As we round the corner into the second half of 2025—I know, it’s weird—perhaps it’s time to pause and take a breath before hurtling headlong into July and August. If you’re looking to get some reading done during that period of hurtling, this list should give you some good places to start, covering everything from eldritch horrors to career highlights. Here’s a look at several books due out in the next two months that have gotten my attention.
File Under: These Landscapes Look Pretty Ominous, Huh
You might know Jason Sanford’s name from his excellent coverage at Genre Grapevine, but his fiction has also been turning heads recently—including a Nebula nomination for The Plague Birds. We Who Hunt Alexanders is his new book, and looks very different from its predecessor; it’s about a family of (mostly) invisible beings who feed on the violent, and the city where they attempt to make a new life for themselves. (Apex Book Company; July 22, 2025)
Science fiction abounds with memorable towns and cities, from Trantor City to San Onofre. Joan Slonczewski’s new novel Minds in Transit abounds with interplays of scale, as minds and cities converge and face a panoply of threats. Slonczewski’s work has earned her plenty of acclaim, and this looks like an excellent addition to her bibliography. (CAEZIK SF & Fantasy; July 15, 2025)
In a 2019 essay, Victoria Nelson observed that Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik, set in a near-future Russia that’s become even more militaristic and authoritarian, was “an outrageous, salacious, over-the-top tragicomic depiction of an utterly depraved social order.” Sorokin (here translated by Max Lawton) returns to that world with The Sugar Kremlin, expanding his vision of this bleak world to come. (Dalkey Archive; August 19, 2025)
Few writers explore the counterfactual as deftly as Harry Turtledove, and his latest novel expands on a 2018 novelette to offer a very different vision of power and resistance. Powerless offers readers a vision of a very different United States, and draws on conflicts between Czech reformers and Soviet authorities in the late 1960s for its themes. (CAEZIK SF & Fantasy; July 15, 2025)
File Under: Ghosts? Ghosts. Ghosts!
In a 2022 interview, Ave Barrera addressed the influence of the Mexican novelist Salvador Elizondo on her novel Restoration, now available in an English translation by Ellen Jones and Robin Myers. As the title suggests, this is a novel where the protagonist is engaged in restoring an old house—and as its inclusion in this category suggests, there’s something uncanny happening there. (Charco Press; August 26, 2025)
You may well have encountered Michael Cisco’s fiction on this very website. Cisco’s work is often challenging to describe (though I’ve given it a go); he balances big ideas with surreal and phantasmagorical imagery. His new novel Black Brane abounds with surreal moments and concepts, following the involvement of its protagonist in a strange think tank and his involvement with the experts who also call it home. (CLASH Books; July 22, 2025)
“I do love a good haunting!” S.H. Cooper said in a 2023 interview. That penchant for the restless dead comes to the forefront again in a story of familial disquiet. Bottling His Ghosts is about a family responding to paranormal visitations and the habits one of them develops to cope with them. (Raw Dog Screaming Press; July 15, 2025)
If you recognize Joshua Hull’s name, it might be for his 2024 novella Mouth, or his role as co-writer of the 2022 horror film Glorious, in which J.K. Simmons voiced an eldritch glory hole. Hull’s new project, the novel 8114, is about a podcaster returning to his hometown and encountering ghosts both metaphorical and real. (CLASH Books; August 26, 2025)
File Under: Punk and its Discontents
The late Terry Bisson had a distinctive approach to writing fiction and a penchant for writing sociopolitically engaged stories and novels. That wasn’t his only foray into blending art and politics, however; the new collection The Outspoken and the Incendiary: Interviews with Radical Speculative Fiction Writers brings together his interviews with the likes of Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, and Cory Doctorow. (PM Press; August 5, 2025)
To date, Margaret Killjoy has released two excellent novellas featuring protagonist Danielle Cain that blend punk rock and ominous magic. Killjoy’s returned to Cain’s story with a new book, The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice, about heroes on the run, ritual magic, and the role stories can play in continuing the memory of the departed. (Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness; July 2025)
Miranda Mellis’ writing thus far spans genres and takes big formal risks that pay off. Her new book Crocosmia comes complete with advance praise from the likes of Jordy Rosenberg and Eugene Lim. In a 2023 interview, Mellis shared some of the books that informed this one, encompassing everything from climate migration to occult military technology. (Nightboat; August 5, 2025)
File Under: All Things Aquatic
In his new novel The Darkest Deep, Chris Butera combines two big ideas in one narrative. The first is an undersea tunnel connecting New York and London, and the second is what it might mean to be trapped in such a space, both in the middle of the ocean and deep below the surface. (Podium Publishing; August 12, 2025)
Do you like your aquatic creatures utterly massive and terrifying? (See also: John Langan’s The Fisherman.) If so, you might well be drawn to John Chrostek’s Feast of the Pale Leviathan, about a man whose foray into the waters leads to an unlikely community living on a massive sea creature—and the unsettling secrets he finds there. (Deep Overstock; August 26, 2025)
There are plenty of unexpected situations to be found in the stories in Marianne Villanueva’s collection Residents of the Deep, including an underwater city and a world after a civilizational collapse. It’s a wide-ranging book that transports its readers to unexpected places; also, this interview, about her speculative work and her interest in fanfiction, is well worth a read. (Unsolicited Press; August 19, 2025)
File Under: Wait, Are We In a Cult?
