Lit Hub’s list of the most anticipated books of the second half of the year includes many genre titles, but, one might argue, not enough. What can I say, I’m an excitable boy, still in love with stories of dragons and spaceships and monsters. And while the darkening world outside can sometimes make it hard to focus on really anything at all, I’m of the opinion that a bit of true escapism is often what you need to keep the fires burning! Besides, it’s often genre fiction that holds the truest mirror up to nature, helping us better understand the darkening world and how to fight for light.
So, I present to you here a corollary to the Big List, in the form of a totally idiosyncratic and absolutely non-comprehensive collection of 33 sci-fi, fantasy, and horror books to look forward to in the back half of 2025:
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Michael Cisco, Black Brane
CLASH Books, July 22
Michael Cisco is one of those impossible-to-classify writers, whose work is ever-shifting and never even remotely the same. He’s also probably your favorite weird-fiction writer’s favorite weird-fiction writer. This new one is a slim shot from CLASH, about a man recovering from a foot injury and remembering his time working for an institute that studied (among other things) black holes. It’s more or less guaranteed to turn your brain inside out. –Drew Broussard, Podcasts Editor and Resident Spooky Wizard
John Langan, Lost in the Dark and Other Excursions
Word Horde, August 5
The bard of Hudson Valley horror returns! Langan continues to rack up an incredible shelf of story collections, each loosely themed to its “and”—this one promises journeys, quests, Blu-Ray commentary, book endnotes, and more. He is the modern heir to literary horror writers like Washington Irving, Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and of course Edgar Allan Poe—but honestly he’s even scarier than any of them. I wait for new Langan books with feverish intensity and will be diving into this as soon as (in)humanly possible. –DB
Tashan Mehta, Mad Sisters of Esi
DAW, August 5
The publicity copy calls Mad Sisters of Esi a cross between Piranesi and Calvino and honestly that’s enough for me. Add in a dash of multiversal story-centric adventure and really what more do you need? The book has a ton of hype behind it, as it was originally published by HarperCollins India in 2023 and won a handful of awards at the time—but I’m avoiding learning anything else about it, because it looks like one of those truly joyful adventures best discovered on the page. –DB, as recommended in our second-half of 2025 list
Annalee Newitz, Automatic Noodle
Tordotcom, August 5
“Cozy” is a divisive word in some parts of the genre community these days, but Newitz delivers a delightful read that manages to deliver feel-good vibes (robots start their own noodle shop! And triumph over bigotry!) while not condescending to its readership by pretending that the world outside doesn’t exist. Somehow it packs in an honest and compelling interrogation of: sentience/robot intelligence, the ethics of capitalist ownership, the joys of cooking, the pleasure of doing something for someone else, and more. Also, I want a t-shirt! Good swag! –DB
Hailey Piper, A Game in Yellow
S&S/Saga Press, August 12
The King In Yellow is the seed of inspiration for Hailey Piper’s batshit erotic horror thriller, in which a lesbian couple looking to spice things up goes down a hellish rabbit-hole when they discover a disturbing masterpiece that gives dark pleasures in small doses, and delivers death to those who ask for a bigger slice. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Managing Editor, as recommended at CrimeReads
Christopher Golden and Brian Keene (eds.), The End of the World As We Know It
Gallery Books, August 19
How to memorialize the impact of Stephen King’s apocalyptic epic The Stand? By commissioning stories from nearly forty writers to expand the world. I’m hard-pressed to think of a more exciting tribute collection (although contributor Gabino Iglesias once proposed on social media a collection of stories from other rooms at the Overlook and I haven’t stopped thinking about that idea)—it will be fun to see writers like S. A. Cosby, Poppy Z. Brite, Premee Mohamed, Caroline Kepnes, Tananarive Due, and V. Castro play in King’s sandbox. –DB
R.F. Kuang, Katabasis
HarperCollins, August 26
I was at a bar recently talking with a friend about how excited we both were for this book. Granted I am usually talking about books, but still! R.F. Kuang is one of the best fantasy authors working right now and I’m truly so stoked about this book. Katabasis is about a graduate student at the Cambridge school of Magick who has to team up with her rival to journey into Hell and save the soul of her favorite professor. I don’t know what more I can say. If that description doesn’t immediately launch this book to the top of your TBR, we could never be friends. –McKayla Coyle, as recommended in our second-half of 2025 list
