Books Horror Highlights Abandoned Mines and Secret Societies: Horror Highlights for November 2025 Spooky Season doesn’t have to end with October! By Emily C. Hughes | Published on November 18, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share When you’re a year-round horror fan, the coming and going of October causes a sort of whiplash. The first day of October hits, and everyone who ignores horror for the other eleven months of the year is suddenly talking about it nonstop. Just as suddenly, Halloween is over and they’ve dropped it again in favor of Thanksgiving, Christmas, or even Edmund Fitzgerald season. I often find myself a little disoriented in early November, the calendar equivalent of the sensation you get when you step off one of those moving walkways at the airport. As much as I’d like to leave our 12 foot skeleton up year-round, the New England winters wouldn’t be kind to him, so we moved him into the barn for hibernation season. Please meet my best friend, Bone Cold Steve Austin The pumpkins have been split and left out as a buffet for for raccoons and possums. There’s woodsmoke in the air, and the trees have shed the last of their leaves. But horror doesn’t stop, and neither does publishing (as much as I wish it would pause occasionally so I can catch up). And there’s an argument to be made that November, with its steely chill, may even be a more apt month for horror reading than October. Here are six November releases I’m particularly excited about. The Great Work by Sheldon Costa (Nov 4, Quirk) It’s the late 1880s in newly-minted Washington State, and everyone’s hunting a legendary giant salamander. But Gentle Montgomery’s reason for seeking the creature is personal: his friend and mentor died in his own quest for the salamander, and Gentle suspects its blood might be able to bring him back. With his nephew, Kitt, in tow, the grief-stricken Gentle embarks on a fraught, dangerous journey across a landscape full of cults and hunters and brigands. This novel leans more toward the Weird than it does toward straight horror—think of it as a dark Western with some deliciously horrifying imagery. It’s also a strange and sensitive meditation on the staggering price of progress, and the magic we lose when there are no more frontiers left unexplored.  The Long Low Whistle by Laurel Hightower (Nov 4, Shortwave) I love extreme settings in horror: deserts, ice caps, the deep sea, outer space, and other places I will never go. Abandoned mines certainly fall under that category (when was the last time you heard about anything good happening in an abandoned mine?), and so I’m rushing to pick up Laurel Hightower’s newest novella. The day her father died, Trish heard the emergency whistle sound from the local mine. Twenty years later, she’s still seeking closure, or something like it. When a group of cryptid hunters come to town with a plan to explore the mine, Trish feels compelled to join them, especially given the video footage they have of the mine’s collapse. What follows is a claustrophobic and visceral journey into the earth, where, they quickly find, they’re not alone. Fans of The Descent or The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling will have a great time with this one. (Whistle is part of Shortwave’s wonderful Killer VHS series, standalone novellas meant to pay homage to that classic horror format, the videotape—the publisher describes them as “Goosebumps for adults.”) Bones of Our Stars, Blood of Our World by Cullen Bunn (Nov 11, Gallery) This is Bunn’s debut novel for adult readers; horror fans will likely already know his name from his work in comics (consider this a bonus plug for Harrow County, which rules). Set over the course of one week on an island off the coast of North Carolina, Bones starts out as a slasher and expands into something much darker and far more cosmic. Bunn puts in the work, creating a huge cast of characters in a lively community before unleashing an absolute bloodbath—fans of Salem’s Lot or Midnight Mass, this one’s for you. It’s gory, epic, and over-the-top in the best way. God’s Junk Drawer by Peter Clines (Nov 11, Blackstone) I’ve been a fan of Clines’ since I picked up his wildly underappreciated sci-fi horror novel The Fold years back, and I’m thrilled every time I see a new release with his name on it. In his newest, a family on a rafting trip find themselves lost in an inexplicable, impossible valley, one filled with neanderthals, dinosaurs, robots, aliens, and more. Decades later, after years of searching, the now-grown son finds a way back to the valley–but accidentally brings a small group of grad students with him. The setup is reminiscent of Sid and Marty Krofft’s 1970s cult classic TV series Land of the Lost, which is an unalloyed positive in my mind, and if you need something to scratch that Jurassic Park death-by-dino itch, look no further. I’ll Make a Spectacle of You by Beatrice Winifred Iker (Nov 18, Run For It) Iker’s atmospheric, creepy debut novel follows Zora, a grad student in Appalachian Studies at Bricksbury University, a venerable HCBU. When her studies lead her to research the history of the university, Zora finds a centuries-long trail of stories about a dangerous beast stalking the woods around campus and a secret society with murky connections to both the beast and the school. Before long, students start to go missing, and Zora is forced to confront whether the past is really past after all. This is a slow burn, full of rich character and textured details, and the payoff is worth it. Told in dual timelines (one present day, one during Bricksbury’s founding in the 1820s), I’ll Make a Spectacle of You is a Hoodoo-laced dark academia creature feature for our time. The Villa, Once Beloved by Victor Manibo (Nov 25, Erewhon) When his grandfather dies, Adrian Sepulveda brings his girlfriend Sophie home with him to the Philippines. For Adrian, it’s a chance to see family and mourn his grandfather; for Sophie, it’s an opportunity to learn about her own distant Filipino roots. But when a landslide traps the family in their remote villa, long-simmering secrets, conflicts, and curses come to a head, many of which are tied to the Sepulvedas’ involvement with the darkest parts of Filipino history. And for Sophie, the odd woman out, the trip rapidly becomes a fight for survival. What follows is dripping with Gothic atmosphere, postcolonial trauma, bad omens, demons, and more. Manibo’s newest is perfect for readers of Isabel Cañas or Trang Thanh Tran. It never gets easier choosing just a few books to highlight from the dozens released each month—to see the full list of November’s new horror books and beyond, head over to my website.[end-mark] News and Notes Call for 2026 horror titles: I’m deep in the process of compiling my horror new releases list for 2026, and you can help! Let me know about any horror/horror-adjacent books publishing next year right over here. I’m looking for adult, YA, and middle grade books, fiction or nonfiction, publishing in English in the calendar year 2026. Go nuts! ’Tis the season to give horror: Just because Halloween’s over for another three hundred forty-odd days doesn’t mean you can’t continue to peer pressure your loved ones into reading it! Prime gift-giving season approaches, and inquiring minds need to know: what’s the horror book you can’t stop giving people? For me, it’s long been The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins—let me know yours in the comments. 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