There’s something about spiritualism that makes for gripping reading—whether that reading is in the form of fiction or nonfiction. It’s in that world that Jesi Bender has set her new novel Child of Light, about a 13-year-old whose family becomes enmeshed in that world in the late 19th century. (Whiskey Tit; August 12, 2025)
The story of King Midas is presented as reason for caution, and yet the allure of turning things into gold has endured over the centuries. That ability is at the heart of Tyler Jones’ novel Midas; throw a sinister cult into the mix and you have the makings of a very compelling yarn. (Lethe Press; August 2025)
Publisher Filthy Loot describes the stories contained within Matthew Mitchell’s Release the Horse as “Ozarkian weird horror”—which is an intriguing premise right from the outset. Mitchell’s surreal tales chronicle bizarre goings-on in the region in question; yes, cultists play a part as well. (Filthy Loot; August 2025)
An Yu follows up her acclaimed novel Ghost Music with Sunbirth, a story set in a village where the light of the sun is slowly vanishing, presenting the residents with a bleak future. Did we mention the society of people whose faces have been replaced with bright light? Yu’s new book abounds with evocative images and haunting moral choices. (Grove Press; August 5, 2025)
File Under: Voyages Into the Unknown
Georgi Gospodinov’s fiction features plenty of ruminations on the nature of time itself, and what it might mean to attempt to revisit the past. Space Opera, translated by Angelo Rodel, takes Gospodinov’s concerns into an interplanetary level, focusing on astronauts traveling between the Earth and Mars. (Hanuman Editions; July 11, 2025)
A documentary filmmaker’s journey into the Arctic takes a strange and menacing turn in Jacy Morris’ novel We Like It Cherry. “It’s about people trapped in an environment that wants to kill them and being chased by other things that want to kill them,” Morris explained in an interview earlier this year. (Tenebrous Press; August 9, 2025)
Edgar Allan Poe only wrote one novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, a thoroughly strange tale of polar exploration that Mat Johnson memorably riffed on in his novel Pym. This new edition features a conversation between Nate Wolff and Joseph Rezek, both experts in their fields, which should open a new dimension in our understanding of Poe’s work. (Smith & Taylor Classics; July 22, 2025)
What happens when one’s own body becomes unknown territory? In David Simmons’ novel Eradicator, he tells the story of a woman working in an NICU who feels herself becoming something new and uncanny. Simmons has been chronicling Baltimore’s uncanny side through his fiction thus far, and this is a welcome addition to his bibliography. (Apocalypse Party; August 13, 2025)
File Under: We Are Getting Mythic
For almost as long as people have told myths and legends, people have retold myths and legends, finding new wrinkles and perspectives on timeless narratives. This summer brings with it a new collection of such work by Aurora Award nominee Colleen Anderson: Vellum Leaves and Lettered Skins. (Raw Dog Screaming Press; July 29, 2025)
What are the modern-day equivalent to the heroes of myth and legend? For some, the answer is superheroes, and argument made by (among others) Grant Morrison in the book Supergods. Does that mean that the pulp heroes who predated those heroes are the equivalent to the Titans? (The Greek mythological ones, not the team with Robin, Raven, and Kid Flash.) Find out for yourself in the anthology Before Superman: Superhumans of the Radium Age, edited by Joshua Glenn. (MIT Press; August 19, 2025)
Cody Goodfellow’s fiction has encompassed everything from hallucinogenic near-future political satire to forays into the horrific. Goodfellow’s latest novel New Tomorrow features pulp heroes fighting sinister forces during an alternate version of the Great Depression, with one review comparing its tone to those of Watchmen and The Boys. (Forbidden Futures; July 2025)
File Under: Do You Like Your Stories Short?
In a 2023 piece at Reactor, James David Nicoll wrote that Carol Emshwiller “eschewed conventional tropes and demanded effort from her readers. Readers, and jurors, rewarded her for aiming high.” (Charlie Jane Anders is also a fan.) If you’re looking for an excellent overview of Emshwiller’s career, the decades-spanning anthology Moon Songs: The Selected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, edited by Matthew Cheney, has plenty to offer — and an introduction by Kelly Link, which is always good news. (Third Man; August 5, 2025)
The title of the new anthology Of Enchantment, Enigma, and the Infinite, from editors Jendia Gammon and Gareth L. Powell, offers readers a good sense of what to expect. The list of contributors is also impressive, with the likes of Cynthia Pelayo, Jonathan Maberry, and Eugen Bacon among the writers involved. (Stars and Sabers; August 5, 2025)
Fresh off his recent Bram Stoker Award win, this summer brings with it a new book from Pedro Iniguez. The collection Echoes and Embers brings together, according to the publisher, “fantasy and science fiction, Latinx themes, and traditional pulp stylings”—which sounds like an intriguing combination. (Stars and Sabers; July 15, 2025)
I mentioned his novel The Fisherman earlier in this column, and now I’m returning to the uncanny world of John Langan’s fiction with news of a new collection of his work. The collection Lost in the Dark and Other Excursions brings together a host of his unsettling cosmic horror, and adds an introduction by the great Victor LaValle into the mix. (Word Horde; August 2025)
