“There’s this fantastic description of the gothic – that it is not a genre at all, but a virus that attaches itself to genres and infects texts, and also morphs through time and adapts as needed. “Horror can encompass anything from Saw to Shirley Jackson,” says Ward. “It’s bang on for anyone who loves Squid Game.” She also recommends The Whistling by Rebecca Netley as “a remote, Scottish-set ghost story with real Hill House vibes”, as well as The Haunting Season, which collects scary tales by authors including Andrew Michael Hurley, Imogen Hermes Gowar and Bridget Collins. “It’s an homage to classic horror with real social commentary at its heart – it really pays tribute to the genre as a whole, which I love,” says Carvalho. Meanwhile Zakiya Dalila Harris and James Han Mattson are writing really sharp, social-commentary horror that directly confronts the dangers of defaulting to white culture, in The Other Black Girl and Reprieve respectively.”Īt Waterstones, buyer Bea Carvalho also recommends Mattson’s Reprieve, which features murder and a frightening haunted house escape room.
Her recent novella Nothing But Blackened Teeth is a new take on J-horror, unmitigated by the usual western dilution. “Slightly lesser-known writers like Cassandra Khaw are also making waves. “ have all really pushed the envelope when it comes to new perspectives on the tradition, especially bringing in alternative folklores and marrying them with western – white – tropes,” says McRobert. This homage to classic horror is bang on for anyone who loves Squid Game Bea Carvalho, Waterstones buyer He points to authors such as Jones, V Castro – whose Goddess of Filth sees four friends hold a seance, only for one of them to begin chanting in Nahuatl, the language of their Aztec ancestors – and Silvia Moreno-Garcia, whose Mexican Gothic is a deliciously creepy twist on gothic horror, set in 1950s Mexico (I adored it). “Horror is in a very exciting place,” says Neil McRobert, who hosts the Talking Scared podcast, which interviews some of horror fiction’s biggest names. A multi-layered dive into the heart of a horrific secret – complete with talking cat – it received a rave review from master of the genre Stephen King, who said he hadn’t “read anything this exciting since Gone Girl”. Ward had already published two literary horror novels, Little Eve and Rawblood, when her latest work, The Last House on Needless Street, came out this year. It’s what horror is for: finding new, boundary-breaking ways to share fear and empathy.” Jones has published over a dozen novels in the US, but The Only Good Indians was his first outing in the UK George Sandison, who acquired it for Titan, said that “one breakneck fever dream of a read later, my mind astray in the North American wilderness, thunderclouds rolling, elk breath at my neck, I realised I had to buy it”.īritish-American author Catriona Ward calls Jones: “a master stylist who takes risks with narrative boundaries, playing with the very idea of what horror is”.
Stephen Graham Jones Photograph: Titan Books