Olga Ravn, tr. Martin Aitken, The Wax Child
New Directions, September 2
Ravn’s The Employees is one of the absolute gems of a bright century for weird fiction so far and My Work was a spectacular and surprising turn, a vital exploration of modern motherhood—so I cannot wait to see what she does with a historical look at witches and witchcraft in Denmark in the 1600s. Also it’s apparently narrated by an actual wax doll, created by one of the accused witches? Sign me up, obviously. –DB, as recommended in our second-half of 2025 list
Bitter Karella, Moonflow
Run For It, September 2
Mushroom horror continues to be so very hot right now (hot enough to……grow mushrooms?!) and Karella’s debut novel is one of the best of the bunch. Set in a mysterious forest in Northern California (and expanding on the world of Karella’s delightful fiction-game Toadstools), Moonflow has weird mushrooms and feminist cults and folkloric monsters and real-life monsters and more. At times, it reads like a crime thriller and at other times it reads like a nature guide and at still other times it reads like Lynchian horror—but no matter the mode, it is a delight from start to finish. –DB, as recommended in our second-half of 2025 list
Sam Rebelein, Galloway’s Gospel
William Morrow, September 16
How blessed we are (by the fog, you might say) to get two Rebelein books this year! Galloway’s Gospel follows February’s The Poorly Made and Other Things and once again returns us to Renfield County in Upstate New York. There are some cute connections to both The Poorly Made and Edenville, but this X-Files-meets-Goosebumps (but way more gruesome than either) tale stands squarely on its own—and should, if there’s any justice, bring more readers into Rebelein’s eerie fold. Don’t mind the cults, the sunflowers, the deranging wood scraps scattered through the town—Renfield County is waiting for you. –DB
Martin Cahill, Audition for the Fox
Tachyon Publications, September 16
Cahill makes his full-length fiction debut with this playful novella, featuring fox gods, time travel, humor, plucky main characters, and so much more. It promises to be an absolute joy. –DB
Gemma Fairclough, The Retreat
Wild Hunt Books, September 18
Wild Hunt is putting out six novellas this year under their “Northern Weird” series—and your local indie bookstore can get any of them for you, despite it being a UK release! I’ve loved the three I’ve read so far, but am most excited for Fairclough’s installment, which promises a strange journey into an exclusive wellness retreat in (you guessed it) the North of England. –DB
Sarah Gailey, Spread Me
Nightfire, September 23
Gailey is at their absolute best when writing horror (Just Like Home is one of the great haunted house novels of all time) and Spread Me goes full-bore. Not for the faint of heart or stomach, Gailey’s desert riff on John Carpenter’s The Thing manages to be both sexy and scary as hell. It will burrow its way into you and you’ll welcome it. –DB, as recommended in our second-half of 2025 list
Bora Chung, tr. Anton Hur, Midnight Timetable: A Novel in Ghost Stories
Algonquin, September 30
I love a novel-in-stories!! The whole idea of it never fails to delight me and a novel in ghost stories might as well be written for me specifically. The latest from Bora Chung is about one night in a research facility for cursed objects—I’m anticipating horror, I’m anticipating weird humor, I’m anticipating the terror of the workplace, and sneaky insights on modern humanity to boot. For anybody who has ever pondered the Backrooms or visited the SCP Foundation, Midnight Timetable must be on your TBR. –DB, as recommended in our second-half of 2025 list
Kit Burgoyne, The Captive
Hell’s Hundred, September 30
Burgoyne is the pen-name of the Booker-longlisted Ned Beauman and here he goes full pulpy horror. A group of revolutionaries kidnap a young heiress only to discover that she’s very much pregnant—and that her shortly-thereafter delivered baby might be the Antichrist or something like it. What ensues is a madcap take on the classic devil-baby story, channeling both Rosemary’s Baby and Good Omens. Sounds like a total blast. –DB, as recommended in our second-half of 2025 list
Mariana Enriquez, tr. Megan McDowell, Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave: My Cemetery Journeys
Hogarth, September 30
Just in time for spooky season, Mariana Enriquez is here with her first piece of translated non-fiction: a walk through graveyards and cemeteries around the world. I absolutely adore Enriquez (Our Share of Night was my favorite novel of 2023, terrifying and heartbreaking in equal measure) and I cannot think of a better guide through not exactly the realm of the beyond—but rather, the all-too-real spaces where we, the living, must confront the inevitability of ‘that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.’ –DB, as recommended in our second-half of 2025 list
