The teenage years can be hard. You have to worry about dating and friendships and family and things and people changing, growing, and it can feel like everyone is moving on without you and you’re all alone. Sometimes you feel like you may not even recognize your friends as they develop interests apart from you or a new relationship. What happens when the reason you don’t recognize them is because they really aren’t themselves anymore?

The House of Illusionists and Other Stories by Vanessa Fogg is a charming collection of speculative stories about love, connection, family, life, death, and more, with lyrical languages and ranging from fantasy to horror to magical realism to sci-fi to a beautiful folkloric tale within a tale.

A mix of horror, mystery, and dark humor, with a dash of nostalgia thanks to the mid-90s setting, this second entry in the Bless Your Heart series is as comforting as a cozy mystery - though the body count and some descriptions of gore - not to mention the snark of high school homecoming queen wannabes - probably bump it out of the cozy category.

Every neighborhood has a haunted house, and in thirteen-year-old Jessie’s neighborhood, that’s the McIntyre place, and like any teenager, she just wants her eight-year-old brother Paul to go away so she can listen to her music, so she dares him to go into the McIntyre place just to get him out of her hair for a few hours. She had no way of knowing she would never see him again or that it would destroy her family.

“Stories are medicine,” says Cynthia Pelayo in her story, “We Women Speak of Wolves” from Howl, the new werewolf anthology edited by Lindy Ryan and Stephanie M. Wytovich, and reading these stories made me feel the truth in that.

Howl is a powerful collection by women authors with a thread of werewolves, but they’re really about power, strength, love, hate, bodies, sex, hunger, desire, loneliness, fear, rage, and the aspects of those that are inherent to womanhood.

Hazelthorn by C. G. Drews is a Gothic tale complete with the classics, a crumbling mansion, mysterious atmosphere, and creepy family members, and modern trappings such as a queer romance, botanical body horror, and being othered - so, yes, it is right up my alley.

The 31st Trick-or-Treater by Ben Farthing was intended to be read as a Halloween advent, one chapter a day - passing as if in real time, and, as such, it was very effective.

A mix of folk horror and true crime - if you’re me, that’s enough to draw you in - but what makes The Sound of the Dark by Daniel Church special is the characters - especially relatable heroine Cally Darker.

The House Saphir by Marissa Meyer is a thrilling reimagining of the Bluebeard story with a tough, funny heroine and filled with magic, romance, and all the gothic-y goodness of the folktale that inspired it.

Witches of Dubious Origin by Jenn McKinlay is a cozy witchy fantasy filled with libraries, curses, and romance - like all the best cozy witchy books.

Psychopomp and Circumstance by Eden Royce is a quiet Southern Gothic tale of family secrets and the power of choice that takes place in an alternate magic-filled version of Reconstruction-era South Carolina.

Herculine by Grace Byron is a funny, sad, horrific story about friends, family, and being sacrificed to or otherwise ripped apart by demons.

And bonus points for the reference to the dark Americana popularized by shows like Twin Peaks. I don’t even like pie, but, thanks to Dale Cooper, I always want to have pie in diners.

The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow is a thrilling, time-traveling fantasy adventure about the lust for power and the power of love, about heroes and villains, about history and mythology and the stories we tell and how those stories change us and the world. 

Girl Dinner follows two women, college sophomore Nina Kaur, eager to join the most exclusive sorority on campus, known as “The House”, and adjunct professor Sloane Hartley, returning to work after giving birth to a daughter Isla, now 18 months old. Nina becomes the first sophomore to join the sorority, and Sloane is asked to be the House’s academic advisor, and they both realize that something sinister is going on as the benefits of being a part of this feminine space are unusually exceptional as all the girls are extremely healthy and beautiful- and go on to be extraordinarily successful in their chosen careers - more than can be accounted for by simple sisterhood.

Rebecca Cuthbert’s The Hauntings Back Home is a beautiful, haunting, sweet, sad, funny collection of stories that explore grief, death, and fear.

Kill the Beast by Serra Swift is a mostly cozy fantasy about identity, found family, and forgiveness with plenty of adventure, humor, and a little romance.

Lyssa is a complicated heroine, who overcharges the rich so she can defend the poor - but she also has a heart filled with vengeance and becomes enraged at the sight of and kills all hounds and other creatures in search of the Beast that killed her brother which has earned her the nickname of “the Butcher”.

The Haunting of Payne’s Hollow by Kelley Armstrong has a classic horror premise: to earn a family inheritance from her grandfather, Samantha Payne must stay at the family’s lakeside cottage for one month.

Happy People Don’t Live Here by Amber Sparks is a quiet, atmospheric cozy gothic horror that is darkly humorous with an undercurrent of melancholy.

Margaret Culpeper is desperate. She has a rare autoimmune disorder whose symptoms - especially the pain - and the impact they have on her make it hard to keep a job or relationships; even her family doesn’t understand, and she’s struggling to stay afloat. So when she gets an opportunity to join a highly experimental study at Graceview Memorial Hospital - which includes a stipend along with complete coverage of all treatment expense - that could cure her, she is quick to accept, in spite of an urgent warning she receives from Isabel, one of the nurses, who urges her to leave.

One of Us by Dan Chaon explores themes of the self, otherness, found family, and what it means to live and die in the trappings of a thrilling adventure novel.