The Scarlet Ball, Nghi Vo (Tor 978-1-250-90496-6, $28.99, 336pp, hc) October 2026.
Nghi Vo has deservedly won a lot of praise for her ongoing Singing Hills series of novellas, with their ingenious experiments in form and genre, but I would argue that her three full-length novels are shaping up into another kind of series as well–an ongoing historical critique of American capitalism, class, power, and racism in which the darker …Read More
We Were Never Here, Sophia Hannah (Simon & Schuster 78-1-665-95833-2, $19.95, 352pp, hc) July 2026.
Take a group of four friends, turn them into fairly popular YouTube paranormal investigators, hook them up in some mysterious way with a nefarious middleman who sells stolen artwork to very specific collectors and then drop the teens into a house with a haunted history that is also home to a highly coveted painting, and …Read More
Wrecks, Matt Hill (Dead Ink 978-1-91779-229-5, £10.99, 352pp, p) August 2026. Cover by Luke Bird.
When Locus reviewers were asked which titles they were anticipating the most this Fall, I chose Wrecks by Matt Hill. His 2023 book, Lamb, is one of the most underrecognised horror novels written in the last five years. It’s both a creepy story with a high ick-factor (mould and rot really gross me out) and …Read More
Null Entity, Seth Haddon (Tordotcom 978-1-25036-521-7, $24.99, 192pp, hc) Cover by Zoë van Dijk. July 2026.
Seth Haddon’s Null Entity picks up just a few months after the events of Volatile Memory (2025). As in that first novella, the narrator is Sable – a woman whose consciousness has somehow become embedded in a LYREBIRD mask. The perspective shifts between Sable’s I and Sable telling the story of you, Wylla, the …Read More
Frankenstein Rex, Adam Roberts (Gollancz, 978-1399617727, hardcover, 288pp, £25.00) October 2026
Leave it to the ever-self-challenging, audience-honoring Adam Roberts to recomplicate (in the approved narrative fashion endorsed by critical luminaries such as Damon Knight and Dark Suvin) even the most outrageous of his novums. It’s not enough for him to trot out a fresh story engine no one has ever handled in quite his fashion before, but he also …Read More
The Fist of Memory, Wole Talabi (DAW 978-0-75641-824-3 $29.00, 416pp, hc) October 2026.
After a decade of well-regarded Afrofuturist short fiction, Wole Talabi published his first novel in 2023. Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon is a complex, vivid, fantasy-heist story ranging across a thousand years up to the present day, shimmering with imaginative energy and somewhat tangled by its nonchronological mode of telling. The Fist of Memory, his …Read More
The Gates of Midnight, Helene Wecker (Harper, 978-0062468680, hardcover, 464pp, $32.00) September 2026
Alas, my 2013 review of the first book in Wecker’s trilogy, The Golem and the Jinni, has vanished down the internet oubliette to which the Barnes & Noble Review consigned all their articles upon dissolution of that publication. However, the sainted, revered and reverent Locus maintains its own past in impeccable archives, and so you can …Read More
The Angel at the Gates, Karen Lord (Akashic Books 978-1-63614-315-6, $22.95, 180pp, hc) October 2026.
Karen Lord’s new novel The Angel at the Gates is the tale of a man seen as being out of place in a place that is out of joint. It is the middle of this century, give or take, and the UK is in turmoil, not so much a civil war as a fragmentation, a …Read More
Mad Eden, Morgan Thomas (MCD Farrar, Strauss and Giroux 978-0-374-62015-8, $28.00, 304pp, hc) June 2026.
Morgan Thomas’s Mad Eden feels like a book that fell from a different plane of reality, that weird interstitial space where Jeff Vandermeer likes to hang out as well. It’s not SFF but it’s not not SFF. It could be straight-up fiction but isn’t quite. There’s an odd unreality but also a hyperreality to it …Read More
A Wall Is Also a Road, Annalee Newitz (Tor 978-1-250-22803-1, $28.99, 304pp, hc) October 2026.
With all the buzz about dark academia over the past few years, actual veterans of the profession might be tempted to remind everyone that academia can get pretty dark on its own terms, thank you very much, without the added input of sorcerers and demons. Annalee Newitz’s genre-hopping A Wall Is Also a Road isn’t …Read More
The Door in Penrose Forest, Sean David Robinson (Crooked Lane Books 979-8-892-42596-4, $19.99, 336pp, pb) June 2026.
When Nico Calloway was a boy, he joined his parents on a research trip to the Appalachian Mountains to study some odd migratory patterns for local monarch butterflies. One night he followed his mother into the forest and watched her climb up a set of stairs that suddenly appeared in a clearing. Behind …Read More
Reliquary, Hannah Whitten (Run For It 978-0-31657-953-7, $30.00, 320pp, hc) August 2026.
