Welcome back to Scare Me! a weekly horror newsletter. Happy new year! Today, I’m sharing a collection of the horror fiction releases I’m most looking forward to in 2026.

2026 is shaping up to be another fantastic year for horror readers. While 2025 saw blockbuster releases by heavyweights like Joe Hill and Stephen Graham Jones, this year is a bit of an off-cycle for the genre’s better known authors. It’s created space for debuts, sophomore efforts from up-and-coming authors, and a thrilling slate of books that span every trope and corner you can imagine.

Or at least, that’s what smarter people than me are saying on podcasts lately. I’m just happy to have a big stack of horror novels surrounding me, digitally and otherwise. I revived my dormant NetGalley account last fall and sent in a handful of requests for titles that particularly piqued my interest. Below, I’ve gathered 10 of the books that I’m planning to read this year—a small sample of a much bigger and more unruly TBR.

Along with these new releases, I have a readerly resolution for the new year: I’m planning to read more books by Clive Barker. I’ve gathered up his Books of Blood, Thief of Always, and a beautiful secondhand hardcover of Imajica, and I’m also in the midst of a reread of his Books of Abarat. By the end of 2026, I’m hoping to have a better grasp on his uniquely imaginative canon.

If you’d like to see what I read in 2025, I posted a recap on TikTok and had a lot of fun chatting with folks in the comments! A few even joined us here at Scare Me! HQ. If that’s you, welcome! I’m so happy you’re here.

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Release Date: January 13

Josie returns to her hometown feeling battered by life. She’s escaped an abusive relationship that put her in a coma, and now she’s living in a gloomy apartment and traipsing through the woods to her job at a local pub. It’s on one of these daily commutes that she stumbles across a badly decomposing body…of a woman who looks just like her.

Itch! is so many things that I love. It’s simultaneously a bug infested body horror, a folk horror steeped in English tradition, and a serial killer whodunit that feels like the best old episodes of Criminal Minds (simultaneously logical and outlandish). Best of all, Amor offers Josie a character development arc that offers hope, healing, and profound growth. I really loved this!

Release Date: January 27

Yah Yah Scholfield’s newsletter is titled to be young, gory and black, and they write razor-sharp commentary about horror, media, the creative process, and more. (I particularly loved this post about who gets to be a weird girl.) Their debut novel is set in the woods of southern Georgia, where our main character Judith has fled after escaping her abusive mother. Determined to survive, she sets out to soothe and domesticate a house haunted by ghosts and haints. She succeeds. Thirteen years later, she’s grown into a talented healer.

Then a mysterious woman shows up on her doorstep, and Judith is once again confronted by everything she tried to leave behind. The premise reminds me a bit of Lucy Rose’s The Lamb, one of my favorite books in 2025. I’m a few pages shy of finishing John Langan’s The Fisherman, and then I’ll be diving straight into this.

Release Date: February 10

I have pretty good luck, but I’m not always triumphant. Sadly, my ARC request for Trad Wife was rejected. To the bookstore I’ll trek!

Trad Wife interrogates the unsettling realm of social media, where influencers curate uncanny images of marriage, motherhood, and femininity. Our main character, Camille, seems to have everything—except for a baby. And she’s determined to obtain one at any cost, even if it makes making a supernatural deal with something she doesn’t fully understand.

Saratoga Schaefer’s debut, Serial Killer Support Group, was widely praised, earning recognition from Goodreads, Barnes & Noble, Spotify, and Autostraddle, among others. They’ve been on my radar, so I’m looking forward to picking this one up.

Release Date: February 24

Catriona Ward is an instant-buy author for me. I loved The Last House on Needless Street and was pleasantly bewildered by Looking Glass Sound. Nowhere Burning, which I read in early December, sits closer to Ward’s crime fiction than the metafictional end of her spectrum.

The story focuses on two children who flee an abusive home, heading into the Colorado mountains in search of a commune where other runaway kids have gathered. There, the so-called Nowhere children have formed a cult that ekes out an unstable survival in the ruins of a disgraced movie star’s burned out ranch. Past and present gradually merge as Ward unravels the place’s layered histories.

