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It’s a wonderful time to be a horror fan with these exciting new Summer 2026 horror book releases!
We’re so lucky to be getting 22 unbelievably exciting horror new book releases coming our way throughout the summer months this year, and the plots of these incredible horror book releases have never been more exciting.
From generational curses to haunted woods with unknown amounts of eyes about, we have more horror books than we do time this season so let’s dive in and start picking out our favorites!
Summer 2026 Horror new book releases
Fabulous Bodies by Chuck Tingle
Release date: July 7 2026
Poppy Stringer was born to be a star.
An aspiring fashion influencer by day, Poppy moonlights as a grave robber to make ends meet, wheeling and dealing dead bodies across Palm Springs.
When her hero, the flamboyant, piano-slamming rockstar Eddie Michaels, unexpectedly dies, Poppy gets a call to retrieve his body from the medical examiner’s office for a lucrative sum. It could be the last job she’ll ever need―if everything goes to plan. But the night’s delivery quickly veers off course when Eddie wakes up.
Now Poppy must fight for her life if she hopes to survive this blood-soaked joyride of carnage and extravagant entertainment.
Cross My Heart, I Hope You Die by Mallory Arnold
Release date: July 14 2026
One isolated cabin. One cheating boyfriend. One plan to get even.
When Nora, Ruby, and Cham discover that they’ve each been dating the same man, what starts as outrage quickly spirals into a plot for revenge. Together they hatch a plan to lure their boyfriend to a romantic getaway in a secluded cabin at the top of a snow-covered mountain.
Only what was meant to be harmless payback soon takes a chilling turn when their not-so-adoring boyfriend is found dead in the cabin.
Stranded and snowed in, the women begin to look at each other with increasing suspicion. And as tensions rise, hidden motives come to light. To survive, each woman must confront her own demons as they fight to uncover if one of them is the killer, or if something else lurks in the freezing wilderness, waiting to pick them off one by one.
Carry Me to My Grave by Christopher Golden
Release date: July 21 2026
Maggie Wise will take your eyes.
When Malcolm was growing up, the local kids made up that chant about his mother, claiming she was a witch. He and his siblings did their best to ignore it. Now, Maggie is dying, and those same siblings have left Malcolm and his sister-in-law Violet to hold a vigil at her bedside.
But they’re not as alone as they think they are. A dark figure waits and watches from beneath the willow tree across the street. Hundreds of miles away, an ancient evil stirs in its burrow under a farmer’s cornfield. Across the country, other buried things begin to dream in anticipation of Maggie’s demise. On her deathbed, the old woman elicits a promise from Malcolm, her youngest child―when she dies, he and Violet must return her body to her birthplace in Shediak, Maine.
A Penance for Crows by Shannon Morgan
Release date: July 28 2026
Off the southern tip of the Beara Peninsula lies Beanna Dubh, an island of savage beauty, its jagged cliffs lashed by Atlantic winds and infested by thousands of crows. Untouched by 21st-century advances, the islanders live under the strict rule of the church, while clinging to old superstitions of the crows as harbingers of disaster. To this desolate, unforgiving place Grizela Urquhart fled, seeking sanctuary from brutal bullying in her native Glasgow.
40 years on, Grizela still remains an outsider—the eccentric painter viewed with distrust and barely tolerated. The feelings are mutual, for she has discovered there are as many secrets on Beanna Dubh as there are crows.
Saint Delilah by Isabelle Spotts
Release date: August 11 2026
Delilah is dead. But her story is far from over. In this feminist supernatural suspense novel, she will find her peace—and give hell to the man who killed her.
Delilah’s death was not swift or painless. A ghost at nineteen, business entirely unfinished, her last breath was angry. Someone killed her, but she doesn’t know who.
Undead creatures stalk Delilah’s spirit, eager to feed on her soul until nothing is left but a frightening poltergeist. She can’t pass on until the violence of her death is balanced with a life for her life.
Her killer must be killed.
Reliquary by Hannah Whitten
Release date: August 11 2026
A young woman is lured to her late fiancé’s remote island estate—only to uncover eerie family secrets, a haunting past, and a monstrous hunger stirring beneath the sea in this deliciously atmospheric horror debut from New York Times bestselling author Hannah Whitten.
