Sinister Societies: Six Novellas of Secrets and Horrors
Edited by Linda Hartley
Paperback/Ebook
ISBN: 978-1968143039
Ruadán Books, December 9, 2025, 520 pgs

A religious town tucked deep in the Appalachians. A Nazi-occupied island off the coast of Italy. A tunnel deep in the mines. An abandoned graveyard. A remote, isolated village. The back alleys and docks of 1920s Cleveland.

These places hold secrets tinged with the dark fantastic in the anthology Sinister Societies, edited by horror veteran Linda Hartley. The six novellas in this collection explore the darker sides of secret societies, ancestral secrets, and hidden horrors. If you’ve ever seen or read horror before, nothing here will surprise you, but while all of the stories have familiar settings, they all take wildly different approaches to well-trodden horror fiction paths. The result is six very different, very entertaining horror stories.

This may not seem like the most seasonal of choices for this month’s review but hear me out. These are pulpy, straightforward popcorn reads. They’re pure fun and adventure for horror fans, with a few deeper moments here and there. This book is perfect for sitting on the couch with a plate of leftovers in the post-holiday rush when you’re sick to death of carols and goodwill and you want to cleanse your palate with something spooky, not too deep, but fun to read and full of action and intrigue.

Like any collection, there’s a variety of storytelling styles and everyone will resonate with different ones and have their favorites. For me, Errick Nunnally’s “Agent Josephine Baker Against the Island of Horrors” is a fun and culturally redemptive take on Black American cultural legend Josephine Baker. The real Josephine Baker was a ground-breaking entertainer who paved the way for Black women onstage and onscreen on two continents from the 1920s until her death in the 1970s. In 2020, declassified government documents revealed that she was also an actual spy for the French resistance and an intelligence asset for both the US and British secret service during WWII. Nunnally’s story imagines into this unexpected facet of her life and adds a horror element that taps into a very common phobia and somehow redeems it. It’s steeped in knowledge of the period. Baker and her sidekick Max form quite a classy duo as they travel across WWII Europe in search of evil to eradicate.

Another standout is “The Witches of Paradise,” by Mercedes Yardley. Out of all the stories here, this one perhaps takes the broadest approach to the anthology’s theme. Its exploration of a gifted line of women and their relationship to their birthplace and neighbors has a fairy-tale stateliness that contrasts well with the harsher elements of the tale. It’s also one of the saddest stories. There’s something deeply crushing about characters repeating generational tragedies because of a secret they don’t even know they hold.

My absolute favorite novella shared here is Sarah Read’s “Cult of the Rat King.” It pulls together so many familiar elements—pickpocket gangs, orphan children, secret societies, creepy graveyards, mysterious magical objects—and spins them into a fully realized little world that plays by its own unique rules. I don’t want to spoil it by giving too much of the plot away, but this is the kind of story that sucks the reader in, dives underwater, then spits them back out on the other shore gasping. The way this story slowly unravels a transfer of power between underground powers and the inevitable revelations of the unnamed main character’s past was really compelling, and I’d gladly read a novel about what happens to her after the final page of this story.

If you’re looking for a collection of novellas to speedrun you through some familiar yet well-crafted horror adventures, have a penchant for secret societies, or just want to wrap your inner Grinch around something a little less holly and jolly—check out Sinister Societies.