There’s something about the early days of autumn that brings indie press titles into the foreground. Maybe it’s the proximity to Halloween putting uncanny storytelling in the spotlight; maybe it’s just that cooler weather nominally means more time for sitting somewhere cozy and losing yourself in a great read. Here’s a look at some of what you can expect to see from independent presses in September and October.
File Under: Cosmic and/or Canadian Horror
Few writers tap into the truly disquieting elements of horror as well as Laird Barron. He’s been writing critically acclaimed cosmic horror for a while now even as he’s expanded his oeuvre to include crime fiction. (Don’t sleep on his Isaiah Coleridge novels.) Barron’s new collection Not a Speck of Light is his fifth collection of short stories to date, and looks to be the perfect thing to keep you unsettled late at night. (Bad Hand Books; Sept. 10, 2024)
Does the idea of a new anthology featuring horror tales from the likes of Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Camilla Grudova, Premee Mohamed, Richard Gavin, and David Demchuk interest you? Editor Michael Kelly has brought their work together with a host of other talented writers for the collection Northern Nights, perhaps the most unsettling Canadian stories since the issues of Alpha Flight where Scramble, the Mixed-Up Man descended into villainy. (Undertow Press; October 2024)
In an interview earlier this year, Christine Morgan detailed her approach to writing. “I just like to write what’s fun for me to write, and let it fall where it may,” she said. As the title of her new collection, Around Eldritch Corners, suggests, this one finds her cranking the cosmic horror up to 11 and taking readers to mind-expanding places. (Word Horde; Sept. 16, 2024)
When Gianni Washington’s collection Flowers From the Void was published in the U.K., Washington addressed her themes of choice in an interview. “I’m super interested in how we perceive our own experience of living versus what we think others experience,” she said—and it’s little surprise that that divide could lead to memorable works of horror. (CLASH Books; Sept. 3, 2024)
File Under: Humanity and Consciousness
There’s an almost certainly apocryphal story floating around New England about a Vermont community that would freeze and revive old and sick residents during the winter. With his new novel Black Days, Jackson Ellis riffs on this legend to tell a thrilling story of medical breakthroughs, unsettling secrets, and the border between life and death. (Green Writers Press; Oct. 22, 2024)
Normally, a new work by Brian Evenson would be filed in the “cosmic horror” category, but some of the stories in the new collection Good Night, Sleep Tight show off a different side of Evenson’s work. Specifically, there’s a lot of reckoning with what makes someone human here—and what it might do to an intelligence to learn that it’s something else. In many ways, this feels like a thematic followup to Evenson’s novella The Warren, which is both unexpected and very welcome. (Coffee House Press; Sept. 10, 2024)
Set in the middle of the 21st century, Michael Keefe’s novel All Her Loved Ones Encoded focuses on technology that allows people to upload their consciousness into a digital space—even as this becomes grounds for crises both personal and political. The resulting narrative sends the novel’s protagonist on the run and reckons with her sprawling family history as well. (Running Wild Press; Sept. 11, 2024)
In the new collection from Tara Isabel Zambrano, Ruined a Little When We Are Born, Zambrano explores familial tensions and connections that sometimes extend into the supernatural. That includes on story in which, as Emily Webber notes in her review, “[e]xtra hands and her mother’s words spill forth from the girl’s body.” It makes for a compelling blend of the familiar and the unexpected. (Dzanc Books; Oct. 15, 2024)
File Under: Stories About Storytelling
File this one under “genre-adjacent works of nonfiction.” There’s a long tradition of writers exploring deeply personal issues through the prism of fantastic fiction; Amanda Leduc’s Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space is one excellent example. This fall sees the release of K.J. Aiello’s The Monster and the Mirror: Mental Illness, Magic, and the Stories We Tell, in which Aiello explores their own experience of mental illness through a genre-infused lens. (ECW Press; September 2024)
Juan Martinez is an excellent author in his own right, but he’s also begun working as an editor with Jackleg Press—and among the books he’s brought there is Joachim Glage’s collection The Devil’s Library. Martinez described it as “feral and funny and deeply weird and like nothing you’ve seen before.” That sounds promising indeed. (Jackleg Press; Sept. 16, 2024)
Bram Stoker Award-winning author EV Knight returns this September with the magnificently-titled The House on the Cover of a Horror Novel. As the title suggests, it’s about a disquieting house that winds up on the cover of a scary book, and turns out to have malevolent secrets of its own. (Raw Dog Screaming Press; Sept. 12, 2024)
Subtitled “A Collection of Experimental Fiction,” Rachel Rodman’s collection Mutants & Hybrids blends formally inventive stories with narratives that transport the reader into the strange and miraculous. Rodman’s work draws upon fairy tales and reimagines them in beguiling new ways, making for a memorable combination of old and new. (Underland Press; Oct. 8, 2024)
