Welcome, friend! Today, I’m thrilled to introduce you to the 17 horror nominees for this year’s Small Spec Book Awards. Like the Fantasy round up, this one was a blast to put together and maybe even a little spookier. I got to explore an incredible range of horror subgenres and storylines, from eerie psychological spirals and Gothic terrors to cosmic decay, killer cults, haunted houses, and monsters made of gears and grief.
First, you’ll find a visual gallery of all the nominated titles (borrowed from the SSBA official announcements). Then, dive into individual spotlights with insight on why you might love each book and some keywords associated with each title. Let’s get started!
🐾 Bear Season by Gemma Fairclough
Publisher: Wild Hunt Books
Links: Purchase from Publisher’s Site, Add to your Goodreads shelf
Why You Might Love This: Set in the haunting isolation of the Alaskan wilderness, Bear Season promises a slow-burn psychological horror about truth, obsession, and the dark things hidden in the woods and in ourselves.
Quick Keywords: Wilderness horror • Missing woman • Survivalist • Psychological unraveling
From the synopsis: When Jade Hunter goes missing in the Alaskan wilderness, everyone is shocked. She was scheduled to speak at an academic symposium but never turned up. What was Jade really doing in Alaska?
🍄 You Will Speak For The Dead by R.A. Busby
Publisher: Stelliform Press
Links: Purchase from Publisher’s Site, Add to your Goodreads shelf
Why You Might Love This: if you like your horror with body-mind melds, haunted interiors, and deeply personal stakes, You Will Speak for the Dead explores memory, identity, and the secrets houses (and people) keep.
Quick Keywords: Eco-horror • Grief and memory • Hoarding• Haunted spaces
From the synopsis: 928 Avirosa isn’t just your normal cleanout. Something in the house is…alive. It’s not just the fungal carpet or the mushrooms growing over every surface, or even the disturbing smell. It’s the woman’s voice he hears inside his head. The creeping sense he’s been invaded.
🔥 Terror at Tierra de Cobre by Michael Merriam
Publisher: Queen of Swords Press
Links: Purchase from Publisher’s Site, Add to your Goodreads shelf
Why You Might Love This: A band of fierce, diverse women face off against an undead shapeshifter with a horse skull for a face. This story promises horror with action, historical flare, and feminist bite.
Quick Keywords: Western horror • Mythic monster • Walking Dead
From the synopsis: An ancient evil has awakened…
In Michael Merriam’s tale, seven women are called to protect a small mining town in the New Mexico Territory, Tierra De Cobre, against an evil that has killed or stolen the town’s men and is twisting the souls of the townswomen.
🌊 From the Belly by Emmett Nahil
Publisher: Tenebrous Press
Links: Purchase from Publisher’s Site, Add to your Goodreads shelf
Why You Might Love This: When a sailor pulls a living man from the belly of a whale, it marks the beginning of a haunting descent into prophecy, madness, and oceanic reckoning.
Quick Keywords: Nautical horror • Gothic atmosphere • Prophetic dreams • Vengeful ocean
From the synopsis: The whaling vessel Merciful has just made its strangest catch: a massive whale containing a still-living man secreted within its stomach lining. Sailor Isaiah Chase is tasked with keeping the enigmatic man alive.
🌽 A Spectre is Haunting Greentree by Carson Winter
Publisher: Tenebrous Press
Links: Purchase from Publisher’s Site, Add to your Goodreads shelf
Why You Might Love This: What begins as a fresh start in a too-perfect small town spirals into a chilling folk horror fable brimming with cult-like wealth, scarecrow symbolism, and revolution. If you like uncanny communities, give this one a try.
Quick Keywords: Folk horror • Cult vibes • Scarecrows • Small-town secrets
From the synopsis: The town is stranger than Carina could have ever imagined.
For one, they still have a video store. For two, everyone is rich.
For three, what’s up with all these scarecrows?
