Editorials
How ‘Fallout 4’ Turned a Normal Mission Into a Nightmare
Preston Garvey had sent me on yet another mission to help yet more settlers, and I had begun to believe they were all the same. Go in, kill some bad guys, get out. This time I found myself at the bottom of the Dunwich Borers quarry, looting the left arm of a dead raider’s power armor—the last piece I needed for my own set—when I saw a door tucked away in the side of a cliff. Curiosity drove me to open it, and that’s when the nightmare began.
The storytellers at Bethesda created an open-world experience in Fallout 4, and sure, the main story is about finding your kidnapped son, but the more terrifying stories are told in the background, in hidden snippets that require you to dig deep and uncover the secret lore of the game. This was one of them.
The Apocalypse and Lovecraft
As I ventured into the caverns beneath the Dunwich Borers quarry, flashbacks shook the screen. Flashes of times before the Great War showed men hard at work carving out the tunnels, only to snap back to the present era where I found only ghouls—humans that had been exposed to too much radiation, their base natures twisted and warped beyond recognition.
The horror should come as no surprise. H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos has long influenced the Fallout series. One of the core stories of this Mythos is known as The Dunwich Horror, a tale set in the fictional town of Dunwich, Massachusetts, the same state where Fallout 4 is set. Fallout 3 included a location called The Dunwich Building in which people worshiped Ug-Qualtoth, an unknown being with god-like powers.
The naming convention of this creature is similar to Lovecraft’s Yog-Sothoth and Yuggoth. Coincidence? Not hardly. The Dunwich Horror features a deformed main character named Wilbur Whateley that is barely recognizable as human, much like a ghoul. The story revolves around mysterious events 0n his family’s farm. Wilbur purchases a lot of cattle, but his herd never grows—and the animals that remain in his heard begin to have hideous open wounds.
I won’t say more. If you haven’t read Lovecraft before, check him out. The man is a master of atmospheric horror. He can scare even the most hardened horror fan. Lovecraft’s words creep into your brain like a fog and leave you unsettled.
It was this same atmospheric effect that made the Dunwich Borers so terrifying. The meaning of the flashbacks is never explained. Their cause is never explained. But their effect is immediately apparent.
Deeper into the Caverns
The ghouls came from every nook and cranny. Bodies I had dismissed as corpses stood and attacked. I began to fire a single round into the skull of every corpse, just to make sure. More than once, the corpses stood and attacked. With each step I took, the lights flickered erratically.
The path descended deeper into the cavern. Bodies and ghouls littered the lower levels more heavily than in the better-lit areas above. The flashbacks seemed tied to power sources within the mine. The moment I flipped one, another flashback would dominate my screen. Moments after it ended, ghouls flooded the hallway.
I fought through tunnel after tunnel until I reached the lowest level. A dimly-lit pathway opened into a larger cave. Construction equipped dotted the room, and a makeshift bedroom had been erected to one side. I dispatched the single ghoul that greeted me and looted the room. I thought I had reached the end; after all, I found a Sneak Bobblehead that permanently upgraded my abilities. Items like that aren’t left about haphazardly.
Then I saw another exit. Tucked away in the darkened corner of the room, a tunnel led deeper into the cavern. I stepped inside. I didn’t expect a flashback. I had grown used to their appearance after flipping a power switch, but I had not found one in the previous room.
When light filled my screen, I watched the eeriest flashback yet. A crowd of people knelt in front of an altar, their hands bound behind them. A man named Tim Shoots addressed the crowd. Just as suddenly as it appeared, the flashback faded—and a named ghoul attacked. I gasped at the name Tim Shoots over the creature’s head. Two more ghouls, Bradley Ramone, and John Hatfield, also joined the fray.
I had just watched a holotape with the three men, but I had not understood their intent.
I killed all three. My last round dropped Bradley Ramone feet from where I stood, and the momentum of his charge carried his now-dead body past me. I walked into the room with the altar, ready to fight more undead, but nothing remained of the flashback. A massive hole filled with radioactive water occupied the space where the altar had been.
At the bottom of the hole, I found Kremvh’s Tooth. This weapon looks like a machete forged from the jagged fang of some otherworldly beast. Upon further investigation, the weapon can be given a unique mod called “Sacrificial Blade.” This causes the target to bleed and deals a tremendous amount of damage.
A simple mission to kill a few raiders had led me to the remnants of a cult that worshiped a Lovecraftian god. Despite the hours I sank into Fallout 4, no other mission created the same level of unease and apprehension that descending through those flashback-filled tunnels did. The storytellers at Bethesda managed to pull me into the long-forgotten lore of a half-destroyed world and used my curiosity as the vehicle.
There’s a lot of reading left to do in 2026, between the glut of summer releases and the approach of fall, when horror titles get a special push from publishers, but this has already been an incredible year for horror literature.
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.
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