Cover Reveal: Smoke Season by Carrie-Edmund Laben

As first revealed on the Night Worms Instagram today, Word Horde proudly presents Smoke Season, a new novel in the tradition of Arthur Machen from Carrie-Edmund Laben, author of A Hawk in the Woods, featuring another fantastic cover from Matthew Revert!

Smoke Season by Carrie-Edmund Laben

Preorder today from Word Horde, and you’ll also receive a bookplate signed by Carrie-Edmund Laben, and a free eBook.

“A mystery that begins with the hazy memory of a forgotten sibling in a cage, spirals outward, entwining dark conspiracy with visions of utopia. Mesmerizing and unlike anything else you’ve read, Smoke Season will challenge your notions of what Weird and political fiction can achieve.” —Paul Tremblay, NYT bestselling author of Horror Movie and Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep

Cover Design by Matthew Revert

Pub Date: June 30, 2026

Format: Trade Paperback
ISBN-13: 978-1-956252-12-5

Format: eBook
ISBN-13: 978-1-939905-81-9

John Langan’s Lost in the Dark Nominated for the Bram Stoker Award!

Lost in the Dark and Other Excursions

Super excited to see that John Langan’s Word Horde collection Lost in the Dark and Other Excursions has been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award® for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection. Congratulations, John!

Thanks to all the HWA members and Stoker jurors who recommended it and congratulations to all the other Stoker nominees! It’s an outstanding ballot this year.

It takes a village to make a book, so we’d also like to take this opportunity to give shout-outs to cover artist Matthew Jaffe, cover designer Scott R. Jones, and copyeditor Shannon Page.

Release Day for Notes from Underground by Orrin Grey

Get ready to travel to subterranean realms with Orrin Grey!

From author, editor, amateur film scholar, and skeleton Orrin Grey comes a new collection of seven uncanny tales that together form a linked story sequence of cosmic horror and masterful strangeness.

Order Notes from Underground: The Hollow Earth Story Cycle now from local independent booksellers everywhere (including the Word Horde Emporium of the Weird & Fantastic), most online retailers, or direct from us.

“With Notes from Underground, Orrin Grey uses the fantastic imagery of the high strange and the charming weirdness of pulp adventure stories as gateways to deeper, murkier depths. He tunnels deep into the honeycombed caverns of his characters’ interior lives and shines a light on what lurks there. A wonderful collection quite unlike any I’ve read before.” —Trevor Henderson, author of Scarewaves