From Tentacles to Tea Cosies: October 2025’s SFF-Horror Novels Round-up

There’s a chill in the air, pumpkin spice in the shops and enough new genre news to rival a Small Press stall at FantasyCon. Strap on your jet-pack and hold onto your trilby – here’s what happened in the worlds of science fiction, fantasy and horror during October 2025. Read on for new books (including necromantic knitting), awards, adaptations and other oddities.

New and upcoming novels

Science fiction & fantasy

The boffins over at Reactor (née Tor.com) compiled a veritable buffet of October SF releases.

• Catherine Asaro’s Gold Dust continues her Olympian Dust Knights saga with games in orbit and athletes bouncing through zero-g. If you thought the sports coverage on BBC Two was surreal, wait until you see a discus throw that arcs around a moon. reactormag.com
• David Mack returns to the Star Trek sandbox with Strange New Worlds: Ring of Fire, a novel about a temporal anomaly, an away team and more regulation-breaking than a Tory party conference. reactormag.com
• K.M. Fajardo’s Local Heavens offers a cyberpunk reimagining of The Great Gatsby where an orphaned hacker named Nick Carraway gets seduced by new-money Jay Gatsby in an AI-controlled Philippines. Expect champagne, code and the Roaring Twenty-Forties. reactormag.com
• Ken Liu channels Neuromancer by way of Inception in All That We See or Seem, following dream-artist Julia Z hacking the digital mindscape. Proust for the Post-TikTok generation. reactormag.com
• Jonathan Maberry delivers cosmic horror in Cold War, sending shoggoth fleets to conquer Earth. Our tip: invest in thermal socks. reactormag.com
• Gareth L. Powell releases a collection, Who Will You Save? (Titan Books), offering tales of reluctant heroes and space-whale conservation. reactormag.com

The Guardian’s October review round-up added more titles to our shopping list: theguardian.com

• E.J. Swift’s climate-punk novel When There Are Wolves Again sees activists rewilding extinct predators in a near-future Britain. Prepare for Daily Mail headlines about wolves on the Underground.
• Alexandra Bell locks guests in a time-twisting seaside hotel in The White Octopus Hotel, a mash-up of Agatha Christie and Groundhog Day.
• Thomas Olde Heuvelt (remember Hex?) goes full Wicker Man in Darker Days, where villagers sacrifice their elders for a good harvest. Because apparently a “seniors discount” is not enough.
• Ken Liu’s All That We See or Seem appears again, because dream-heist capers are like buses.
• For those who like their ghost stories with romance, Nicholas Sparks and M. Night Shyamalan team up for Remain, a tale of undead lovers and twist endings.

Book Riot singled out Daniel H. Wilson’s Hole in the Sky, in which a Cherokee Nation father and a Texas astrophysicist confront what might be humanity’s first contact with a spaceship. Expect weather forecasts reading “cloudy with a chance of alien warships.” bookriot.com
They also touted Tasha Suri’s new sapphic fantasy The Isle in the Silver Sea, where a cursed knight and witch are fated to fall in love and repeatedly break up. Think Groundhog Day meets The L Word. bookriot.com

Horror and the dark side

Our pumpkin-spiced hearts belong to horror, and October’s releases didn’t disappoint.

• Brian Asman leads the way with Man, F** This House (and Other Disasters), a collection featuring a haunted house that fights back. Bring salt, holy water and perhaps a structural engineer. reactormag.com
• Grace Byron’s Herculine follows a trans woman who decamps to an all-trans commune only to discover demons in the attic. Estate agents will not mention this in the brochure. reactormag.com
• K.J. Charles offers a locked-room murder called All of Us Murderers where ghosts and etiquette vie for dominance. reactormag.com
• John Hornor Jacobs’ The Night That Finds Us All strands yachters on a haunted sailboat. Because Jaws wasn’t traumatic enough. reactormag.com
• Jenny Kiefer crafts a survival horror in Crafting for Sinners, where a queer woman trapped in a church-owned craft store uses knitting needles to fight cultists. Macramé will never be the same. reactormag.com
• Angela Slatter returns with The Cold House (Titan Books), a novella about grief, secrets and a ghostly residence. Dark, funny and likely to make you suspicious of your boiler. readjumpscares.com
• Mark Waddell’s Colin Gets Promoted and Dooms the World is a workplace satire in which a desperate employee bargains with a demonic CEO for a promotion. HR policies everywhere shudder. readjumpscares.com
• The massive Jump Scares catalogue also flagged Stephanie Ellis’ folk-horror Harrowfield, Edward J. Flora’s small-town murder mystery In the Shadow of a Broken Spire, Jihyun Yun’s YA revenant tale And the River Drags Her Down, and Patrick Barb’s tentacular disaster novel The Big One. Frankly, we couldn’t keep up and had to lie down in a darkened room. readjumpscares.com

