s really going on. It’s a trick he’s used many times before, and it usually works. 

So, why doesn’t it work this time? Because reading this particular book, as opposed to Sager’s other successes, I felt like the answers and the emotional impact they have on the characters were secondary to the basic need for the story to have twists that catch the reader off-guard. Riley Sager novels don’t necessarily have just one twist; they have several, nested together to create an added tension over what’s real and what’s invention. That should be extra potent in a novel about filmmakers, and yet by the end, The Unknown is much more driven by the need to swerve the readers than the need to serve the characters and their emotional journeys.

It was less exciting than it was tiring. I just wanted to see the impact of all of these secrets and decisions and hidden details, and instead the book devolves into a state of near-constant expository dialogue, laying out layer after layer of secrets. Are the questions answered? Yes. Are the answers satisfactory? Depends on your response. Do they feel like part of a story with genuine heft? By the end, they don’t. 

Again, Riley Sager’s one of our finest thriller writers, but even the best have missteps, and this was one of his for me. Maybe the old narrative tricks are wearing thin, maybe this book is over-ambitious, or maybe I just didn’t respond to it. Whatever the case, despite solid prose and pacing and a great start, this one went off the rails somewhere for me, and never got back on track. 

The Unknown is available now wherever books are sold.

The post ‘The Unknown’ Book Review: Riley Sager’s Latest Twists Itself Into Too Many Knots appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

August brings dozens of new horror releases from rising stars and big names, and it was extremely hard to pick just 10 to headline this list.

That said, these are the books we absolutely can’t wait to read this month, from a couple of compelling hauntings to two tales of demonic influence to a novel that wants to take us into the New French Extremity film territory. 

The Unknown by Riley Sager (August 4)

Riley Sager‘s books, whether they’re supernatural thrillers or pieces of grounded suspense, always move as they run on jet fuel. His stories are immaculately paced and engrossing, making him the perfect horror author for summer. In The Unknown, Sager takes us to an island in Vermont, where a struggling actress may have just landed a career-making role with a hot director. To prepare, she and the rest of the cast take a research trip to live at the site of the legendary disappearances that inspired the film. But when the disappearances begin again, the stranded filmmakers have to wonder: Were the stories true? I got an early look at this one, and I’m pleased to report it’s a ball. 

Penitents by Madeline Blondeau (August 11)

Indie publisher Ghoulish Books is always a great place to look for exciting, transgressive voices, and we might have another one with Madeline Blondeau‘s Penitents. Described as a debut novel from a new trans writer that blends New French Extremity with ’70s grindhouse, the book follows a writer’s encounter with a “violent” family across one weekend in Astoria, Oregon. The title alone makes me think of Martyrs, and I can’t wait to read where this one takes me.

Midwestern Chrome by Michael Bettendorf (August 11)

Speaking of indie publishers I always trust to show me something exciting, we’ve got Tenebrous, and the latest from Trve Cvlt author Michael Bettendorf. This one isn’t necessarily all-out horror, but neither is it all-out sci-fi or apocalyptic fiction. It’s, well…Midwestern Detective Android Cyberpunk Mystery Noir? Maybe. But this one just sounds too wild to pass up, particularly if you like when horror intersects with other genres. 

Devil Inside by Clay McLeod Chapman (August 11)

Clay McLeod Chapman has a knack for creative stretching, and he commits to it in book after book. After conquering the young adult space with Shiny Happy People, Chapman turns his eyes to horror-romance with the story of a man recovering from a near-death experience and a woman who might not be entirely human. You can probably guess where some of this is going based on the title alone, but Chapman books always pack emotional, devastating surprises, so don’t miss this one. 

Lights! Camera! Frendo! Clown in a Cornfield 4 by Adam Cesare (August 18)

Adam Cesare‘s wildly popular Clown in a Cornfield books are fun for a lot of reasons, but my favorite is the way they keep playing with the perception of the story they’re telling. Now, after telling stories of alt-right Frendo conspiracies and full-on cults, Cesare’s taking Frendo to the only place he could go after he got a film adaptation: Hollywood. That’s right, the Kettle Springs Massacre movie is happening, the cast and crew are in Missouri, and the lead actress just might be the next victim in a fresh string of murders. Sounds like a blast.

Marla by Jonathan Janz (August 18)

Technically, this edition of Marla is a nice upgraded reprint, but its arrival offers a fresh chance for readers to get to know its rising star author, Jonathan Janz. A veteran of the indie horror scene, Janz’s presence has been building through books like Children of the Dark and Veil. Now, Marla – with its story of a title character who transforms her small town in ways big, small, and frightening – is back for a wider audience, ready to help make Janz’s mark on the horror world even deeper in the years to come. 

The Minimalist by Kailee Pedersen (August 18)

With Sacrificial Animals, Kailee Pedersen delivered one of my favorite horror debuts of the last decade. Now, she returns with her sophomore novel, a tale of creative obsession in the classical music community. The Minimalist of the tale might be a legendary, recently deceased composer, or it might be that composer’s favorite student, who’s just inherited his entire estate. Working in the shadow of her own issues, and tasked with the burden of finishing her mentor’s last composition, Mia Voss will dive headlong into the most personal work of her entire career, and it just might change her forever. I got a very, very early peek at this one, and it’s got all the lyrical beauty of Sacrificial Animals, with an even deeper horror bite.

These Walls Remember by Del Sandeen (August 18) 

With her fierce debut This Cursed House, Del Sandeen announced herself as one of our foremost modern haunted house architects. Now, she returns with another novel of dark family secrets, strange transformations, and houses with a life of their own. This time around, Sandeen brings us the tale of two sisters, both trying to clean up and sell off a house they’ve just inherited in Savannah. But as the home’s history starts to come to light, one sister gets a little too close to the house itself, while the other will be forced to pull her sibling back out the door. One of our finest rising horror stars is back at it, so keep an eye on this one.

The Calamities by Chuck Wendig (August 18)

Through books like The Book of Accidents and Black River Orchard, Chuck Wendig has built each of his new horror novels into an event, and The Calamities feels especially potent in that regard, because it’s launching a new series. A blend of horror and dark fantasy, the book follows the half-demon Mayne family, one of the world’s most powerful bloodlines, as their reluctant heir is forced to come back home. Succession with demons by Chuck Wendig? I’m already there.

The Devil Knows Her Name by C.N. Vair (August 25)

Some subgenres just pull you in right away, and for me one of those subgenres is Appalachian Folk Horror. So, I was especially interested to read about this debut novel, set in a rural community where a woman with a witchy lineage has built a sanctuary for herself and the wildlife she cares for. But when that balance is disrupted by the arrival of a strange creature, she must confront a decades-old deal with the devil dating back three generations, and find a way to survive her own dark bargains. Reads like something I’m ready to devour in a single sitting. 

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Shannon Morgan‘s latest novel, A Penance for Crows, gets that right from the opening pages. Set on a secluded Irish island and told from the perspective of an outsider who’s learned to coexist with a theocratic community, it’s immediately immersive, which helps make it one of those books fans of folk and occult horror absolutely shouldn’t miss.

Grizela is a painter, living in relative seclusion in a cottage on the island of Beanna Dubh. She moved here from Scotland long ago, sells her paintings under pseudonyms, and in general kind of likes that the rest of the islanders see her as an oddball at best and a bad influence at worst. She spends her days painting, reading, and mentoring local girls Nessa, Una, Enya, and Maeve, hoping that they’ll one day find freedom beyond the island.

Beanna Dubh, you see, is tightly controlled by the Catholic Church, particularly the aging Father Murphy, who runs the local parish and keeps a tight grip on the reins of the community.

So when one of Father Murphy’s underlings turns up dead on Beanna Dubh’s shores, it sends ripples of terror through the community. Grizela, as the person who finds the body, is the subject of particular suspicion, and the local superstitions about the flocks of crows who live on the island and supposedly warn of impending doom flare up all over again. A mystery is afoot, one marked by ancient sigils and strange happenings, and if Grizela doesn’t solve it, it just might consume her.

What jumped out at me first about this book is how good Morgan is at balancing initial jolts of exposition with atmospheric worldbuilding and, of course, sound character work. Grizela is inherently fascinating, an outsider who nevertheless has spent enough time on the island to know it in and out. She’s up on all the gossip, knows where the chief tension lies, and sees paths to deeper connections through fellow misfits and expats. Or at least…she thinks she does.

Morgan does not waste a moment in diving straight into the plot, knocking Grizela back on her heels and leaving her scrambling for answers as the town moves closer and closer to something like a full-blown Satanic panic. This leaves her looking for footholds, whether they lay in the past or the present, and sets up very clear avenues of antagonism for characters like Father Murphy. It’s all beautifully arranged, and the ways of the island people – from their own peculiar way of greeting each other to the significance of local landmarks – stand out with a vividness that recalls folk horror classics like The Wicker Man.

This careful arrangement of story elements emerges so Morgan can spend the back half of the book not just upsetting the balance of life on Beanna Dubh, but blurring it, giving it depth and shade like a painter might blend colors. Grizela’s present starts to echo her past, sending her into corners of her mind she’d rather not go.

The line between what seems like accidental deaths and superstitions of diabolical influence practically disappears, as it no longer seems to matter whether the Devil is afoot or it just feels like he is. The church, the town’s protective and guiding influence, takes on more shades of malevolence, and even though they feel predictable, they fit right in to the larger tapestry.

The result is a book that delivers folk horror in the classic sense, calling to mind the novels of Dennis Wheatley and Thomas Tryon as well as films like Blood on Satan’s Claw and Witchfinder General, with an added sense of timelessness that really sings. If I have any major complaint, it’s that the pieces of evidence building to a solution start to get a little too convenient at times, losing some of the book’s well-earned ambiguity on its course toward explaining everything that’s happened.

That’s more personal preference than a question of good craft, however. If you love folk horror, occult horror, or just atmospheric, Gothic chills mixed with old, dark magic, you will love A Penance for Crows.

A Penance for Crows is out now wherever books are sold.

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The project is described as an elevated horror film based on the critically acclaimed horror novel by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo.

It’s set in “Saint-Auch, a fictional suburb on the outskirts of Toulouse in Southern France, in the early 1990s. It follows a group of teenagers drawn to an abandoned house that exerts a strange power on them. After one of their friends dies under disturbing circumstances, they decide to enter the house, not suspecting it’s alive with something supernatural. Once they enter it, it begins to feed on their private fears, desires, and traumas, turning their psychological vulnerabilities into something monstrous and inescapable.“

The French-language Netflix original marks Audiard’s first foray into horror.

The divisive Emilia Perez, Audiard’s Spanish-language musical crime drama, amassed 13 nominations at the 97th Academy Awards but also met with controversy when offensive tweets by star Karla Sofía Gascón during the film’s award campaign.

Del Amo’s source novel was published last year and has been described as an homage to ’80s and ’90s horror in the vein of Stephen King, though its social realism is what lends itself to the elevated horror concept and Audiard’s attachment to the project. 

Stay tuned for more as it arrives.

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The closest I ever got to wanting to run D&D was after my party played the Curse of Strahd campaign in fifth edition. The Ravenloft setting was perfect for me, forcing our intrepid band of heroes to face down all sorts of vampires, werewolves, and other things that go bump in the night. One of my all-time favorite moments as a player was entering someone’s home, slowly realizing she was a witch, and pushing her into an oven “Hansel and Gretel” style before she could spring her trap. Leaning into the horror got my mind racing with the possibilities for a campaign, but nothing ever came of it.

Recently, Wizards of the Coast released Ravenloft: The Horrors Within for the latest edition of D&D, revamping the legendary setting for the updated ruleset. While I still have plenty of games I would turn to first for spooky roleplaying games, after flipping through the book, I was impressed with the wide range of horror that the new setting manual allows for. To be clear, this isn’t a beat-by-beat campaign book with full prep for a long-running adventure, but rather a series of settings, creatures, villains, and character creation options that can be added to the world, allowing you to explore the darker side of D&D.

Character Options With a Horror Twist

The introduction of The Horrors Within outlines the main narrative concept of the book, the Domains of Dread. These are isolated areas that can be accessed by traversing through mysterious mists. Each domain has a Darklord, who is both a ruler and prisoner in the land. Their domain acts as a dark reflection of their past in a way that makes for a cohesive space that’s backed up by interesting character drama.

While much of the book is dedicated to GM-facing tools for creating a horror campaign within the Domains of Dread, the first chapter is all about new subclasses for players to use as their characters level up. There’s not a new one for every class, only seven of them, but they do add some supernatural flavor to the traditional character archetypes, along with smartly thought-out mechanical additions. None of them are terribly game-changing in my opinion, but they do help you create characters that feel like they are becoming monsters themselves. My favorite of these is the Reanimator subclass for the artificer, who assembles corpses into undead companions that can help you out.

