Most anticipated SFF & horror of 2024

It’s an increasingly dark world out there, with horror’s continuing ascendance and gloomy spins on seemingly every subgenre: Katherine Arden explores the terror of the trenches, Stephen Graham Jones brings his Indian Lake trilogy to a grand (Guignol) finale and Leigh Bardugo sets up shop in the Spanish Inquisition. But glimmers of hopepunk remain, especially in the return of Catherynne M. Valente.

Available 1/23/2024

Science Fiction

Exordia

By Seth Dickinson

The author of the acclaimed Masquerade fantasy series, which follows a woman who infiltrates a powerful empire in order to destroy it from the inside, Seth Dickinson is so devoted to intricate world building that some have labeled his work “hard fantasy” (a la hard science fiction, a subgenre replete with details of futuristic technology). So it’s hardly surprising that Dickinson will be making the leap to sci-fi this year with Exordia, an absolutely wild tale of first contact.

Available 1/30/2024

House of Flame and Shadow

By Sarah J. Maas

After a cliffhanger that left readers in utter shambles at the end of House of Sky and Breath, Sarah J. Maas’ return to Crescent City is eagerly awaited even by her towering standards. Fans of her other fantasy series know that Maas often waits to reveal the full extent of the story she’s telling until the second or third book in a series; whatever’s revealed in House of Flame and Shadow could blow the preceding book’s cliffhanger out of the water.

Available 2/13/2024

Fantasy, Historical Fantasy

The Warm Hands of Ghosts

By Katherine Arden

The author of the marvelous Winterlight trilogy returns to historical fantasy with this haunting tale set during World War I. Former nurse Laura Iven’s parents recently died in an accident, and her brother, Freddie, was declared MIA. But what actually happened to Freddie is far stranger.

Available 3/26/2024

The Angel of Indian Lake

By Stephen Graham Jones

The third and final installment in Stephen Graham Jones’ acclaimed horror trilogy, The Angel of Indian Lake will find horror aficionado and final girl extraordinaire Jade Daniels returning home to the very unlucky town of Proofrock, Idaho. Jade’s spent the four years since the conclusion of Don’t Fear the Reaper incarcerated, and after she’s released, it’s time for a showdown with the evils that lurk within her hometown.

Available 4/09/2024

Historical Fantasy

The Familiar

By Leigh Bardugo

Full of hidden perils and twisting machinations, The Familiar is Leigh Bardugo’s most assured and mature work yet.

Available 4/09/2024

Horror, Science Fiction

Ghost Station

With its thoughtfully crafted characters, top-notch pacing and ever-present sense of dread, Ghost Station is another sci-fi horror hit from S.A. Barnes.

Available 4/09/2024

The Hemlock Queen

By Hannah Whitten

Hannah Whitten won a fan base with her fantasy Wilderwood duology, and last year’s The Foxglove King proved her bona fides with a tale that was darker and more ambitious than her first two novels. Its sequel, The Hemlock Queen, finds Bastian and Lore seemingly on top and on the verge of changing the city of Dellaire for the better, but in the time-honored tradition of second installments everywhere, things are not only about to take a turn for the worse, but they’re also about to get much more complicated.

Available 4/23/2024

First Light

Liz Kerin’s Night’s Edge was the best new spin on the vampire novel in ages, and First Light will continue the story of Mia, who’s now on the hunt to find the man that turned her mother into one of the undead.

Available 4/23/2024

The Dead Cat Tail Assassins

By P. Djèlí Clark

In a genre dominated by long, epic fantasies, P. Djèlí Clark’s The Dead Cat Tail Assassins is a breath of fresh air.

Available 5/07/2024

Science Fiction

Space Oddity

By Catherynne M. Valente

Space Opera, Catherynne M. Valente’s hilarious “Eurovision in space” novel, was one of the harbingers of the hopepunk ethos in SFF, and now another round of the Metagalactic Grand Prix (the high-stakes singing contest that has replaced warfare between alien worlds) is about to begin. Humanity eked out a win in Space Opera, which means they’re the race to beat in Space Oddity.

Available 6/04/2024

Science Fiction

Service Model

By Adrian Tchaikovsky

One of the finest purveyors of hard sci-fi writing today, Adrian Tchaikovsky writes on enormous, galaxy-spanning canvases, but with a sense of detail that extends down to the tiniest cog. With his uncanny ability to make heady concepts feel achingly human, there is perhaps no one better suited to write about a robot uprising and make readers root against their own species.

Available 6/11/2024

Science Fiction

Cuckoo

By Gretchen Felker-Martin

Gender-based dystopias have proved to be, ahem, very controversial in recent years, not to mention downright disappointing. But then there is Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt, shining like a blood-covered beacon. The odyssey of two trans women trying to survive in a world where a plague has turned anyone with high levels of testosterone into heinous monsters, Manhunt zeroed in on the people and problems lesser dystopias ignore. Her sophomore novel, Cuckoo, will demand a similarly tricky balance of genre thrills and sensitive character work. Set at a conversion camp, Cuckoo follows a group of former campers who reunite to face down the evil entity that they survived as teenagers.

Available 7/23/2024

Hera

By Jennifer Saint

Feminist Greek mythology retellings have been in vogue for a while now, and Jennifer Saint’s novels are among the best of the best (with the very top of Mount Olympus reserved for Madeline Miller, of course). Her previous three books have focused on heroines (Ariadne and Atalanta) and avengers (Elektra), but her next work will be the first to star an outright villainous figure: Hera, Zeus’ jealous and vindictive wife. The goddess of marriage, Hera is a figure that practically begs for a more sympathetic reappraisal given our modern perspective on Zeus’ unfaithfulness and cruelty.

Available 8/20/2024

A Sorceress Comes to Call

By T. Kingfisher

With both gut-clenching scenes and moments of heartwarming humor, A Sorceress Comes to Call is the Regency-fantasy-horror hybrid only T. Kingfisher could write.

Most anticipated by genre

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