Awards: And the winners are…

Nebula Awards 2025

At the 2025 Nebula Awards (announced June 7), John Wiswell’s body-horror-comedy Someone You Can Build a Nest In took Best Novel, A.D. Sui’s The Dragonfly Gambit nabbed Best Novella, A.W. Prihandita’s Negative Scholarship on the Fifth State of Being won Best Novelette, and Isabel J. Kim scooped Best Short Story with “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole”. The Andre Norton YA award went to Vanessa Ricci-Thode for The Young Necromancer’s Guide to Ghosts. In audiovisual realms, Dune: Part Two swept the Ray Bradbury Award for Dramatic Presentation, proving once again that spice must flow and so must awards. events.sfwa.org

Hugo Awards 2025

Over at Worldcon in Seattle, the Hugo Awards crowned Robert Jackson Bennett’s baroque murder mystery The Tainted Cup as Best Novel. Ray Nayler’s eco-SF novella The Tusks of Extinction took Best Novella, Naomi Kritzer grabbed Best Novelette for “The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea” and Nghi Vo won Best Short Story with “Stitched to Skin Like Family Is”. The Between Earth and Sky series by Rebecca Roanhorse triumphed in Best Series. Dune: Part Two also took Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form), while indie roguelike Caves of Qud burrowed away with Best Game. seattlein2025.org

BSFA and other honours

The British Science Fiction Association dished out gongs to some fine folks: Aliya Whiteley’s Three Eight One won Best Novel, Adrian Tchaikovsky snagged Best Shorter Fiction for “Saturation Point”, Isabel J. Kim (again!) won Best Short Fiction for “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole”, and Una McCormack’s Doctor Who: Caged secured Fiction for Younger Readers. Non-fiction and art categories honoured Jenni Coutts, Ted Chiang and Abigail Nussbaum. starburstmagazine.com

The Rhysling Awards for speculative poetry gave Short Poem honours to “Lost Ark” by F.J. Bergmann and Long Poem honours to Mary Soon Lee’s “The Blackthorn”, while the Elgin Awards crowned Pedro Iniguez’s poetry collection Mexicans on the Moon and Katherine Quevedo’s chapbook The Inca Weaver’s Tales. file770.com • file770.com

Coming soon… World Fantasy Awards

The World Fantasy Convention descends upon Brighton from 30 October to 2 November. Finalists include Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Tainted Cup, Yangsze Choo’s The Fox Wife, Morag Sheldon’s The Bog Wife and Ann Leckie’s The Bright Sword. The winners hadn’t been announced by press time, but we predict a riot (probably at the hotel bar) once they are. reactormag.com

Podcast picks and book clubs

The Sword & Laser book club dusted off Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire for October. It’s not new, but it’s perennially relevant; our advice is to pair your reading with a nice glass of claret (or a blood orange mocktail). Elsewhere, a graphic novel spin-off for Dungeon Crawler Carl launched its BackerKit campaign, and fans of text-based dungeons are still arguing about hit points on Reddit. sffbookreview

Deals, imprints and miscellany

A new Aethon & Vault imprint was announced to bring ebook and audiobook hits into print; the first wave includes Larry Correia’s Academy of Outcasts and Andrew Givler’s Ironbound. Good news for those who like their grimdark adventure on paper rather than purely audible. aethonbooks.com

In publishing deal news, Bloomsbury snatched up Duskborn, Callum Broadway-Bennett’s epic fantasy in which a holy warrior must become a vampire to save humanity. Meanwhile, Del Rey acquired Elizabeth Lim’s Fishbone Cinderella, a magical family saga spanning 1940s Hong Kong and 1960s San Francisco, and Berkley preempted Jaclyn Moriarty’s Time Travel for Beginners. Viking also pre-empted Lindsey Anderson Rios’ YA dystopia Bright Light on the Horizon, where teens travel across a fungal plague to recover a vaccine. Publishers Weekly • PW Rights Report

Closing thoughts

That’s October 2025 in a nutshell – or perhaps a cursed jack-o’-lantern. The genre field continues to expand faster than a runaway Dyson sphere, with awards celebrating both blockbuster and indie voices and publishers snapping up everything from time-travel rom-coms to poetry about black holes. If your wallet and bookshelf groan, blame the authors – and maybe the monsters under the bed.

Tune in next month when we find out which World Fantasy nominee triumphs, whether the haunted craft-store yarn can defeat evil, and if anyone has invented a self-brewing kettle for late-night reading. Until then, keep your towel handy and may your reading pile never topple on you.