The book also has a bard that summons ghosts, a cleric who worships the forces of death, a ranger who communes with dark creatures, a rogue who gets trinkets from the dead, a sorcerer who draws power from the shadows, and a warlock who made a pact with an undead patron.

To round out character creation, there’s a new set of horror-tinged backgrounds and species to layer on top of your character. Variants of werewolves, vampires, and zombies are now available to you, in addition to some fun concepts like paranormal investigator and spirit medium. While none of these excite me a ton on their own, I can see the possibilities forming in my mind as I come up with different ways to mix and match the classes, backgrounds, and species, making it enticing for players who are looking for creepier ways to build their new character. It doesn’t elevate the class creativity to something along the lines of Heart: The City Beneath or Mork Borg, but it’s definitely more flavorful than the standard D&D archetypes I’ve been using for years.

Darklords, Domains, and Dark Gifts

As you level up, you’re given access to a new set of feats called Dark Gifts. These can be bestowed on you from the GM at narratively interesting points, or can be selected any time you would gain a feat from the origin category. These are once again very thematic, combining mechanics and fiction in clever ways, but importantly, they come with a price to be paid when you roll a critical failure.

For example, the Gathered Whispers feat allows you to not only cast Message, but also to use a reaction to summon spirits to defend you when you would be hit by an attack. As a cost, if you roll a one, the haunting voices get so loud that you need to make a saving throw or take the condition deafened. I’m always in favor of a tabletop RPG making failure more interesting, so this is a step in the right direction for me personally, and I would love to see the concept pushed even further, especially with the focus on horror.

The bulk of the book, about half of the page count, is spent outlining the various domains of Ravenloft and their associated Darklords. This chapter is extremely thorough, highlighting the various horror subgenres and hallmarks that each domain explores so you can find one that aligns with the story you are trying to tell. Want to do something about gothic horror and political intrigue? Send your party to Borco and have them caught in the battle between the two Darklords, Ivana Boritsi and Ivan Dilisnya. Looking for a dark fantasy adventure about doomed quests and cursed items? Then you’ll want to use the Shadowlands, where the sentient sword Ebonbane torments would-be heroes.

Is your group begging for cosmic horror? Well, among the Domains of Dread in this book is Innsmouth itself, giving you the tools to put your players against the ultimate Lovecraftian evil, Cthulhu. There are sixteen fully-realized domains in here, as well as about two dozen others with brief, but still intriguing descriptions. I wouldn’t say any of them are mind-blowingly creative, but they certainly push the limits of what I’m used to seeing in D&D, with lots of options to explore your subgenre of choice.

While they don’t lay out full, beat-by-beat campaigns for each of the locations, there’s definitely enough information here to get the gears turning on hooks to draw the player in. There are several points of interest laid out for each domain, as well as a full history of the area and the associated Darklord. Each Darklord also has a full stat block, preparing you to craft that epic boss fight when the time comes. My favorite part of each entry is the suggested campaign overview, which outlines ideas for what characters should be doing during specific level ranges.

These are only about a page long, but they also come with plans for a full mini-adventure within that overview, complete with NPCs, plot twists, and often a map for you to use at the table. I’m a big proponent of the GMing philosophy of “draw maps, but leave blank spaces,” so while some may be disappointed that there’s not more detailed prep contained in this chapter, this is just the right amount of info for me to start creating my own campaign.

A Worthy Collection of Horrors

The following two chapters are focused on giving you the tools to start writing your own campaigns within the Ravenloft setting, providing solid advice for how to think about how you want the horror to manifest at your table. Given how goofy players can get at the table, it can be hard to maintain an atmosphere of menace between friends, but the tips and tricks in these chapters are a great start. Ravenloft: The Horrors Within also gives you the framework to build your own domains and darklords to tell the story that you want to tell, including tables to roll on to help you generate ideas.

To round out the book, the final chapter is a bestiary full of horrors to throw at adventurers. They all still end up getting broken down into D&D mechanics, so they aren’t anything extremely wild and out there, but there are some gnarly creatures rendered in compellingly moody artwork. My personal favorites were the Boneless, an animated skin of a flayed corpse, the cleverly named Carrionette, a doll animated by sinister magic, and the Relentless Killers, a series of supernatural murderers that take inspiration from slashers. Included among the monsters are some good NPCs that can be worked into your campaigns, either as friend or foe. It’s not as clever as the surreal monsters in Mothership or as truly horrific as the terrors outlined in Mork Borg, but these are definitely some of D&D’s darkest creations, allowing you to weave horror into your standard encounters.

There are definitely games better equipped to do horror in tabletop RPG form, but if you’ve got a group of players who love D&D and don’t want to try a new system, this setting book is the best way to inject the horror you’re looking for into the classic game. Not only does it lay out a wealth of options for you to pull from, between the domains, darklords, and monsters, it also provides you the tools to come up with your own ideas to prepare compellingly terrifying campaigns of your own.

Even if it sticks to well-worn genre tropes, any horror-loving GM will get a kick out of flipping through this book and seeing how their favorite subgenres have been translated into the world of Dungeons & Dragons.

Ravenloft: The Horrors Within is available now from D&D Beyond in Digital and Physical versions.

Follow along for more Tabletop Terror, a monthly column highlighting roleplaying games new and old. 

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Dick Warlock: The Shape of My Career is available NOW from Harker Press.

Who is Dick Warlock? In addition to playing The Shape in the original Halloween II, Warlock has appeared in and done stunt work for countless high profile horror movies including Halloween III, Jaws, When a Stranger Calls, Escape from New York, The Thing, The Dead Zone, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, Pumpkinhead, Child’s Play 2, and so many more.

Harker Press previews, “Go behind the mask with this definitive chronicle of celebrated stuntman Dick Warlock, a fearless performer whose career helped shape some of Hollywood’s most unforgettable moments. This electrifying memoir traces Warlock’s rise through the stunt ranks, his collaborations with legendary filmmakers, and his indelible contributions to classic movies like Jaws, Halloween II, Escape from New York, and so many others.

“Packed with candid stories of on set danger and firsthand insights into stunt work, this book peels back the curtain on how it all went down. Whether dodging explosions, battling a mechanical shark, or donning the mask of Hollywood’s most iconic slasher, Dick Warlock’s legacy is explored here in thrilling, vivid detail.”

Dick Warlock: The Shape of My Career even features a foreword by Kurt Russell!

Harker Press also promises hundreds of rare full-color photos, many never-before-seen, interviews with Rick Rosenthal and Tommy Lee Wallace, a guest chapter by Halloween II co-star Lance Guest, call sheets and production paperwork, and personal notes from Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, Jamie Lee Curtis, Debra Hill, and more.

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Available now as an eBook and paperback, New York Times Bestselling Author Bruce Campbell’s Reconcile sees Campbell putting his own spin on the classic Western genre.

Campbell explains, “My mother, Joanne, loved the Western genre. She read every Zane Grey novel he ever wrote. I know because I drew stick-figure cartoons in the margins of her massive paperback collection. Westerns, by nature, are riddled with clichés – the steely-eyed, unshaven hero protecting innocent pioneers from brutal, unforgiving savages. With Reconcile, I tried to sidestep many of the cliché elements we’ve read or seen in Westerns for a generation.”

“Reality isn’t tidy or reliable,” Campbell continues. “Reality has unpleasant circumstances that don’t always resolve themselves like they do in the movies. In the heat of battle, the “good guys” and “bad guys” aren’t so easily defined. In the sprawling history of the American West, I’d like to think a different kind of story was possible, and I hope you enjoy it.”

You can purchase your copy of the 116-page, self-published novella now.

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They’re all, standing alone and taken together, very promising ingredients, and when Smith starts to bounce all those secrets and all that seclusion around with a little murder in the mix, they make for some juicy plotting. But fun twists and macabre themed party nights do not a thriller make. There is fun to be had here, but for all its reliance on classic horror tropes and the films of a master of cinematic suspense, Scary Movie Night never quite finds a way to become something more. 

Movie blogger and influencer Tippi (yes, she’s named for Tippi Hedren from The Birds) is going through a rough patch. Her upcoming marriage was just called off, and she’s planning to hit the Cannes Film Festival then travel the world as a newly single woman, even shifting her career focus from movies to travel in the process. Her friends Ava, Marlowe, and Constance are supportive, but they also know it might be the last time they see Tippi for a while, so master party planner Ava comes up with the perfect sendoff: A themed scary movie night party, complete with costumes, hosted at the elegant estate of Tippi’s grandmother, Marmee.

Marmee, you see, has her own history with the glamour of Hollywood, and even has a private cinema set up in her mansion. It’s the perfect venue for the perfect night, at least until Tippi starts receiving vaguely threatening notes from her ex, and the first body turns up. 

See what I mean about all the ingredients being there? This book starts with so much promise, particularly when guests turn up for the party and reveal their various movie costumes. There’s so much to chew on, and Smith wastes no time diving directly into the drama of it all. The book moves primarily through Tippi’s first-person perspective, so we get the lowdown on her friends, their various relationships, the quarrels that have defined previous social interactions, and much more. It’s a series of rich veins all tapped at once, and it feels like the book is genuinely going somewhere quite fun. 

Here’s the thing: The book does go somewhere quite fun; it just gets there in a way that I found both frustrating and often unfulfilling. The characters aren’t defined by their choices in the book so much as they’re defined by what Tippi tells us about each of them, and while the notion of Tippi as an unreliable narrator is key to the plot, her supporting cast never really gets a chance to sit up and exist as anything other than archetypes in her head. The dialogue doesn’t help matters in this regard, and I kept finding myself wishing one of Tippi’s friends would just seize the narrative, just for a moment, so I’d get some sense of these people beyond the broad brushstrokes of the protagonist. 

Which brings us to the issue of Tippi as the narrator in the first place. Like the Hitchcock blondes on which she’s clearly modeled, we’re meant to learn about her through her choices, and constantly question whether or not she’s made the right ones. Why did she leave her ex with a wedding looming? Why is she changing career paths? Why does she have to be talked into her own going-away party? How she reacts to these things, and what she’s really after, will be what defines her, but here’s the thing: Tippi, for all her Hitchcockian layers of plotting, never steps forward as a fully formed character. Like the Hitch films playing in the background during the party, she’s more like a suggestion of a character than a person.

Writing first-person present-tense is tricky under the best of circumstances, but doing it when your protagonist is meant to be harboring secrets of her own is especially challenging, and it just…never quite entirely works here, and drawing very direct parallels between her and Hitchcock’s various leading ladies doesn’t really help matters.

But here’s the really interesting part: I wouldn’t be invested in any of these issues were it not for a story that genuinely kept me reading. For all of this book’s shortcomings, and I found a few, it ultimately holds together because Smith has a genuine gift for plot twists, and secrets, and the kind of juicy drama that makes a thriller keep barreling forward on the page. There’s good stuff in here, even if it’s sometimes overshadowed by missteps, and that means that while Scary Movie Night might not obsess you or give you nightmares or stick in your head for weeks on end, it will entertain you. I wanted more from this book, but I also want to see what Miranda Smith writes next, and that’s an achievement in itself. 

Scary Movie Night is available July 14 wherever books are sold. 

The post ‘Scary Movie Night’ Review: A Hitchcock-Themed Thriller Full of Juicy Twists But Not Much Else appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Then Tingle will drop one of the single creepiest bits of imagery you’ve ever read, and you’re right back in the horror space. It’s not always a jump scare, but it is always a pulsing feeling of dread that keeps you hooked through the rest of the book. 

Fabulous Bodies, Tingle’s latest horror novel, carries on these gifts, and the promise Tingle showed on books like Camp Damascus and Bury Your Gays. His fiction’s growing ever more confident and precise, and his eye for horrific detail hasn’t dimmed in the least, making this a summer reading delight for horror fans. 

Poppy is a single mother determined to make a better life for her daughter, particularly after growing up in group homes and foster systems. By day, she works hard to keep up the flow of upbeat, enthusiastic content as a fashion influencer, and while that’s going well, it’s not yet making ends meet. To make up the difference, she moonlights as a grave robber, lifting bodies from morgues and funeral homes and selling their pieces on the black market. It’s grueling, dangerous work, and it’s about to pay off big. Out of the blue, Poppy gets a call to transport the newly dead body of her musical hero, the legendary Eddie Michaels. It’s a weird gig, but the payout is big enough that she could walk away from her macabre side gig forever. Poppy takes the job, and things get complicated when Eddie turns out to be, well, only mostly dead. 

From the moment Eddie’s corpse enters the picture, Fabulous Bodies takes on the vibe of a road novel, as the grave robber and the undead rock star make stop after stop, and Poppy tries again and again to wrap her mind about what she’s gotten herself into, and how she might get herself out. It’s a delightful premise, and Tingle never loses his grip on the fun of it. No matter how dark the novel gets, and it does get quite dark, the narrative keeps barreling forward, delivering macabre laughs and moments of beautifully gruesome invention along the way. 

