It might be a bad year in the world, generally speaking, but it has been a great year for books—especially genre books! I love some good literary fiction as much as anybody but I’m a sucker for a good book of magic, dragons, spaceships, monsters, slashers, ghosts, etc...
and so I’ve been combing the calendar for the back half of 2024 to bring you a totally idiosyncratic and absolutely non-comprehensive list of 21 sci-fi, fantasy, and horror books to look forward to. We’re living in a true golden age of genre fiction, so there’s a little something for everyone here—Big Five publishers, small indie presses, novels, short story collections, non-fiction, doorstoppers, single-sitting novellas—but feel free to sound off in the comments with books I didn’t include that you’re looking forward to, too! * The Bright Sword The Bright Sword * Vampires, witches, Black Panthers, ACAB—this one’s got it all. Plus, that cover! I loved Chuck Tingle’s traditional-publishing debut (a terrific possession/demonology novel that managed to both terrify and uplift) and his Tinglers remain an absolute delight, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that is his best work yet.
It deserves to be the literary equivalent of a massive summer blockbuster, and I’m using that term specifically because it is set in Hollywood and written by somebody who : the suits are going to drive us all off the cliff of increasingly crappy AI-driven stories that have zero humanity to them whats.
