Horror has never been more mainstream, and climate change looms large in this season’s outings—but writers still offer glimmers of hope in speculative tales highlighting social justice and inclusion.
Top 10
The Daughters of Izdihar
Hadeer Elsbai. Harper Voyager, Jan. 10 ($27.99, ISBN 978-0-06-311474-6)
An aristocrat and a bookseller who share forbidden magic band together to agitate for women’s rights in the Egypt-inspired world of Elsbai’s epic fantasy debut and series launch.
Desert Creatures
Kay Chronister. Erewhon, Nov. 8 ($26.95, ISBN 978-1-64566-052-1)
Chronister’s debut sends a man and his nine-year-old daughter, Magdala, who has a clubfoot, trekking through a near-future desert wasteland toward the holy city of Las Vegas, where they believe Magdala will be cured.
The Genesis of Misery
Neon Yang. Tor, Sept. 27 ($27.99, ISBN 978-1-250-78897-9)
Misery Nomaki seeks to understand their mystical abilities as they’re sucked into a galaxy-wide political conflict in a sci-fi adventure that PW’s starred review called a “tour du force.”
Illuminations
Alan Moore. Bloomsbury, Oct. 11 ($30, ISBN 978-1-63557-880-5)
The first collection of short fiction from the bestselling graphic novelist behind Watchmen brings together 40 years’ worth of speculative stories. 150,000-copy announced first printing.
The Monsters We Defy
Leslye Penelope. Redhook, Aug. 9 ($17.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-316-37791-1)
A colorful crew of criminals embarks on a high-stakes heist at the behest of a power-hungry spirit in this African American folk magic–infused historical fantasy from bestseller Penelope.
The Mountain in the Sea
Ray Nayler. MCD, Oct. 4 ($28, ISBN 978-0-374-60595-7)
Nayler’s debut turns the traditional first contact story on its head as intelligent life is discovered not in outer space, but deep within Earth’s oceans, sparking fierce competition between tech companies hoping to exploit the discovery. 100,000-copy announced first printing.
Tell Me I’m Worthless
Alison Rumfitt. Nightfire, Jan. 17 ($17.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-250-86623-3)
Rumfitt puts a trans spin on the classic haunted house story in her debut horror novel, which finds a trio of friends reckoning with a terrifying night they spent in an abandoned house years before the novel’s start.
Tread of Angels
Rebecca Roanhorse. Saga, Nov. 15 ($21.99, ISBN 978-1-982166-18-2)
A murder in an 1883 Colorado mining town that’s ruled by the angelic Virtues and haunted by the demonic Fallen propels this dark fantasy from bestseller Roanhorse.
White Horse
Erika T. Wurth. Flatiron, Nov. 1 ($27.99, ISBN 978-1-250-84765-2)
Wurth debuts with the story of an Indigenous woman who accidentally calls up her mother’s ghost, pushing her to finally investigate how her mother died.
The World We Make
N.K. Jemisin. Orbit, Nov. 1 ($30, ISBN 978-0-316-50989-3)
In the highly anticipated sequel to The City We Became from three-time Hugo Award winner Jemisin, the living embodiments of New York City’s boroughs face a new foe: a corrupt, Trumpian candidate for mayor.
SF, Fantasy & Horror
47North
The Union by Leah Vernon (Sept. 20, $14.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-66250-035-0). In a harshly stratified near-future dystopia, a mixed-race enslaved girl plans her escape to freedom while a Black elite agitates for change from within the system. When their paths cross, revolution follows.
Ace
House of Hunger by Alexis Henderson (Sept. 27, $27, ISBN 978-0-593-43846-6). After a struggling young woman finds work as a bloodmaid, allowing nobles to drink from her veins, she’s drawn into the dark, seductive world of Countess Lisavet.
The Witch and the Tsar by Olesya Salnikova Gilmore (Sept. 20, $27, ISBN 978-0-593-54697-0). Gilmore’s debut reimagines the Russian folkloric figure of the Baba Yaga as a demigoddess fighting to save her country from the reign of Ivan the Terrible.