Because he’s set his protagonist up as a fashion influencer, Tingle has lots of room to play in the space of how we view human bodies, both alive and dead, how we use them, and what we value in them. This is the emotional core of Fabulous Bodies, and while it’s sometimes overshadowed by the runaway train of the plot, it remains a potent source of thematic exploration throughout the book, and it gets more complicated when you consider certain gifts Eddie’s been granted in his strange supernatural state.

In essence, we’re looking at a story about a grave robber who discovers a body that not only fights back, but takes control of any given situation. That throws Poppy for repeated loops and keeps the plot moving, but it also makes us consider on a deeper level exactly what we value about our own physical form, and what might happen when we lose our grip on it entirely. 

The book’s themes and emotional concerns hum through the whole narrative, but the overwhelming impression I got while reading Fabulous Bodies was just how much damn fun this book is. I couldn’t stop reading it, not just because it’s so filled with sudden swerves and ghoulish setpieces, but because Tingle has honed his horror storytelling down to a fine, very sharp point. Fabulous Bodies moves like a roller coaster, complete with a tension-filled ramp-up and a finale that’ll leave you breathless by the time the ride is over.

If you haven’t been reading Chuck Tingle’s horror work up to this point, it’s time to get on board, because he’s just getting started, and he’s already mastered the art of the scary page-turner.

Fabulous Bodies is available now.

The post ‘Fabulous Bodies’ Review: Chuck Tingle Latest is a Wild, Unputdownable Ride appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

So, whether you’re into grave robbers, creepy neighbors, vampires, or good old-fashioned Gothic chills, here are the books we’re most excited about in July of 2026. 

The Brides by Charlotte Cross – July 7

The Dracula legend has grown to such titanic proportions over the last century and more that we’re still finding new ways to twist it into fresh stories. The Brides sets out to do exactly that with a feminist retelling of the story that attempts to lay out the origins of Dracula’s famous trio of brides. It begins with a journey to Budapest, an invitation from a Transylvanian noble, and a castle in the woods. It ends…well, read it and find out. 

The Red Sacrament by Sara Hinkley – July 7

Do you ever wish the theater of vampires from Interview with the Vampire was a novel unto itself? That’s the world Sara Hinkley will dive into with The Red Sacrament, a vampire novel set in 19th-century Paris about a mysterious midnight theater troupe that never seems to age. Set amid a time of bickering and potential revolution in the vampire world, it follows a theater company full of blood drinkers as they navigate strange new tribulations, including the arrival of a witch who could upend everything about their immortal existence. I’m an absolute sucker for books like this one, and I can’t wait to dive in.

Fabulous Bodies by Chuck Tingle – July 7

Chuck Tingle’s rise to become one of the most important horror writers of the decade continues with his latest novel, a wild ride pitched as a blend of Drive and Beetlejuice. It follows Poppy, a single Mom and fashion influencer who makes ends meet by dealing in black market body parts. It’s a tough gig, but Poppy’s ticket out might have arrived when the opportunity arises to transport the corpse of a newly dead rock star. It seems like an easy way to a big payday…at least until the rock star wakes up. I’m in the thick of this book right now; I’m having a blast, and I’m betting you will too. 

Brave New Weird Vol. 4 – July 14

Tenebrous Press is one of the finest indie genre publishers out there right now, and Brave New Weird is a big reason why. Curated by Tenebrous editor Alex Woodroe, this book aims to collect the best in “New Weird Horror” published throughout the last year, bringing together nearly two dozen writers on the cutting edge of genre short fiction right now. If you want to read key works from the genre writers of the future, or you just like your horror really, really strange, this is the place to go. 

Cross My Heart, I Hope You Die by Mallory Arnold – July 14

The latest from the author of How to Survive a Horror Story begins with a really juicy hook: Three women all discover they’re dating the same man, and they decide to get revenge. To make that happen, they decide to team up and lure him to an isolated mountain cabin, where they’ll put their whole plan in motion and get some relatively nonviolent payback. But when he turns up dead, the women are plunged into a nightmare. They can’t trust anyone, even each other, and they might not be alone. I’m so ready to see how this one plays out. 

Home Sick by Rhiannon Grist – July 14

A very promising debut novel, Home Sick follows Tamsin, a woman hoping to start over with a new house and a new life in Scotland, after her old life starts to crumble. She’s optimistic, but then she meets her neighbor, a perplexing woman with whom Tamsin shares a wall. When strange things start to happen in the house, backed up by local stories about the place, Tamsin starts to wonder if her neighbor is behind it all, setting off a dark psychological spiral. I’ve heard great things about this one, and I’m thrilled that it’s almost here.

Scary Movie Night by Miranda Smith – July 14

A woman named Tippi (I’m already on board) is turning 35 and breaking free from a crappy relationship, and her friends decide to celebrate by renting out a mansion and basically throwing her a horror movie-themed costume party. It’s a great idea, and it feels like it’s gonna be a great night, at least until Tippi’s friends start disappearing and her ex starts sending threatening texts. A slasher whodunit steeped in movie references, Scary Movie Night feels like a perfect summer horror read, particularly for those of us who can imagine attending a party exactly like this one. 

Carry Me to My Grave by Christopher Golden – July 21

Christopher Golden is one of modern horror’s heavy hitters, and Carry Me to My Grave is his latest page-turner. The book follows Malcolm, who sits by his dying mother’s bedside and makes her a very specific promise: In the coming two days, he will transport her body home to Maine, or there will be dire consequences. Does Malcolm understand those consequences? Not really, but the strange figures watching from outside, and the feeling that he’s being pursued, suggest he’d better hurry. I was lucky enough to get a very early look at this one, and I can tell you it’s Golden at his best, a freight train of a book you won’t want to put down.

Unnamed Bones by Lora Senf – July 21

Through books like The Clackity, Lora Senf made her name as one of the finest horror authors for young readers, and now she’s taking on the young adult world with a dose of cosmic horror. After the death of her father, teenage Harrow and her friends head to a seemingly impossible island to search for answers, only to find themselves in a world with rules they don’t understand. To make things more complicated, Harrow has coped with her own cursed life by making her feelings into personalities that live very full lives in her head, and now they’re all coming out to play. Throw in a mysterious creature, and you’ve got a book poised to be jam-packed with creepy fun from one of the best writers in the genre right now. 

A Penance for Crows by Shannon Morgan – July 28

Billed as a Gothic novel with a synopsis that hints at folk and occult horror, A Penance for Crows is set on an island off the coast of Ireland that’s like a trip back in time. Modern technology doesn’t touch it; the church is the highest authority, and residents still hold to old folk beliefs, including a sense of ill omens brought by the island’s many crows. It’s here that we meet Grizela, a local painter plunged into a supernatural mystery when a local priest turns up murdered, and a quartet of young girls starts holding strange meetings after dark. This one feels like it’s got everything I love about the genre bundled up in one satisfyingly haunting package, so I’m eager to crack it open. 

The post Vampires, Grave Robbers, and Crows: 10 Horror Books We Can’t Wait to Read in July appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Some of the biggest names in the genre have turned in outstanding work, rising stars have made their mark, and we’re only halfway through the year. 

To celebrate the midway point of 2026, with plenty of horror books still to come, we’re taking a look back at the best horror books we’ve read this year so far, listed alphabetically by author.

If you missed any of these books earlier in the year, consider this your reminder to catch up. 

Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker

A student running from a crime he may or may not have committed escapes to his father’s country home in Japan, only to find himself haunted by strange apparitions, while in the past, a young samurai tries to find salvation for her family and finds a door to the future instead. Kylie Lee Baker’s Japanese Gothic begins with this dialogue between past and present, and then blossoms into so much more, a cross-time ghost story about old wounds and what it really takes to finally heal them. I got so happily lost in this one that I would have read at least 200 more pages.

Persona by Aoife Josie Clements

In this tale of shut-ins, sex workers, artists, and the horrors they both summon and recoil from, Aoife Josie Clements weaves something that feels less like a story to be experienced and more like a psychic wound to be endured, and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible. Evocative in its prose and nightmarish in its imagery, Persona is a story of the masks we wear, and the understanding that not all of our masks are particularly pretty or even easy to breathe through. It’s a dense, literary, unnervingly vicious book, and while it’s already attracted an audience, it deserves a much bigger one. 

Dead First by Johnny Compton

Johnny Compton’s latest novel opens with a throwing down of the gauntlet, a sequence that made me instantly think “How on Earth is he going to top this?” It’s a story that begins with a billionaire hiring a private investigator to determine why, despite trying in many brutal ways, he cannot die. That premise, and the scene which sets it all off, is so alluring and delightfully gruesome that you almost can’t believe it’s the way a book begins, and then Compton just keeps going, delivering a supernatural mystery that I could not put down. 

Make Me Better by Sarah Gailey

A woman grieving for the life she wanted visits a mysterious island renowned for the healing salt its residents harvest and sell, seeking renewal and relief. What she finds instead is a strange cult with a twisted history with surprising resonance in her own life, and a people who are more than willing to grant the relief she wants, for a price. Laced with beautiful prose and moments of profound realization alongside folk and even cosmic horror, this is vintage Sarah Gailey. 

Partially Devoured by Daniel Kraus

If you love horror film history and analysis, Partially Devoured is an essential. Written by Pulitzer Prize-winner Daniel Kraus, the book is a deep dive into his favorite movie of all time, George A. Romero‘s Night of the Living Dead, complete with exhaustive research into the making of the film and passages of deeply moving memoir woven in. If you’ve ever wanted to know what the eerie music that opens the film is called while also bursting into tears at how horror movies can save your life, this is a must-read.

Wretch by Eric LaRocca

Our reigning King of Extreme Horror, Eric LaRocca weaves books of uncommon beauty out of the most nightmarish parts of humanity, and Wretch is no exception. The story of a grieving man who longs for relief and searches for it amid a strange support group that might be a cult, Wretch is a brutal journey into the darkest part of us all, and explores what salvation we might find when we get to the rotten core of the world and peel back its layers. LaRocca’s on a tear of great work right now that few other genre writers can match. 

Headlights by CJ Leede

A mystery, a serial killer horror show, a tribute to Stephen King‘s The Shining. All of these things describe CJ Leede’s Headlights, and yet they don’t begin to cover the full breadth of horror awaiting you in this novel. The story of a former FBI agent drawn back into the cold case that haunts him most, it’s a shocker brimming over with vivid moments that’ll live behind your eyes. CJ Leede has now published three novels, and they’re all bangers, so it’s time to get on board if you haven’t already. 

It Came From Neverland by Cynthia Pelayo

Cynthia Pelayo has been one of our finest genre writers for years now, but It Came From Neverland is my favorite thing she’s written, and it’s not even close. A dark take on Peter Pan from the perspective of an adult Wendy Darling living in World War I-era London, Pelayo’s book works as both a satisfying horror narrative and a rich exploration of what it really means to never grow up. The horror never loses its potency, but it’s the search for the meaning behind the Peter Pan phenomenon in our own lives, and what we can do about it, that sticks with me most.

Filth Eaters by Ito Romo

Ito Romo’s Filth Eaters is a slim volume, one you can read in just a couple of hours if you’ve got the inclination, but it has the feel of a generation-spanning epic. The story of a breed of vampires born in Central America, the European vampires who encounter them, and the offspring they eventually produced, it spans centuries and packs loads of juicy lore into its pages while never losing its grip on character and narrative drive. I would read hundreds more pages of this world, but I’ll settle for this uncommonly grand-scale novella for now.

Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep by Paul Tremblay

A former pro gamer gets a job at a tech company to pilot a brain-dead human body across the country, and so Paul Tremblay’s sci-fi-horror juggernaut begins. Indebted to Philip K. Dick, the primal snarl of Harlan Ellison, and the quirky comedy of The Big Lebowski, and yet wholly original, this is a towering and ambitious novel by one of horror’s most respected voices. What starts as a high-concept tech thriller soon becomes a startling meditation on the value of stories, who gets to tell them, and what happens when we cede too much control to machines we don’t understand. It’s a stunner.

The post The 10 Best Horror Books of 2026 (So Far) appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Oscar Brady’s Ronin is a new take on the post-apocalyptic ’80s exploitation/punksploitation pulp, mixed with the fem-action of Coffy, the playful sexuality of Supervixens, and the cargo-hauling, coast-to-coast adventure of Smokey and the Bandit.

It’s also the first book released by Midnight Pulp, expanding the popular streaming service’s footprint into publishing.

Ronin is available for pre-order now on Amazon.

In Ronin, “Meet Seph. Seph is a badass outsider hero for a f*cked-up, rabid, and gruesome world. All her life, she has scraped by, choosing to fight to live over ending up on some mutant cannibal’s dinner table. When she is assigned a big score to escort a truckload of trafficked sex workers across the country, she fends for her life… and the lives of her priceless cargo. Accepting the seemingly impossible quest was the easy part of the mission. Seph never knows when she will come face-to-face with randy rape riders, monstrous mutants, and feral forest folk.

