This January, I’m counting down my favourite 24 books of 2024.

Check out my Top 8 novels of the year here.

Then read on for my Top 8 Collections of 2024:

8. The Still Beating Heart of a Dead God by Sam Richard (Weirdpunk Books)

True expressions of grief, trauma, and longing for connection, metastasizing into waking nightmares that explore the borders between loss and renewal, between destruction and creation. Richard’s settings are tactile, his characters crafted with an unsettling level of realism – you can smell them, rifle through their things, flip through the black metal records on their turntable shelves – making it even more disturbing when they abandon their real lives to walk paths they don’t consciously choose, trapping themselves in shadowy purgatories.

7. Invaginies by Joe Koch (Apocalypse Party Press)

No one writes fiction like Joe Koch. These stories feel like they take place in the cracks behind the physical world, depicting the phantasmagorical dramas playing out in our unconscious minds. Through dream logic, Koch explores the complexities of identity and memory, revealing truths denied by waking life.

6. Endless Now by Ira Rat (Filthy Loot)

This collection of poetry and microfiction reads like a steadily mounting anxiety attack. Existential dread abounds, culminating in a Godot-quoting one-act play steeped in quasi-apocalyptic paranoia. For maximum impact, read this in one-sitting.

5. Gone to Seed by Justin Lutz (Filthy Loot)

With weird transformations, arcane secrets, and occult rituals, these stories feel like tall tales told by maladjusted coworkers and urban myths found on obscure online forums. Justin Lutz recalls Richard Matheson in his concise style and ability to build palpable suspense in a short space; his fantastical storylines are anchored by fleshed out, plausible characters. No-nonsense, creepy fun.

4. Love Skull by Emma Alice Johnson (Weirdpunk Books)

A greatest hits from bizarro author Emma Alice Johnson that shows the full range of her offbeat, emotional style. The stories range from gentle fantasy romance to absurdist comedy to violent, disturbing horror, arranged to highlight the whiplash-inducing contrasts in tone (the slyly sexy opening story, for example, is immediately followed by the harrowing “Five Ways to Kill Your Rapist on a Farm”). Johnson’s writing is witty and visceral, but her greatest strength is her sincerity; she imbues her tales of lovesick levitating skulls, lonesome centaurs, wistful kaiju fans, and pizza-worshipping cults with genuine tenderness and vulnerability.

3. Red Flags: Stories and Other Disturbances by Charlene Elsby (House of Vlad Press)

Charlene Elsby places troubled characters in dire situations, not to rescue them, but to pin them down and plumb the recesses of their minds. The circumstances range from chillingly plausible (a neglected teen spending a cold night locked out of her trailer) to downright wacky (the self-explanatory fate of an arrogant researcher in “Don’t Stand Around Near the Liquefier”). At times empathetic, often sardonic, Elsby is invariably methodical in her dissection of each disordered psyche, exposing their most taboo desires and perverse pleasures. Comic, cruel, and precise as a scalpel.

2. A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enríquez (Hogarth)

A collection of unnerving tales steeped in magical realism, exploring how trauma stamps itself onto places and people.

Enriquez’s characters are idiosyncratic, neurotic, and often haunted, tuned into the unpleasant realities of life and the dark sides of human nature; terrified ghosts, cursed garments, and hungry demons underscore what they secretly already know. Wondrous and sinister, these stories meander pleasantly before pouncing.

1. Histories of Mgo by Edwin Callihan (Castaigne Publishing)

Histories of Mgois a masterclass in Weird fiction, spanning from modern cosmic horror to sword and sorcery of the most sinister kind. Many of the stories feel like heavy metal albums come to life, featuring ritual cannibalism, occult books, and blasphemy in the age of the dinosaurs.The collection is also an esoteric experiment in setting – the stories revolve around a place called Mgo, which is sometimes a physical location and sometimes a state of mind, presenting as a futuristic dystopia and an ancient empire lost to time.