Future Fiction #389 – Cover Reveals & Newly Discovered SFF Books

Welcome to Future Fiction, my reimagining of the Waiting on Wednesday meme! There are so many amazing new books coming out, that I can no longer pick just one. My goal with Future Fiction is to share at least three new books each week, a combination of recent cover reveals and books that I’ve recently added to my TBR pile. I’m still going to be linking up with Wishful Endings/Can’t Wait Wednesday, and I also want to give a shout out to Jill at Breaking the Spine for starting the original Waiting on Wednesday meme. I hope you’ll find some new books to add to your TBR piles, and as always, I look forward to hearing what YOU’RE looking forward to:-D

---

It’s a Summer of Horror batch today, with three Spring 2027 horror releases, take a look:

---

Revenge comes with a bite when a group of jaded zookeepers unleashes the animals on unsuspecting patrons in this high-octane thriller from the nationally bestselling author of The Paleontologist and Nothing Tastes as Good—perfect for fans of T. J. Newman’s Falling and Daniel Kraus’s Whalefall.

Something is wrong at the world-famous ZOO USA. Animals keep escaping. Others are found dead in their enclosures. It’s a public relations nightmare for Ashlee Beauchamp, the communications executive responsible for convincing the public that nothing is amiss. Worse, she suspects the incidents are no accident—and fears someone on the inside is responsible.

Bright-eyed, young conservationist Megan Taylor is thrilled to be in town for North America’s largest conference for zoo professionals. The conference has been eye-opening, but at least she has Zoo Day to look forward to: a full day to explore ZOO USA with her sister, Sierra, if only she can convince Sierra (and herself) that zoos aren’t exploitative animal prisons.

Brandon McCabe is counting down the days too. Twisted by hate and hell-bent on revenge, the disgruntled zookeeper and his coworkers are planning something big to get back at the institution that has wronged them. Much like the animals he cares for, Brandon has grown tired of his cage—and when Zoo Day comes, everyone best run.

Told in real time over a single day, We Don’t Call Them Cages is an action-packed, multi-POV thriller that will leave readers breathless and thinking twice before their next day at the zoo.

We Don’t Call Them Cages by Luke Dumas. Releases in March 2027 from Atria Books. I had a lot of fun with Dumas’s Nothing Tastes as Good, so I’m ready for his next book! Although the whole “zoo” setting makes me a little nervous, I’m excited to read this.

---

“They say that as a young pup she liked to bite. She ripped chunks of flesh from three servants and nearly bled one of them to death.”

In Barranquilla, Carnival belongs to the living, the dead, and the women who feed on both.

Julieta Vanterroso was born with fangs, a beautiful little monster in a family that knew exactly what to do with monsters. Her grandmother, Julia Vanterroso, has built an empire out of blood: the Sanguina factory, the Highblood Club, the old Carnival families, the politicians, the servants, the bodies that can be drained and paid and forgotten. In Barranquilla, the Vanterrosos do not hide what they are. They dress it in lace, teach it to dance, put it on a float, and call it tradition.

Now Julieta is meant to become Queen of Carnival. She must smile, dance, read the Bando, marry the man chosen for her, and step into the future her grandmother has prepared since the day she was born. But as Carnival approaches and the Vanterroso family begins to turn on itself, bodies appear where they shouldn’t, old rituals start to fail, and the women around Julieta grow hungry in ways even blood cannot satisfy.

By the time Carnival crowns its queen, Julieta will have to decide how much of herself she is willing to lose to become what her family has been waiting for.

Drawing from Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions, Highblood transforms Barranquilla Carnival into a landscape of blood, spectacle, and ritual, where women inherit hunger like a family heirloom and survival depends on who is willing to devour whom first.

Highblood by Claudia Amador. Releases in February 2027 from Atria. This might be my favorite cover I’ve seen recently, it’s simply stunning! A Spanish vampire story? This is going to be a must read for sure:-)

---

A new haunted house novella by the new master of horror, Stephen Graham Jones, in which a mysterious girl in lavender footie pajamas will do anything to keep her house from being sold.

Mr. Morning Gun, the hapless narrator of this first-person novella, is a disgraced history teacher who is now an unhoused person who is largely living within his electric car and the empty homes he looks after for local real estate agencies in a specific way: he flushes the empty houses’ toilets to keep, primarily, the wax seals on the toilets fresh, and the plumbing flowing. For this, he gets a bit of money under the table.

One day, at “The Messner House,” he gets caught by an aggressive realtor having a tryst. When the ghost of the previous owners’ missing child intervenes, killing the couple and saving the former teacher, Mr. Morning Gun finds himself embroiled into an ever-increasing layer of cover-ups as the girl in the lavender footie pajamas keeps killing folks to keep the house empty, except for him.

Ears by Stephen Graham Jones. Releases in March 2027 from Saga Press. OK this sounds super bizarre! But it’s Stephen Graham Jones, so of course I have to read it.

---

What do you think of this week’s Future Fiction picks? Let me know in the comments!