“Will anybody make it out in one piece? Not if Seph has her say!”

“I am very excited to see where this new venture takes me. My story, Ronin, pays homage to the sensational, over-the-top grindhouse and exploitation films that I love watching, so Midnight Pulp makes perfect sense for me and my story,” said Oscar Brady.

Midnight Pulp. Read something strange.

The post The Wasteland Gets Bloody in ‘Ronin’, Midnight Pulp’s First Original Novel Available to Preorder Now appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

For those unfamiliar, the Strange Stories podcast centers around classic sci-fi, fantasy and horror literature, aiming to “render the familiar unfamiliar,” compelling its listeners to “experience the world anew” regarding topics such as monsters, magic and flying saucers. With the TTRPG, this one-night, rules-light session game will emulate short stories of the fantasy/horror/sci-fi genre. The team plans on replicating the same experience for their listeners with tabletop players, plunging them into extraordinary situations that reframe the ordinary.

Chris Lackey is no stranger to working on TTRPGs, having written for TTRPG publishers Chaosium and Pelgrane in the past, including the award-winning “Cults of Cthulhu”. For Strange Stories – The Roleplaying Game, accompanying each adventure will be an audio companion to prep Story Guides (GMs) to run each session. More details are expected when the campaign officially launches.

“For seventeen years on our podcast, we’ve studied the architects of the uncanny. Now, our game brings their worlds to life. Drawing on the work of Rod Serling, H.P. Lovecraft, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard (just to name a few), we plunge players into extraordinary situations that reframe the ordinary.”

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Whether he’s playing with traditional novelistic forms, holding conversations with characters across time, or pushing his stories to their bleakest and strangest possible conclusions (if they have concrete conclusions at all, Tremblay is a daring novelist, never playing it safe for his audience or himself. The author of A Head Full of Ghosts, Horror Movie, and more is always pushing for something in his fiction, digging into the core of an issue until he finds its bloody, beating heart. 

Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, Tremblay’s latest novel, is no different. From the title alone you might surmise certain things about the narrative, from its Philip K. Dick influence to its sci-fi-horror premise, and you’d be right. But Tremblay always pushes beyond those initial assumptions, and here we get not just a gripping sci-fi-horror showcase, but something much stranger and more profound: An exploration of what it means to be human, fragile bodies and all, in the age of AI. 

Julia, Tremblay’s protagonist, is in a strange place when the novel begins. A former gaming streamer who’s retreated from her digital spotlight, she’s in search of a new direction in life, and she finds one in the last place she might expect. Julia’s mother, who runs a California tech behemoth, has a job offer for her daughter, an unprecedented one. It seems that the company has introduced proprietary new technology into the body of a brain-dead man, and now they need to see what this tech can do. Julia’s job? Using her gaming skills to take this human vegetable (Julia calls him “Bernie” because of Weekend at Bernie’s) from one side of the country to another, using a stealthy controller purpose-built for the experience. 

This is a wonderfully ghoulish premise on which to build a novel, and Tremblay makes full use of its nightmare fuel. As Julia comes to grips with the implications of what she’s about to do, and what she might discover while doing it, the author punctuates her journey with trips into the mad mindscape of Bernie himself, a dark reflection of our own world populated with half-remembered moments and images and hallucinations. As simple exercises in writing craft, they recall Philip K. Dick at his best, building the same sense of overwhelm and wonder so present in his work, but Tremblay’s after something else as well, and it’s purpose-built for this moment. 

The novel builds deliberate juxtapositions with Bernie’s half-remembered life and Julia’s ongoing one, sending them barreling at each other from opposite ends of consciousness. Julia’s brain functions as only her brain can, a mass of pop culture references and dreams and memories she both cherishes and would rather forget. Bernie’s world is one of shadows, but also one of constantly shifting perspective, as the tech in his head remakes him. He’s not just a passenger in his own body, but an unwilling participant in a Frankenstein-ing of human and machine. It’s not the first time an author has attempted such a thing, but through Tremblay’s evocative, visceral prose, it’s one of the most effective, and it hits on something vital that Tremblay says in a way that only he can. 

Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is a thumping sci-fi yarn, a journey into new frontiers through untested technology with vast implications for the future of the world, and if Tremblay had only explored that genre, he’d have done well. When the horror elements creep in, though, Tremblay’s work raises endless questions over what exactly we are sacrificing when we let machines get so close not just to our flesh, but to our consciousness, even when, medically speaking, that consciousness is gone.

Tremblay breaks this sacrifice down in terrifying detail, sometimes quite literally breaking down the basic flow of prose in Bernie’s head until he’s been hijacked by words and phrases and shapes that he doesn’t understand. Along the way, Tremblay gets almost metafictional with his probing of this hybrid consciousness, asking us to question not just where the story will go, but who gets to be in control when the narrative becomes a runaway train. 

All of this makes Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep the most ambitious book of Paul Tremblay’s career, which is really saying something. His daring, his boldness, and his ability to mine the unspeakable are on full display, and they work together to deliver one of the year’s most unnerving genre books.

Tremblay’s at the peak of his powers with this one. 

Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep hits shelves on June 30. 

The post ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’ Book Review: Paul Tremblay’s Primal Scream Against the AI Push appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Releasing just ahead of the franchise’s 10th anniversary, Stranger Things: The Official Story Behind the Legendary Series serves as the ultimate retrospective on the cultural phenomenon, chronicling its journey from an ambitious genre series to one of the defining television events of the past decade.

Sold exclusively at Target, this deluxe official volume features a foreword by creators Matt and Ross Duffer and offers an unprecedented look at the making of all five seasons.

Random House previews, “Go behind the curiosity door with the creators, cast, and crew in this definitive, deluxe guide. With never-before-seen content from the show’s inception and beyond to its thrilling conclusion, this is the director’s cut in book form, taking you on a visual ride through each heart-warming moment, spine-tingling adventure, and roll of the dice.”

Packed inside the pages of Stranger Things: The Official Story Behind the Legendary Series you’ll find commentary from the Duffer Brothers, exclusive cast interviews, creature concept art, in-world ephemera, maps and blueprints, costume photography, script snippets and more.

While you wait to grab your copy, exclusively check out a sneak peek at the book’s third chapter below, which fittingly dives deep into “Stranger Things 3.” The Season 3 chapter chronicles the making of the series’ blockbuster (and fan favorite) third season, including behind-the-scenes stories, creative insights, and exclusive imagery from the production.

Grab your copy from Target beginning June 30, 2026!

The post ‘Stranger Things: The Official Story Behind the Legendary Series’ – Preview the New Book’s Season 3 Deep Dive [Exclusive] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

The Faust Bible: The Making of F.W. Murnau’s Masterpiece is being published by Mubi Editions in partnership with la Cinémathèque française, Variety reports today,  on October 17.

The new release “brings to light a recently-unearthed artefact of film history: a visual diary of approximately 400 photographs and original illustrations documenting the making of the film almost step-by-step.”

Faust crew members Robert Herlth, Carl Hoffmann, and Walter Röhrig initially presented Murnau with the materials in a prop bible for the comprehensive dive into the film’s production, but they were lost for many years in his move from Germany to Hollywood. 

After a painstaking restoration process, the Faust Bible will be published in full for the very first time.

“One of the most influential and pioneering filmmakers of the silent era, F.W. Murnau was known for the privacy of his film sets,” said la Cinémathèque française’s Mannoni. “Reluctant to welcome visitors, he was even less inclined to reveal his creative process. The rediscovery of the Faust ‘Bible’ offers extraordinary insight into the making of one of cinema’s great masterpieces. Published in its entirety for the first time, it allows readers to trace the creation of this legendary film.”

In the silent film classic, “God and Satan war over earth; to settle things, they wager on the soul of Faust, a learned and prayerful alchemist.”

To mark the occasion, both for the rare release and Faust‘s 100th, Mubi will present a series of international events and screenings throughout fall 2026.

The post Mubi to Publish Lost ‘Faust’ Bible For 100th Anniversary of F.W. Murnau’s Silent Film Classic appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

This is why I’m thrilled that, by chance, Kraus’ first post-Pulitzer novel is The Sixth Nik, a spacefaring adventure full of horrifying imagination and brimming over with imagination. Like all of his books, it’s an elegantly written, narratively complex piece full of memorable characters given depth and shade, but as with Angel Down, it’s also an effort by Kraus to stretch his wings, work out some prose muscles that he doesn’t use as much in his straight-ahead horror work. If you’re coming to Kraus for the second time after reading Angel Down, you’re going to get something completely different and yet distinctly Kraus-ian, a space odyssey that’ll make your brain tingle even as your stomach is doing cartwheels. 

In the future, when humanity has colonized Mars, Europa, and other nearby habitable worlds to varying degrees, Earth is the site of a secluded sect that has made Greenland their home. This sect is responsible for nurturing the Niffakoq, a kind of messianic child warrior whose legacy is passed down in a way similar to the Dalai Lama. The Niffakoq are trained from birth for their “Chore,” a task they must complete that will radically improve some aspect of life in the cosmos, and given brain implants known as “Niks” to enhance their innate empathic abilities. They also, due to the danger of their chores, rarely live beyond the age of 11. 

Nine-year-old Sisilla is the latest of these Niffakoq, and she’s just been given her Chore, involving a faraway colonial outpost on a remote planet that’s rarely in touch with the rest of humanity anymore. To achieve her Chore, Sisilla boards The Sickness, an AI-designed, organic ship that looks like a flying tumor, and meets her crew, including everyone from a bodyguard known only as “Murder 005” to a bodacious engineer who revels in changing her appearance through futuristic procedures to a drug-addicted, reconstructed ship’s medic who offers her a chance to try peyote. 

Sisilla is not here to make friends. She’s here to do her Chore, fulfill her purpose in the universe, and pass on to make room for the next Niffakoq. But life on The Sickness determines to surprise her, from an entire room that seems to be made of placenta to a glitching robot that seems to know something of her past. Worst of all, though, it seems that something or someone on board is out to harm the whole crew, and the Chore Sisilla’s spent her whole life preparing for is wrapped around a terrible, paradigm-shifting secret that will make her rethink everything about her life, her purpose, and her place among the stars. 

This is a lot of groundwork to lay for one story, in typical epic science fiction fashion, and it’s only scratching the surface of what The Sixth Nik has to offer, from ship’s quarters hidden behind curtains of impossibly long human hair to an encounter with worms that left even my strong stomach churning a bit. To pull off something this grand, this multi-tonal and big, Kraus has to lay everything out elegantly, using Sisilla as the viewpoint character and narrator while keeping her in the dark about each key revelation until exactly the right time. It’s not the kind of book I associate with Kraus and his imagination, but he rises to the challenge with a novel that offers something surprising on each new page, a kind of prose sensory overload that almost tips off into being overstuffed. But not quite. 

More than the worldbuilding and vibrant cast of characters, though, what makes The Sixth Nik stand out is Kraus’s layered, often cognitively dissonant view of humanity’s future. Technological advances render some troubles obsolete, only to create entirely new problems. Humans morph and shift themselves in so many ways that they sometimes seem to be walking Ships of Theseus. Building ships from organic matter seems more efficient and elegant, yet it fills each voyage with a parade of grotesqueries.

It is a solar system filled with wonders and horrors in equal measure, and it says something deeply relatable and rewarding about the world we’re in now, this mesh of terrors and triumphs, breakthroughs and brokenness. Kraus managed to capture our own fractured view of the present and catapult it several centuries ahead without losing any of his sci-fi bombast or character-driven sense of wonder. That’s a hard trick to pull off, but it makes The Sixth Nik a hell of a read, and a great new primer for the vast imagination of Daniel Kraus. 

The Sixth Nik is available in bookstores now.

The post ‘The Sixth Nik’ Review: Pulitzer Winner Daniel Kraus’s Horror Sci-fi Epic appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

We have an exclusive excerpt from “Blood and Tinsel,” a Christmas horror story written by 30 Days of Night creator Steve Niles.

They say the best gifts aren’t under the tree. One Christmas morning, Andy’s parents found out their gifts were six feet under…

Edited by Bram Stoker Award winner James Aquilone (Kolchak: The Night Stalker), the 260-page book features a lucky 13 original stories inspired by “Creepshow.”

Other contributors include David Avallone (Elvira: Mistress of the Dark), Nancy A. Collins (Swamp Thing), Dennis Crosby (Weird Tales), Keith R.A. DeCandido (Star Trek), Gwendolyn Kiste (The Haunting of Velkwood), Jonathan Maberry (Rot & Ruin), Lisa Morton (Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween), Nick Roberts (The Exorcist’s House), Thomas E. Sniegoski (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Tim Waggoner (Terrifier 3), Simon Bestwick (The Faceless), and Aquilone.