Amazon Crossing
Hospital by Han Song, trans. by Michael Berry (Jan. 10, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-5420-3947-5), sends a man infected with a mysterious illness through the byzantine bureaucracy of an absurdist, dystopian hospital system.
Anchor
Thistlefoot by Gennarose Nethercott (Sept. 27, $28, ISBN 978-0-593-46883-8) pulls from Eastern European folklore to tell the story of estranged
siblings who are reunited when they inherit their ancestor’s sentient house—and with it grave danger.
Angry Robot
Where It Rains in Colour by Denise Crittendon (Dec. 13, $15.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-
1-915202-12-3). When the reigning beauty on the idyllic vacation planet Swazembi contracts a rare skin disease, it spells change for both her and the entire galaxy.
Arsenal Pulp
Queer Little Nightmares: An Anthology of Monstrous Fiction and Poetry, edited by David Ly and Daniel Zomparelli (Oct. 4, $18.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-55152-901-1). A star-studded lineup of queer authors reimagine classic monsters and interrogate the fear of the other in this anthology of horror shorts.
Baen
Worlds Long Lost, edited by Christopher Ruocchio and Sean CW Korsgaard (Dec. 6, $16 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-982192-30-3), brings together stories of forgotten alien cultures and their impact on the ancient civilizations of Earth.
Berkley
The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna (Aug. 23, $16 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-593-43935-7). A lonely witch joins a diverse found family working together to raise three unruly young witches in a mysterious manor known as Nowhere House.
BHC
The Spirit Phone by Arthur Shattuck O’Keefe (Nov. 15, $28, ISBN 978-1-64397-322-7). After Thomas Edison invents a phone capable of communicating with the dead, his rival, Nikola Tesla, teams up with occultist Aleister Crowley to keep the device from falling into the wrong hands.
Black Spot
Darling by Mercedes M. Yardley (Aug. 23, $17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64548-119-5). A woman moves her family back to her eerie hometown, where a series of child murders force her to confront her dark past.
Blackstone
Valley of Shadows by Rudy Ruiz (Sept. 20, $27.99, ISBN 978-1-982604-64-6). In the late 19th century, a string of disappearances in a U.S.-Mexico border town sends a former Mexican lawman and an Apache Mexican seer into the desert on a quest for justice.
CAEZIK SF & Fantasy
The Best of Galaxy’s Edge 2020–2022, edited by Lezli Robyn (Oct. 4, $26.99, ISBN 978-1-64710-063-6), collects sci-fi and fantasy shorts originally published in the Galaxy’s Edge literary magazine, featuring work from titans of genre fiction and up-and-coming authors alike.
CamCat
When the Night Bells Ring by Jo Kaplan (Oct. 11, $25.99, ISBN 978-0-7443-0611-8). This near-future horror novel follows climate refugees who discover a diary from the 1860s in an abandoned silver mine—and soon encounter the terrors that its writer described firsthand.
Daw
To Each This World by Julie E. Czerneda (Nov. 1, $18 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-7564-1542-6). Three humans and their alien allies search for a lost fleet of generation ships that was sent from Earth to colonize the galaxy centuries before.
Del Rey
Black Shield Maiden by Willow Smith and Jess Hendel (Oct. 4, $28, ISBN 978-0-593-35673-9). An African warrior stolen from her home rises in the ranks of the Vikings as she serves and befriends a Norse princess.
The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik (Sept. 27, $28, ISBN 978-0-593-15835-7). Sorceress El and her friends face down an all-out magical war in the finale to bestseller Novik’s Scholomance trilogy.
Dutton
Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez (Jan. 24, $28, ISBN 978-0-593-18363-2). A crew of asteroid miners must engineer a spacecraft to rescue two of their own against a backdrop of climate change and the second Cold War.
EDGE
Wolf Is a Four-letter Word by Carrie Newberry (Aug. 11, $15.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-77053-207-6). A wolf-shifter targeted by a politically connected killer searches for a way to save herself and her secret society, the Sankhain, without bloodshed.
