Books Horror Highlights Demon Descendants and Deadly Diet Culture: Horror Highlights for March 2026 This month’s essential horror titles include malicious hauntings, family scandals, and deadly diet culture… By Emily C. Hughes | Published on March 12, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Everybody already knows about September and October, but honestly, March kind of crept up on me as a Big Month for horror releases. I’m not mad about it, of course, but when I was compiling this month’s list, I kept expecting to hit the end and it just… kept going. There are over fifty new horror books publishing in March—here are just a few I’m really excited about. Partially Devoured: How Night of the Living Dead Saved My Life and Changed the World by Daniel Kraus (Mar 10, Counterpoint) I became fully Kraus-pilled after reading Angel Down last year, and I’m beginning to suspect there isn’t much the man can’t do. He hopscotches between genres and modes without any apparent effort—horror, fantasy, sci-fi, kids’ books, adult books, comics, prose, novelizations, and more. Now he’s entered the nonfiction world with Partially Devoured, equal parts a love letter to George A. Romero’s genre-defining masterpiece and intimate memoir about Kraus’s childhood, grief, and the evolution and erosion of American life over the past sixty-plus years. This one’s a must for any horror movie lover. Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran (Mar 10, Doubleday) For my money, there is nothing more terrifying than a girls’ boarding school, let alone a girls’ boarding school where the girls in question are performing seances to find out what happened to their dead friend. And a girls’ boarding school where a malicious haunting is causing rotten food, sinister events, and an ever-increasing body count? Brother, I am already out the door and down the road. Curran’s buzzy debut also features repressed queer longing and an enemies-to-lovers storyline, in case you somehow needed more reasons to buy it.  You Should Have Been Nicer to My Mom by Vincent Tirado (Mar 10, William Morrow) When the patriarch of a wealthy family dies, he leaves a message for his descendants: one of you is a demon. Everyone takes this about as seriously as you might expect, until a violent storm traps the entire family together in their ancestral home. Before long, scandals are uncovered, secrets come to light, and skeletons are practically falling out of closets, and that’s before the murders start. It’s down to Xiomara to act on Papi Ramon’s final message—as long as she can survive the night. (Plus ten points for the title, which is fantastic.) The Curse of Hester Gardens by Tamika Thompson (Mar 31, Erewhon) There are a lot of variations on the haunted house story out there, and I’m always delighted to see a fresh angle cross my desk. Thompson’s debut novel takes place in a public housing project in Michigan and follows Nona, a woman doing her best to make ends meet while mourning the violent, senseless death of her eldest son and trying desperately to keep her two younger sons safe. Thompson does a beautiful job exploring the community of Hester Gardens: the competing influences of faith and crime, the complicated interpersonal network of resentments, secrets, and expectations, and the way the residents pick each other up when they fall. And the emotional storytelling is exquisitely done—parts of this novel hit me like a physical blow. Pick it up as soon as you can.  Nothing Tastes as Good by Luke Dumas (Mar 31, Atria) I don’t know about you, but if I have to see one more GLP-1 ad while I’m minding my own business trying to watch my shows, I am going to lose my entire mind. Luckily, Luke Dumas is back with his third novel, ready to take direct aim at fatphobia, diet culture, and the weight loss industry. Emmett has struggled with his weight his whole life, and has suffered the social and professional consequences of living while fat. When he’s offered a place in a trial for a miraculous new weight loss drug, he jumps at the chance. But the drug comes at a cost (of course it does—this is a horror novel!), and before long, Emmett is craving something much bloodier than mere acceptance. This is one’s about as timely as it gets. (And if you’re in New England, come see Luke and I talk about this book in April!) It never gets easier choosing just a few books to highlight from the many released each month—to see the full list of March’s new horror books and beyond, head over to my website.[end-mark] News and Notes The Bram Stoker Awards final ballot: This year’s Stoker Award nominees have been announced! You can check out the full list here—highlights include Wendy N. Wagner’s Girl in the Creek on the Novel ballot, Bitter Karella’s Moonflow on the First Novel ballot, and Clay McLeod Chapman’s Acquired Taste on the Fiction Collection ballot. Awards will be announced at StokerCon in early June. (NB to HWA members: you can vote through March 15th!) Zando launches Evil Twin: Independent publisher Zando has announced a new dedicated horror imprint coming later this year. Per the publisher: “Evil Twin will bring readers new and distinctive voices in horror that confront our darkest fears and deepest questions, from psychological twists, to supernatural terror, to bone-chilling gore. The imprint will exclusively publish in the horror genre, focusing on all things unabashedly scary so readers can trust its titles to be unputdownable, unsettling, and utterly inescapable.” Evil Twin will launch with two books in fall 2026: A.P. Thayer’s debut novel Tapeworm (Aug 18) and Abe Moss’s Morsels (Oct 6). By my count, that makes five dedicated horror imprints from Big Five or mid-sized indie publishers: Nightfire (Tor/Macmillan), Run For It (Orbit/Hachette), 12:01 (Atria/Simon & Schuster, launching later this year), and Hell’s Hundred (Soho Press). The post Demon Descendants and Deadly Diet Culture: Horror Highlights for March 2026 appeared first on Reactor.