When Claire’s fiancé mysteriously dies of an unknown neurological illness, she’s prepared to sink back into the lonely life she lived before. Orphaned by a freak boating accident in her childhood, she never expected to find connection like she did with Elias, anyway. Their relationship wasn’t perfect—his coldness, his secrets, his strange aversion to the ocean—but what relationship is?
Dreamland by Olivie Blake
Release date: August 11 2026
From New York Times bestselling author Olivie Blake comes a tantalizing story of power, seduction, and the omens you’ll ignore when everything you’ve dreamed of feels just within reach.
The headlines are calling it the “summer of exsanguination” in LA―girls are being murdered, the Santa Ana winds are blowing a strange energy into the city, and all signs point to fire season.
More pressing for Anya Morris, though, is the drudgery of living at home, working part time at the family store, and contending with her mother’s disdain for the acting career Anya knows she’s destined for but that feels more impossible by the day.
She Haunts Me Still by De Elizabeth
Release date: August 11 2026
These violent delights have violent ends.
After surviving a shadowed childhood marked by ghost stories and loss, Mallory Webb is ready to start fresh as a theater major at her mother’s alma mater, a sanitarium turned liberal arts university in Rhode Island. Landing the lead role in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet feels like a dream—until the blood-soaked spirit she suspects caused her mother’s death resurfaces after years of quiet. With nothing to go on but cryptic symbols in an old college notebook, Mallory hopes the reason behind her mother’s haunting lies somewhere on campus, and resolves to find answers before she meets the same fate.
The Sleeping Sisters by Jennifer Givhan
Release date: August 18 2026
A mother’s love is the oldest curse
Fortuna Miércoles has finally moved her family to a better neighborhood across the Rio Grande, desperate to outrun the curse that’s stalked her bloodline since her greatest grandmother crossed the desert with a cactus thorn splitting her throat. But burying a family’s violent legacy—or her own haunting secret—isn’t so easy. Twenty years ago, girls and women vanished into the Albuquerque night, their bones later unearthed on the mesa. The so-called Reaper was never caught. Now, beneath the dormant volcanoes called the Sleeping Sisters, the killings have begun again, and they’ve called forth something in Fortuna that she has long fought to keep buried…
The Calamities by Chuck Wendig
Release date: August 18 2026
The heir to one of the world’s most influential families reckons with the demonic secret of their power in this contemporary dark fantasy that melds occult magic with shocking family drama, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Accidents.
Mourning Mayne knows he’ll one day bear the duty of managing his family’s vast empire of wealth and power. But the feckless Mourning has always struggled to accept this legacy of cruelty, domination, and exploitation . . . and something even darker.
The Minimalist by Kailee Pedersen
Release date: August 18 2026
For fans of Tár and The Piano Teacher, this gruesome and unsettling psychological drama is a darkly lucid portrait of a classical composer’s descent into madness.
As the last and greatest student of famed minimalist composer Ryder Wakefield, Mia Voss has long been assured a rise to prominence in the insular world of classical music. When Ryder dies unexpectedly, she inherits everything–including the unfinished manuscript of his final composition, the mysterious Death Fugue: Music for Orchestra.
The Devil Knows Her Name by C.N. Vair
Release date: August 25 2026
A hundred years ago, a witch sold her soul to save her life—but now she must stop the devil from collecting his due in this gripping and nuanced debut horror novel.
The devil was as my mother and grandmother had always described him: polite enough that you might forget yourself, so beautiful that you’d want to, so dangerous if you did.
The Burn Line by Jonathan Sims
Release date: August 25 2026
From the dark and twisted mind behind the podcast sensation The Magnus Archives comes a suffocating, socially charged nightmare that reveals how fear festers in the cracks of everyday life…
Beneath the streets of London, it hungers…
It’s the hottest summer on record and the city is suffering. Prices are high, pay is low. And on one fateful morning five travelers find themselves trapped in a tube car deep in the London Underground.
It will change their lives forever.
Kiss Slay Replay by Rachel Harrison
Release date: September 1 2026
Every wedding guest’s worst nightmare is on repeat in this wild and twisty new horror novel from the New York Times bestselling author of So Thirsty and Play Nice.
