Welcome to Dreadful Digest, Vol. 8, where the common thread is not “quality control” but endurance. This batch wades through splatter that wants to outgross you, witches who survive by rules and grit, sea stories that smell like rot and diesel, gothic poisonings slow enough to gaslight you, and anthologies that dare you to keep reading in broad daylight. Some of these books bite. Some of them gnaw. A few just smear themselves on your shoes and wait to see if you flinch. That’s the point. This isn’t a victory lap of masterpieces, it’s a field report from the trench where indie horror is trying things, fucking some of them up, and occasionally nailing the landing hard enough to make you sit up straight. Expect seawater, bile, wards, curses, and at least one “why am I still reading this” moment. No mercy, no marketing copy, no pretending splatter equals substance. Let’s dig in.

Stories to Take to Your Grave Volume 3: A buffet of dread with a side of scurvy.

Salt air, rope burn, and that specific ocean funk that says “you’re about to learn something awful.” Stories to Take to Your Grave: High Seas Edition (edited by D.L. Winchester) is a 16-story nautical grab-bag that works the water from coast to deep sea, from ghosts to “strange creatures,” with a clear theme and a big “come on in, the tide’s fucked” welcome mat. The best pieces hit that claustrophobic, shipboard-stress sweet spot: “Cabin Nine” drops you into a luxury yacht run gone wrong, where the one rule is do not open that door, and the tension tightens until it’s pure panic meat. “The Draugr” goes colder and more folkloric, starting with a boat returning wrong and ending in full-on corpse-stink monster business.

This collection is more “solid, readable indie horror with good variety” than formally unhinged weird, and that’s both the selling point and the ceiling. Winchester’s intro makes a big deal (rightly) about new voices and first acceptances, and you can feel that earnestness in the mix: some entries swing hard, others play it clean and film-ready. If you want sea-flavored scares with a few nasty standouts, you’ll have a good time. If you need every story to be a barnacle-encrusted masterpiece, you’ll be muttering “fine, whatever” into your rum.

Published January 30, 2026 by Undertaker Books.

Just the Tip: The American Dream is a wet noise.

A low score for Just the Tip by Rob Nelson, which is a shame because the book absolutely commits to escalation. It just does it in a way that feels more like an endurance test than a weird little triumph. Jesse, broke and spiraling, starts delivering food to keep his head above water, then a delivery goes violently sideways and he finds himself sliding into a new, ugly appetite that keeps getting worse.

The pacing is relentless and the chapters are built to shove you forward, and the gore is described with full-body, wet-mouthed certainty. But the engine leans hard on shock mechanics (sexualized gross-out, degradation, gore set-pieces) without enough tonal invention or craft-side surprise to make the nastiness feel earned instead of merely stacked. Even the occasional dark humor and abrasive banter (Dolores gets the best of it) can’t consistently alchemize the grime into something sharper. This is for splatter diehards who want maximum mess and don’t care if the book is basically yelling “more!” until the lights go out. If you’re looking for wit, weirdness, or a fresh angle on body-horror hunger, you should probably skip.

Published January 16, 2026 by Rob Nelson.

A Slow and Secret Poison: Gothic chic, with a side of control issues.

Carmella Lowkis’s A Slow and Secret Poison is a gothic pressure-cooker where the scariest thing in the room might be the manor, or it might be the people who know exactly how to make you doubt your own damn senses. Vee lands at Harfold and gets pulled into Arabella’s orbit, where the story’s hook is simple and nasty: Arabella insists Harfold is cursed, one death every three years in inheritance order, misfortune stacked like kindling, and “something” that wants to wipe the family out. The catch is the book keeps grinding that supernatural claim against a very human one: that “curse” talk can be a tool for control, dependency, and isolation, especially with Reacher whispering poison into everyone’s ear.

Lowkis sells the mood and the slow rot. The garden-work texture is tactile, the dread comes in incremental contaminations (even the flowers start looking sick), and the diary trail gives the paranoia a paper-cut edge instead of big BOO theatrics. It’s solid, not great: a controlled burn with a satisfyingly bitter bite when the “is it a curse or is it cruelty” question tightens. This is for readers who like their gothic fucked-upness grounded in manipulation and grief more than jump scares. If you need maximal strangeness or stylistic risk, you’ll likely shrug.

Published January 22, 2026 by Atria Books.

We Call Them Witches: Faith, fear, and “please don’t open that.”

India-Rose Bower’s We Call Them Witches has a voice that feels like it’s talking to you across a barricaded doorway: tired, sharp, darkly funny, and absolutely not interested in pretending the world is fine. After the first nights when “nearly everyone died,” Sara and her people cling to a hard-won folklore logic, because whatever the “witches” are, you survive by rules, wards, and not getting cocky for even a second.

The craft strength is that pragmatic-survival texture: the book takes its protections seriously (running water, wards, rowan, an adder stone passed down), and builds dread by showing how fragile those systems feel when the screaming starts and shapes move just beyond the line. Bower’s bleakness is lived-in rather than performative, and the emotional hits land because the day-to-day is so grounded, like lessons that prioritize maps, signs, scavenging, and “which berries… will leave you shitting for weeks.” It’s not a “what the fuck did I just read” trip, it’s “this world is fucked and I believe it,” which puts it solidly above average without tipping into full-on standout-weird.

Published January 22, 2026 by Poisoned Pen Press.

Fucked Up Stories to Read in the Daytime Vol. 2: Six ways to ruin your lunch break.

Fucked Up Stories to Read in the Daytime Vol. 2 is the follow-up to the collection that started Filthy Loot‘s horrific underground reign. Ddesigned & compiled by Ira Rat, edited by Amy M. Vaughn, the collection is not talentless, not pointless, but too often it confuses escalation with invention. Six shorts sprint from a “costume party baptism” bender to abjection-monologue slime, an end-times TV bunker mantra (“Don’t open the door for nobody.”), scat-splattered writer satire, an aggressive fast-food “secret menu” screed, and a late-game culty body-morph glow-up into something not remotely HR-compliant.

When the voice is doing the work, it sings. Elsby’s gelatinous, self-lacerating address has real texture and churn, and von Hessen’s confrontational pamphlet energy is genuinely funny in that “you’re being yelled at by a cursed PDF” way. But a lot of the collection leans on gross-out and degradation as the primary engine, and once you’ve clocked the vibe, the surprises start feeling like louder versions of the same note (yes, including the literal shit-firehose sequence).

This is for readers who want an endurance-test splatter grab-bag with a couple of sharp voice-driven wins. Skip if you’re allergic to scat, sexualized nastiness, or casual apocalypse brutality.

Published by Filthy Loot.