🎸Trve Cvlt by Michael Bettendorf
Publisher: Tenebrous Press
Links: Purchase from Publisher’s Site, Add to your Goodreads shelf
Why You Might Love This: Trve Cvlt is an interactive descent into band drama, religious trauma, and satanic stagecraft that blurs the line between performance and possession. Try something new with this one!
Quick Keywords: Gamebook horror • Occult ritual • Meta narrative • Interactive chaos
From the synopsis: You wake with a brutal hangover, but that can’t crush your spirits: you’ve been invited to take back the drum throne for Abyss, the cult band you co-founded!
🌅 Sundown in San Ojuela by M.M. Olivas
Publisher: Lanternfish Press
Links: Purchase from Publisher’s Site, Add to your Goodreads shelf
Why You Might Love This: In Sundown in San Ojuela, Liz’s return to her hometown sets off a confrontation with grief, generational trauma, and supernatural forces that blur the line between spirits and gods. This book promises an introspective horror that honors heritage and history.
Quick Keywords: Desert Gothic • Family ghosts • Cultural identity • Childhood trauma
From the synopsis: When the death of her aunt brings Liz Remolina back to San Ojuela, the prospect fills her with dread. The isolated desert town was the site of a harrowing childhood accident that left her clairvoyant, the companion of wraiths and ghosts. Yet it may also hold the secret to making peace with a dark family history and a complicated personal and cultural identity.
🩸 The Eater of Flies by Richard Gadz
Publisher: Deixis Press
Links: Purchase from Publisher’s Site, Add to your Goodreads shelf
Why You Might Love This: A gritty Victorian Gothic with a parasitic twist on vampire lore, The Eater of Flies slinks through London’s opium dens, music halls, and blood-soaked alleyways. If you would like to explore corruption, ambition, and survival, check out this unique horror thriller.
Quick Keywords: Gothic horror • Victorian London • Greed & betrayal
From the synopsis: The Eater Of Flies leaves traditional vampiric lore behind, offering a chilling Victorian gothic tale laced with crime, pitch-dark humour and, above all, rampant greed: for money, for power … for blood.
🌲 Mazi by Koji A. Dae
Publisher: Ghost Orchid Press
Links: Purchase from Publisher’s Site, Add to your Goodreads shelf
Why You Might Love This: Mazi explores the haunting intersections of kink, isolation, and mental health.
Quick Keywords: Erotic horror • Psychological unraveling • BDSM & mental health • Cabin isolation
From the synopsis: The debut novella from Koji A. Dae, author of Scars that Never Bled, Mazi is a seductive erotic horror tale inspired by the author’s experiences using kink to deal with mental health issues and the bitter, sometimes isolating winter of the Balkan Mountains.
🛹 Church Of Skatan by Damian Casey
Publisher: Mad Axe Media
Links: Purchase from Publisher’s Site, Add to your Goodreads shelf
Why You Might Love This: What begins as a suburban summer of skating and old friendships turns into a full-blown showdown with a cult and their mechanical monstrosities.
Quick Keywords: Occult horror • Body horror • Friendship vs. evil • 2000s mayhem
From the synopsis: In the backdrop of the early-2000s small-town skate scene, a group of skaters is about to face off against evil cultists…
🎤 Pageant by Wendy Dalrymple
Publisher: Mad Axe Media
Links: Purchase from Publisher’s Site, Add to your Goodreads shelf
Why You Might Love This: A dive into the dark underbelly of child beauty pageants, Pageant combines nostalgic 90s vibes with a fierce psychological horror twist.
Quick Keywords: Psychological horror • Child pageants • Coming-of-age dread • Feminine rage
From the synopsis: Pageant is a psychological pink horror novella that marries the nostalgia of the 1990s with the heart of Little Miss Sunshine and the terror of Carrie.
🌌 The Scientist, The Spaceman, And The Stars Between Them by A.L. Davidson
Publisher: Timber Ghost Press
Links: Purchase from Publisher’s Site, Add to your Goodreads shelf
Why You Might Love This: Blending cosmic horror with queer sci-fi, this tale explores love, isolation, and alien decay on the edge of human survival.
