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Ellen Poe: The Forgotten Lore by Diana Peterfreund is a YA mystery with a touch of horror, which will officially be released on April 7, 2026. The publishers were kind enough to send me an advance copy for review.

As the title suggests, the novel draws on the works of Edgar Allan Poe for inspiration. Ellen Reynolds is a supposed descendant of Poe from one of his forgotten relationships. Even though it may only be a rumor, much of her family is Poe-obsessed, including Ellen’s aunt, with whom she’s currently living while her father is away for several months on a job. Aunt Marie is trying to launch a Poe-themes Bed and Breakfast, decorating some rooms according to Poe’s theories on furnishings, and others, including Ellen’s bedroom, around his stories. Ellen herself would prefer to downplay her connection, but while helping her aunt sort through boxes, she finds an old journal which appears to have belonged to Poe. It’s written in code, as Poe was known to do, and immediately after finding it, Ellen begins seeing Poe’s ghost. She’s already been having bad dreams since coming to live with her aunt, seeing dead people who appear to be in torment and waking with the feeling of being suffocated. Ellen’s already complicated life is further complicated when a new student named Gus joins her class and she immediately recognizes him as the dead boy from her dreams.

While there are references to Poe’s horror stories and poetry throughout the novel, Peterfreund leans most heavily into Poe as the originator of the modern detective story. There are two intertwined mysteries for Ellen to unravel – the mystery of her dreams and Gus’ death/near-death and the codes in the journal, which as she begins to solve them lead to a larger mystery surrounding artifacts related to Poe hidden across the city in various locations tied to his life and death.

The book is the first in a series, but strikes a good balance between wrapping up enough of the mystery, while leaving other threads open, to feel satisfying on its own. There is a light romance element, but the primary focus is on friendship as Ellen finds someone with common interests who encourages her to be herself in Gus, and also repairs another friendship that fell apart over a miscommunication. The true heart of the story though is Ellen figuring herself out, accepting her strengths and weakness, deciding what kind of person she wants to be, and coming to terms with her family legacy and both the positive and negative aspects of her relationship with her father.

The mystery elements blend well with the coming-of-age elements and the idea of finding one’s place in the world. There are some nice historical tidbits for Poe fans, and Peterfreund does include notes at the back pointing to which elements are taken from Poe’s life and which are inventions of the book. Overall it’s smoothly written and a satisfying read.

I recently posted about my favorite novellas of the year, and now it’s time to turn my attention to collections. This felt like an especially strong year for short fiction collections, and I’ve already been lucky enough to read a few coming out next year that make me think 2026 will be equally stellar. There are still posts on novels, anthologies, and stand-alone short fiction on the way, but in the meantime, what have you read this year and loved?

Haunted Ecologies by Corey Farrenkopf

As the title implies, there’s a focus on ecological and environmental horror in this collection. As a result, a strong sense of place suffuses the stories, whether atmospheric and moody or desolate and melancholy, whether smelling of the sea or the deep, piney woods. Other themes that echo across the collection include family, difficult relationships, and people trying to do the best they can to understand each other, even amidst horrors. The collection overall is incredibly strong, but there were a few pieces in particular that stood out. Mother’s Wolves centers on a daughter searching for proof that wolves have returned to Maine while looking for her mother, who disappeared while studying them. Translations for a Dead Sea sees a woman living alone in a cottage on Cape Cod, finishing a translation of an epic poem discovered by her father, which draws monstrous creatures from the sea, but may also provide hope against something worse. Dredging the Bay is the story of a man who recovers trash from the ocean and discovers half a body in a washing machine, leading him to learn of a terrifying local practice of sacrificing people to the sea.

A Catalog of Storms by Fran Wilde

This is a gorgeous and lyrical collection that provides a wonderful sampling of Wilde’s work across fantasy, science fiction, and horror. As with Farrenkopf’s collection, there are themes of ecology and the environment at play here, along with various other themes that recur from story to story. It’s wonderful to see these works brought together and the way, when collected, they are in conversation with each other. There are stories exploring bodily autonomy and freedom, who gets considered a person and who gets overlooked, and who has access to healthcare. This, in turn, speaks to the stories about transformation, bodies changing forms, and people changing themselves through technology, explored through the lenses of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. Some stories crackle with anger, others are meditative, and yet others deploy subtle humor, showcasing Wilde’s range.