Lindsay Merbaum, Vampires at Sea
Creature Publishing, Oct 7
Sometimes, you just want a book that lays out for you exactly what it is up to from jump. Merbaum, a talented prose trickster and an unparalleled literary mixologist, delivers just that with her latest: it’s vampires, they’re taking a sea vacation, hijinks ensue!! It’s perfect for the White Lotus types among you looking for a good spooky season treat, but it’ll also scratch the itch for true horror aficionados as well. We’re on vacation! –DB
Kay Chronister, Thin Places: Stories
Counterpoint, October 7
Hard for me to not slip in a Crypt Keeper voice when recommending this booo-tifully written skull-ection of short scaries. If you like horror that emphasizes a well-crafted sentence, you’ve probably already read Chronister’s The Bog Wife and should add her new collection to your TBR. Thin Places was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award, and is being reissued with four new stories just in time for spooky season. Chronister’s writing is beautiful, and her supernatural and atmospheric stories about lighthouse keepers, composers in remote villages, and swamp hoteliers have a little bit of Ghibli whimsy in places. But there is a clinging dread and mystery in these stories that will stay with you. Happy reading, boils and ghouls! –James Folta, Staff Writer, as recommended in our second-half of 2025 list
Todd Grimson, Stainless
McNally Editions, October 7
I’ve been waiting on McNally Editions to bring something truly horror-centric back into print—and I’m very excited by what promises to be a blood-soaked 90s LA vampire novel from “the greatest horror writer you’ve never read.” There’s also a washed-up rock-star element? Say no more. –DB
Anbara Salam, The Salvage
Tin House, October 7
Anything that gets comped to Julia Armfield’s chilling and waterlogged Our Wives Under the Sea immediately hits my TBR and Salam’s latest looks like just the thing. It’s historical fiction, set in 1962 in Scotland as a marine archeologist explores a Victorian shipwreck—but stranger things are afoot, and oh yeah the Cuban Missile Crisis kicks off in the background to boot. I can already smell the brine. –DB, as recommended in our second-half of 2025 list
Grace Byron, Herculine
S&S/Saga Press, October 7
A “paranoid, self-annihilating” horror debut that the author elevator-pitched as a “trans girl Buffy”? Yes! I’m excited for this one, especially since I’m already a fan of Byron’s fantastic reviews and longform, in particular her piece for The Nation on a trans vegan cult obsessed with AI, which feels like it may have partially inspired this novel. Herculine follows a woman who escapes NYC and her demons, both literal and figurative, to an all-trans girl commune in Indiana. Naturally, things get a little wild at the rural commune, and our protagonist has to unravel frightening mysteries and contend with “disemboweled pigs, cultlike psychosexual rituals, and the horrors of communal breakfast.” –JF, as recommended in our second-half of 2025 list
Zefyr Lisowski, Uncanny Valley Girls: Essays on Horror, Survival, and Love
Harper Perennial, October 7
I love the pairing of personal narrative with film criticism, and I thought Lisowski’s Girl Work was excellent. Horror is horrific in part because it brings humans a little too close to ourselves for comfort. It holds a mirror to the parts of us we don’t want to see. But it can also act as a space for solace and interpretation for those who love it, and that seemingly contradictory place is what excites me about these essays. –Oliver Scialdone, Community Editor, as recommended in our second-half of 2025 list
Hiron Ennes, The Works of Vermin
Tor Books, October 14
I loved Ennes’s Leech but was surprised by just how desperately I loved this—I started reading it on a Sunday and finished it feverishly the next night. For any reader who longs to visit Ambergris, New Crobuzon, Luriat, Hav, Ravicka… pack your bags for Tiliard. Ennes’s new novel is an epic fantasy set in a rotting city infested with bugs where opera soloists fight duels to the death onstage and perfumers craft scents to warp reality. Truly on par with Vandermeer and Miéville, an absolute thrill to read. –DB
Quan Barry, The Unveiling
Grove, October 14
I think, actually, that Quan Barry can do anything. As longtime readers of this site may remember, I loved her exuberant, ridiculously fun novel We Ride Upon Sticks (’80s New England, girls field hockey, magic?). I also loved her contemplative When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East (monks, brothers, Mongolia). Did I mention she’s also a celebrated poet, and a beloved professor of same at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s MFA program? Her latest novel is another left turn, a work of literary horror set in Antarctica, in which a Black location scout for a production company making a film about the Shakleton expedition and then winds up stranded with a bunch of white people…and also something else. Yes, please, thank you. –Emily Temple, Managing Editor, as recommended in our second-half of 2025 list