I’ve been reading a lot of Lovecraftian fiction lately that takes HPL’s work and mythos in new and diverse directions. Hannah Whitten’s Reliquary is a solid addition to this wave and also may herald the arrival of a new voice in horror (the author is already an accomplished voice in dark fantasy and romantasy).
Claire and her fiancé …Read More
The Language of Knives: Stories, Haralambi Markov (Mythic Delirium 978-1-95652-205-1, $17.95, 216pp, tp) July 2026. Cover by Diana Naneva.
In her excellent introduction to Haralambi Markov’s debut collection, The Language of Knives: Stories, Ann VanderMeer compares Markov’s fiction to that of Clive Barker. The likeness lies less in voice or structure – though the grisly The Midnight Feast would fit seamlessly into Books of Blood – than in the transgressive, …Read More
The Year’s Top Hard Science Fiction 10, Allan Kaster ed. (Infinivox 978-1-88461-292-3, $22.99, 333pp, pb) Cover by Maurizio Manzieri. June 2026.
Bolder than I would be, Allan Kaster opens his introduction to The Year’s Top Hard Science Fiction 10 – featuring eleven stories from 2025 – with a stab at defining that perennially amorphous thing, hard science fiction. He quotes from numerous luminaries – Norman Spinrad, David G. Hartwell, Carl …Read More
Alston Moor, Anne Charnock (Goldsmiths Press 978-1-91598-355-8, $12.95, 240pp, tp) September 2026.
The only problem with reviewing Alston Moor, the new novel by SF writer (and past Arthur C. Clarke Award winner) Anne Charnock, published by SF imprint Gold SF, is that it is not in itself SF, or anything other than realism. What it is, other than good, is fiction about scientists in a time of climate change. I …Read More
Nostalgic Futures, Max Dosser (Rutgers University Press 978-1-9788-4628-9, $33.95, 202pp, tp) July 2026.
What makes something speculative fiction? Okay, yes, you could spend a whole thesis chapter answering this, so I’m going to try for an abridged version: Speculative fiction imagines worlds and futures where reality is different from our own. Through worldbuilding it invites us to experience the impossible, and through characters allows us to immerse in alternate cultures. …Read More
Vaster Than Empires, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (The MIT Press, 978-0-262-05487-4, $24.95, 296pp, tp) November 2026.
Vaster Than Empires is an intimate, interstellar testament to humanity’s future. Across memories, cultures and galaxies, award-winning authors imagine what being alive really means in uncertain futures.
Nimbly setting the anthology’s ambitious tone is Osculation Point by Greg Egan. On near-future Earth, a scientist named Jumoke makes a fantastic discovery that ignites generations of research. …Read More
The Book of the Dead, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Harper Voyager 978-0-063-38198-8, $45.00, 480pp, hc) October 2026. Cover by Galen Dara.
At this point, in keeping with the flawless etiquette expected of Locus reviewers, a disclaimer: Habitual readers of this column may have noted that, from time to time, I’ve covered anthologies edited by Jonathan Strahan, who is not only the reviews editor of this magazine but my partner in podcasting …Read More
Sea of Charms, Sarah Beth Durst (Bramble 978-1-250-40067-3, $29.99, 384pp, hc) July 2026.
The latest entry in Sarah Beth Durst’s Spellshop series is the delightful, witty, and a little bit revolutionary Sea of Charms. The worldbuilding continues apace as Durst digs further into the events overtaking the Crescent Islands empire since the defenestration of the emperor in book #1. (Yes, that is the only word that works for what happened …Read More
Pictures of You, Josh Malerman (Del Rey 978-0-59372-315-9, $28.00, 288pp, hc) September 2026. Cover by Fritz Metsch.
Reading Josh Malerman is always a different experience, but I’ve already written about that in previous reviews of his work. Pictures of You, Malerman’s latest, continues the trend. A very different novel than its predecessor, Incidents Around the House, this one deals with a couple trying to survive and get back together after …Read More
As You Wake, Break the Shell, Becky Chambers (Harper Voyager 978-0-06293-606-6, $32.00, 480pp, hc) October 2026.
For more than ten years now-starting with 2015’s A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet-I’ve been trying to figure out how Becky Chambers does that Becky Chambers thing. You know: Write a book that continuously puts her protagonists in danger and somehow never stresses the reader out, but doesn’t dilute the dynamic engine …Read More
Exit Party, Emily St. John Mandel (Knopf 978-0-59332-146-1, $32.00, 320pp, hc) September 2026.
