Category: Book Reviews

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In the Woods They Wait: An eerie Southern Gothic that saves its scariest tricks for too late

Mandy Webster

There’s something in the woods, and it has been waiting for someone to notice. Carrie Lee South’s In the Woods They Wait is an atmospheric Southern Gothic horror novel about grief, guilt, missing children, and an ancient presence lurking in the woods. The slow-burn mystery kept me reading, but the rushed final act and underwhelming reveal kept the novel from reaching its full potential.

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In Carrie Lee South’s In the Woods They Wait, the woods surrounding Devil’s Den State Park are more than a backdrop. They are a presence—ancient, watchful, and seemingly hungry. Fifteen years after Audrey Figg’s younger brother, Benny, disappeared from the park, she has made a life for herself among the very trees that swallowed him. As a park ranger with expertise in wilderness search and rescue, Audrey has turned her grief into a vocation, spending her days protecting hikers and searching the backcountry for the person she has never stopped hoping to find. When a young girl named Ivy disappears from the same woods, Audrey sees too many similarities to Benny’s disappearance to believe it is a coincidence.

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Rooted by Leopoldo Goût: A horror novel about memory, history, and ancient gods

Mandy Webster

What if the past isn’t really the past? In Rooted, Leopoldo Goût turns a woman’s return to Mexico City into a terrifying confrontation with buried memories, ancient gods, and a world that refuses to remain neatly separated into the categories modern humanity has created for it. The result is a horror novel that is as much about our relationship to the world around us as it is about supernatural terror.

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Rooted, which releases September 15, 2026, follows Aurora, a successful art lawyer who returns to Mexico to celebrate a campaign she helped lead to repatriate stolen artifacts, including a mysterious statue of an Aztec god known as the Flayed One. But her homecoming quickly becomes unsettling. Mexico City is familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, and Aurora begins to experience impossible memories, disturbing dreams, and increasingly frightening distortions of reality. There is nothing wrong with Aurora—or at least, that is what everyone keeps telling her.

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Something of a Calling by Zoje Stage: Unsettling Horror or Unintentional Comedy?

Mandy Webster

Some books are unsettling because they burrow under your skin and refuse to leave. Others leave you staring at the final page thinking, “What did I just read?” Zoje Stage’s Something of a Calling falls firmly into the second category.

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Releasing September 15, 2026, Something of a Calling follows Detective Andy Cooper, a woman approaching retirement with very little waiting for her on the other side of it. Her daughter was killed by a drunk driver, her marriage ended in divorce, and her career has become the one thing she has left—and now she is about to lose that, too. She imagines an RV she hasn’t bought, a dog she doesn’t own, and a garden she might someday tend once the cable company finishes tearing up the woods behind her house. Then people start turning up dead.

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American Nightmare by Kelly McWilliams asks where evil really comes from

Mandy Webster

What if the monster haunting you isn’t a supernatural creature at all, but the hatred of ordinary people—and what if the only way to fight it is to become one of them? That question sits at the heart of Kelly McWilliams’s American Nightmare, a haunting historical thriller inspired by the life and work of civil rights activist Walter F. White.

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Releasing September 15, 2026, American Nightmare follows Clark Wendell White, a light-skinned Black man who first encounters what he calls the Nightmare as a child during the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot. As Clark and his father stand guard over their family home, a white boy named Sam Cahill tries to redirect the mob toward them. When Clark and Sam lock eyes, Clark sees something in Sam that frightens him even more than the mob itself. He sees what he believes is an evil presence, something that wasn’t there before. From that moment forward, the Nightmare becomes a presence in Clark’s life, although he is never entirely certain whether it is something supernatural or a manifestation of the trauma he experienced as a child.

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We Already Dug the Grave by Emma C. Wells: A kitschy Southern gothic thriller

Mandy Webster

I wanted to love We Already Dug the Grave. After all, I absolutely adored Emma C. Wells’ debut novel, This Girl’s a Killer, so when I saw that Wells had another book coming out, it was an automatic must-read for me. Unfortunately, while We Already Dug the Grave has plenty of the ingredients I loved in her debut, it never quite captures the same sharp wit or confidence.

The cover of the novel We Already Dug the Grave by Emma C. Wells
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We Already Dug the Grave follows estranged sisters Milly and Francis, who have spent years apart after something terrible happened in a Tennessee meadow. Milly has always been the odd one, with an ability to divine the future through tea leaves. But lately, the tea leaves have gone silent, which might seem like a blessing considering how bleak Milly’s life has become.