Creepshow: 13 Tales of Terror features cover art by Russ Braun (The Boys), and each story is accompanied by full-page art by EV Cantada.

The post ‘Creepshow: 13 Tales of Terror’ – Read an Excerpt from Steve Niles’ Christmas Horror Story [Exclusive] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Both Operation Leading Edge and the miniatures set are available for pre-order now from the Free League webshop, with immediate PDF access ahead of its Q4 2026 release. You can also snag a new dedicated dice tray for the Alien RPG and the Evolved Edition.

Operation Leading Edge is a stand-alone adventure for Alien RPG, but also serves as the second installment of the Jeremiah Saga trilogy. The adventure is designed for 3–5 players plus the Game Mother, and lets the players take the roles of a team of Colonial Marines sent to secure a rich mineral deposit on the remote moon Jeremiah VI.

Here’s what you get with the new campaign:

• The main Operation Leading Edge adventure book.
• Two huge double-sided maps (format 34 × 22 inches) featuring the key adventure locations in great and terrifying detail.
• Five pre-generated characters to choose from.
• Playing cards for personal agendas and NPCs.
• Cardboard tokens for characters and creatures.
• GM maps and player handouts.

Complementing Operation Leading Edge is the new miniatures set for the campaign, featuring 20 high-quality miniatures of Colonial Marines, enemy troops from the Union of Progressive Peoples (UPP), and of course, a host of Xenomorphs.

Standing 28mm in scale, these are perfectly sized for use on the large battle maps included in Operation Leading Edge and other cinematic adventures for the Evolved Edition.

The new Operation Leading Edge miniatures set also includes a booklet with simplified combat rules that make it possible to play quick skirmish battle rules in the Alien universe using the included miniatures.

In case you haven’t hopped on board, you can check out Aaron’s review of the Evolved Edition, which as you might expect, adds even more fantastic content to an already fantastic TTRPG.

The post New Cinematic Adventure “Operation Leading Edge” Coming to ‘Alien The Roleplaying Game’ appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

The author of The Only Good Indians, My Heart is a Chainsaw, and dozens of other entries in the modern horror canon has built a reputation for two things: Chilling fiction and a jaw-droppingly prolific output, and today we can exclusively reveal the next story he’s unleashing on readers. 

On March 9, 2027, Jones and Saga Press will release Ears, a new haunted house horror novella about a down-on-his-luck man who finds an unlucky ally in the ghost of a child in footie pajamas, complete with bunny ears on top. 

Here’s the official synopsis:

“Mr. Morning Gun, the hapless narrator of this first person novella, is a disgraced history teacher who now is an unhoused person who is largely living within his electric car and the empty homes he looks after for local real estate agencies in a specific way: He flushes the empty houses toilets to keep, primarily, the wax seals on the toilets fresh, and the plumbing flowing. For this he gets a bit of money under table. One day, at “The Messner House” he gets caught by an aggressive realtor having a tryst, and the ghost of the previous owners’ missing child intervenes, killing the couple, and saving the former teacher and he finds himself embroiled into an ever-increasing layer of cover-ups as the girl in the lavender footie pajamas keeps killing folks to keep the house empty, except for him.”

What inspired a story like this? For Jones, it began with something very practical, which quickly morphed into a new expression of horror. 

“I was wondering if the chargers for electric cars are universal or not, but didn’t know how to phrase a search to figure that out, so I had to figure it out the only way I know how: with a story—with horror,” Jones told Bloody Disgusting. “With, as it turned out, a haunted house. So, now I know that they probably are universal. And that that leads to… to bad things.” 

Bloody Disgusting is pleased to exclusively reveal the haunting cover for Ears, designed by Luisa Dias.

Ears is the latest entry in Jones’ always-busy publishing schedule, which includes a new novel, Off the Reservation, arriving this fall from Saga. Beginning next spring, Saga will also reissue three of Jones’ earlier horror works for a new generation of readers, delivering new editions of Demon Theory, The Last Final Girl, and Growing Up Dead In Texas.

Those reissues don’t have firm release dates yet, but you can expect Ears to arrive on March 9, 2027. 

The post Stephen Graham Jones’ Haunted House Novella ‘Ears’ Exclusive Cover Reveal appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Available from D&D Beyond in Digital and Physical versions, the 288-page Ravenloft: The Horrors Within features 16 elusive Domains of Dread, including the new cosmic horror domain Innsmouth – home to the Great Cthulhu. You’ll be able to call upon 17 Darklords, including the treacherous knight Lord Soth and the tormented despot Strahd, as challenging foes for your campaign.

There are seven subclasses available to you—including the new Reanimator and Hollow Warden—as well as four species, four backgrounds, two Origin feats, and nine Dark Gifts for building your tortured protagonists.

You can choose from 10 different genres of horror, which can then be filled with a bestiary of 41 monstrosities and 10 domain denizens for your party to encounter. Completing the package are 47 maps and 28 digital quickplay maps.

And if you’re quick, as a pre-order bonus you can grab the Mists of Ravenloft Digital Dice Set, along with the Dungeon Masters: Ravenloft Play-Along Pack, and D&D Encounters: Shadows of Sithicus mini-adventure.

And for completionists, there’s the Ultimate Bundle, which includes Digital and Physical versions of Ravenloft: The Horrors Within, Physical and Digital Ravenloft: The Horrors Within Tarokka Deck for weaving terrifying twists into your campaign with 54 fully illustrated cards, Physical Ravenloft: The Horrors Within Dungeon Master’s Screen, and Physical and Digital versions of the Ravenloft: The Horrors Within Map Pack.

The post ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ Brings The Fear Today With ‘Ravenloft: The Horrors Within’ appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Tabletop roleplaying game manuals are an interesting object. Traditionally, we want them to be laid out cleanly in a way that’s easy to understand so they can be played effectively. But this means they are often dryly written, focusing on clarity instead of style. That’s not to say they don’t have good art, but they are rarely experimenting with the form in a way that makes the book itself exciting.

Some of my favorite games in recent memory are the ones that purposefully break the rules in an attempt to be just as much of an art book as a rule book. Games like Mork Borg, whose aggressive, borderline unreadable layouts are constantly shifting fonts alongside its maximalist artwork. Games like Triangle Agency, which use in-fiction format changes to illustrate the strange forces at play behind the titular agency. Games like Soul Cemetery, a book that kept up the illusion that it was an instruction manual for a lost PS2-era video game, tell a tale of how our relationship with fiction shapes our lives.

You Will Die In This Place takes this to the extreme, mixing its nihilistic dungeon crawling rulebook with a “House of Leaves“-style meta narrative that tells a deeply personal tale about identity, mortality, and the act of creation. Not only is it stylistically bold and endlessly inventive, but it weaves its characters with a raw believability that brings the book itself to life in a way I’ve never seen in the medium.

The Meta-Narrative That Sets You Will Die In This Place Apart

The actual game is by Elizabeth Little, but it’s framed as a reconstruction of an abandoned project pieced together from various notes and design documents. Fictional tabletop designer Samantha Little is cleaning out boxes in her parents’ attic when she comes across the game, which was originally written by a college friend, Charlotte Avery, whom she hasn’t talked to since graduation.

The version of You Will Die In This Place that you’re reading is one that Samantha has “finished,” compiling Charlotte’s notes, which included design work, microfiction, and illustrations, but the line between Charlotte’s original vision and Samantha’s additions to the work remains a tension throughout. There’s also a third character, KC, who is the book’s editor, who comments to Samantha about the process and questions her decisions. The book presented is the “final version” of the game, along with footnotes that give insight into Samantha’s work on the book and how it felt rediscovering her old friend through these notes.

The actual game part has a premise that seems pretty standard, but is done with its own unique flair, both mechanically and narratively. Your party plays a group of people who have been exiled to the Abyssal Labyrinth, a horrific series of corridors and rooms full of creatures warped by manablight.

You will never return from the labyrinth. There’s no winning your way out.

The title says it all. Rather than being a game about heroically slaying the beast that has cursed the labyrinth, it’s about trying to find meaning before you die in this place. While it’s definitely not the first game where you are doomed adventurers that will reach an unfortunate end before the campaign is over, the way it explores the idea thematically feels unique.

It’s hard to figure out where to even begin to talk about this game, and that’s part of the fun. Should I go into the maybe-too-clever class system first, or dig into the themes about what it means to create? Is it best to dive into the strange bestiary, or do you first need to have context about Charlotte’s thought process through her tangential essays that Samantha decided to include? Maybe I don’t even get into the details of that because the rewarding part of the book is watching it all click together in a holistic way.

Experimental Character Classes and Innovative RPG Mechanics

I’ll start by treating it as a traditional tabletop RPG, but even that will immediately give way to talking about the meta layers. One of the most interesting ways for me to look at what a game is capable of is by looking at its character classes and the ways it expects players to use them to interact with the world through their rules. In a bold move, You Will Die In This Place forgoes traditional conventions by having each class operate on a completely different set of rules. While it may seem like a bit of a stunt at first, it’s very clear that each of these disparate ways of playing is well thought out and intended to convey something important about each class.

The Muzeiiyd Mercenary sounds like the most standard class of all of them, a powerful warrior, but you play by rolling a pool of dice and placing them on different body parts to do different actions, almost like a worker placement board game. The Zibari Headhunter uses a deck of cards and asks you to play poker hands to activate your skills, with your deck acting as an alternate health system. The Corpse Engineer forces you to directly control your character while also doing a programming minigame for a flesh golem that does most of your fighting for you.

The Bermail Knight wears a powerful set of armor, but that comes with a heat management system that alters your available actions as you heat up and cool down. The game’s wizard class, the Blight Channeler, writes as many spells as it can fit on a section of its character sheet, but crosses off words of the spells when using them, while also having to physically tear off pieces of its sheet when injured. There’s even a pair of hidden classes, including one that is written in a cipher that I was not able to solve.

At the beginning of this section, there’s a note about how Charlotte wasn’t a fan of class-based systems because they felt immersion-breaking, and these classes are almost a hyperexaggerated response to that, each being as maximally fiddly as possible in its own unique way. As someone who runs a lot of tabletop RPGs, I pride myself on being able to get a good sense of how something will play just by reading, and I have no idea how these would feel at the table. They definitely are clever, but they might be too clever to the point of not being balanced, or maybe even fun, in action. But I feel like Charlotte would agree with that and respond by saying, “Yeah, pretty cool, right?”

Identity, Roleplaying, and Self-Discovery

The classes are successful on two layers, because they not only offer a fun experimentation with the form, but they also use the mechanics of the game to give us insight into the surrounding meta-narrative of who Charlotte is as a designer and as a person. The notes also mention she was not a fan of levels and hit points, and this game plays with those as well. In an inverse of the traditional power fantasy structure, your characters will get worse the further they get into the dungeon.

When you hit certain thresholds of damage, you will take injuries, which will give you debuffs that will constantly make it harder for you until your death. It’s another bold choice that might not make the game as “fun,” but leans hard into the themes in a way that reinforces the text overall.

The idea of creating characters, both for players and creatures, is one that is very important to Charlotte throughout her notes. Not only was she very particular about putting work into non-playable characters in order to make sure they felt like they had lives that didn’t revolve around waiting for the player characters, but it was also an act that was associated with discovering your own identity.

As the story goes on, it’s revealed that Charlotte is a trans woman, and this fact immediately feels like it unlocks the work thematically. Passages about the disproportionate power of choosing your character’s name make sense within that context. The idea of using roleplaying as a mask to try on different identities is a potent one, made all the more powerful by this detail. The real-life author Elizabeth Little is also trans, making this feel like a deeply personal work that’s just as much about her journey as it is about the fictional characters’ journeys.

The Abyssal Labyrinth’s Bestiary and Worldbuilding

The bestiary of the game contains a lot of strange variants on common ideas, some of them even pushing into experimental territory with their mechanics. Each enemy is described sparsely, with just enough stats and special rules to get you rolling, often leaving the minutiae of the physical description up to you. A giant worm with a human-shaped appendage used to lure unsuspecting individuals, animated chunks of alien meat, and innocuous-looking creatures that devour meaning and words are among the creatures you’ll run into in the Abyssal Labyrinth, making for a more surreal and upsetting dungeon crawl than most.

There are several floors laid out to act as your complete campaign of You Will Die In This Place, each with its own grid layout and threats listed. Many of these are pretty simple fights against enemies, but some of them have clever gimmicks that test the player in ways beyond their character sheet. There’s interesting lore contained within these spaces, but never too much that it takes away from the ominous nature of the setting by filling in too many details.

Coming from Charlotte, who describes her GMing style as one that has trended away from overprepping, I found the explicit dungeon maps to be a bit surprising, but it’s here where much of the tension between the two creative forces of the work comes to a head. This was an unfinished game when Samantha found it, but it becomes clearer as the book goes on that she has made significant changes to the final product, including many that seem to go against Charlotte’s design intent.

