A content note: the author has stated that this book may be difficult for some people, and readers disinclined to encounter sexual trauma in their fiction may want to avoid it.)

I said this at Bookcon, but I'm going to say this here too: I take care with the way I write trauma and I am not interested in misery tourism. Alex's experiences in Ninth House draw directly from my own and this book was in many ways a work of catharsis. HOWEVER. — Leigh Bardugo (away for a while) (@LBardugo) June 3, 2019

– Megan Crouse

A Lush and Seething Hell by John Horner Jacobs

October 29th, Harper Voyager

After having recently, finally read The Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft my appetite for that quiet, brooding horror has only been stoked. When I stumbled upon this soon-to-be-published piece, I figured I hit jackpot. John Hornor Jacobs is an award-winning author who collects two novellas in this volume: “The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky” and “My Heart Struck Sorrow.” This new release is promising a mix of supernatural and psychological terror, a pairing that does well to get inside one’s mind this time of the year.

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“My Heart Struck Sorrow” follows a librarian who has discovered a music recording from the Deep South that might be from the Devil himself (anyone getting any “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” vibes?). Jacobs has written Southern horror that echoed that famous song’s premise before, notably his book Southern Gods, in which a blues man’s music makes some people go insane while also raising the dead.

“The Sea Drams It Is The Sky” has a little less straightforward description, though no less intriguing: This story features an exiled poet trying to decipher a difficult text, a South American dictatorship and “a young woman trying to come to grips with a country that nearly devoured itself.” Points go to the one who can guess if that devouring is literal or figurative, seeing as this author’s work could go either way.

– Bridget LaMonica

I’m a Gay Wizard by V.S. Santoni

October 29th, Wattpad Books

If I Know What You Did Last Summer decided to hang out with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, but added to the mix LGBTQ coming of age and romance, it might turn out something like Santoni’s debut YA novel, I’m a Gay Wizard.

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Originally released as a Wattpad serial, the novel hits shelves October 29, 2019. Main characters Johnny and Alison spend their summer playing at magical spells—Alison is obsessed with magic, and Johnny goes along for the ride. But when a vengeance spell against bullies tormenting them causes an earthquake, the pair are whisked away to the Marduke Institute, a clandestine school for wizards, and told they must leave their old lives behind… forever.

The Institute is more prison than school, but it’s also where Johnny and Alison meet cute boys Hunter and Blake, who know a lot more about the world than the two newcomer wizards. While this isn’t a creepy, Halloween-y story, it’s a perfect back-to-school tale featuring underrepresented main characters (Johnny is Latinx and gay, Alison is trans) from an #OwnVoices author.

– Alana Joli Abbott

The Witches are Coming by Lindy West

November 5th, Hachette

Back in October of 2017, writer Lindy West wrote a column in The New York Times about bad men’s bad faith responses to the #MeToo movement. It was called “Yes, This Is a Witch Hunt. I’m a Witch and I’m Hunting You.” Please read it immediately if you haven’t already, and then you’ll know why I’m so excited for this book, which promises to be an expansion of the themes in her original Times piece.

Witches have been having something of a moment right now, and Lindy West’s choice to invoke imagery used to scare women into silence long before it was used to scare children while reclaiming the “witch hunt” phrase shows a glimpse of her power as a writer and thinker. I picture a powerful witch stalking steadily toward perpetrators and their defenders like the woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper” circles the room at the end of the story: purposeful, terrifying, and a bit mad.

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You might know Lindy West from her time writing classics at Jezebel like her takedown of Love, Actually or from the Hulu show Shrill, which is based on her memoir/scathing cultural critique of the same name. Or perhaps you saw or participated in #ShoutYourAbortion, where folks shared their stories in an effort to destigmatize healthcare, or even from her debate with a comedian about rape jokes on W. Kamau Bell’s television show. The point is, West has been leading and shaping the cultural conversation with wit and intelligence for a long time, especially when it comes to gender, violence, and discrimination.

While it may feel like all we do is talk about gender and violence these days, we still haven’t stepped back and parsed what this means for us in the longer term, beyond each individual case, and on the list of writers I’m eager to hear from on the topic, West is damn near the top.

– Delia Harrington

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

November 5th, Graywolf Press

“Y’all, this book almost killed me dead, but I did it,” Machado tweeted last November when announcing her forthcoming memoir. And if that isn’t gothic AF, then I don’t know what is. After tapping into deep-seated terrors—cruel Girl Scouts and awkward writing residencies, a gut-punch retelling of “The Green Ribbon”—in 2017’s collection Her Body and Other Parties, Machado turns that same excavating eye on her own traumas in In the Dream House. With an eerie cover that evokes a V.C. Andrews novel, Machado traces her own escape from an abusive relationship with a charismatic woman in a genre-bending account that clearly took its toll on her (another hallmark of old-school literary horror).

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What’s more, the story is told in disparate pieces, with each chapter built around a narrative trope: the haunted house, the bildungsroman, erotica. It’s a keen way to compartmentalize and analyze what have to be harrowing memories, and thematically links back to Her Body and Other Parties. Yet there are moments of levity, too, as Machado’s memoir explores hidden passageways of Star Trek, Disney, and fairy tales. The most effective horror (Get Out, Signs, Hereditary) contrasts jarring moments of absurd or even laugh-out-loud comedy alongside the disturbing; I can’t wait to see how Machado holds space for both the light and the dark.

– Natalie Zutter