The House of Illusionists by Vanessa Fogg

The stories in this collection tend to the mythical and the magical and many of them suggest worlds that extend far beyond the page. The stories throughout are beautifully written, often suffused by melancholy, but offering hope as well. A few in particular stood out. Wild Ones is a heartbreaking story about youth and age as a mother tries to keep her daughter from being stolen by the wild hunt. The Wave is an excellent exploration of seeking an adrenaline high and the difference between real and virtual experiences as a group of surfers take on a massive wave while mind-casting, allowing audiences to experience thrills vicariously. The Message is a bittersweet story about the desire for connection and communication as Sarah shares messages and stories with her best friend who she is in love with but has never met in person, while scientists try to decipher an alien communication which may not even be meant for humans. Wings is a gorgeously written story of a princess who marries a poet against her mother’s wishes, causing her mother to curse the poet to transform into a series of animals so he can never speak again. One Midsummer’s Eve considers what it means to be a myth and being caught in cycles of history as a boy who will one day become the demon prince and destroy his people out of grief for his lost love returns to the garden where it all began with the hope that this cycle will be a happy one.

Teenage Girls Can Be Demons by Hailey Piper

Simply growing up and surviving your teenage years can be a horror, a fact which Piper highlights in this excellent collections that perfectly blends the mundane and the supernatural. Why We Explode looks at the way boys silence girls, as girls explode with unspoken words until one of them learns to fight back. Thagomizer is an effective exploration of fear and guilt as, after burying her son, a mother drives back home haunted by memories and seeing what appears to be her son’s favorite dinosaur stalking her through the trees. The Last Leaf on the Ursine Tree centers on a complicated mother-daughter relationship in a world where periods call hungry bears to follow around the person menstruating, delving into the idea of being a parent and being expected to prioritize others above yourself. Hopscotch is a pleasantly eerie story about a mysterious child who challenges the kids in the neighborhood to a game that causes one of them to disappear. Magic Girl Child Crusade Squad is a satisfying examination of the magic girl trope, what it means to be a perpetual warrior, what happens when you don’t believe in the fight anymore, and what happens to a magical girl when in your day-to-day life people think you’re a boy and not a girl. My absolute favorite story in the collection is the original novelette, The Many Sins of Clara Greenstone. The nuns who run St. Mary’s Home for Girls are cruel, doling out vicious punishments and there are even rumors that they fed one of the girls to the dark thing in the attic. Then Clara Greenstone arrives, a girl in appearance, but possibly a fae trickster or demon in reality, causing chaos for the nuns, but providing the other girls with hope.

Uncertain Sons by Thomas Ha

Thomas Ha has been absolutely killing it in the short fiction realm over the last several years, so it’s no surprise his debut collection is outstanding. He has a talent for stories that drip with uneasiness, are evocative, and often suggest much worse things just out of sight and beyond the margins of the page. Many of the stories I’d read when they were originally published, but it was a pleasure to revisit them. The collection also includes a new novelette, Uncertain Sons. Like many of Ha’s stories, it weaves cosmic horror through a story about family as the Young Bikeman sets out to destroy the thing that killed his father, bringing his father’s disembodied head along for the ride. The descriptions are rich and unsettling, and Ha makes effective use of voice and shifts in perspective throughout, adding both further uncertainty and depth to the tale.

Tell Me Yours I’ll Tell You Mine by Kristina Ten

Like Hailey Piper’s collection, many of the stories in Ten’s collection explore the horrors of growing up. They straddle literary, cosmic horror, dark fantasy, and everything in-between. The Dizzy Room and The Curing both explore the uneasy space of childhood and trying to define yourself, especially as a child of immigrant parents and ESL learner. Bunny Ears is a dark and unsettling tale centered around a ghost story told at summer camp about the bunny-ear kids whose parents never picked them up, who subsequently went feral and still inhabit the woods. Mel for Melissa focuses on mundane horror rather than the supernatural, and it’s one of those most chilling stories in the collection. It does a wonderful job with structure, circling around the central horror of what happened to the protagonist’s best friend Mel when they were in high school. It’s an excellent piece of body horror that delves into trauma, the way women’s bodies in particular are viewed, and the brutality athletes endure in order to win.

