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
I spotted three new horror books/covers this week, and all of these covers are very creepy!
Tif Robinette’s Swallerjaw blends swamp-drenched, occult horror with generational trauma and twisted faith in a stunning southern gothic horror debut.
The swamp doesn’t give gifts; only trades.Like the swamp that surrounds it, the once prosperous town of Festus holds many secrets.
A pole dancer, Crystal, takes care of her granny as best she can and tries to keep a promise to her dead mother: to wait for her brother to come home. Seven years ago someone took the boy, and the case remains unsolved.
The officer assigned to that case died, leaving his widow, Athena, to do her best to raise their young son. When seven-year-old Early goes missing, she has to reopen old wounds and old case files to try to find him.
Gravedigger brothers Grant and Tick Bittergreen were always warned by their gatorwitch mother not to accepts gifts from the swamp. But the swamp has given up a skull, and it’s not long before its appetite claims a human victim, and it demands a new body.
As the novel builds to its extravagant, bloody conclusion, the twisted secrets of Festus’s past are revealed. To save themselves, the gravediggers, the stripper and the grieving mother must confront their cursed blood and the horror that the swamp has birthed.
Swallerjaw by Tif Robinette. Releases in August 2027 from Tor Nightfire. From the description, there seems to be a lot going on in this story, but I am all over this book! The cover is givig me the heebie-jeebies, lol. Cover rating: A
You Just Have to Ask Me by Hadeer Elsbai. Releases in February 2027 from Union Square & Co. I love that the blurb doesn’t give too much away. This is tagged as “horror” on Goodreads, so I’m curious to see what those horror elements are. Cover rating: A
Escaping foster care, two sisters encounter the natural—and supernatural—entities of the North American Great Lakes on an otherworldly quest homeward to the matriarchal commune where they were raised in this Gothic eco-horror novel for fans of Catriona Ward, T. Kingfisher, Kay Chronister, and Vincent Tirado.
The Great Lakes: Huron. Ontario. Michigan. Erie. Superior. Their waters teem with life. Humans have taken advantage of their natural resources for generations. After being poached, polluted, and poisoned for centuries, they have survived, forced to coexist with the toxicity that has tainted them. Thousands of sailors have lost their lives to shipwrecks on the lakes. In the winter, the lakes are at their most angry, and their most powerful. Shipwrecking storms and ravenous vampire fish are just the beginning.
Amidst this setting, teenage sisters Sylvie and Marie-Ève George run away from their foster home and stow away on a Great Lakes bulk freighter, kicking off a supernatural odyssey. The girls grew up isolated from society, on a secluded island on the St. Lawrence River. But after the government removes them from their mother’s care, Sylvie and Marie-Ève will do anything to get back home, including journeying 1,500 miles across the lakes. They face dangerous smugglers, foul-mouthed sailors, a matriarchal cult of witches—and the everpresent threat of the lakes.
Nature remembers, and it doesn’t forgive. Mr. Martin Williams, an industrialist with investment in every part of the lakes, has employed the George family for generations. His crimes against the Great Lakes are never forgotten, and trickle down through his bloodline. His choices ripple outward through time all the way to Sylvie and Marie-Ève.
About the haunting journey to find family and a place to call home, Allison Mick’s Dark Waves is a supernatural adventure combining the social commentary of Octavia Butler and the multigenerational family drama of T. Kingfisher’s The Twisted Ones.
Dark Waves by Allison Mick. Releases in January 2027 from Erewhon Books. A comparison to T. Kingfisher and Catriona Ward? I desperately need to read this. I love the setting of the Great Lakes and the eco-horror genre. Hopefully the messaging will be more subtle than some other recent eco-horror books I’ve read. Cover rating: B
Swallerjaw sounds wild!