I recently posted about my favorite novellas of the year, and now it’s time to turn my attention to collections. This felt like an especially strong year for short fiction collections, and I’ve already been lucky enough to read a few coming out next year that make me think 2026 will be equally stellar. There are still posts on novels, anthologies, and stand-alone short fiction on the way, but in the meantime, what have you read this year and loved?
Haunted Ecologies by Corey Farrenkopf
As the title implies, there’s a focus on ecological and environmental horror in this collection. As a result, a strong sense of place suffuses the stories, whether atmospheric and moody or desolate and melancholy, whether smelling of the sea or the deep, piney woods. Other themes that echo across the collection include family, difficult relationships, and people trying to do the best they can to understand each other, even amidst horrors. The collection overall is incredibly strong, but there were a few pieces in particular that stood out. Mother’s Wolves centers on a daughter searching for proof that wolves have returned to Maine while looking for her mother, who disappeared while studying them. Translations for a Dead Sea sees a woman living alone in a cottage on Cape Cod, finishing a translation of an epic poem discovered by her father, which draws monstrous creatures from the sea, but may also provide hope against something worse. Dredging the Bay is the story of a man who recovers trash from the ocean and discovers half a body in a washing machine, leading him to learn of a terrifying local practice of sacrificing people to the sea.
A Catalog of Storms by Fran Wilde
This is a gorgeous and lyrical collection that provides a wonderful sampling of Wilde’s work across fantasy, science fiction, and horror. As with Farrenkopf’s collection, there are themes of ecology and the environment at play here, along with various other themes that recur from story to story. It’s wonderful to see these works brought together and the way, when collected, they are in conversation with each other. There are stories exploring bodily autonomy and freedom, who gets considered a person and who gets overlooked, and who has access to healthcare. This, in turn, speaks to the stories about transformation, bodies changing forms, and people changing themselves through technology, explored through the lenses of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. Some stories crackle with anger, others are meditative, and yet others deploy subtle humor, showcasing Wilde’s range.
The House of Illusionists by Vanessa Fogg
The stories in this collection tend to the mythical and the magical and many of them suggest worlds that extend far beyond the page. The stories throughout are beautifully written, often suffused by melancholy, but offering hope as well. A few in particular stood out. Wild Ones is a heartbreaking story about youth and age as a mother tries to keep her daughter from being stolen by the wild hunt. The Wave is an excellent exploration of seeking an adrenaline high and the difference between real and virtual experiences as a group of surfers take on a massive wave while mind-casting, allowing audiences to experience thrills vicariously. The Message is a bittersweet story about the desire for connection and communication as Sarah shares messages and stories with her best friend who she is in love with but has never met in person, while scientists try to decipher an alien communication which may not even be meant for humans. Wings is a gorgeously written story of a princess who marries a poet against her mother’s wishes, causing her mother to curse the poet to transform into a series of animals so he can never speak again. One Midsummer’s Eve considers what it means to be a myth and being caught in cycles of history as a boy who will one day become the demon prince and destroy his people out of grief for his lost love returns to the garden where it all began with the hope that this cycle will be a happy one.
Teenage Girls Can Be Demons by Hailey Piper
Simply growing up and surviving your teenage years can be a horror, a fact which Piper highlights in this excellent collections that perfectly blends the mundane and the supernatural. Why We Explode looks at the way boys silence girls, as girls explode with unspoken words until one of them learns to fight back. Thagomizer is an effective exploration of fear and guilt as, after burying her son, a mother drives back home haunted by memories and seeing what appears to be her son’s favorite dinosaur stalking her through the trees. The Last Leaf on the Ursine Tree centers on a complicated mother-daughter relationship in a world where periods call hungry bears to follow around the person menstruating, delving into the idea of being a parent and being expected to prioritize others above yourself. Hopscotch is a pleasantly eerie story about a mysterious child who challenges the kids in the neighborhood to a game that causes one of them to disappear. Magic Girl Child Crusade Squad is a satisfying examination of the magic girl trope, what it means to be a perpetual warrior, what happens when you don’t believe in the fight anymore, and what happens to a magical girl when in your day-to-day life people think you’re a boy and not a girl. My absolute favorite story in the collection is the original novelette, The Many Sins of Clara Greenstone. The nuns who run St. Mary’s Home for Girls are cruel, doling out vicious punishments and there are even rumors that they fed one of the girls to the dark thing in the attic. Then Clara Greenstone arrives, a girl in appearance, but possibly a fae trickster or demon in reality, causing chaos for the nuns, but providing the other girls with hope.