Quick Keywords: Cosmic horror • Space isolation • Love & survival
From the synopsis: After surviving a near-fatal revival from their cryo-pod that permanently damaged their lungs, Dr. London Davies has spent the last two years trapped within the confines of a sterile, sanitized outpost far away from the rest of humanity and their loving husband, Temple.
👁️ Benothinged by Alvar Theo
Publisher: Haunt Publishing
Links: Purchase from Publisher’s Site, Add to your Goodreads shelf
Why You Might Love This: Darkly funny and emotionally razor-sharp, Benothinged is a horror-comedy
Quick Keywords: Grief horror • Existential dread • Dark comedy • Soul-sucking monster
From the synopsis: To survive, Mask needs to do the impossible: find a reason to live.
❄️ Resisters by Chris Campeau
Publisher: Anuci Press
Links: Purchase from Publisher’s Site, Add to your Goodreads shelf
Why You Might Love This: If you enjoy nature as a slow silent threat, check out Resisters where as the power cuts out and the cold sets in and one man descends into obsession.
Quick Keywords: Psychological horror • Winter storm • Canadian Gothic
From the synopsis: A wintery version of Psycho meets The Fog, Resisters explores who we become when what haunts us won’t loosen its grip.
🐍 Through the Blur by Yolanda Sfetsos
Publisher: Anuci Press
Links: Purchase from Publisher’s Site, Add to your Goodreads shelf
Why You Might Love This: Through the Blur promises a chilling tale of family secrets, grief, and ancient legacies. When Peg stumbles upon an impossible room, she uncovers dark truths buried beneath her mother’s silence.
Quick Keywords: Dark family secrets • Portal horror • Hidden legacies • Sisterhood & survival
From the synopsis: Snakes and stones may break her spirit, but the truth can never hurt her.
📻 Static by Stacey L. Pierson
Publisher: Anuci Press
Links: Purchase from Publisher’s Site, Add to your Goodreads shelf
Why You Might Love This: A haunting that spans time and tenants, Static weaves together two ghost stories in one house, blending time loops, dream reading, and eerie disconnection.
Quick Keywords: Time loop horror • Dual timelines • Haunted house • Ghost investigation
From the synopsis: Jesse is beginning to be haunted. Additionally, she is caught in a time loop that she is unaware of until she visits Lorna, the neighborhood dream reader.
🪨 The Briggar Stone by James Parsons
Publisher: Anuci Press
Links: Purchase from Publisher’s Site, Add to your Goodreads shelf
Why You Might Love This: When Katherine returns from presumed death, reality twists around her and her friends in ways that defy time, identity, and mortality. If you enjoy folklore and ritual, this one promises an unsettling read.
Quick Keywords: Folkloric horror • Resurrection • Shape-shifting identities • Surreal dread
From the synopsis: With the strange dogs, her parents hunt to return her to the stone but they themselves are not what they seem.
What’s Next for SSBA 2025 on the blog
I love supporting indie and small press authors, and awards like the Small Spec Book Awards (SSBA) are such a fantastic way to explore a variety of bold, creative, genre-expanding titles. As an influencer championing these awards, I’ll be highlighting nominees and winners throughout the year in a few different ways:
- This post continues my nominee roundup series with a focus on the Horror shortlist. I kicked things off with the Fantasy nominees, and next up in July, I’ll be spotlighting the Sci-Fi titles.
- I also had the pleasure of chatting with SSBA founders Millie and LN in an interview you can read here.
- Don’t miss the Indie Recommendations from Millie and check out LN’s favourites here.
- In September, I’ll be featuring the semi-finalists, with in another possible roundup.
- Finalists and winners will be highlighted and reviewed on the blog!
- You know I won’t miss the opportunity to chat with the winning authors. 😀
You can follow along and catch all the latest updates at the links above. Indie publishing is doing exciting things in speculative fiction, and I’m so thrilled to be part of sharing it with you! Thanks for reading! 🙂
Check out the links below for updates on the Small Spec Book Awards: Official Page, X, Instagram, BlueSky.
Fantasy 2025 SSBA
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