Amanda L. Webster is the author of If You Didn't See It Coming, One Bad Cat, Demons of the Night, DIY High, Valley of the Bees, and F-ing Freddy Fisher. She is also a writing teacher who lives part-time in a sorority house.
This anthology brings together a collection of short fiction, poetry, and black-and-white art that all live in that uneasy space where beauty and horror overlap. These are stories that don’t just aim to scare—they linger. They follow you. They ask you to look a little closer than you’re comfortable with.
At 33, Grace Whittaker is convinced she’s finally figured herself out. By 38, that certainty has unraveled completely. In Ways to Find Yourself by Angela Brown (releasing May 1, 2026), that shift—subtle at first, then all-consuming—becomes the foundation for a story that explores how fragile our sense of self really is.
The novel opens with Grace at 33, secure in who she believes herself to be. But when the narrative moves forward five years, everything has changed. Her mother has died, her writing career has stalled, and her marriage is quietly falling apart. Returning to Sea Drift, the beach town of her childhood, feels less like a retreat and more like a last attempt to make sense of a life that no longer fits.
For something people describe as sacred, romantic, and eternal, marriage in the United States is surprisingly bureaucratic. Before two people can be “married,” they need a government-issued license. A clerk records the paperwork. A legal framework determines how assets will be divided if the relationship ends. And in many cases, the couple signs the same basic legal agreement that millions of other couples sign, whether it suits their lives or not. In other words, marriage—at least in the eyes of the state—is already a contract. We just pretend it isn’t.
Two ways to say “I do”: one sacred, one legal—both important, both separate.
The confusion comes from the fact that in modern culture, two completely different institutions are treated as though they are the same thing: religious marriage and legal marriage. They are not.
I knew exactly what I was getting into when I picked up Dark Is When the Devil Comes by Daisy Pearce—or at least I thought I did. After how deeply Something in the Walls unsettled me (to the point that I had to stop reading it before bed), I expected dread. I expected unease. What I didn’t expect was just how suffocating this story would feel once it took hold.
Set in the English countryside, the novel follows Hazel, who returns to her hometown of Idless after a traumatic divorce, intending to quietly rebuild her life. But when she fails to reconnect with her sister Cathy as planned, concern quickly turns into something darker. The town whispers. The woods loom. And the sense that something has gone very, very wrong settles in almost immediately.
Desperation, dark humor, and a wildly tangled web of secrets collide in Mrs. Shim Is a Killer by Kang Jiyoung, a novel that transforms a grieving widow’s fight for survival into something far more unexpected—and undeniably entertaining.
Mrs. Shim is simply trying to keep her family afloat after losing both her husband and her job at a butcher shop. But when she answers a vague job listing and discovers her knife skills are needed for something far more dangerous, her life takes a sharp turn into the world of contract killing. What follows is less a straightforward thriller and more a darkly comedic descent into chaos, where misunderstandings, hidden motives, and unlikely connections drive the story forward.
One of the most striking elements of this novel is its tone. There’s an almost slapstick quality to the violence and the situations Mrs. Shim finds herself in, giving the story a surreal edge. The idea that her transition from butcher to assassin feels oddly natural is part of the book’s charm—it leans fully into its premise and invites the reader to do the same.
The best plot twists in fiction rarely come out of nowhere—they feel surprising and inevitable at the same time. That paradox is usually the result of careful foreshadowing. When done well, foreshadowing prepares readers for events long before they happen, creating the sense that the story’s outcome was always embedded within the narrative. I was thinking about this recently while reading Ruins by Lily Brooks-Dalton. The novel includes a central revelation that attentive readers may begin to suspect early on, yet the author never makes the answer obvious. Instead, she carefully plants clues that guide the reader toward the truth without spoiling the experience. That balance is the essence of effective foreshadowing.
Foreshadowing is the quiet trail of clues that leads readers toward the ending long before they realize it.
What is foreshadowing?