So many of the notes and microfiction pieces are about the nature of creation, about what it means to create for the artist and what it means for a piece of the author to live on in the art, making this feel like a strange violation. How much of what we’re reading is Charlotte’s work and how much is Samantha’s, and how much does that really matter if we just want to play the game?

Final Verdict on You Will Die In This Place

You Will Die In This Place is the rare tabletop RPG that I would recommend picking up and reading, even if you have no intention of getting it to the table. As a game, it’s deeply experimental, taking a well-worn grimdark dungeon crawl and bringing it to life with intentionally overcomplicated mechanics that feel fresh and odd, even if they perhaps aren’t the most balanced or intuitive.

As a whole, it’s a marvellous work about the act of creation and finding yourself, even in the face of the bleak world in front of you. It was hard not to make this review into just a list of my favorite passages, but I’d rather leave it to you to discover the story of the Corpse Engineer or Charlotte’s tale of being haunted by the memory of a dying fox or the unsettling demonstration of the natural blind spot we all have in our vision.

There’s so much going on in this book, but it all gels together into one of the most unique tabletop RPGs I’ve ever seen. It’s a powerful statement about the creative process, one that’s inspired me to pick up the proverbial pen again and start writing my own RPG, which is honestly the highest compliment I can give it.

You Will Die In This Place is now available in full over on itch.io.

The post Experimentation in ‘You Will Die In This Place’ Provides Wealth of Gameplay Possibilities [Tabletop Terror] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

It Came From Neverland, Pelayo’s latest novel, takes that search and applies it to one of the most famous children’s stories ever conceived, J.M. Barrie’s beloved and oft-adapted tale of the Boy Who Never Grew Up. But this is not just a Peter Pan retelling, or a Peter Pan meta-sequel. Through gorgeous prose, finely drawn characters, and an iron grip on the themes that drive the story, Pelayo crafts It Came From Neverland into one of the year’s must-read genre novels, both a horrifying spin on Peter Pan and a luminous dark fantasy about the search for salvation in a cold, brutal world.

In Pelayo’s version of events, Wendy Darling and her brothers John and Michael really did travel to Neverland when they were children, drawn there by a charismatic and irresistible figure called Peter Pan. But this Neverland is far from the Disney version, and after fighting to survive in that ageless place, the children made their way home and shut Peter Pan out of their lives, refusing to so much as utter his name, lest he find them again. 

Flash forward to 1914, where Wendy’s working as a schoolteacher at Marigold House, a London orphanage growing increasingly crowded amid the outbreak of World War I. By day, she teaches and volunteers at a local hospital, reading to the war wounded, and by night, she remembers to check every window latch and keep an eye on every shadow. But lately those shadows seem to behave strangely again. Crows caw all around her. And worst of all, children are disappearing again. Peter Pan is back, and faced with memories of how no one believed her the first time, Wendy prepares to face him one more time. 

This is a remarkably well-suited atmosphere for moments of classic, chill-inducing terror, and Pelayo wastes no time weaving a world in which every bird call, every stray thought from the mouth of a child, could be evidence that this monstrous Peter Pan is near. Wendy lives a haunted existence, and as the chaos of war grips London, old fears grip her while new ones fight for position. If you come to this novel looking for something like Stephen King’s IT by way of J.M. Barrie, you’re going to get it, through flashbacks and dark lore and wonderfully well-timed scares, but Pelayo’s not done. 

This version of Wendy Darling, through whom we see most of the narrative, cares for children in adulthood because she did not receive the care she needed herself as a child in the aftermath of a traumatic experience. She considers it her duty to listen to them, to protect them, to understand them in a world that still views them not as human beings, but as potential locked up in tiny bodies.

Setting the book in 1914, when young men across Europe were signing up to go and die in a war they didn’t quite understand, underscores this beautifully. Children are grist for the mill in the world of It Came From Neverland, their eager spirits waiting to be crushed by a machine of war and empire and capitalism that will not relent even if an armistice eventually arrives. It’s a wider, more existential layer of horror than the storybook monster, which gets us to open the book in the first place, but the real brilliance at work here is how Pelayo ties it all together. 

At the core of all of this, the beating, icy heart of It Came From Neverland‘s horror and its search for meaning amid the narratives of war, children’s fiction, collective memory, and more, Pelayo is most interested in what it really means to never grow up. It means retaining a sense of play, yes, but it also means a refusal to move on, to embrace not just the responsibilities of aging, but the moral burdens of it.

Peter Pan is a monster not because he likes to play, but because he does not consider consequences, mortality, or even the needs and desires of others. The same is true of the leaders of Europe sending young men off to die in a war, and the same is true of leaders now, playing dice with human lives amid the rise and fall of the stock market. To never grow up is to lose something essential about being human, and Pelayo depicts that loss as both existentially terrifying and heartbreaking. That terror and heartbreak drive the novel, but Wendy’s efforts to escape that terror and to mend her broken heart make it fly. 

It Came From Neverland is available June 9 wherever books are sold.

The post ‘It Came From Neverland’ Review – A Stunning, Devastating Take on Peter Pan appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Schools are emptying, beaches are filling, and it’s a great time to pack a tote full of brand-new books and get some reading done in the shade. But even if the sun is bright, your fiction can still be dark, because June is absolutely packed with great new horror releases from rising stars and genre icons.

From a Psycho retelling to a dark twist on Peter Pan lore to a new book from a Pulitzer Prize winner, these are the horror titles we can’t wait to crack open this June. 

The Children by Melissa Albert – June 2

A blend of dark fantasy, Gothic family saga, and horror novel that’s received rave reviews from Stephen King and more, The Children follows the adult children of a legendary fantasy author who died when a fire consumed their home. Now, living their own creative lives, Guinevere and Ennis must revisit the secrets from the night of the fire, the darkness surrounding Ennis’s new art installation, and the truth of their family legacy in both fact and fiction. It sounds like a wonderful twisted nest of secrets and magic, and I’m eager to dive in. 

Marion by Leah Rowan – June 2

Just when you thought we’d run out of interesting ways to riff on Robert Bloch and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Leah Rowan comes along with Marion. As the title suggests, it’s the story of the Bates Motel’s most famous victim, but this time, she doesn’t die in the shower. She takes control of the knife and the narrative in this daring retelling of a proto-slasher classic. The story we know is just the beginning, and I can’t wait to find out the end. 

Headlights by CJ Leede – June 9

Through her first two novels, Maeve Fly and American Rapture, CJ Leede emerged as one of the most exciting new horror voices of the 2020s, and she’s just getting warmed up. Leede’s third novel follows an FBI agent on the brink of retirement, running from his past and from the unsolved case that haunts him most, as he’s slowly pulled back into a gruesome serial killer narrative. Victims start turning up again, wearing someone else’s skin like a cape, with no memory of how they got that way, or how they got a lone strand of unidentified hair tied around their tongue. Both a riff on The Shining and a journey into the dark Colorado night, Headlights is one of the year’s most exciting horror lit events.

It Came From Neverland by Cynthia Pelayo – June 9 

Cynthia Pelayo‘s novels have always felt like dark fairy tales, and with her latest, she’s taking things into the realm of one of the most famous children’s stories ever. It Came From Neverland follows a version of Wendy Darling who, while working as a schoolteacher and as an aid to rehabilitate World War I soldiers, finds old fears returning when a student goes missing. It seems that an entity Wendy knows only as “Peter Pan” is back on the prowl, and unlocking her memories might be the only way to stop it. That’s right, it’s a dark Peter Pan retelling as only Pelayo can do it, and you know you want a piece of that. 

The Other by Annie Neugebauer – June 9

Annie Neugebauer’s The Extra ranks as one of the most clever and frightening horror novellas in recent memory, but that was only the beginning. This June, Neugebauer returns with the next book in what’s been dubbed “The Outsiders Sequence.” This time, Neugebauer’s strange world of doppelgangers and mimics turns to a couple on a hike who run into their exact duplicates, setting off a chain of events that will test their understanding of each other in terrifying ways. Neugebauer’s one of horror’s finest rising stars right now, so if you haven’t jumped on board The Outsiders Sequence yet, pick up The Extra and get ready for The Other.

Marla by Jonathan Janz –  August 18 (Editor’s update: Release has now shifted from initial June 23 publication date)

Speaking of rising stars in the horror world, we’ve got Jonathan Janz, whose work has hit another level in recent years thanks to work like Children of the Dark and Veil. Now he’s back with Marla, the story of a local woman surrounded by urban legend, and her possible connection to a string of crimes in the community of King’s Branch. Is Marla a witch, a killer, a victim, a helpless child? We’ll have to read and find out in what feels like a perfect jumping-on point for new Janz readers.

The Sixth Nik by Daniel Kraus – June 23

Daniel Kraus has long been a favorite among genre readers, but thanks to his recent Pulitzer Prize win for his brilliant novel Angel Down, he’s more visible than ever, and all that visibility comes as he’s about to unleash a space epic with all the hallmarks of epic sci-fi and horror alike. The Sixth Nik promises everything from a sentient spaceship to a rogue planet full of plague to a nine-year-old “cultist” with an enhanced brain. This is Kraus playing in a brand-new sandbox, and genre readers everywhere won’t want to miss that. 

Slasher Summer by E.L. Chen – June 23

E.L. Chen‘s latest novel is described as a love letter to ’80s slasher films, and anyone who’s taken a dive into the meta-horror of Scream or My Heart is a Chainsaw will want to sit up and take notice. The book follows a group of friends who grew up in a town famous as the location of a slasher movie, where they frequently played the characters during midnight shows. As adults, they return to their hometown, and to the location of the slasher movie, only to find that someone’s out to get them, someone wearing a very familiar mask. This sounds like a blast, and the latest in an ever-growing strand of slasher novels reinventing the genre on the page. 

Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep by Paul Tremblay – June 30

Modern horror master Paul Tremblay‘s latest novel sounds like his most ambitious yet, and that’s really saying something. Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep follows Julia, a former pro gamer who gets an offer she can’t refuse: For a hefty payday, she must pilot a man named “Bernie” across the country for her mother’s tech company. The catch? Bernie’s in a vegetative state, and his mobility comes from the AI chip in his head. As Julia moves Bernie’s body, Bernie’s mind moves through an unfathomable nightmare world, but where are they heading, and what’s Bernie really meant to find? Every new Paul Tremblay book is an event, and this one feels particularly special. 

Red X by David Demchuk – June 30

This one’s technically a reprint, but David Demchuk’s Red X is so revered among the horror community, and particularly other horror authors, that it feels worth highlighting, especially during Pride Month. Complex and metatextual, Red X is about a series of disappearances and a demonic entity plaguing the gay community of Toronto, but it’s also an autobiographical sketch of an author navigating death, survival, queer culture, horror as a means of expression, and more. In short, it’s an essential, and this new edition, complete with fresh writing by Gretchen Felker-Martin and Anthony Oliveira, is a must-have.

The post Urban Legends, Serial Killers, and Space Epics: 10 Horror Books We Can’t Wait to Read This June appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Unnur’s life revolves largely around two things: Work, where she’s hopefully due for a big promotion, and attachment to an emotionally unavailable man. Her life is small but, she insists, satisfying, free of complications but also prickling with moments of loneliness. When a black cat shows up at her door, she sees a problem to be quickly solved, and soon tracks down its owner: Asta, another local woman with her own issues. When the cat, named Io, turns out to be pregnant, Unnur and Asta are drawn into an unconventional petsitting arrangement to maximize the animal’s comfort, and what started as a small act of neighborly kindness soon becomes an unlikely friendship. 

But Unnur’s not the only one dealing with a man she has to make excuses for, and soon her bond with Asta is given the ultimate test, a bloody trial that’ll either bond them forever or ruin their lives. 

From the outside looking in, Dead Weight seems to fit most comfortably into the realm of revenge horror, the story of two women who decide they’ve finally had enough and act, however reluctantly, on that emotion. But Knútsdóttir doesn’t take the most direct route to getting us there, even if she’s always consciously playing with the expectations of the subgenre and the noir-tinged elements of her saga. Her prose is at once contemporary and hard-boiled, and the very nature of her approach casts Unnur, who narrates the whole novella, as a kind of detective out to solve not just Asta’s issues, but the puzzle of her own existence. 

This is where things get tricky, because even by the standards of a novella, it takes Knútsdóttir a little while to get to the horror goods here. There’s a lot of wind-up in Dead Weight, so much that sometimes it feels like the tension starts to slack just slightly. I suspect a re-read would solve this particular issue for me, but at first glance, it feels, momentarily, like the story might be treading water. 

When what Knútsdóttir’s really after kicks in, though, those concerns are quickly forgotten, and the beauty of Dead Weight is in its ability to deliver an emotional dagger at unexpected, often staggering moments, sometimes without an ounce of violence. Unnur sets out to solve Asta’s problems, but of course, her own issues – her relationship, her focus on work, her insistence that she’s figured everything out in contrast to her new friend’s messy life – are an even more compelling case to be solved.

