Frightfully Good New Horror Books Coming Out This August!

South Korean author Kim Bo-Young’s fiction has been called a “breathtaking piece of cinematic art” by Parasite director Bong Joon-ho. Her recently translated novella is set in a seaside village that is quarantined after a plague spreads, turning its victims into fish-like monsters. Bodyguard Mu-young moved to the village to be with her niece, but now her niece is dead, and Mu-young’s only job is hunting down villagers who try to break isolation. But when a bureaucrat from Seoul arrives in the village, everything changes.

This gothic horror novel follows Claire, a woman grieving her fiancé Elias, who died from an unknown neurological illness. Then, Elias’s wealthy family reaches out and invites Claire to a three-day wake at their secluded family home on a private island. Claire sees this as an opportunity to connect with the family of the man who meant so much to her and gave her a sense of belonging for the first time. But things do not go the way she hoped. As soon as she gets there, Elias’s brother warns her to leave, and the family’s dark secrets start bubbling to the surface. What is going on with this family and their deep connection to the sea? Is it somehow connected to Claire’s own past trauma and the accident that killed her parents and sister?

If you’ve ever longed to read a haunting ghost story from the perspective of the ghost, this is the novel for you. Delilah was a 19-year-old dancer in Wisconsin. Now she’s a ghost with no memory of how she got murdered. Delilah will not be able to pass on until she receives justice, but the longer she remains, the more she risks becoming a soulless poltergeist. She has until Halloween night to identify the man who killed her. She teams up with a spirit medium and a mysterious stranger who somehow can see her. Together, the three seek to restore balance by killing the man who murdered Delilah.

Jennifer McMahon’s queer folk-horror novel is set across two timelines. In 1919, Frankie O’Massey is apprenticing under her uncle, Dr. Thomas Endicott, who has been training her in medical science. A mysterious plague has ravaged the small town of Boone’s Ferry, Vermont, and the townspeople suspect supernatural forces. But Frankie is sure there must be a logical explanation.

In 2016, siblings Ashley and Malcolm inherit their grandmother’s property in Boone’s Ferry and return to the town in the hopes of uncovering the truth about their mother’s mysterious disappearance two years earlier. The town has seen much tragedy over the century between these two story lines, and as the timelines converge, chilling secrets about the townspeople and their traditions are revealed.

Kailee Pedersen, the author of Sacrificial Animals, is back with a spine-chilling psychological horror. Mia Voss is a 35-year-old classical composer who was the final (and favorite) student of the famed minimalist composer Ryder Wakefield. After Ryder dies unexpectedly, Mia inherits everything, including Ryder’s unfinished final masterpiece. Mia isolates herself in Ryder’s home to complete his work, but something about the manuscript holds a deep psychological grip on her that goes beyond a normal artistic obsession. Perhaps something supernatural is at play. Perhaps the manuscript is cursed.

This Southern Gothic horror novel is set in Savannah, Georgia, and follows two estranged sisters, Mickie and Delilah, who inherit a distant relative’s house on 724 Hartford Street. The house only has one rule: stay out of the attic. But of course, they break the rule, and everything goes terribly wrong. Delilah starts behaving strangely, and Mickie knows it’s up to her to save her sister from the evil that lurks within this house’s walls.

We Used to Live Here meets The Amityville Horror in The Woods, a haunting novel about a family in desperate need of a fresh start after their teenage daughter Lucy dies. Alice, her husband Geoff, and their two other children, Quinn and Polly, move to an isolated forest bungalow to escape the city and difficult memories. But the house hides a horrifying secret. Years earlier, a woman named Justine Gordon murdered her family there, claiming that the woods had taken her real family. As Alice starts to notice her family behaving in odd ways and strange figures outside their home, she has to wonder whether she is falling victim to madness or if something in the woods is hunting them.