Wrapping Up Reading Challenges of This Year and Anticipated Horror in 2026

All right, friends, can you already hear the snare drums rolling in the distance? Before announcing the bests of the year 2025, I need to come to a closure with all the challenges I plead to finish this year though. It didn't look very rosy until this morning, but I made use of my Sunday to finish some books and rearrange my prompts as well as I can, so that I have finished most of my challenges of the year, except for one. Can you guess which one?

Let's start with the Horror Aficionados challenges. I have just barely finished the Book Cover Challenge (which had a series of prompts about what ought to be on the cover of the books to read) and the Movie Title Challenge (which gave you a series of movie titles and you had to read books dealing with similar themes) but I actually made it, so hooray! (If you wonder how, I researched all the covers of the books I have already read, and switched to different editions which had the book cover motif I needed, so I cheated for some books.) For the Summer Horror Challenge I've read 10 summer horror books and was victorious in that challenge too. The one challenge I couldn't finish is my Mount TBR challenge, for which I needed to read 12 books which are waiting on my shelves for more than two years. I read 10 books but still have two books to go and I don't really think I will be able to read them in the next two weeks, so too bad really. (The photo above shows the end shelves of my home library, where the books, sorted alphabetically according to the authors' last names end, and my TBR begins, which is about 3,5 shelves long. I can't seem to finish those...)

I completed the general Goodreads 2025 Reading Challenge though, for which I pledged to read 100 books, and so far I'm at 111 - much less than last year when it was 153.

For the Shine and Shadow Group I completed both challenges I participated in; Deep Dark Depths Deux for which I've read 15 books of various horror sub-genres and The World Tour Challenge for which I've read books from various countries, including; Japan, Australia, Austria, Nigeria, South Korea, and Türkiye. I really enjoyed this a lot and next year I want to double down and complete this challenge twice with different countries.

All in all it was OK, I didn't really think the challenges were much fun, so maybe I won't join as many in the next year, let's see. 

Now it's time to make space for the new and upcoming book publications! There aren't that many announced yet but one of them made me jump for joy when I saw it, namely This’ll Make Things a Little Easier by Attila Veres.

This wasn't on my bingo card at all, and honestly I was a little worried that The Black Maybe may have been a one hit wonder and I would never be able to read anything by Veres again, so this comes as a nice surprise for the new year. So excited am I that I didn't even read the cover description, because I want to go into it blind, read it without any expectations.

I love the cover already and have been looking for ways to pre-order it, but it's not available anywhere yet, neither our regular supplier at Hammett, Gardners, the German Libri nor the evil amazon, so I guess I just need to be patient and wait, even though I'm kind of giddy with excitement. Really, I can't wait to dive into his world again. 

The second new publication that caught my eye was The Truth of Carcosa by Jacob Rollinson - not that I know anything about the author nor the book, in fact I think it is a debut. But it looks interesting, being the story of a cursed book, told from the perspective of a madman obsessed with said book.

Obviously it is a take on Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow promising a truth about the most terrifying place in the Mythos. If written well, this might be a banger, I always found the first five stories in Chambers' Yellow King book to be the best of cosmic dread compared to more prominent authors' takes, so I'm curious and excited, hopefully this book will live up to my expectation.

So apparently Sauúti is a collective and the universe of the same name this collective created, that focuses on Afro-Centric fiction, and they are publishing Sauúti Terrors: Short Stories from the Unique Universe Created by Contemporary African Writers (ed. Eugen Bacon, Cheryl Ntumy, & Stephen Embleton) shortly, which "tells of the doomed, the damned, the shunned, the cunning, the destroyers, the noxious, and more, in the worlds of the living, the in-between and the dead" - quoted from the cover description.

To be honest, this sounds great to me, and I'm lucky that I'll be collecting all my New Year's presents in the shape of gift cards from Dussmann, so that I can buy and read books exactly like these.

Persona by Aoife Josie Clements. Thumbing through the reviews, I get the impression it's a terrifying story of two trans women who are the mirror image of each other. For some reason I feel like this is written well, let's wait and see.

And finally, I'm anticipating The Midnight Muse by Jo Kaplan, not because I have read anything by Kaplan before or know any of their work, but because it's about the singer of a metal band going missing and about mushrooms, and this being categorized as mycelium-metal horror, and that is something I have never read before, but can't wait to explore.

I'm sure there are many more gems to come, this is basically for the first half of the year and it's incomplete, but a start nevertheless.