Notable 2021 Horror Releases

Hey readers,

I’ve listed some horror releases you should note. Some are already released, but most are yet to come.

Tor/Nightfire has their first season of horrors releasing this late summer/fall, and a lot of them look like enjoyable and chilling reads. From Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s cult vampire novel Certain Dark Things to the English release of a haunting witch story, Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s Hex.

Horror is one of those genres that reaches its claws into almost any type of story that you can imagine. It can be more literary, stemming from its ancestor, Gothics, or Shakespeare, or walk the line between stereotypical horror and fantasy. Sapphic boarding schools with witches, Shakespearean horror, Black mediums, Indigenous horror nerds, and chilling Filipino tales; horror is the new ‘It Girl.’

Never Have I Ever by Isabel Yap

Release date: February 23rd, Small Beer Press, Adult

Immigrant tales, legends, and spells gather in this bundle of stories. From monstrousness, trauma, teenagers to ancient goddesses, androids to witches comes various speculative fiction.

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Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon

Release date: May 4th, MCD, Adult

Sorrowland is a Gothic where monsters aren’t individuals but entire nations. In her escape from a strict religious cult, Vern flees into the woods, where she and her twins survive the outside world.

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The Taking of Jake Livingston by Ryan Douglass

Release date: July 13th, G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers, Young Adult

Get Out meets Danielle Vega. A boy sees dead people everywhere. When another Black student arrives at his prep school, romance is on the horizon. But a vengeful ghost has plans for Jake.

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All’s Well by Mona Awad

Release date: August 3rd, Simon & Schuster, Adult

The author of Bunny, a funny novel about Shakespeare and chronic pain, delivers something between suffering and laughter. A theater professor with chronic pain is trying to save her job by putting on Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, but her mutinous cast stays determined on staging Macbeth instead.

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The Dead and The Dark by Courtney Gould

Release date: August 3rd, Wednesday Books, Young Adult

In this debut, two girls fall for each other as they stop evil in the small town of Snakebite, Oregon.

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A Lesson In Vengeance by Victoria Lee

Release date: August 3rd, Delacorte Press, Young Adult

Wilder Girls and Ninth House wrapped up in a boarding school haunted by its witchcraft history. In an ivy-covered campus, a girl mourns the home of her dead girlfriend. An exclusive dorm belonging to Dalloway’s students’ haunted spirits, a mystery unfolds in a novel of occults, prodigies, and brilliant girls.

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My Heart Is A Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones

Release date: August 31st, Saga Press, Adult

In a rural lake town, horror and gentrification take control in Stephen Graham Jones’s next big release. American colonialism and Indigenous displacement in the home of a young girl. Jade takes her anger and puts it into her love for horror films.

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Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Release date: September 7th, Tor/Nightfire, Adult

With Horror’s comeback comes the re-release of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s vampire novel. From Tor/Nightfire, Certain Dark Things unravels a gritty story of fangs and vampire lore in Mexico City.

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White Smoke by Tiffany D. Jackson

Release date: September 14th, Katherine Tegen Books, Young Adult

The Haunting of Hill House meets Get Out in Tiffany D. Jackson’s next YA novel.

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Stalking Shadows by Cyla Panin

Release date: September 14th, Amulet, Young Adult

A Gothic fantasy retelling of Beauty & The Beast centering sisters and a curse. In Eighteenth-century France, Marie laces perfumes with poison to lure victims for her sister, the beast. Based on the historical Beast of Gévaudan, a mysterious creature that ravaged the rural French region of Gévaudan.

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To Break A Covenant by Alison Ames

Release date: September 21st, Page Street Kids, Middle-Grade

Likened to Wilder Girls and Sawkill Girls, a novel of a small mining town’s hauntings and sapphic romance center around four friends.

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Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

Release date: September 21st, Tor/Nightfire, Adult

In the re-release of Hex, the Black Rock Witch haunts a small town. A seventeenth-century woman with eyes and a mouth sewed shut enters sleeping houses.

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The Last House On Needless Street by Catriona Ward

Release date: September 28th, Tor/Nightfire, Adult

A psychological horror explores dark truths in a boarded house on a dead-end street in the wild woods, where a family of three lives.

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Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo

Release date: September 28th, Tordotcom, Adult

The Sound and the Fury, The Fast and the Furious, and The Secret History bound up in a single queer Southern Gothic.

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Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw

Release date: October 19th, Tor/Nightfire, Adult

A creepy and haunted house mixes with Japanese folklore. Friends gather to celebrate a wedding with a night of drinks and games but unfold into a night where a ghost bride takes the stage.

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The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling

Release date: October 19th, St. Martin’s Press, Adult

Ninth House meets Mexican Gothic in a gothic fantasy horror. A practical woman marries a reclusive doctor in a marriage of convenience, but he’s got one condition: that she never visits his crumbling family manor. But in a pitch-black rainstorm, she finds her husband changed into a paranoid man unable to tell reality from nightmare. In a post-war England gothic, The Death of Jane Lawrence inspires the likes of Crimson Peak.

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Within These Wicked Walls by Lauren Blackwood

Release date: November 9th, Wednesday Books, Young Adult

In an Ethiopian-inspired Jane Eyre Young Adult novel, an exorcist cleanses households. To find steady work, she must find a patron, wealthy and well connected. The handsome and rude young heir Magnus Rochester hires Andromeda. Horrifying manifestations and curses, Blackwood weaves a novel of creepy and romantic Gothics.