Horror

When Ikemefuna, a young Nigerian dancer, boards a plane from Lagos to Texas, she imagines a new life filled with opportunity, freedom, and the promise of a happy marriage. Instead, she finds herself trapped in the home of her new husband’s parents, where her movements are controlled, her independence stripped away, and the pressure to produce a male heir grows increasingly intense. Her husband, Nna, initially struggles to reconcile his self-proclaimed feminist beliefs with his family’s expectations. As secrets emerge and the household becomes increasingly suffocating, the boundaries between victim and perpetrator, tradition and cruelty, begin to blur. Ikemefuna’s apparent obedience conceals something far more complicated, and the family’s carefully maintained facade begins to unravel. Blending domestic thriller, psychological horror, and Nigerian diasporic fiction, House Woman explores patriarchal power, forced marriage, intergenerational trauma, and the devastating consequences of silencing women. It also questions whether moving to another country necessarily brings freedom when oppressive social structures travel with you.

The seven houses in these seven stories are strange. A person is missing, or a truth, or memory; some rooms are enticing, some unmoored, others empty. But in Samanta Schweblin's tense, visionary tales, something always creeps back inside: a ghost, a fight, trespassers, a list of things to do before you die, a child's first encounter with darkness or the fallibility of parents. In each story, twists and turns will unnerve and surprise: Schweblin never takes the expected path and instead digs under the skin, revealing surreal truths about our sense of home, of belonging, and of the fragility of our connections with others. This is a masterwork from one of our most brilliant modern writers.

Natural Beauty follows a talented young pianist whose promising musical career is interrupted when an accident leaves her Chinese immigrant parents unable to care for themselves. Forced to abandon her ambitions, she takes a job at Holistik, an exclusive beauty and wellness store in New York City that caters to wealthy customers seeking increasingly extreme forms of physical perfection. As she becomes immersed in this glamorous world, she discovers an industry where experimental treatments promise to reshape bodies, erase imperfections, and transform people’s appearances. Her growing fascination with Helen, the niece of the store’s charismatic owner, further draws her into a world of privilege, desire, and manipulation. Yet beneath the seductive promises of self-improvement lies something deeply disturbing.

Exit Zero is a collection of twelve surreal and imaginative short stories that explore the strange, often unsettling experiences of ordinary people. Blending magical realism, dark humour, and reflections on mortality, Marie-Helene Bertino creates worlds where the boundaries between everyday life and the extraordinary begin to dissolve. In the title story, Jo returns to her estranged father’s home after his death and discovers that she has inherited an unexpected companion: a unicorn living in the backyard. Elsewhere, former lovers fall mysteriously from the sky, gardens become sites of communication between the living and the dead, and familiar objects take on uncanny significance. Beneath the collection’s fantastical premises lies a thoughtful exploration of loneliness, family relationships, grief, and the difficulty of navigating an unpredictable world. Bertino’s stories invite readers to look beyond the apparent absurdity of everyday existence and consider the connections, losses, and moments of wonder that give life meaning.

Set in a near-future Ecuador, Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun follows Noa and her best friend, Nicole, as they leave the violence and decay of Guayaquil behind to attend Solar Noise, an experimental music festival held in the remote Andean highlands near an active volcano. Amid psychedelic music, ritualistic dances, and a gathering of young people searching for transcendence, the festival becomes a space where the boundaries between the physical and spiritual worlds begin to dissolve. Noa has a personal reason for making the journey: she hopes to find her father, who abandoned her when she was a child. But after arriving at the festival, she begins experiencing strange transformations, speaking in a voice that seems not to belong to her. As Nicole tries to understand what is happening to her friend, both young women confront their histories of abandonment, violence, and emotional pain. Blending speculative fiction, psychological horror, Andean mythology, and experimental music culture, Ojeda explores the search for belonging and the relationship between trauma, identity, and transcendence. The novel’s hallucinatory atmosphere evokes a world where ancient spiritual traditions collide with futuristic subcultures, offering a haunting meditation on the desire to escape the past and imagine a different future.