Foreshadowing is a narrative technique in which an author plants subtle hints about events that will occur later in the story. These hints might appear as dialogue, imagery, symbolism, or even small details that initially seem unimportant. The goal isn’t to give the plot away. Instead, foreshadowing creates narrative cohesion. When the key event finally arrives, readers recognize the groundwork that made it possible. The story feels intentional rather than arbitrary.
In Ruins, for example, the opening sections contain small details that feel slightly out of place. The world seems familiar but not entirely so. Certain descriptions, structures, and assumptions about society invite questions. None of these clues explicitly reveal where the story is going, but together they form a pattern that becomes meaningful later. The result is a reading experience that rewards attention without demanding it.
The promise of Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker is immediate and irresistible: a blood-soaked, myth-laced horror novel where two lives—separated by centuries—intersect through a house that shouldn’t exist.
Set across two timelines, the novel follows Lee Turner in 2026, fleeing to his father’s secluded home in Japan after a brutal, inexplicable act of violence, and Sen, a young samurai in 1877 living in fear of both imperial soldiers and something far worse within her own home. The house behind the sword ferns becomes the connective thread between them—a place where reality bends, ghosts linger, and something buried refuses to stay that way.
Get your copy of Japanese Gothic from my independent online bookstore today!
Despite the title, though, this isn’t quite the gothic experience I expected. Going in, I anticipated the kind of creeping dread that lingers long after you’ve put the book down—the kind that makes you think twice about turning off the lights. Instead, the horror here leans heavily into blood and gore, but never quite lands with emotional or psychological weight. There’s a noticeable fairy tale quality to the storytelling that creates distance rather than immersion. It’s vivid, yes—but it rarely feels real enough to truly unsettle.
There’s a particular kind of dread that creeps in when you realize the person watching didn’t just stumble into power—they built it themselves. In Molka by Monika Kim, that realization lands early and lingers long after the final page.
Set in a seemingly ordinary Seoul office building, the novel introduces Junyoung, an IT technician who has taken surveillance far beyond anything sanctioned or accidental. The cameras he watches aren’t part of the company’s security system—they’re his. Installed deliberately, carefully, and invasively throughout the building, including in restrooms, they give him total control over the private lives of the women around him. This isn’t passive observation. It’s calculated, obsessive, and deeply violating.
Get your copy of Molka from my independent online bookstore today!
That distinction matters. It transforms Junyoung from someone abusing access into someone who has engineered an entire ecosystem of control.
Julia Langbein’s sharp, irreverent novel reclaims female desire from the shame imposed upon it.
Some novels arrive with a premise so startlingly original that you immediately lean closer. Dear Monica Lewinsky by Julia Langbein is one of them—a novel that is at once profound and wickedly irreverent, using the ghost of Monica Lewinsky as both witness and guide in an excavation of female desire, shame, memory, and blame. Set for release on April 14, 2026, this is a book that refuses easy moral judgments. Instead, it asks a more difficult and necessary question: when women are punished for desire, whose sin is it really?
Get your copy of Dear Monica Lewinsky from my independent online bookstore today!
Forty-year-old Jean Dornan has never truly escaped the summer of 1998. While studying abroad in France as a college student, she entered into an affair with her much older professor, David—a married man and a figure of institutional authority. When he reappears decades later with an invitation to his retirement celebration, Jean is forced back into the emotional wreckage of that summer. What follows is not merely a reckoning with memory, but a confrontation with the story she has been telling herself for years.
Beautiful and Terrifying: Tales and Visions from the Edge of the Uncanny, the newest anthology from Elderfly Press, will be released on April 23, 2026, bringing together haunting fiction, poetry, and black-and-white artwork that explore the strange space where beauty and fear collide.
The cover of Beautiful and Terrifying: Tales and Visions from the Edge of the Uncanny, Elderfly Press’s upcoming anthology of eerie fiction, dark poetry, and black-and-white art, releasing April 23, 2026.
I’m thrilled to finally share the release date for this collection, which has been such a meaningful project to bring into the world. From eerie woods and submerged cities to folklore retellings, grief-soaked landscapes, and intimate encounters with the supernatural, this anthology embraces the unsettling and the sublime in equal measure.
Write on the World 