Whether she’s writing immersive and imaginative fiction or tracing the history of a genre, Nisi Shawl’s work is never less than compelling. Her new novel The Day and Night Books of Mardou Fox combines these aspects of her work, drawing on the life of Beat poet Alene Lee to tell a story of literary dynamism and otherworldly visitations. (Rosarium Publishing; Oct. 15, 2024)
What happens when disquieting films begin to bleed through into a fractured reality? That’s the question at the heart of JM Tyree’s The Haunted Screen, about a film scholar pulled deeper and deeper into an uncanny mystery. Tyree knows his way around both film history and compelling fiction, and this should make for a thoroughly compelling combination here. (Deep Vellum; Oct. 1, 2024)
File Under: Alternate Histories
PM Press’s Outspoken Authors series abounds with concise collections of work by a number of interesting writers. What’s almost as interesting as the series roster itself is seeing what different writers have done with volume. In the case of John Kessel, the answer involves—appropriately enough, given that it’s an election year—fictional heads of state. The stories in The Presidential Papers encompass alternate histories and space opera; it’s an impressive display of Kessel’s range. (PM Press; Oct. 22, 2024)
You don’t read one of Robert Kloss’s books as much as you immerse yourself in it. His latest book bears the haunting title The Genocide House, and takes readers on a tour of landscapes that are familiar and landscapes that never were. Apparently there are secret histories and ill-fated rockets in there as well, which makes for a compelling whole. (Bridge Books; Oct. 15, 2024)
Meg Ripley’s novel Necrology—the first in a new series—uses the Salem Witch Trials as the starting point for a radically different vision of American history. Here, Ripley imagines a very different landscape, one where magic-using women and the nonmagical populace remain at an impasse and bodies transform in unforeseen ways. It’s a promising debut. (Creature Publishing; Sept. 24, 2024)
Margaret Tabor’s 1980 novel Unity Penfold was first published in the U.S. two years later under the title Nightmare Street. As the latter title suggests, this is a book that sends its protagonist to an unsettling place—specifically, an altered reality where her place in the world has radically changed. This new edition brings together the endings of both versions of the book. (Valancourt Books; Sept. 17 2024)
File Under: All Things Ecological
In recent years, the work of Eugen Bacon has begun to gather a host of high-profile award nominations, including a Philip K. Dick Award nomination for Danged Black Thing and a British Fantasy Award win for An Earnest Blackness. Up next for Bacon is a collection, A Place Between Waking and Forgetting, including the World Fantasy Award-nominated story “The Devil Don’t Come With Horns.” (Raw Dog Screaming Press; Sept. 19, 2024)
It’s been two years since the publication of Kay Chronister’s novel Desert Creatures, which blended eco-fiction and a heady dose of the surreal. Chronister’s new novel The Bog Wife keeps that earlier book’s connection to place but does so in telling a more fantastical, gothic tale—in this case, a family steeped in strange rituals and unsettling sacrifices. (Counterpoint; Oct. 1, 2024)
Do you like your fiction with a combination of environmental awareness and the potential for optimism? Metamorphosis: Climate Fiction for a Better Future, an anthology from the nonprofit Grist contains an introduction by Sheree Renée Thomas, as well as the winners of the organization’s Imagine 2200 fiction competition. (Milkweed Editions; Oct. 22, 2024)
The Sapling Cage is the first book in a planned trilogy from the great Margaret Killjoy—who I suspect is the only writer on this list who’s also in an anti-fascist black metal band. In telling the story of a young trans witch looking to protect her home from supernatural forces, Killjoy puts a new spin on the quest narrative—and if that has your attention, you can also read an excerpt here. (Feminist Press; Sept. 24, 2024)
Pasha Malla’s previous novel ran dying malls through the lens of horror. What’s next for this talented writer? In this case, wellness resorts. The publisher of All You Can Kill has compared it to a blend of White Lotus and Shaun of the Dead, and—you know what? That’s an elevator pitch that I can get behind. (Coach House Books; Oct. 8, 2024)
File Under: Welcome to Dystopia
The latest book in the Radium Age series of genre reissues comes to us from Francis Stevens, also known as Gertrude Barrows Bennett, who wrote in the early 20th century and anticipated much about where the genre would go. The collection The Heads of Cerberus and Other Stories includes six stories, including the title story about a group of people transported to a dystopian 22nd-century Philadelphia. (Radium Age/MIT Press; Sept. 17, 2024)
Rivers Solomon called [sarah] Cavar’s Failure to Comply “a striking and fresh examination of life under boot of hegemonic corporate society lovingly and ecstatically told,” which is an enticing endorsement if ever there was one. Cavar’s writing is both formally inventive and thematically rich, and their literary interests are wide-ranging—all of which makes for an enticing combination here. (featherproof; Sept. 24, 2024)