Uncertain Sons by Thomas Ha
Thomas Ha has been absolutely killing it in the short fiction realm over the last several years, so it’s no surprise his debut collection is outstanding. He has a talent for stories that drip with uneasiness, are evocative, and often suggest much worse things just out of sight and beyond the margins of the page. Many of the stories I’d read when they were originally published, but it was a pleasure to revisit them. The collection also includes a new novelette, Uncertain Sons. Like many of Ha’s stories, it weaves cosmic horror through a story about family as the Young Bikeman sets out to destroy the thing that killed his father, bringing his father’s disembodied head along for the ride. The descriptions are rich and unsettling, and Ha makes effective use of voice and shifts in perspective throughout, adding both further uncertainty and depth to the tale.
Tell Me Yours I’ll Tell You Mine by Kristina Ten
Like Hailey Piper’s collection, many of the stories in Ten’s collection explore the horrors of growing up. They straddle literary, cosmic horror, dark fantasy, and everything in-between. The Dizzy Room and The Curing both explore the uneasy space of childhood and trying to define yourself, especially as a child of immigrant parents and ESL learner. Bunny Ears is a dark and unsettling tale centered around a ghost story told at summer camp about the bunny-ear kids whose parents never picked them up, who subsequently went feral and still inhabit the woods. Mel for Melissa focuses on mundane horror rather than the supernatural, and it’s one of those most chilling stories in the collection. It does a wonderful job with structure, circling around the central horror of what happened to the protagonist’s best friend Mel when they were in high school. It’s an excellent piece of body horror that delves into trauma, the way women’s bodies in particular are viewed, and the brutality athletes endure in order to win.
The Greatest Fight of Sunny Granada and Other Stories by Kenneth Yu
This slim collection covers a lot of ground and includes speculative and non-speculative stories, humor, science fiction, fantasy, and horror. The title piece, which opens the collection, is quite sweet and carries real emotional weight. Sunny Granada is an interspecies fighter, recruited to be the face of a new league. After he’s knocked out in a fight, his life flashes before his eyes, but the memories unlock they key to beating his opponent. Operation Bleach is a chilling look at internalized racism and racist beauty standards, effectively told through a series of case studies and interviews. A new product called Porselna turns Pinoy people white, with a new version promised that will alter height, features, and eye color. Blending In is the least speculative story in the collection, but one of the most emotional and highly effective. The narrator’s older brother and his best friend Ronel are basketball stars. Ronel’s father has been threatened for telling the truth about corrupt local politicians on his radio show, leading the politician to plant drugs on Ronel. When Ronel’s father tries to defend him, both he and his son are killed in the ensuing fight. The relationship between the two brothers and between the two families are both lovely, and the story provides a nice look at playing the long game and how small actions can have a huge impact in seeking justice.
Call and Response by Christopher Caldwell
Published by Neon Hemlock, this collection is gorgeous inside and out, with lovely sprayed edges and consistently beautiful fiction. Caldwell has a real talent for creating worlds that feel fully realized and like they have a life beyond the page. In fact, there are several stories that call back to and reference each other, or feature the same characters. For example, the stories which bookend the collection – Femme and Sundance and Miz Boudreaux’s Last Ride – are directly linked. The narrator and his boyfriend seek a favor from Miz Boudreaux in the first and face the consequences of the deal they made in the last as she returns after her death to ask them to do a favor for her in return. Similarly, The Beekeeper’s Garden and Counting Her Petals, feature the same character at different points in her life – as a child, lured into a magical garden and enchanted by a woman who wants to keep her like a living doll, and as an adult as she follows her girlfriend into a virtual world and tries to bring her home. Many of the stories have a fairy tale-like feel, and Serving Fish in particular is a take on an animal transformation story. A young drag queen meets a magical, wish-granting fish as a young child, and calls on the fish again later in life to become something more than human.
