Published March 22nd 2022 by Titan Books

A chilling Gothic horror novel set at a coed boarding school in Scotland, where a teen girl must not only fight against her monstrous male classmates but the monster growing within her after being cursed.

Every wish granted comes with strings attached. That’s how Catriona Cameron gets a scholarship to Floodbane Academy—an elite boarding school in the Scottish Lowlands she never applied to—where she’ll be one of only six girls to enter the castle’s unwelcoming halls.

As the carnage mounts, Catriona faces the possibility that she is becoming as monstrous as those she hunts. Ultimately, is vengeance worth the loss of her humanity?

Add to Goodreads

 

Wishes are dangerous. Anyone who has ever read a fairy tale knows this, and yet we keep making them anyway. Ridley leans hard into that particular brand of fae cruelty, and the result is one of the more satisfying YA horrors I've read in a while. 

Catriona Cameron arrives at Floodbane Academy, an elite boarding school in the Scottish Lowlands, after such a wish. She is one of only six girls admitted to its halls, and its current students absolutely do not want them there. After a violent attack, those unseen dark fairies grant cruel wishes made flippantly against her. Catriona begins to change. She becomes more attractive, but cursed with an insatiable hunger to devour anyone who preys upon women. The fairies give, and the fairies take, and what they take is your sense of self.

It's a great take on the classic “be careful what you wish for”, and the inclusion of Scottish folklore and the baobhan sith adds an extra layer to the story. There is also a surprising amount of gore, but the violence works especially well alongside the female rage running through the story and the very real inequality these girls are dealing with. The boys are horrible people. They're cruel, entitled, and despicable, so watching them get their comeuppance was extremely satisfying.

However, Insatiable isn't a straightforward revenge fantasy with a gothic academic flair. As the carnage mounts, Catriona confronts the possibility that she is becoming as monstrous as those she hunts. Watching her grapple with wanting the hunger and fearing the hunger, but feeding it anyway, is tense in the best way. Ridley keeps the focus on that dilemma throughout the story. Where does the monster end and the girl begin?  And is vengeance worth the loss of her humanity? That's the kind of moral weight that elevates horror from pure pageantry into something that actually sticks with you.

If you like your gothic horror with fae curses, female rage, questionable morality, and a generous helping of bloodshed, this one delivers. I had a great time watching Catriona turn “be careful what you wish for” into a problem for everyone else. Sometimes the best solution to misogyny is a curse, a monster, and a little creative violence.

Published August 18, 2026 by Bantam

Published April 21, 2026 by Atria/Emily Bestler Books/12:01 Books

Published September 1, 2026

Some doors are locked to keep you in. This one was sealed to keep the end of the world out.

Harvey Covington wakes with tubes in his arms, no memory of his name, and four strangers who know as little as he does.

They call their captor The Host. He restocks their food without ever being seen and leaves nothing behind but a note claiming they chose this life underground. None of them believe it.

As starvation sets in and the group turns on itself, Harvey discovers something waking inside him — abilities that shouldn't be possible, and a truth far worse than any prison. The memories they lost weren't taken to protect them.

They were taken to hide what he did.

Beyond that vault door lies a dead and gray world. Cities emptied. The infected roaming in place of the people they used to be, hollowed out like zombies by something ancient that Harvey set loose with his own hand.

It has a name. And it remembers his.

The Whisper of Death is coming for the last thing standing between it and eternal life — and Harvey is the only one who can stop what he started.

Kevin Koelbl is a fiction author and storyteller who spent eight years serving in the National Guard before trading the uniform for the page. His writing spans dark fantasy, sci-fantasy, and beyond — genre-bending stories built around morally complex characters, high stakes, and worlds that don't play by the rules. Kevin believes the best fiction doesn't stay inside the lines, and he brings that same restless spirit to every story he tells. When he's not writing, he's chasing new experiences across the globe, convinced that the best stories live somewhere between the places you've been and the ones you haven't found yet. The Whisper of Death is his debut novel.

Published October 6, 2026 by Dutton

The Greers built their fortune on alligator bones.

Dartrine Beaumont believes her mother’s sudden death has left her alone in the world—until she learns of long-lost wealthy relatives living in Florida. Confused but delighted by the possibility of extended family, Dart travels to her grandmother’s stately Gilded Age mansion on Amelia Island for answers, just in time to stake a claim on an unusual inheritance: an alligator farming empire.

Her arrival at Greer House isn’t everything she hoped. Without warning, Dart finds herself in fierce competition with her grandmother’s arrogant heir-apparent, and tensions rise as threatening acts of vandalism escalate on one of the farms. More unsettling is her hostile grandmother’s fanatical belief that the danger stems from a curse; according to legend, a larger-than-life alligator hunted down by a bloodthirsty ancestor still haunts the family. Yet Dart can’t deny that the farm’s placid alligators hiss only at Greers, or that a shadowy figure creeps through the mansion’s halls, plaguing her with suspicions that the mythical alligator and monstrous, long-dead matriarch may have unfinished business.

As Dart uncovers the truth about her violent birthright, she faces a terrible accept her place in her family’s grim legacy or forge a new path by slaying a different beast entirely.

Add to Goodreads

 

The premise of this one had me completely sold. Florida Gothic? A crumbling mansion? An alligator farming empire haunted by a vengeful spirit? The bones (ha!) of something genuinely great are here, and I really wanted this book to deliver. It didn't quite get there for me, and I've been chewing on why.