The Greatest Fight of Sunny Granada and Other Stories by Kenneth Yu

This slim collection covers a lot of ground and includes speculative and non-speculative stories, humor, science fiction, fantasy, and horror. The title piece, which opens the collection, is quite sweet and carries real emotional weight. Sunny Granada is an interspecies fighter, recruited to be the face of a new league. After he’s knocked out in a fight, his life flashes before his eyes, but the memories unlock they key to beating his opponent. Operation Bleach is a chilling look at internalized racism and racist beauty standards, effectively told through a series of case studies and interviews. A new product called Porselna turns Pinoy people white, with a new version promised that will alter height, features, and eye color. Blending In is the least speculative story in the collection, but one of the most emotional and highly effective. The narrator’s older brother and his best friend Ronel are basketball stars. Ronel’s father has been threatened for telling the truth about corrupt local politicians on his radio show, leading the politician to plant drugs on Ronel. When Ronel’s father tries to defend him, both he and his son are killed in the ensuing fight. The relationship between the two brothers and between the two families are both lovely, and the story provides a nice look at playing the long game and how small actions can have a huge impact in seeking justice.

Call and Response by Christopher Caldwell

Published by Neon Hemlock, this collection is gorgeous inside and out, with lovely sprayed edges and consistently beautiful fiction. Caldwell has a real talent for creating worlds that feel fully realized and like they have a life beyond the page. In fact, there are several stories that call back to and reference each other, or feature the same characters. For example, the stories which bookend the collection – Femme and Sundance and Miz Boudreaux’s Last Ride – are directly linked. The narrator and his boyfriend seek a favor from Miz Boudreaux in the first and face the consequences of the deal they made in the last as she returns after her death to ask them to do a favor for her in return. Similarly, The Beekeeper’s Garden and Counting Her Petals, feature the same character at different points in her life – as a child, lured into a magical garden and enchanted by a woman who wants to keep her like a living doll, and as an adult as she follows her girlfriend into a virtual world and tries to bring her home. Many of the stories have a fairy tale-like feel, and Serving Fish in particular is a take on an animal transformation story. A young drag queen meets a magical, wish-granting fish as a young child, and calls on the fish again later in life to become something more than human.

As I continue to gather links to eligibility posts and recommended reading lists, it seems like the perfect time to share some of my own favorites reads from the year. I’m still frantically trying to catch up, as always, and I may update the post at some point. There are also other posts forthcoming dedicated to collections, anthologies, novels, and short fiction. Maybe there’ll even be a post for games and media, we’ll see how ambitious I get. For now though, novellas!

Alakazam by Mia Dalia

PS Publishing has carved out the perfect niche for itself with limited edition collections, novels, and anthologies that are lovely as physical objects in addition to being excellent reads. Right off, I feel the need to mention Alakazam’s cover art, which is reminiscent of Stephen Gammell’s unforgettable illustrations for the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series. The piece is a collaboration between Dalia and Michael Marshall Smith, and it’s incredibly eye-catching. The novella follows two friends who become fascinated with a house once belonging to the Amazing Archibald, a magician whose tricks no one ever figured out, who mysteriously disappeared after his retirement. The present-day sections are interwoven with Archibald’s own story – a man with secrets, carrying a deep sadness within himself. It’s soaked in a sense of place, and captures quiet desperation, faded glory, and the feeling of magic perfectly, making for a story that is both haunted and haunting.

The Cosmic Color by T.T. Madden

Speaking of carving out niches, Neon Hemlock has made its mark with novellas, anthologies, and collections, consistently publishing multiple excellent titles each year. Eric is an Instar pilot, a mech-like, partially biological creature designed to fight the Imago, humans transformed by amber – a fuel source that powers the Instars, but can also turn people into insect-like or reptilian creatures. He’s uncertain about his role and the rightness of fighting the Imago, and experiences dysmorphia both inside and outside his Instar. He isn’t sure who and what he’s supposed to be; he just knows doesn’t feel like himself. Stories about mechs are frequently used to explore identity, and The Cosmic Color is a particularly effective example of the sub-genre, looking at how the sense of self can be tied to a person’s physicality, while also looking at both race and gender. The novella also touches on violence and how humans are often more comfortable responding with aggression to something they don’t understand, while also looking at humans being used as cogs in the military machine.