The best narrative trick Knútsdóttir pulls in the book is setting the stage for a revenge story and spending most of the word count delivering a gripping psychological drama punctuated by the folklore-laden specter of a black cat crossing Unnur’s path. We get to see Unnur not only deal with her issues, but also come to realize they are issues before our eyes, all within the span of 100 pages. 

This, combined with Asta’s lingering troubles, creates a thread of tension that tightens throughout the first two acts of this narrative, and it’s so effective that you almost forget the brutality promised by the book’s premise and its opening pages. When that brutality finally circles back around, it smacks you in the face with remarkable, icy intensity, delivering one of the year’s best horror finales.

Dead Weight is available May 26 wherever books are sold. 

The post ‘Dead Weight’ Book Review – Brutal Icelandic Horror Noir appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Kerry Washington (Django Unchained, Wake Up Dead Man) is set to star and executive produce.

Chris Luccy (“A Million Little Things”) is penning the adaptation, with McG (Terminator Salvation, The Babysitter) on board to direct.

In the series, “After taking the life of a disturbed man in the line of duty, Detective Elise Sutton (Washington) – a devoted wife, loving mother, and cold case specialist — reels from the guilt of her actions.

“To convince herself that she did the right thing, she makes contact with a mysterious man that she saved that day, only to discover that he’s not at all what he seems. She’s soon caught in a dangerous game of cat and mouse, following the clues he leaves for her and realizing that the only person who can stop him… is her.”

20th Television and Kapital Entertainment are behind the show, with Walker producing. Executive producers include Luccy; Washington & Pilar Sivone for Simpson Street; McG, Mary Viola & Corey Marsh for Wonderland Sound and Vision; and Aaron Kaplan for Kapital Entertainment.

Released in 2023 by Blackstone Publishing, What Remains is described as a “dark, twisty, and highly addictive psychological thriller” in the vein of The Woman in the Window and The Silent Patient.

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Now available from Harker Press, new book Monsters Unborn: The Lost Universal Monster Remakes shines the spotlight on FIFTEEN Universal Monsters movies that never were!

Harker Press previews, “Drawing on unproduced scripts and decades of behind-the-scenes history, author Bruce Kilkowski Jr. uncovers a treasure trove of “lost” stories from haunting gothic reimaginings to bold futuristic reinventions that never made it to the screen.

“Packed with new research, this book brings to life abandoned visions of legendary monsters like the Bride of Frankenstein, the Mummy, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon, revealing just how close they came to rising again. Equal parts film history and thrilling “what might have been,” Monsters Unborn is an essential, fun, and eye-opening journey for horror fans and cinephiles alike.”

“Fans of our past titles like Taking Shape II: The Lost Halloween Sequels and Slash of the Titans: The Road to Freddy vs Jason are really going to enjoy this one,” Harker Press owner Dustin McNeill tells Bloody Disgusting. “Bruce Kilkowski has prepared exhaustive coverage of fifteen abandoned Universal Monster remakes, many of which have seldom been discussed or explored before. It’s fascinating to consider how these proposed remakes might’ve changed the franchise landscape heading into Universal’s ill-fated Dark Universe effort.”

Monsters Unborn covers lost remakes written by:

• John Carpenter (Halloween, Escape From New York)
• George A. Romero (Night of the Living Dead, The Crazies)
• Mick Garris (The Stand, The Shining, Psycho IV)
• Anne Rice (Interview with the Vampire, Queen of the Damned)
• David S. Goyer (The Dark Knight and Blade trilogies)
• Andrew Kevin Walker (Se7en, 8MM, Sleepy Hollow)
• Nigel Kneale (Quatermass and the Pit, Halloween III)
• And many more!

Grab your copy of Monsters Unborn from Amazon for $22.99 today!

The post ‘Monsters Unborn: The Lost Universal Monster Remakes’ – New Book Spotlights 15 Unmade Remakes! appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Deadline reports that Sanderson will write the pilot script with “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” and “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” co-creators Jed Whedon & Maurissa Tancharoen.

In the novel, “Humanity is trapped on a harsh planet and constantly under attack by mysterious alien forces. The story follows Spensa Nightshade, a determined pilot who dreams of joining the fighter corps to defend humanity and redeem her disgraced father’s legacy.

“Blending high-stakes aerial combat, advanced technology, and themes of courage, identity, and discovery, the series explores both the secrets of the galaxy and Spensa’s growth from an outsider into a key figure in humanity’s fight for survival.”

“Brandon has created a thrilling universe where courage, curiosity, and determination to challenge what we think can change the fate of entire worlds,” said Tomorrow Studios’ CEO Marty Adelstein and President Becky Clements. “The vision that he, Jed, and Maurissa have for a television adaptation is ‘defiant to the end.’”

“I’ve been working on the Skyward series for nearly a decade, and to have a partner like Tomorrow Studios to help bring this story to television is a dream come true,” added Sanderson.

A #1 New York Times bestselling author, Sanderson published Skyward in 2018 via Delacorte Press. He followed it with three sequels: 2019’s Starsight, 2021’s Cytonic, and 2023’s Defiant.

The post Alien Novel ‘Skyward’ Set for Series Adaptation from ‘One Piece’ Studio appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Dan Aykroyd’s Soulhider will be published October 27, 2026 from HarperCollins.

The publisher previews, “The legendary Dan Aykroyd makes his literary debut with this mind-bending, page-turning speculative adventure about a regular guy caught up in a battle between warring aliens, told with equal doses of humor, suspense, and cosmic intrigue.”

Here’s the plot rundown for Dan Aykroyd’s debut novel Soulhider:

Doug Beeston is an ordinary insurance adjustor in his mid-thirties, living an unremarkable life with his wife and kids in central New York State. Until one day, out of the clear blue sky, Doug is tapped by alien lifeforms to take on an extraordinary mission. The assignment? Hide the human souls they’ve harvested for mysterious reasons of their own in various locations across Earth—using his prowess as a risk assessor to assure their precious commodities will not go missing.

Doug embraces his responsibility with pride, believing he’s playing a crucial role in something far bigger than himself and enjoying the lucrative side of his new vocation. But as he soon discovers, he’s not just a courier—he’s a pawn. Multiple alien species are locked in a silent interdimensional rivalry, using Doug as an unwitting middleman in their cosmic chess game. The more he understands his role, the more Doug realizes that the fate of Earth itself may hang in the balance.

HarperCollins previews, “Channeling Dan Aykroyd’s signature hilarious wit and deep fascination with the supernatural, Soulhider is a high-stakes, hilarious ride that only he could write, exploring the unseen forces shaping our world—both terrestrial and otherwise.”

“My writing of this novel was motivated by two factors. As an experiencer, a close-up witness of two vivid separate UFOs/UAPs, my curiosity was stimulated by who might be operating these hyper-advanced airborne platforms and what an average person would do if contacted by these beings,”  Dan Aykroyd told PEOPLE in an exclusive statement.

You can pre-order copies – both signed(!) and unsigned – from Barnes & Noble now.

Dan Aykroyd of course co-wrote the original Ghostbusters and its sequel alongside Harold Ramis, along with the films The Blues Brothers, Nothing But Trouble, and Coneheads.

Aykroyd will next be producing a new Ghostbusters animated series for Netflix.

The post ‘Soulhider’ – Dan Aykroyd’s Debut Novel Finds Alien Life This October appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

“The Walking Dead” veteran Channing Powell will serve as showrunner and writer, in addition to executive producing with Stallone and D. Matt Geller (Kiss of the Spider Woman).

The series will draw from Barker’s original 4MK trilogy — 2017’s The Fourth Monkey, 2018’s The Fifth to Die, and 2019’s The Sixth Wicked Child — as well as the recently announced prequel trilogy, which kicks off with The First Scarlet Door on September 22.

Set in Chicago, Barker’s novels follow Detective Sam Porter as he hunts the elusive Four Monkey Killer, a murderer who has terrorized the city for years with a chilling and highly personal code of judgment.

Guided by the maxim “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil,” the killer removes the ears, eyes, and tongues of his victims, turning every crime scene into a ritualized message. But the true horror lies in the unspoken fourth commandment, “do no evil,” which reveals the killer’s deeper agenda: exposing hidden corruption by punishing the guilty through the people they love most.

“J.D. Barker has created a world with enormous scale, real danger, a ruthless narrative engine, and the kind of mythology that is tailor-made for premium television,” said Stallone. “Channing Powell is not only a powerhouse writer and producer, but a true creator with a rare command of dark, character-driven storytelling, and she is exactly the right force to bring 4MK to the screen. This is the kind of property that audiences don’t just watch, but get pulled into, and it has all the makings of a series that can hit hard, travel globally, and leave a real mark.”

“What drew me to 4MK immediately was its intensity, its intelligence, and the way it keeps tightening the screws until you can barely breathe,” added Powell. “Beneath the suspense is a story about guilt, justice, corruption, and the emotional wreckage people leave behind. J.D. Barker has created a world that is bold, dangerous, and deeply addictive, and Sylvester Stallone and the Balboa team provide the invaluable support needed to bring my adaptation to the screen, driving this series toward real scale.”

“From the start, 4MK was designed to be a relentless, psychologically charged ride, one where every revelation cuts deeper, every secret carries a cost, and every character is forced to confront the darkest parts of themselves,” notes Barker. “Sylvester Stallone and the team at Balboa immediately saw the power, danger, and franchise potential in that world, and Channing brings exactly the kind of instinct for character, tension, and longform storytelling that can make it land with real force on screen. With this creative force, 4MK won’t just be gripping television, it will be the kind of series that gets under people’s skin and stays there. I couldn’t be more excited to see it come to life.”

Powell worked as a writer and consulting producer on “The Walking Dead” and “Fear the Walking Dead” before co-creating and showrunning “Tales of the Walking Dead.”  She currently serves as co-executive producer on “From.”

The post Sylvester Stallone & ‘The Walking Dead’ Vet Developing ‘4MK’ Series Based on Serial Killer Novels appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

The novel was originally published in 2015 in eBook form only, and Cesare tell us that this new edition of Mercy House is a revised and overhauled version of the previous release.

Cesare previews, “I really took the book down to the studs and improved things for this new edition.” The new print and audiobook release of Mercy House arrives on October 20, 2026.

“Welcome to Mercy House, a state-of-the-art retirement home that appears perfectly clean and orderly . . . but something is turning the residents into monsters.

‘In this thrilling novel from the author of Clown in a Cornfield, you will find little mercy—only a shocking eruption of unfathomable horror.”

Here’s the full official synopsis for Mercy House…

Harriet Laurel notices the odor the moment she steps inside Mercy House, brought to the retirement home against her will by her son and his wife. In the early stages of dementia, Harriet has grown to resent her daughter-in-law for not providing grandchildren. Yet as she crosses the threshold, she notices her mind begins to sharpen. Then her hate begins to grow…

Arnold Piper, an eighty-five-year-old ex-Marine, has always prided himself on self-reliance. But betrayed by his own body, he’s learning that surviving war-torn Korea was easier than facing the daily indignities of old age. And his worst trials are still to come.

Sarah Campbell, an idealistic nurse, is already stretched thin at the chronically understaffed Mercy House. Now her duties are about to take a terrifying turn.

Can she survive the night. . . and her patients?

Author Nick Cutter (The Troop) calls the novel “100% distilled nightmare juice.”

You can pre-order your copy of Mercy House on Amazon today.

The post ‘Mercy House’ Exclusive Cover Reveal – Adam Cesare’s Horror Novel Returns This Halloween appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Olivier Award-winning playwright Morgan Lloyd Malcolm (Netflix’s “Obsession“) is attached to write the series.

Published in 1980, Puffball was previously adapted into the 2007 film of the same name by Nicolas Roeg.

The novel follows “a young London couple, Liffey and Richard, who move to the country with the expectation of having children. Their neighbors are Mabs and Tucker, a farming family with five children of their own.

“Mabs, jealous of the newcomers’ easy life, sends Tucker to sleep with Liffey while Richard is away, priming her with an herbal aphrodisiac, but she becomes angry when Liffey becomes pregnant and finds that she herself is suddenly unable to conceive.”

The new take on Puffball is not yet attached to a network, but Firebird is backed by BBC Studios.

The post Supernatural Novel ‘Puffball’ Set for TV Adaptation appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

It’s available in the June issue of The Atlantic and can be read online with a subscription or a 30-day free trial.

The 6,000-word short story sees King trading in his signature New England setting for coastal Florida to explore a family’s dark secret.

King will next publish Other Worlds Than These on October 6 — but if Dinah’s Hat is any indication, a new short story collection could follow.

Other Worlds Than These is the final entry in the horror fantasy trilogy that King created with Peter Straub, following 1984’s The Talisman and 2001’s Black House.

