Out There Screaming is, as it says on the tin, an anthology short stories by black authors, edited by Jordan Peele. I’m about two-thirds of the way through this myself. Most of these are excellent. A few didn’t work for me, but that’s to be expected in any cluster of stories.

Look forward to a proper review of this anthology down the road, but don’t wait on me to buy it.

Blood from the Air is described as “fantasy of the darkest sort.” The author, Gemma Files, is a multi-award winning British-born Canadian writer and journalist.

Although I am unfamiliar with her work, I will be picking this book up. It looks like it has threads of cosmic horror and liminality, which is very much my jam.

The short story “Quondam” by Cindy O’Quinn, published in The Nightmare Never Ends. This one was a bit of a dark horse. The anthology was not especially well distributed and doesn’t feature a super-star list of authors like the winning collection and anthology entries.

I would classify Ai Jiang’s Linghun as a novelette. It’s listed at 150 pages on Amazon, but the book also contains a foreword, a non-fiction essay, and two short stories.

This looks to be a ghost story at wide-scale. Think Haunting of Hill House meets Uzumaki. I’ll be picking this one up for myself and keeping an eye on this author, who has another book coming out next year.

Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory was highly anticipated before its release and has been lauded since. Due is a multi-award winning author of black speculative fiction (and widely respected as one of its pioneers) and a lecturer at UCLA.

Ghost stories have been popping off lately, and ghosts and the Jim Crow South pair well together.

The first novel category is always an interesting one to watch. Every nominee on the list is an author to watch, including The Daughters of Block Island‘s Christa Carmen. This is another novel in the gothic style, which seems to be a trend right now. If you’re looking for more ghosts and old houses, take a chance on this new voice in horror.

Trang Thanh Tran’s She Is A Haunting is being compared to Mexican Gothic, but a Vietnamese take. This is another ghost story, as most of the winners this year have been and deals with similar themes of colonialism, oppression, and broken homes to The Reformatory. This one is also tagged as an LGBTQ+ text, so if you’re looking for something of that bent, this might be a good one for you.

The Nighthouse Keeper is the second book of the Blight Harbor series. Another ghost story, but this one deals with a world where the ghosts have gone missing. The setting on this one is reminiscent of Coraline or Stranger Things in that it’s dealing with an alternate reality in a sort of parallel-dimension.

Horror poetry is still a fairly small subgenre. I’ve read some here and there and it can be genuinely inspired. This book received somewhat mixed reviews on GoodReads, but one reviewer described it as “beautiful and grotesque,” going on to call it “dark and feral, gothic and unhinged.”

If you’d like to dip your toes in, this collection comes well recommended as the Stoker winner, although it does look like being familiar with Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle could impact your enjoyment.

I have heard nothing but good things about Godzilla Minus One, but none of us managed to watch it yet. It is available for streaming on Netflix now, so if you’re like us and just haven’t gotten around to it, you can find it there when you’re ready.

From what I have read, this is a good kaiju film; it isn’t rewriting the genre or anything. Expect an action-packed military movie.

Writer Amy Chu and illustrator Soo Lee came together for this graphic novel take on the 19th century vampire novella Carmilla. This graphic novel is not an adaptation, although it does take from the original. This book deals with homelessness and LGBTQ+ issues in the cold heart of New York City

As an academic, this book has rocketed to the top of my list. Not one, but three essays made the final ballot for the Stokers. The winner was Nadia Bulkin’s “Becoming Ungovernable: Latah, Amok, and Disorder in Indonesia.”

The other nominees were “100 Livers” and “Displaced Spirits: Ghosts of the Diaspora.” Also notable is previously mentioned author Ai Jiang, who has an essay titled “The Unquiet” in this book.

This book is a collection of short explainers (not precisely summaries) of various horror novels, arranged by theme. The great benefit of this book is the “At a Glance” sections that identify prominent themes, tone, style, and setting for each entry.

The author, Sadie Hartmann of Night Worms, has a strong reputation in the industry, and this book is a product of that.