In a world where popularity determines survival, Mishin Mizushima is a teenage girl who struggles to meet Japan’s unforgiving standards of beauty and social status. Unpopular at school and abandoned emotionally by her mother, she occupies the lowest rung of a ruthless social hierarchy dominated by glamorous, powerful girls. But when a new teacher introduces a seemingly simple instruction—students must form pairs, and no two people can pair together twice—the established order begins to collapse. Those left without partners face a terrifying consequence: execution. Blending the vicious social politics of Mean Girls with the deadly competition of Squid Game, Chiren Kina’s dark, candy-coloured thriller explores bullying, conformity, beauty standards, and the desperate human need to belong. Beneath its exaggerated, unsettling premise lies a sharp examination of how easily social exclusion can become a matter of life and death.

Twenty-three-year-old Yosoye arrives in Lagos eager to begin a new chapter of her life. Working for a prestigious architectural firm, she finds herself immersed in a world of glamorous social gatherings, ambitious colleagues, and exciting possibilities. Her company is developing Omi City, an extravagant new housing project built on reclaimed land and presented as a symbol of Lagos’s bright future. For Yosoye, the development represents progress and the promise of a city reinventing itself. But beneath the glittering surface, something is deeply wrong. Stories of pregnant women walking into the city’s waters and drowning begin to spread, while the construction of Omi City continues to reshape the landscape and displace the past. When Yosoye discovers that she is pregnant herself, the strange events around her become increasingly difficult to ignore. As she investigates the mysteries surrounding the development, she is forced to confront unsettling connections between motherhood, urban expansion, and the forces that haunt the city. Blending literary fiction, horror, and Nigerian folklore, Aguda’s atmospheric novel examines the human and environmental costs of progress. It explores the complicated relationship between women and their bodies, the weight of ancestral histories, and the question of what a society sacrifices when it builds its future on buried ground.

Lena is consumed by a hunger she can no longer control. Alone in her luxury apartment, she gorges herself on everything from loaves of bread to cat food, while doctors dismiss her growing distress. When Joan, a glamorous actress on the brink of stardom, moves upstairs, Lena is drawn into a world of beauty, wealth, and privilege she has always desired. But as her appetite becomes increasingly grotesque, Lena’s carefully constructed identity begins to unravel. A disturbing, darkly comic body-horror novel about invisible illness, class inequality, loneliness, and the impossible expectations placed on women.

When a mysterious, deadly plague sweeps across the world, a group of friends seeks refuge in a luxurious countryside mansion near the Pakistan–India border. But the haveli conceals an ancient darkness, and when they uncover a sealed chest hidden in a nearby cave, they unleash a primordial force that turns their sanctuary into a nightmare. Trapped inside the sprawling estate, the friends begin to unravel under the influence of its sinister magic, confronting buried traumas, personal demons, and the stories they tell themselves to survive. Drawing on South Asian and Middle Eastern folklore, this atmospheric dark fantasy explores memory, fear, and the terrifying power of the past.

Missy Djalo has spent years chasing her dream of becoming an actress, enduring failed auditions and struggling to escape the shadow of her fractured relationship with her Cameroonian mother. Broke and desperate, she receives an unexpected opportunity to audition for a mysterious company called Air Free. Welcomed into a beautiful house by a charismatic couple, Missy soon realises that the audition is unlike anything she has experienced before. As reality and fantasy begin to blur, she faces an unsettling question: how much of herself must she sacrifice to become the person she longs to be? A surreal, unsettling tale of ambition, memory, and identity, this philosophical horror explores the frightening possibility that achieving your dreams might mean losing yourself.

When teenager Janie Yearling vanishes from the small town of Gold River, her grieving parents become the centre of a media frenzy. Her mother, Annette, turns her pain into a carefully maintained public image, while her father, Calvin, becomes a figure of suspicion. Fifteen years later, a podcaster with a troubled past offers to reopen the case, stirring up old rumours about a mysterious spirit said to haunt the nearby woods. As the investigation unfolds, the boundaries between truth, superstition, and spectacle begin to blur. A chilling, darkly comic novel about grief, obsession, and the stories we tell to make sense of tragedy.