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Children of the Wolf by Abby Geni: A literary mystery about family, mythology, and inherited violence

Mandy Webster

Some families pass down recipes, heirlooms, and old photographs. Liv’s family passes down stories of gods, bloodshed, and a violent legacy she has spent her entire adult life trying to escape. Abby Geni’s Children of the Wolf, releasing September 15, 2026, is one of those novels that feels like an elaborate tapestry: dazzling threads in thousands of colors, each one carefully woven into the next until the final piece is something far more intricate and awe-inspiring than you could have imagined from the individual strands. At its heart, it is a story about loving a serial killer—and about whaeddt happens when the person you love turns out to be someone you should have feared.

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I don’t think it’s a spoiler to tell you that Liv’s father, Ulf, is a serial killer. The novel gives us enough clues to understand what is happening during Liv’s childhood even while Liv herself fails to recognize the signs until long after she has grown up and escaped her father’s control. And that distinction is important. Children of the Wolf isn’t really a story about discovering that Ulf is a killer. It is a story about what it means to have loved him.

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Strange Is the Light by Sarah Maria Griffin: A dark fantasy of friendship, betrayal, and consequences

Mandy Webster

What happens when the games you invented as children turn out to be more real than you ever imagined? In Sarah Maria Griffin’s Strange Is the Light, a childhood game becomes the doorway to something ancient, dangerous, and very much alive—and the friends who created it must finally reckon with the consequences of the last time they played.

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Strange Is the Light follows Daphne, Ronan, Leonie, and Finn, four childhood friends whose lives have been intertwined by a strange and somewhat magical summer friendship. Three of them live year-round on the island of Valentia, while Daphne visits only during the summers. At the center of their friendship is a game they have created together, one that begins as the kind of elaborate play-acting children do and gradually evolves into something closer to the role-playing games we know today. They create a world, invent stories and characters, and take turns building the narrative together.

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She’s a Doll by Barbara Truelove turns the haunted-doll story upside down

Mandy Webster

What if the creepy haunted doll isn’t the monster in the story—but the victim who has finally come back to make her killer pay? That’s the deliciously dark premise behind Barbara Truelove’s She’s a Doll, a horror novel that takes the familiar haunted-doll story and gives it a very satisfying twist. Instead of an innocent person becoming the target of an inexplicably murderous antique doll, this time the doll has every reason to be angry. Lucy McQuinn was murdered, and now her ghost has taken up residence in an eighteen-inch porcelain body. She may be small, but she has unfinished business with Kyle, the man who killed her.

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There’s something wonderfully subversive about the way Truelove approaches the haunted-doll trope. We’re accustomed to assuming that the doll is the threat. The creepy porcelain face, the old-fashioned clothes, the unnatural movements—everything about a haunted doll is designed to make us wonder what it’s going to do to us.

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Body Language by Meg Howrey explores the complicated choices of family, autonomy, and Alzheimer’s

Mandy Webster

Body Language by Meg Howrey is a deeply thoughtful and surprisingly funny literary novel about three sisters forced to confront their mother’s wishes, their own differences, and the difficult question of what it means to honor someone’s autonomy when they can no longer make decisions for themselves. The novel releases September 1, 2026.

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Body Language is a great literary novel—profound, evocative, and layered—but perhaps more importantly, it is a readable literary novel. There is a difference. Literary fiction can sometimes become so enamored with its own language and philosophical underpinnings that reading it begins to feel like work. Meg Howrey avoids that trap. Her prose is clear, concise, intelligent, and often very funny, while still giving the story the depth and complexity I want from a literary novel. In my opinion, clarity is one of the major requirements of a good novel, and Howrey demonstrates just how much can be accomplished without burying a story beneath unnecessarily elaborate language.

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We Are for the Dark by Gretchen McNeil: An unsettling descent into Newfoundland horror

Mandy Webster

What if a missing-person investigation led you to an island where nothing is quite what it seems—and something ancient beneath the ground is very, very hungry? Gretchen McNeil’s We Are for the Dark, releasing September 1, 2026, takes that premise and turns it into a fast-paced supernatural horror story filled with isolated communities, religious unease, strange traditions, and a growing sense that the people arriving on the island may have made a terrible mistake.

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McNeil’s novel begins with Father Shane Ryan, a recently ordained Catholic priest with an unusual past as an FBI analyst. When a priest disappears from a remote island off the coast of Newfoundland, Cardinal Jacobs calls on Ryan to investigate. At roughly the same time, Royal Newfoundland Constabulary constable Miriam Rideout becomes concerned about a frantic call she received from the missing priest. When her superiors refuse to authorize a wellness check, Miriam takes matters into her own hands and travels to the island herself. Naturally, the two eventually end up together—and neither is particularly thrilled about it.

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