King penned the 624-page novel based on a concept by Straub, who passed away in 2022. The book also wraps up the fate of the worlds from King’s Dark Tower series.

It follows Jack Sawyer, who must stop a rampaging gang of infected teenagers from America-side, and the forces of the mysterious Gullet at the edge of Mid-World, before it destroys our world and all worlds.

The post Stephen King Publishes New Short Story ‘Dinah’s Hat’ appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Lawrence is eying to direct and produce under his first-look deal with Lionsgate, who has locked down the rights to the book.

Lawrence’s partner Cameron Maconomy will also produce, as will Scott Glassgold for 12:01 Films. Golden and Pete Donaldson will executive produce.

Publishing July 21 via St. Martin’s Press, Carry Me to My Grave is described as a high concept horror novel about a man trying to protect his dead mother’s body from the evil that is hunting them.

The full synopsis reads: “Maggie Wise will take your eyes.

“When Malcolm was growing up, the local kids made up that chant about his mother, claiming she was a witch. He and his siblings did their best to ignore it. Now, Maggie is dying, and those same siblings have left Malcolm and his sister-in-law Violet to hold a vigil at her bedside.

“But they’re not as alone as they think they are. A dark figure waits and watches from beneath the willow tree across the street. Hundreds of miles away, an ancient evil stirs in its burrow under a farmer’s cornfield.

“Across the country, other buried things begin to dream in anticipation of Maggie’s demise. On her deathbed, the old woman elicits a promise from Malcolm, her youngest child―when she dies, he and Violet must return her body to her birthplace in Shediak, Maine.

“From the moment she takes her last breath, before her remains are even loaded aboard the baggage car of the Imperial Limited, there are forces trying to stop Malcolm from fulfilling that promise. Violence erupts on the train, evil preys on its passengers, and once the sun goes down, those long-buried things are coming to make Maggie Wise pay for her past. God help anyone who stands in their way.”

Golden, who co-wrote Hellboy: The Crooked Man, has two other high-profile adaptations in the works: Road of Bones from Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill, and The House of Last Resort for Michael B. Jordan’s Outlier Society.

Up next from Lawrence is The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, out November 20.

The post ‘I Am Legend’s Francis Lawrence to Adapt Christopher Golden Horror Novel ‘Carry Me to My Grave’ appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Thankfully, the semi-anonymous writer and SCP contributor QNTM has finally found a way to escape the SCP bubble with their mind-bending novel, There Is No Antimemetics Division. A metatextual masterpiece that toys with readers as it explores memory and the terrifying power of narrative, this literary puzzle was originally self-published as an SCP spin-off before QNTM revised the story into something more original and, in my humble opinion, even more entertaining!

The new version of the book accompanies Director Marie Quinn (originally Marion Wheeler) throughout her career at the “Organization”: a secretive foundation that secures, contains, and protects paranormal anomalies ranging from cursed objects to Kaiju-sized creatures that cannot be perceived by human senses. Specifically, Marie works for the titular Antimemetics Division, an obscure department within the Organization that deals with Unknowns capable of disrupting human perception and sometimes even the idea of storytelling itself.

Via encounters with memory-eating parasites and clues left by past incarnations of the Division, Marie eventually realizes that there’s an apocalyptic conspiracy afoot involving a forgotten war against a godlike being from beyond the limits of human comprehension – and it doesn’t look like our side is winning.

On the surface, this is pretty much the same story as was first published online for free back in 2020, but the more you read, the more you realize that QNTM has completely reworked the text into a fully revamped novel, fixing nearly every gripe I had with the original work. While it’s a shame that character names had to be changed and overt references to the SCP Foundation were discarded in favor of legally distinct analogues, this was all done in the service of telling a tighter and more emotionally impactful story with an ending that hits a hell of a lot harder.

Just the mere fact that the book no longer assumes that you’re already familiar with the SCP Foundation is enough to make it much more accessible to the average reader. This also allows the novel to better explore concepts that were taken for granted in the original text. From the inner workings of the Unknown database itself to the bizarre nature of some of the lifeforms contained by the Organization, it’s fun to see so many outlandish events treated like just another day at the office as characters describe elder gods through language usually reserved for paperwork.

In fact, that signature SCP style of depicting high-concept paranormal activity as more of a daily inconvenience than anything else is present on nearly every page here. While the overall mythology behind the Unknown ecosystem contains some of the most fascinating sci-fi concepts I’ve read about in years (with some individual ideas being more than enough to sustain an entire horror novel by themselves), the best part of There Is No Antimemetics Division is the way that QNTM weaves these fantastical elements together so naturally that you can’t help but take them in stride.

That’s why creatures like Marie’s memory-eating “pet” can be elevated to supporting character status without even batting an eye, and the division’s battles against self-censoring “ideas” are so normalized that workers are used to being forgotten by the rest of the Organization (hence the book’s tongue-in-cheek title).

Of course, Marie’s relationship with Adam is the real heart of the story, with this raw emotional throughline grounding all of the Organization’s supernatural shenanigans in an all-too relatable personal tragedy. I’d even argue that you can read a lot of symbolism into the novel when you realize that, if you remove the world-ending anomalies from the mix, the story is ultimately about a woman with a high-stress job that keeps her from living a fulfilling life – but at the same time, she can’t escape the situation because she knows that her sacrifice is the only thing keeping the world from falling into chaos since most people are incapable of perceiving the true nature of reality.

While I was a fan of the over-the-top Noosphere portion of the original book (where it was revealed that the SCP Foundation’s struggles continued even in the afterlife), I have to admit that the new third act is a huge improvement. Not only does the story focus more on Marie and Adam’s connection, but the stakes also feel higher when you know that our protagonists can’t rely on a higher power to save them.

Despite the novel having been streamlined for a broader audience, I’ll admit that some of the surviving plot points are likely to hit harder if you’re already familiar with certain “online” subject matter like the infamous Mandela Effect. However, I’d argue that QNTM’s prose is effective enough that most readers will have no problem with allowing their minds to be repeatedly blown by unexpected reveals. Hell, even rereading the book made my brain leak out of my ears due to the author’s ruminations on the fickle nature of memory, and I mean that as a compliment!

Regardless of whether you’re an existing fan of the previous version of the story or a complete newcomer to the Organization, I can guarantee that QNTM’s definitive version of There Is No Antimemetics Division is a genre treat unlike any other. Ironically enough, given the subject matter, there are moments and characters here that will likely haunt your thoughts long after you’ve finished reading.

So, if you like cosmic horror that makes you question the very nature of reality, you owe it to yourself to pick this one up.

There Is No Antimemetics Division is available now on all major platforms, with a special audiobook edition also available with intentionally corrupted audio files and creepy special effects.

The post ‘There Is No Antimemetics Division’ Review – SCP-Inspired Novel Will Leave You Questioning Reality appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Isa Mazzei (Faces of Death, Cam) will pen the script, with FirstGen (The Testament of Ann Lee, Splitsville) producing.

The Third Hotel follows “Clare, a recent widow who travels to Latin America weeks after her husband Richard’s mysterious death, driven by the need to understand her role in his early passing. Lost in a new, unfamiliar city, she spots a man in the street, and it’s not just someone who looks like Richard, it’s him in the flesh.

“What begins as a skeptical pursuit of Richard’s double quickly devolves into an all-consuming obsession, unraveling Clare’s grip on reality and pulling her into a liminal nightmare where she is suspended between the living and the dead.”

“I’m so thrilled to work on an adaptation of such an eerie and brilliant novel alongside Isa Mazzei, whose work I’m a real fan of, and FirstGen, who have made films I love,” said Cervera. “I’m honored to be part of it.”

“The book is wonderfully surreal and deeply unsettling in a way that lingered with me,” Mazzei added. “I’m excited to be able to translate that feeling into a cinematic experience, and I feel lucky to be collaborating with such a thoughtful and talented team.”

“This is a wonderful creative team adapting a haunting and beautiful book,” commented Michael D’Alto of FirstGen. “We are honored to work with them to actualize their vision, and can’t wait for everyone to see this film.”

Published in 2018 by Picador, The Third Hotel was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award.

The post ‘Huesera’ Director & ‘Faces of Death’ Writer to Adapt Horror Novel ‘The Third Hotel’ appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Deadline reports that Coin Operated, the production company of IT and Annabelle screenwriter Gary Dauberman, has secured the rights with an eye toward developing a feature adaptation.

The story follows a young musician who finds himself locked inside a gas station bathroom in the middle of the night by an unseen assailant, caught between the horrors on the other side of the door and the horrors rapidly skittering down the walls inside.

Cassidy will adapt the screenplay, with Dauberman & Mia Maniscalco producing through Coin Operated.

“I like to describe this novella as Green Room meets Gerald’s Game,” Cassidy told Deadline. “It’s the closest thing I’ve yet written to ‘extreme’ horror — though, I wouldn’t say it goes nearly as hard or gets nearly as bleak as the most extreme ‘extreme’ horror stories I’ve read. Regardless, I’m hoping it makes your next visit to a gas station bathroom even scarier than it would otherwise be.”

“Like the junk food aisle at any sketchy gas station on the side of the road, Rest Stop has a little bit of everything (that may or may not kill you),” Dauberman added. “Its relentless pace, psychological torment, heartfelt character moments, and many squirm-inducing sequences make it the rare horror story that has all the ingredients for a perfectly terrifying experience on the big screen.”

Rest Stop appears in Cassidy’s I Know A Place: Rest Stop and Other Dark Detours, released May 5 by Shortwave Publishing. The collection features an introduction by Stephen King, who praises it as “fucking awesome.”

Up next from Coin Operated is Passenger, in theaters May 22, followed by The Revenge of La Llorona, due out on April 9, 2027.

The company’s development slate includes the Urban Legend reboot, video game adaptation The Medium, an adaptation of Joe Hill’s short story Ushers, and He Never Dies from Brightburn filmmaker David Yarovesky.

The post Gary Dauberman to Produce Nat Cassidy’s ‘Rest Stop’ Adaptation: ‘Green Room’ Meets ‘Gerald’s Game’ appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Celia, a lonely woman whose fertility issues and miscarriages have left her wracked with grief, is hopeful about her visit to Kindred Cove. She hopes the island, famous for its healing salt on grocery store shelves and its annual “Salt Festival” retreat for a few lucky visitors, will grant her the healing she needs. Maybe she’ll even run into an old friend who told her about the Festival in the first place. 

But when she arrives at Kindred Cove, surrounded by the salty Lake Vetiver and its vibrant, biologically fascinating reef, Celia finds something a bit more unconventional than she expected. Her phone is confiscated, residents and visitors alike seem to vanish from activities without explanation, and her assigned companion for the week, Cove native Easy, isn’t helping matters with her cryptic reasoning for everything. But Celia wants to be better, wants it more than anything, and soon she dives headlong into what Kindred Cove has to offer her, particularly the community’s promise that “nothing is ever lost.” 

If you’re familiar with even a few of the narratives in the cult horror subgenre, stuff like Midsommar or even The Wicker Man, you immediately feel at home in the world Gailey’s building here, but that’s just what gets you in the door. As Celia journeys deeper into Kindred Cove’s secrets, the book also journeys back in time, charting the course of the people who run the island now, how they got here, what they’ve done, and how it all becomes part of Celia’s own journey. The book becomes an epic, growing far beyond Celia, to the point that it almost feels overstuffed with material. But the epic qualities grow beyond the plot, and that’s the real trick to Make Me Better‘s success.

There are few genre authors working today who can craft sentences like Gailey. Their work is lyrical, precise, and often stealthily profound. They build layers of dread in their characters and in their worlds, and center it all on the interiority of those characters, until by the end it’s as much about someone’s mental state as it is about the state of the world around them. In Make Me Better, we come to know Celia intimately, and yet in the pressure cooker that is Kindred Cove, we feel like we get to know her all over again with each passing chapter, because Celia is determined, at all costs, to grow through her experience.

In one of the most honest and unflinching depictions of a cult I’ve ever read in fiction, Gailey offers in Celia the sense that we are being immersed in the culture of Kindred Cove, not just as observers but as participants. They ask us to be honest with ourselves about what we would take from such an experience, and never tip their hand as to what Celia might do next. It’s an emotional epic as much as it’s a narrative one, and Gailey never gives in to easy answers for their protagonist.  

The result is a work of stunning verisimilitude, and since it’s a horror novel, that means we don’t just witness the dread, but embody it. If you’re looking for loads of jump scares and gore, you won’t find them here, but you will find a truly unsettling reading experience that’ll keep you up late into the night.

It’s rare to feel so immersed in such a patient, slow-burn of a novel, but with Make Me Better, Gailey crafts images and moments so vivid you’ll swear you can taste the salt on your tongue. 

Make Me Better is now available wherever you get your books.

The post ‘Make Me Better’ Review – Sarah Gailey’s Haunting, Tactile Wellness Horror appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.