Leanne Olson

The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The Bewitching follows three generations of women touched by witchcraft: Minerva, a graduate student in the 1990s researching the life of Beatrice Tremblay, a horror author and possible victim of a witch attack that echoes one experienced by Minerva’s grandmother in 1900s Mexico.

I’ve loved everything I’ve read from Silvia Moreno-Garcia. I’m a sucker for historical horror, the way horror can be passed down in families, and stories that span generations of women. My favourite aspect of this book, though, is that Moreno-Garcia’s witches are genuinely scary.

A Box Full of Darkness by Simone St. James

In A Box Full of Darkness, three siblings return to the house they fled eighteen years before, called back by the ghost of their long-missing brother.

I love Simone St. James’ lighter horror, often with a touch of romance and a mystery story. I really loved the sibling relationships in this one: they’re flawed and fascinating people.

It’s a quiet, slow burn but the mystery of what happened to their younger brother (the only child actually loved by their parents) had me hooked.

The Butcher’s Daughter by David Demchuck and Corinne Leigh Clark

The Butcher’s Daughter is an epistolary novel that tells the story of Mrs. Lovett, the pie-baking anti-heroine from the musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

Mrs. Lovett is one of my favourite characters (and favourite Angela Lansbury performance), so I had to read this immediately. I loved the unreliable narrator and complete immersion in the Victorian England setting. The setting is grim and bloody, and I felt like I could smell it.

This one is dark, devastating, and surprisingly funny. Is it weird that I was craving meat pies afterward?

The Caretaker by Marcus Kliewer

A young woman accepts a caretaking job from Craigslist, only to discover the position has consequences far greater—and more dangerous—than she ever could have imagined.

Every now and then I get a craving for a Nosleep-style book, and Marcus Kliewer is my favourite for this. I love when a protagonist has to follow a set of inexplicable rules and just keeps messing it up — to horrific consequences.

I read The Caretaker in one sitting and was completely absorbed.

Exiles by Mason Coile

A locked-room mystery set in a small base on Mars, featuring a human crew who arrives to discover the base damaged and one of three robots missing.

I read this little book in one sitting — it’s such a wonderful concept and hook that kept me guessing.

After reading it, I immediately grabbed a copy of W1ll1am and loved it too. While the author has tragically passed away, he does have a new book coming out this September.

The Haunting of Paynes Hollow by Kelley Armstrong

When Samantha’s grandfather dies, he leaves her the family cottage, with the requirement that she stay there for a month.

Fourteen years ago, Sam caught her own father burying the body of a child in the forest there — but her grandfather always insistent his father was innocent.

Kelley Armstrong’s one of my favourite authors who can write any genre, and I’m so glad she’s gotten into horror. Paynes Hollow mixes her warm, humourous writing style with a mix of mystery, myth, and spookiness.

Also a head’s up for the fall: I read an ARC of her new book, Dive Bar at the End of the Road, and I think it’s my favourite thing she’s ever written. So good.

The Hunger We Pass Down by Jen Sookfong Lee

In this intergenerational saga, a single mother’s doppelgänger forces her to confront the legacy of violence that has shaped every woman in their family.

The Hunger We Pass Down is my first novel from Jen Sookfong Lee, though I see she writes in a variety of genres and I’m curious to check out her other work.

This one a literary horror novel that tells of generational trauma in women of a Chinese-Canadian family. The doppelgänger aspect was wonderfully creepy, and the story of Alice’s great-grandmother’s life as a comfort woman in World War II was heartbreaking.

Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies by Lindsay Wong

A desperate young Chinese-Canadian woman, granddaughter of a powerful witch, signs her life away as a corpse bride to save her family.

This weird, funny, creepy novel is in the running for my favourite book of 2026.

The folklore is fascinating, the concept of being buried alive is terrifying and Wong’s writing is snarky and smart. She gets a bit meta, adding footnotes about her own writing and the feedback given by white professors — as a white woman writer in academia, I was cackling out loud. Such a fun book.

The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts by Kim Fu

I just picked up a copy of this one. I loved Kim Fu’s The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore, so I’m really excited it to read it later this month. This is described on StoryGraph as “an eerie, spellbinding novel of grief and guilt, with a razor-sharp eye for the absurdity and melancholy of the internet age.”