HPL 2026 Fiction Spotlight

"A fox spirit sells magical confections to troubled humans, only for them to get a little more than they bargained for"-- Provided by publisher.

"Diana, Justin, Vivian, and Errol have been friends for as long as they can remember. They worked hard and went to good schools, but rather than finding post-grad dream jobs, they've reunited while moving back into their childhood bedrooms. A year out of college, they are still job-hunting in the shadow of the early aughts recession. The four of them could not be more different, but together, away from the watchful, gossiping eyes of their parents,...

"Simone St. James, the New York Times bestselling author of The Sun Down Motel, returns with her scariest, most shocking novel yet in this pulse-pounding story about siblings who return to the house they fled 18 years before, called back by the ghost of their long-missing brother and his haunting request: Come home. Strange things happen in Fell, New York. A mysterious drowning at the town's roadside motel. The unexplained death of a young girl whose...

"Shortly after our narrator, a writer named Julian, begins this compact book by discussing the workings of involuntary memory, he interrupts himself with a bulletin to the reader: "There will be a story--or a story within the story--but not just yet." Of course, whether Departure(s) is mostly fiction or not, there is a lot of its author in it, including Barnes's reckoning with the blood disorder he has been living with since he was diagnosed in 2020,...

After escaping an emotionally abusive marriage, Sylvie Broder heads to graduate school and forms a bold new belief: women will only find true happiness once they abandon romance altogether. Determined to keep love out of her life, she embraces casual relationships and focuses on pleasure without commitment. But when she meets two very different men-kind, steady Robbie and passionate, unpredictable Abie-Sylvie finds her carefully crafted philosophy...

Every Happiness is a dazzling debut that explores the ties that bind two women across decades and continents despite rivalry, class difference, and the conflicting needs of family and self. Deepa and Ruchi are 12 years old when they meet at their Catholic school in India, but their connection is swift and lasting. As the two girls grow up and face their families' expectations and the limits of their ambitions, their friendship is marked by intimacy,...

Remote Western Australia, 1958: here, for generations, the MacBrides have lived on a vast sheep station, Meredith Downs. It is a million acres, an ocean of arid land. On an ordinary day, on a lonely road, under the unending blue sky, patriarch Phil MacBride swerves to avoid a kangaroo. In seconds the lives of the entire MacBride family are shattered. And then, tragedy revisits when a twist of consequences claims the life of one sibling, and leads...

"The human 'oddities' in the Museum of the Strange are less wondrous than the gawking rubes had been promised. But Alida is something else. The real thing. Traveling Depression-era America from carnival midways to speakeasies, Alida is resigned to an exploited and lonely life on the road as the museum's golden ticket--until she's rescued by two compassionate strangers. Franklin and Loretta Fairchild see in Alida a gifted and uncannily well-read girl...

"A woman haunted by a dark inheritance returns to the woods where her mother vanished, in this queer midwestern Gothic -- a butch Black Swan. Sam, finally sober and stable with a long-term partner and a cat in Brooklyn, returns alone to Hemlock, her family’s deteriorating cabin deep in the Northwoods. But a quick, practical trip takes a turn for the worse when the rot and creak of the forest starts to creep in around the edges of Sam’s mind. It...