The MC: Let's start with Dart. I wanted to root for her: she's grieving, she's an outsider, she's walking into a family that doesn't want her there. But her desperation to fit in with the Greers drove me absolutely crazy! These people are hostile to her from page one, and she just keeps trying to ingratiate herself with them anyway. I get that she is starved for family and connection, I do, but at some point it tips over from sympathy into frustration, and I lost patience with her faster than I expected to.

The Horror: The central threat, Ironheart, the alligator spirit haunting the family, sounds like a wild, creepy concept. And there are flashes of atmosphere where the swamp and the mansion genuinely drip with unease. But the tension never really builds into anything. Every time the story starts to feel genuinely unsettling, it pulls back. The family curse storyline resolves in a way that felt tidy rather than terrifying, and I finished the book feeling like I'd been promised something that never fully arrived.

The Setting: The muggy ambiance is doing heavy lifting here, and it does it well! Huneycutt clearly loves Florida's particular brand of gorgeous, rotting strangeness, and Amelia Island is rendered with care and detail. 

One thing I do want to flag loudly: there is a significant amount of animal harm in this book. Given that the story centers on an alligator farm, this isn't exactly surprising, but it's woven throughout and unavoidable. If that's a hard trigger for you, please go in prepared or sit this one out.  

If you're a die-hard for Southern Gothic and you can vibe with a slow, more character-driven read, there's something here for you. But if you need the horror to solidify, you might walk away a little underwhelmed.

Looking for more scary reads? Browse all of my horror book reviews.

Published October 20, 2026, by St. Martin's Press

From the bestselling author of The Death of Jane Lawrence comes a new, genre-bending supernatural horror about a vampire broodmother fighting against her own monstrous descent.

Beatrice is a broodmother: a vampire responsible for nursing newly made fledglings through the first years of their unlife. She nests in an abandoned, isolated warren of office space beneath her patron's skyscraper, raising two fractious fledglings: Gorgeous—once a heartthrob, now to all appearances a living corpse—who longs for the return of the lover who made him immortal with all the fervor of a rebellious teen, and Fortunata, the scion of Beatrice's mistress, alien and ambitious in her desires.

But when Beatrice decides to take on a third fledgling, the product of an attempted siring gone wrong, teetering between vampiric purity and ghoulish depravity, Beatrice finds herself strained to breaking between the societal and physical demands of her position, her own ravenous hunger, and an obsessive need to discover what’s happening to her—because her body is changing too, transforming her into something even more monstrous. She begins to crave the taste of flesh, something anathema to all vampires, and to swing between desperate hunger and vicious power.

Desperate to master herself once more, Beatrice courts a mortal OBGYN who might be able to unravel the secrets of her unnatural anatomy. But soon their connection threatens the secrecy of her vampiric coven as well as the safety and development of her dependent nurslings… and the humans they stand to slaughter if left to their own devices.

Add to Goodreads

 

Motherhood in horror seems to be all the rage these days, but Milkteeth takes it in a brand new direction. Who knew vampires need mommy too?

Most vampire stories are focused on the change to vampire. Someone gets bitten by a vampire, dies, wakes up again, and bam, new vampire. Milkteeth takes it in a different direction and questions what happens in between life and undeath and life again. What steps have to be taken for a newly turned vampire to become a productive member of vampire society? What does feeding look like as a hungry newly undead? How does a fledgling learn to control its hunger so the world isn't littered with dead bodies? 

As a broodmother, Beatrice does all that and more for newly turned vampires or "fledglings". However, while she's trying to keep her fledglings fed, teach them to control their hunger, and generally trying to keep them from becoming a menace, strange things start happening to her too. The changes become more and more concerning, and her hunger is getting worse, her body is changing, and none of it makes sense. Beatrice turns to a mortal doctor for help, which brings a whole other set of problems. 

Instead of treating the fledgling as a finished vampire the second they rise from the transformation, Starling gives us the messy, prolonged, very physical process of becoming one. It made me look at her vampires as an entirely different creature instead of just a human with fangs. The broodmother angle brought something new and different, of course, but I think what I liked most about Milkteeth is that it made vampires feel weird again. Not sexy and brooding. Not tragic and moody. Just weird and very unhuman. I guess what I'm saying is that mothering made vampires less human instead of more. See? Weird. 

Looking for more scary reads? Browse all of my horror book reviews.

Published September 2, 2026

Ebon Hollow has always kept its secrets close.

When Jeni Michaelson returns to the rituals her family taught her as a child, the old rules no longer feel like superstition. Hold the threshold. Count the beats. Never answer what calls from the other side.

Then the house begins answering back.

As an unnatural tide approaches the isolated coastal town, Jeni and those closest to her uncover generations of hidden journals, forbidden rituals, and a secret buried beneath Ebon Hollow long before any of them were born. Something imprisoned beneath the island is waking—and it has spent centuries learning the voices of the people who keep it contained.

Every answer draws them deeper into a legacy built on sacrifice. Every discovery makes it harder to know whom they can trust.

David Baldus is a Marine Corps veteran and the author of Tides of Ebon Hollow, his debut novel.

After more than sixteen years of service in the United States Marine Corps, David traded military life for a career in recruiting—but never lost his fascination with dark stories, unexplained things, and the question of what ordinary people will do when faced with something they cannot explain or escape.

His fiction blends slow-burn gothic horror, supernatural mystery, family bonds, and atmospheric settings, with an emphasis on characters who feel human even when the world around them becomes anything but.

David lives in Oklahoma with his wife and family. Tides of Ebon Hollow is his first published novel.