The fall of the United States, a triptych, part two. Or perhaps parts 2a and 2b, because the two halves of Emily St. John Mandel’s Exit Party are styled A-Side and B-Side, with each side showcasing a different US failure mode. On both sides, politics seems to be more cause than consequence, albeit a handwaved politics that …Read More
Black Point, Jacqueline West (Atheneum Books for Young Readers 978-1-665-98185-9, $19.99, 304pp, hc) July 2026.
Jacqueline West’s teen novel Black Point, named for the Minnesota town where it takes place, is a speculative thriller that turns up the tension as the protagonist struggles to decide who she can trust. Lucia is happy in Black Point; she loves working for her grandfather at the Viking Museum, hanging out daily with his …Read More
Driven, Mason Coile (G.P. Putnam’s Sons 979-8-21717-710-3, $29.00, 224pp, hc) September 2026. Cover by Lorie Pagnozzi.
Mason Coile’s (a pseudonym for the late, great Andrew Pyper) Driven is a fast, eerie, violent ride in a smart car with a haunted man who can’t escape the ghosts no matter what he does. Wonderfully written and twisty, this short novel is a bittersweet reminder of Coile’s talent and a great addition to …Read More
Ply, Hernan Diaz (Picador 978-1-03740-716-1, $32.00, 452pp, hc) September 2026.
The fall of the United States, a triptych, part one. Hernan Diaz’s eloquent new novel Ply is set a few centuries after the fall, in an anonymised city somewhere on the eastern seaboard, possibly New York (although I changed my mind a couple of times about that guess while reading). State capacity has withered until even its symbolic function fell …Read More
Incarnate, Alma Katsu (G.P. Putnam’s Sons 979-8-2171-777-0-7, $30.00, 336pp, hc) September 2026.
Dorothy Wagner has skills. An accomplished programmer and up-and-coming VFX artist, she was always a step ahead of her teachers and cohort. Sadly, her skill set doesn’t include the social, and she struggles to make connections in the real world or online. Until she meets wunderkind Tomas Delgado, whose revolutionary technology can create lifelike videos of anyone he …Read More
The Hill in the Dark Grove, Liam Higginson (Hogarth 979-8-21715-416-6, $28.00, 304pp, hc) August 2026.
Perhaps the only downside of horror subgenres becoming popular is that the market soon floods with half-cooked narratives written to meet market demand. Recent examples include hardcore/extreme horror westerns, dark academia, and folk horror. That’s why I was hesitant to read Liam Higginson’s The Hill in the Dark Grove. The story called to me. A …Read More
The Slantwise Histories, Alix E. Harrow (Tordotcom 978-1-250-34536-3, $29.99, 304pp, hc) October 2026.
It might seem a bit pretentious to describe Alix E. Harrow’s work as critical fictions – stories that comment on their own traditions, and sometimes on specific source texts – but there’s nothing pretentious at all about the fun she seems to be having with it. The Ten Thousand Doors of January is, among other things, a …Read More
The Children, Melissa Albert (William Morrow 978-0-063-48743-7, $30.00, 416pp, hc) June 2026
YA author Melissa Albert makes her adult debut with The Children, a haunted house story that follows the travails of two adults who, as children, were made famous by their mother’s literary pursuits. Opening with Guinevere Guin Sharpe promoting her memoir of growing up with her famous mother, The Children hints early on that not all was grand …Read More
Engines of Reason, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tordotcom 978-1-250-39929-2, $26.99, 175 pp, hc) September 2026. Cover by Emmanuel Shiu.
In Engines of Reason, the sequel to Elder Race (2021), Adrian Tchaikovsky continues the exploration of the collision between magical and materialist views of the world and, more significantly, how the stories they generate interact with the world-as-it-is. In literary-categorical terms, this means that these books exploit the tensions and overlaps between the …Read More
A History of Horror, Fear, and the Uncanny, DK (DK, 979-8217134281, $35.00, 320pp, hc) April 2026.
The byline of the handsomely produced, profusely illustrated A History of Horror, Fear, and the Uncanny is simply DK, but I believe it’s important to credit the people behind a project of this sort, and fortunately the book’s last page provides the relevant detail. To wit, the book’s two lead consultants are Dawn Keetley …Read More
Slow Burn, Amal Singh (Flame Tree Press 978-1-78758-988-9, £20.00, 224pp, hc) August 2026.
Portal fantasies, where characters travel through some kind of magical gateway to another world, are a staple of speculative fiction, and the subgenre includes a wide range of works from the recent Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, to children’s classics like C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books. In his new novel Slow Burn, Amal Singh references another classic portal fantasy, …Read More