I’ve written before in these pages about the work of the writer known as both Manuela Draeger and Antoine Volodine. The latest book of Draeger’s to appear in the U.S. comes in a translation by Lia Swope Mitchell and is titled Kree: A Post-Exotic Novel. It follows the title character as she travels through a host of harsh realms, both in the here and now and in a series of disquieting afterlives. (University of Minnesota Press; Oct. 22, 2024)
The story behind this new edition of Irish writer Margaret O’Donnell’s dystopian novel The Beehive is a fascinating read in its own right. O’Donnell’s book is set in a near future in which a reactionary government has placed restrictions on the lives and freedom of women; the resulting read—appearing in the U.S. for the first time—is a disquieting speculative inquiry. (Valancourt Books; Sept. 24, 2024)
File Under: Strange Investigations
There’s a long tradition of science fiction that’s incorporated elements of crime fiction and mysteries into its DNA. Marie Howalt’s novel The Wenamak Web is the latest entry in this storied tradition, and it adds a terrific concept that blends both: extraterrestrials capable of detecting lies through scent. (Spaceboy Books; September 2024)
Jordan Rothacker returns to the world of his earlier book The Death of the Cyborg Oracle to put that book’s investigators on a new case; the result is the impressively-titled The Shrieking of Nothing. Set in a futuristic Atlanta where both the climate and the treatment of religion and belief have radically changed, this is a thrilling book both for the ideas at its core and the mystery at its heart. (Spaceboy Books; Oct. 22, 2024)
“I like taking innocent things and giving them a sinister twist—sometimes darkly funny, but always dark,” Sorora Taylor said in a 2020 interview. That sense of turning the quotidian into the uncanny comes through in Taylor’s new book, the novella Errant Roots, which chronicles a young woman’s disquieting foray into her own family history after she becomes pregnant. (Raw Dog Screaming Press; Oct. 15, 2024)
File Under: Weird Spaces
Beth Castrodale gives haunted house narratives a new spin with her novel The Inhabitants. Its protagonist moves into an architecturally distinctive home only to learn that something is very amiss there—all the while also embarking on a mission of what Castrodale terms “revenge-by-painting.” (Regal House; Sept. 9, 2024)
The fiction of Camilla Grudova has been acclaimed in these pages before, including praise for her collection The Doll’s Alphabet and her novel Children of Paradise. This fall sees the U.S. release of her collection The Coiled Serpent, which blends surreal happenings and a textured sense of place, and has already received fine reviews across the Atlantic. (Unnamed Press; Oct. 8, 2024)
To read Brian Keene’s unsettling fiction is to be transported to another world—sometimes one that resembles the one outside your door, sometimes one far more bizarre. It’s the latter sensibility that’s at work in Island of the Dead, which finds Keene in full-on epic fantasy mode. A barbarian soldier far from home doing battle against legions of zombies? That sounds eminently page-turning. (Apex Book Company; Oct. 22, 2024)
The French writer Jean Lahougue has been publishing books since 1973, but K. E. Gormley’s English translation of his novel Vacated Landscape is the first of his books to appear in English. It’s about an editor on the increasingly complex trail of a writer, an errand that takes him to the streets of a bizarre and surreal city. (Wakefield Press; September 2024)
What happens when the traditional elements of a Western are used to tell a story about a community facing something uncanny? Perry Meester’s The Flesh Inherent addresses that very question. Also, Meester has also said that “[i]t’s definitely a book about being horny in the desert”—so that might be of interest as well. (Ghoulish; Sept. 10, 2024)
File Under: Other Realms
Earlier this year, S.M. Beiko was a finalist for an Aurora Award. Now, she’s back with the followup to her 2023 novel The Stars of Mount Quixx, The Door in Lake Mallion. This one’s about a young man who faces a violent attack and winds up transported to another world via the titular portal, where he makes an unlikely connection with unexpected consequences. (ECW Press; Oct. 8, 2024)
If there’s a frequent motif in the fiction of David James Keaton, it’s in the way Keaton turns familiar things, from films to guitar cases, into something thoroughly strange. Keaton’s new novel Shallow Ends, about a group of revelers celebrating a birthday on a converted fire truck whose journey transforms into something supernatural. (Podium Publishing; Sept. 24, 2024)
“I love to get into the heads of kids who are getting in a little too deep. Kids trying to figure out why life already seems to be skidding off the road, and they don’t know how to recover,” Josh Rountree said in a recent interview about his new collection. Death Aesthetic—his third collection of short stories—explores unexpected transformations and journeys into the self, rarely leaving his characters where they began. (Underland Press; Sept. 3, 2024)