Ken Liu, All That We See or Seem
Saga Press, October 14
New Ken Liu!! New Ken Liu!! On the heels of his recent translation of the Dao De Jing, Liu returns to original speculative fiction with this series opener that follows a famous “orphan hacker” as she tries to help save a kidnapped ‘dream artist’ who can manipulate shared virtual landscapes. It sounds like a great technothriller and Liu, one of our great speculative minds, is a sure-fire bet for a good time. –DB, as recommended in our second-half of 2025 list
Olivie Blake, Girl Dinner
Tor Books, October 21
A second book from Olivie Blake this year?! And one that reads totally unlike anything she’s done so far—while also still veryyy much being an Olivie Blake joint? Yes please. This one, about a college sorority with a curious ritual, sounds pulpy on the surface but is taking aim at nothing short of the modern movement to repress women. This is the kind of book that people who never thought they’d pick up a book from Tor might pick up, and they’ll be all the better for it. It reads like a thriller and it lingers like a fine meal, with a fresh Chianti. –DB
Mary Robinette Kowal / Sam J. Miller, Apprehension / Red Star Hustle
S&S / Saga Press, October 21
I’m loving Saga’s decision to revive the old Ace Doubles format this year (following, it should be noted, in the footsteps of the fabulous Tenebrous Press Split Scream series—and, I suppose, Catherine Lacey’s The Möbius Book, although that’s kinda different)—the first was a Stephen Graham Jones double-header, then a Day/Night-themed Ellen Datlow-edited story collection, but this is where the rubber should meet the road for the format: two brand new novellas from absolute SF stars. I can’t wait to read them both, and to flip the book in-between! –DB
Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting
Tor, October 28
Harrow-heads already know that she’s one of the best fantasy writers working—but this new book is a time-twisting Courtly Romance (an academic is thrown back in time to accompany his country’s most famous knight on her final crusade) with sneaky-deep reflections on storytelling, truth, power, and love that promises to be her best yet. I’ll follow Alix Harrow wherever she goes. –DB, as recommended in our second-half of 2025 list
Laurel Hightower, The Long Low Whistle
Shortwave Publishing, November 4
Some of the coolest stuff happening in genre publishing is coming out of little presses doing neat projects—and Shortwave’s Killer VHS Series is one of the gold standards. Each book is meant to evoke video-store weird B-movie energy and from holiday slashers to creature-features, they’ve knocked it out of the park so far. The newest promises cryptid hunters and spooky mines and I’ll read it like I would’ve watched it: late at night, half-scared and half-delighted. –DB
QNTM, There is No Antimemetics Division
Ballantine, November 11
I’m on record in these pages as being an enormous fan of QNTM’s There is No Antimemetics Division—and I’m so excited that it’s getting a major-pub re-release, and even more excited that QNTM has extensively revised and deepened this strange novel. As I said in 2023: Imagine, if you can, an entity that it can immediately erase any knowledge of its existence from the minds of anyone who encounters it. Now try to imagine that you’re one of the few people working for an organization trying to defend humanity from such an entity—but you can barely remember the gig, because of the aforementioned memory erasure. Welcome to the antimemetics division; no, this is not your first day. –DB
Sam Munson, The Sofa
Two Dollar Radio, November 11
A family comes back from vacation to find that their sofa is…. different. Things will almost certainly get weirder from there, because it’s a Two Dollar Radio book and it’s a Sam Munson book. I can’t wait. –DB
Rascal Hartley, Dear Stupid Penpal
Tenebrous Press, November 12
An angry astronaut discovers that, as time dilates on his trip and those he and his crew left behind have all died, his penpal back home inexplicably survives. Tenebrous continues to acquire strange and genre-wobbling books, and this one should bring horror and pathos and old-school space-faring SF in equal measure. –DB
Georgia Summers, The Bookshop Below
Orbit, November 18
For all the book-lovers out there, all the dreamers who wish for their own bookstore, who feel that there’s a magical connection to books themselves… get The Bookshop Below onto your stack ASAP. A classic adventure story with mysterious shady organizations and magical books & bookstores and slow-burning romance. Between this and The City of Stardust, Summers is staking her claim as one of the great joyful-fantasy novelists. It’ll make you happy. –DB