The Iron Below Remembers by Sharang Biswas

This is another Neon Hemlock title featuring mechs, but in a very different context. Here, they artifacts being studied by the protagonist, Laxman – a nerdy academic whose boyfriend just happens to be the most famous superhero in the world. The voice of the novella is a lot of fun, perfectly mixing snark with academic citations, while the plot mixes up superheroes, ancient mechs, and alternate history. The characters are fantastic, and the relationships between them are very nicely done, showing both Laxman’s and Ezra’s insecurities and the ways they each feel insufficient at times, but also showing their deep love for each other and their ability to be open and honest and not allow those insecurities to drive them apart. There’s a strong sense of history and the feeling of a living, breathing world that extends beyond the page, accomplishing a lot at novella length while never feeling rushed.

The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar

This is a gorgeous, fairy tale-like novella that draws inspiration from classic murder ballads and revels in the magic of language. Ysabel and Esther are sister who live on the border of faerie. Their family has always cared for the willows there, singing to them in appropriate seasons and making baskets from their branches. Esther’s lover, Rin, is one of the fae. They visit infrequently and never stay long, which is less than Esther wants from the relationship. Meanwhile, the neighboring farmer is courting her, and trying to pressure her into a relationship, which ultimately leads things to take a dark turn.

Don’t Sleep with the Dead by Nghi Vo

This novella is a sequel to Vo’s novel The Chosen and the Beautiful, which itself reimagines The Great Gatsby, placing the characters from Fitzgerald’s classic novel in a world of magic in a way that makes it feel like that’s where they’ve always belonged. The story picks up several years after the events of the novel, with the dead returning and Nick believing he’s seen Gatsby’s ghost, or perhaps Gatsby himself. The world is richly imagined and beautifully written, blending fae magic and Hell with the world of the Great Gatsby, and doing a wonderful job portraying a character haunted by his past both literally and figuratively.

No One to Hold the Distant Dead by K.L. Schroeder

The novella starts off with visceral and immersive descriptions as Inga is beamed into a receptacle body on the distant planet of Nordenmark, there to help a community in crisis and on the verge of ecological collapse. There are gaps in her memory, and she’s having trouble adjusting to the new body, which feels like it’s dying from the moment she arrives. An air of loss permeates the novella, with the planet being on the brink of failure and the sense that not much can be done to save it. As a press, Psychopomp focuses on stories about death, and No One to Hold the Distant Dead puts a unique spin on the theme with the idea of mourning an entire planet. It’s a thoughtful and caring look at death and finding hope and meaning in a bleak situation.

Quantum Ghosts by Nancy Kress

Published over two issues of Asimov’s Magazine, starting with the May/June 2025 issue, this novella is full of great worldbuilding and characters. It’s tightly plotted, weaving together multiple narrative threads and points of view. Rob Dayson is the younger brother of Cabot Dayson, a senator killed in an attack on the Capitol Building over 20 years ago. Rob is now a senator in his own right, hoping to introduce new experimental quantum implants to the population. Kenda is a young woman caring for her younger sister Caity after their mother’s death, forced to live next to a quantum upload center, leaving their apartment haunted by quantum ghosts. Kress does a wonderful job of ramping up the tension across the two parts of the novella, and along with being a satisfying speculative story, the novella does a good job exploring themes such as who has access to technology, the erosion of public trust, misinformation, and conspiracy theories, among others.

Murder on the Eris Express by Beth Goder

It’s hard to resist a locked room mystery set in space, and Beth Goder’s novella, published in Analog Magazine, is an excellent example of the subgenre. Mo is an AI aboard a ship; after an argument with the captain, she wakes to find hours of her memory missing and the captain dead. The four passengers aboard are all suspects with potential motives and secrets they’re trying to hide. Since Mo has always dreamed of being a detective, she’s thrilled at the opportunity, and sets out to solve the case. The story has a fun voice, great characters, and provides a satisfying mystery to boot.

The Chronolithographer’s Assistant by Suzanne Palmer

This novella, published in Asimov’s Magazine, puts a unique spin on the time travel genre. Thomas comes from a family of fishermen, but he’s terrified of the water. Instead of going into the family business, he gets a job as an assistant to a local artist. Mrs. Hammond is eccentric, often says things that make no sense to Thomas, and her age seems to shift occasionally, but he enjoys the work. However, after making his first print of his own, Thomas opens the door to discover winter in the midst of July. Mrs. Hammond reveals that her press causes her entire cottage to travel in time, and they’ve ended up 400 years in the past, before their town even existed. Ultimately, it’s a sweet novella, and there’s a nice arc for several of the character, especially Thomas as he digs into the roots of his fear of water and finds a way to overcome it. Art as a means of time travel is also a fun concept, and overall, it’s a lovely story.