It’s the picture-perfect wedding weekend: The venue is dreamy, the weather is beautiful, love is in the air—and Willa Sullivan is having a bad time. She’s excited to celebrate her best friends’ finally having the big wedding they’ve always wanted, but this is the first time she’s seen her ex-fiancé in months, and he brought a date. Everything feels off, like she stumbled into an alternate universe. But things start to look up when Willa meets Danny, the groom’s charming and single childhood best friend. When they sneak off together, their rendezvous is interrupted by a masked killer terrorizing the reception. Willa and Danny fight to save the ones they love and survive the night, but the killer is unrelenting. A final girl Willa is not.
Blacktail by Scott Hawkins
Release date: September 1 2026
The long-awaited second novel from the author of the cult hit The Library at Mount Char, a one-of-a-kind dark fantasy in which a wolf sets out on an epic journey of revenge.
The wolf Blacktail is faithful to his Forest God, but in these times, faith is not enough. His world is besieged by men. Soon his territory will be overrun, and then there will be nowhere left to go. When his mate, a house dog, is killed, Blacktail rebels. He invades the house of her owners, seeking vengeance.
As the Snow Gathers by Mere Joyce
Release date: September 1 2026
The forest doesn’t just take what it’s owed―it takes whatever it wants.
Dominic was born in Aplin Shade, a remote Canadian town built on the bones of another that vanished without a trace. Bookish and quiet, he never asked to lead his family, but after a carriage crash kills his father and leaves his sister forever changed, he has no choice.
The only person who truly sees him is Lex, a logger in the camp near town and the love Dominic must keep secret. Together they dream of escaping Aplin Shade, a place where isolation breeds judgment and every kindness hides a cost.
Pictures of You by Josh Malerman
Release date: September 8 2026
A woman becomes the unknowing subject of an artist’s dangerous work in this intense Hitchcockian thriller from the New York Times bestselling author of Incidents Around the House.
After a magical night out on the town with her boyfriend Jack, Emily wakes alone in a huge bed in a beautiful, well-lit room. But the pink ceiling, the mauve walls, and the deep, dark corners are nothing like the hotel she and Jack rented.
More worrisome yet: Emily has no memory of this place from the night before.
Where is she?
A woman’s voice directs her to remain in bed.
The Wellness Retreat by Dawn Kurtagich
Release date: September 8 2026
Perfection comes at a cost.
Jaimie Vane used to measure her life in concert halls and standing ovations. Now she measures it in symptoms. The chronic illness that ended her career as a cellist doesn’t have a name or a cure—just a long list of things her body can’t do anymore.
When her wild child younger sister Sybil reinvents herself as a live-in staffer at an ultra-exclusive wellness retreat, Jaimie assumes it’s another phase.
I Am the Monster Under the Bed by Emily Zinnikas
Release date: September 15 2026
TIME ONLY MAKES THE NIGHTMARE MORE REAL.
Something lives under Willa’s bed. As an adult, her fondest childhood memories are of the invisible entity under her bed who taught her how to read. Now thirty-two, Willa is a reclusive but successful painter until a bombshell news report exposes her identity as the controversial survivor of the unsolved Rapture Mystery Slayings, a small-town tragedy that splashed across headlines during her senior year of high school. Six teenagers died in the woods while Willa walked free, and everyone thinks she killed them.
In the Woods They Wait by Carrie Lee South
Release date: September 22 2026
A park ranger becomes obsessed with the case of a missing child―a case that mirrors the disappearance of her own brother, whom she lost in the woods years ago―and the possibility that both were taken by something vicious and unnatural that lives deep in the Ozarks.
Fifteen years ago, Audrey Figg’s little brother, Benny, vanished on a family vacation to Devil’s Den state park, a day that split her life in two. Now, Audrey is a park ranger in the very same woods with expertise in wilderness search and rescue. Audrey has found a rhythm to her days: training new rangers, tending to injured hikers, protecting the backcountry, and still, searching.
Incarnate by Alma Katsu
Release date: September 22 2026
Beauty doesn’t fade. It feeds.
Dorothy Wagner has spent her whole life wanting nothing more than to be seen. But after failing to make her mark as an influencer, she takes a job working for a brilliant coder whose company is focused on cutting-edge deepfake technology. And there, in secret, is where she creates her salvation.
Our Cut of Salt by Deena Helm
Release date: September 22 2026
There is something haunting Nuhad’s childhood home in Haifa. Cats avoid its perimeter, strange noises come from within, and residents have mysteriously vanished without a trace. Although Nuhad has not returned to her home since the Nakba in 1948, she always held a place for the house in her heart.
And, in return, the house did the same for her.
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