Horror · December 2026
4 Horror Books Arriving in December 2026
An island with a vampire novel in its past, a vampire who wants her old life back, a coffin with a deadline, and sharks that come with the rain.
The vampire stories take three different routes. Sarah McCarry sends a college student back to the island her mother made famous. Katie Cunningham takes a vampire’s powers away and leaves her in a facility with gaps in her memory. Lavie Tidhar puts his vampire story on the road, with a coffin that needs to cross the country.
Brian Allen Carr’s story is the odd one out. It takes the western setup of a stranger warning a town about trouble and lets the trouble swim in the air. CLASH Books is bringing Motherfucking Sharks back in December. It first appeared in 2013.
At a glance
Which horror books are coming in December 2026?
Possession Island and the reissue of Motherfucking Sharks are scheduled for December 1. Something to Live For is due December 8. The UK publisher NewCon Press announced Quincey for December, with December 8 listed in the U.S.
01 · Contemporary gothic · Murder mystery
Possession Island
By Sarah McCarry
· US · Saturday Books
Angela Bell comes home from college to Possession Island, the remote Pacific Northwest setting of her late mother’s famous vampire novel. Then her estranged friend Mo is murdered, and the police turn their attention to Angela. Sally Raleigh, who couldn’t stand Angela in high school, is grieving Mo too. The two start looking for answers together.
Sally wants to leave the island but feels bound to her family. Angela comes back to a place where her mother’s fiction has given outsiders a story about the town that its residents have had to live with. The vampire lore hangs over the investigation, while the gothic tension comes from what Angela and Sally still owe the people they’re questioning.
A standalone novel. The vampire novel by Angela’s mother is part of the story.
02 · Weird western · Creature horror
Motherfucking Sharks
By Brian Allen Carr
· US · CLASH Books
A stranger rides into a nearly deserted town with a warning about sharks. These come with storms and can move through the air, which makes his story easy to dismiss in a place far from the sea. The townspeople have little reason to trust him until the weather changes.
The setup belongs to a western, where a stranger arrives with news a town would rather ignore. Carr makes the threat ridiculous and the violence graphic. The joke is in the idea of flying sharks, and the dread is in how little good a warning does once the rain starts.
CLASH Books is reissuing the standalone story, originally published in 2013.
03 · Psychological vampire horror
Something to Live For
By Katie Cunningham
· US · Dead Sky Publishing
Ardeola has spent about a century as a vampire when a facility captures her and makes her human again. She wants to escape and return to the vampire who made her, who is also her partner. But whole stretches of her life are missing from her memory, along with people she once knew.
The facility calls what happened a cure. To Ardeola it feels like the loss of the life she chose and the power she used to have. The gothic unease comes from that gap between what she wants back and what she can actually remember about it.
A standalone novel. Ardeola’s long history emerges as she tries to piece it together.
04 · Vampire horror · Road novella
Quincey
By Lavie Tidhar
· US · NewCon Press
Quincey drives a hearse in Los Angeles. When a stranger offers him a rush job taking a coffin to New York, the distance and the deadline make it sound like trouble. The money changes his mind. The one rule is that he has to leave the coffin closed.
Tidhar puts vampire horror into a cross-country transport job. Quincey knows what a hearse is for and how to get it where it needs to go. For once, he’s being paid to know as little as possible about what he’s carrying.
A standalone novella from the UK publisher NewCon Press.
More horror and December releases
Ardeola’s missing memories put her story close to the books on the psychological horror shelf, where danger comes partly from what the characters can’t trust about themselves. The release hub gathers the rest of the December guides.