Flame Tree
Demon Dagger by Russell James (Aug. 16, $26.95, ISBN 978-1-78758-695-6). Monster hunter Drew Price becomes the hunted when the demon Nicobar seeks revenge—starting with stealing the soul of Drew’s son.
Flatiron
Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo (Jan. 10, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-250-31310-2) returns to the dark academia-inspired world of the bestselling Ninth House as Alex Stern works to rescue her frenemy Darlington from hell and monsters converge on Yale campus.
Forge
Midnight on the Marne by Sarah Adlakha (Aug. 9, $26.99, ISBN 978-1-250-77459-0). Marcelle Fournier works as both nurse and spy in WWI France, where she attracts the admiration of American soldier George Mountcastle. After tragedy strikes, George risks altering timelines to change the course of their lives and love.
Harper Voyager
Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R.F. Kuang (Aug. 23, $27.99, ISBN 978-0-06-302142-6). In an alternate Victorian England, a diverse group of students study the magical art of translation at Oxford University.
Bindle Punk Bruja by Desideria Mesa (Sept. 13, $17.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-06-305608-4). A white-passing flapper in 1920s Kansas City hides her identity as a bruja to rise in the ranks of the city’s bootleggers in Mesa’s historical fantasy debut.
Keylight
The Appetite Factory by Jon Gingerich (Aug. 23, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-68442-869-4). In the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis, a Madison Avenue PR exec with a bizarre appetite for inedible objects is blackmailed by his subordinate—whose own hunger is stranger still.
Lanternfish
An Archive of Brightness by Kelsey Socha (Aug. 30, $16 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-941360-65-1) pieces together a mosaic of speculative love stories as chronicled by a group of birds observing human behavior.
Mira
Vampire Weekend by Mike Chen (Jan. 31, $27.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-7783-8696-4). A lonely, punk rock vampire who’s subsisted for decades on blood bags and night jobs finds new
purpose in raising a long-lost, human teenage relative.
MIT
Tomorrow’s Parties: Life in the Anthropocene, edited by Jonathan Strahan (Aug. 23, $19.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-262-54443-6), gathers 12 perspectives on life in a post–climate change world from big-name science fiction authors, including Kim Stanley Robinson and Sarah Gailey.
Orbit
Notorious Sorcerer by Davinia Evans (Sept. 13, $17.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-316-39803-9). The heavily policed alchemical magic of Evans’s fantasy debut is the province of the rich and famous—until a dockside worker discovers his own exceptional abilities. Now it’s up to him to save his city from magical catastrophe.
The Oleander Sword by Tasha Suri (Aug. 16, $17.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-316-53856-5) continues the epic fantasy that began with The Jasmine Throne as princess Malini fights to claim the crown from her brother, and priestess Priya works to rid the country of a mysterious illness.
Putnam
Suburban Hell by Maureen Kilmer (Aug. 30, $17 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-593-42237-3). A group of discontented women in a Chicago suburb accidentally summon a demon during one of their monthly wine nights in Kilmer’s horror comedy.
Quirk
Ghost Eaters by Clay McLeod Chapman (Sept. 20, $20.99, ISBN 978-1-68369-217-1).
A mysterious drug allows a grieving woman to see the ghost of her late best friend, who died by suicide—but the door to the afterlife is more easily opened than closed.
Redhook
Ithaca by Claire North (Sept. 6, $28, ISBN 978-0-316-42296-3) retells the Odyssey from the perspective of Penelope of Ithaca, who works to maintain a fragile peace in her husband’s absence.
Saga
Silver Under Nightfall by Rin Chupeco (Sept. 13, $27.99, ISBN 978-1-982195-71-7). Chupeco’s epic fantasy adult debut follows Remy Pendergast, a monster hunter and heir to a dukedom, who finds unexpected allies in vampire heiress Xiaodan and her fiancé, Zidan, as Remy investigates a mysterious illness.