Release Date: March

Chris Panatier is back in March with Daytide, a very special release from Rapture Publishing. Chris not only wrote the story (a “black metal Wizard of Oz,” as he says) but also designed and illustrated the book himself! A psychological plague called the Longing has overtaken humanity—a cruel disease that bends sufferer’s thoughts toward self-annihilation. We find our main character, Adam, at a support group for survivors when a mysterious priest arrives, claiming to have found a cure. Could he possibly be telling the truth?

This one isn’t an ARC—there will only be 350 copies printed in this limited release, so I preordered a copy last summer. It’s a bit of a splurge at $65, but it’s full of thoughtful details and design elements that make it feel special and luxe.

Release Date: March 24

I’m a little wary of stories that focus on grief. I lost my mom a couple years ago, unexpectedly, and I still have to be gentle with myself about grief-related horror. But Eric LaRocca is my favorite horror authors’ favorite horror author, so I’m going to be brave and dive head first into Wretch.

The story is billed as a Gothic techno-horror that centers Simeon, who is grieving the recent loss of his husband. His grief support group, The Wretches, introduce him to a mysterious figure who promises to provide one last moment with lost loved ones. But this irresistible opportunity comes at a steep cost.

Doesn’t that sound horrible and intriguing? I can’t wait to find out what this deal entails.

Release Date: April 14

I’m shallow sometimes: This book’s pretty cover drew me in. I haven’t read C.J. Dotson before, but the premise also sounded interesting—it’s about a woman who’s reeling in the aftermath of a brutal crime. Her parents have been murdered, and the suspected culprit is an old childhood friend. This is a horror novel, so obviously she moves her family back into her childhood home, where the crime occurred.

I tend to like stories where the past refuses to stay buried, so I’m curious to see what secrets lurk in these characters’ backstories.

Release Date: April 21

I haven’t read Bat Eater yet, but I’ve seen it hailed as one of the best books of 2025 by so many fellow horror readers! Baker’s follow-up unfolds in two timelines: one in 2026, and one in 1877. In true Gothic fashion, a house serves as the link between these two time periods.

Lee Turner flees New York after inexplicably killing his college roommate, hiding in his father’s house in Japan. But the house has a horrible energy, and a sword-wielding woman appears in the yard at night. Its history traces all the way back to 1877, when the horror first began. I love a dual timeline narrative where both stories seem equally compelling and fully realized, and I’m looking forward to seeing how these stories weave together.

Release Date: April 28

I finished Molka recently—what a fast-paced, suspenseful, gory, wild ride. The story puts two colleagues in a Seoul office building on an inevitable collision course: Dahye, a financial analyst whose personal life is gradually imploding, and Junyoung, an IT worker who’s rigged the entire building with hidden cameras (the eponymous molka for which the book is named).

The story is a refreshing corrective to K drama tropes that romanticize the wealthy chaebol class. If you crave eat-the-rich, good-for-her stories with a supernatural twist, I can’t recommend this enough.

Release Date: June 9

I was listening to a podcast a few months ago and heard Stephen Graham Jones call CJ Leede’s Maeve Fly icky and impressive. So when I stumbled across her next release on NetGalley, I immediately sent in a request.

Headlights is a gruesome and twisted crime thriller that centers Daniel Stansfield, a burnt out FBI agent on the brink of resigning his position. Just as he’s about to escape the Bureau, he receives an alarming message. On the side of a highway in Denver, disoriented people are showing up with no memory of how they arrived there—and they’re wearing pieces of other people’s bodies.

Gnarly, huh? Stansfield can’t resign under these conditions, and soon he’s plunged back into an unsolved case that’s bound up in his own childhood trauma.

I’m working on scheduling an interview with Catriona Ward about Nowhere Burning, so crossed fingers are appreciated! If the timing works, I’ll publish next week—but it’s looking more likely that we’ll have a little post-holiday gap before returning to interview land.

But that’s okay! I have a whole two weeks’ worth of yapping trapped inside my head. Next week’s newsletter topic will be a surprise to both of us.

Scare Me! is a free weekly horror newsletter published every Thursday morning. It’s written by Michelle Delgado, featuring original illustrations by Sam Pugh. You can find the archive of past issues here. If you were sent this by a friend, subscribe to receive more spooky interviews, essays—and maybe even a ghost story or two.