Scribner
Fairy Tale by Stephen King (Sept. 6, $32.50, ISBN 978-1-66800-217-9). Horror legend King sends a teenage boy with a tragic past through a portal to a parallel world where a supernatural war rages.
Skybound
The Last Hero by Linden A. Lewis (Nov. 8, $27.99, ISBN 978-1-982127-05-3) concludes the First Sister space opera trilogy as revolution brews throughout the galaxy, and change comes for the oppressive theocracy of the Sisterhood.
Small Beer
The Silverberg Business by Robert Freeman Wexler (Aug. 23, $17 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-61873-201-9). In 1888 Texas, a private detective tasked by his rabbi to purge their community of swindlers enters a high-stakes, supernatural poker game.
St. Martin’s
The Choice by Nora Roberts (Nov. 22, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-250-27272-0) brings bestseller Roberts’s Dragon Heart Legacy trilogy to a close as heroine Breen fully embraces her power and works with her loved ones to save the magical land of Talamh.
Tachyon
The Unbalancing by R.B. Lemberg (Sept. 20, $17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-61696-380-4). The first full-length venture into Lemberg’s Birdverse universe pairs a misanthropic poet with the caretaker of a sleeping, suboceanic deity as they work together to save their island home.
Titan
Isolation: The Horror Anthology, edited by Dan Coxon (Sept. 13, $15.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-80336-068-3), collects 20 tales of lonely and claustrophobic terror from Ken Liu, Ramsey Campbell, A.G. Slatter, and others.
Tor
Arch-Conspirator by Veronica Roth (Jan. 17, $19.99, ISBN 978-1-250-85546-6). Bestseller Roth sets this retelling of Sophocles’s Antigone in a far-future dystopia, where only one city remains on an otherwise barren Earth. 200,000-copy announced first printing.
The Lost Metal: A Mistborn Novel by Brandon Sanderson (Nov. 15, $29.99, ISBN 978-0-7653-9119-3). The second era of bestseller Sanderson’s Mistborn series comes to its end as Sen. Waxillium Ladrian and his allies close in on the Set, a corrupt secret society.
Tordotcom
Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction, edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and Zelda Knight (Nov. 8, $27.99, ISBN 978-1-250-83300-6), showcases science fiction and fantasy shorts from African writers and writers of the African diaspora.
Even Though I Knew the End by C.L. Polk (Nov. 8, $19.99, ISBN 978-1-250-84945-8). The private detective heroine of Polk’s 1940s-set noir fantasy has one last shot to save her soul from the devil by tracking down a serial killer who has dark and powerful magic.
Face by Joma West (Aug. 2, $26.99, ISBN 978-1-250-81029-8). In the high-tech dystopian society of West’s debut, advanced genetic engineering and omnipresent social media give the wealthy and beautiful unprecedented social capital.
Undertow
Breakable Things by Cassandra Khaw (Nov. 8, $17.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-988964-37-9) is the first collection of horror shorts from a rising star of the genre.
Union Square
A Broken Blade by Melissa Blair (Aug. 2, $16.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-4549-4787-5). A half-elf orphan raised to fight on behalf of the crown joins a growing revolution in Blair’s debut. 150,000-copy announced first printing.
Unnamed Press
Saturnalia by Stephanie Feldman (Oct. 4, $27, ISBN 978-1-951213-64-0). In a disease and climate change–ridden alternate Philadelphia, the arcane festival of Saturnalia gives rise to secrets, seduction, and the supernatural.
Vintage
Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth (Oct. 4, $17 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-593-46702-2). Hogarth’s adult debut finds Abby Lamb working to save herself and her husband from the vindictive ghost of her mother-in-law.
WorDFire
Double-Booked by Kevin J. Anderson (Nov. 22, $34.99, ISBN 978-1-68057-352-7). Bestseller Anderson’s recurring hero, Dan Shamble, zombie detective, sets out to destroy Lovecraft’s famed Necronomicon before it can wreak havoc on the world.
