Roots are tricky things. As Bram Stoker and British Fantasy Award nominated author Gemma Amor explains in her introduction to her edited collection of ancestral horror Roots of My Fears, out from Titan on September 9, they can both tie us to positive forces in our lives but also constrict and trap us. I’ve often found horror rooted in where we come from to be disturbing, as I’ve always felt unmoored from family, country, ancestry, demanding freedom from it all like a hermit Braveheart. But even for those whose roots are forces of good in their lives, horror linked to our familial and ancestral identities is often the most unsettling, not just too close to home but home itself. And in this collection, a group of acclaimed authors combine to drag you down in the tangled dirt with them, and the result is a genuinely terrifying, vivid, and often beautiful smorgasbord of intense family ties horror.

In the strongly interpretive opener “Lamb Had a Little Mary” by Elena Sichrovsky, part symbolism, part brutal reality, a child of an abusive mother is forced to protect their younger sibling. It’s a tale of parental failure versus their offspring’s strength, a vivid punch to the senses, more exposed root canal than family roots. 

Parents continue to not get a great rap in Roots of My Fears: in Premee Mohamed’s stand out “One Of Those Girls”, an American university student from an immigrant family must hide her abortion from her strict parents when she falls pregnant by her college professor, unhelped by the ghostly apparition of a pregnant woman who’s driving her to madness. As always Mohamed’s unique and uncompromising voice drives this story. Meanwhile, in Nadia El-Fassi’s deeply terrifying female body horror/cosmic horror blend “The Saint in the Mountain”, the mother is thinking of anyone but her daughter’s best interests with horrifying consequences. In Ai Jiang’s “Unsewn”, the author uses her precise prose and inventive storytelling to examine the traditions of favouring the birth of sons over daughters and the tricky concept of the simultaneous culpability yet blamelessness of the women participating in this process. 

But parents can be powerful nurturing forces too: in Hailey Piper’s strange ode to parental love and eerie transformation “Crepuscular”, a gifted yet dangerous child and her two mothers travel to an Indonesian island in the hope of a cure to ease their daughter’s more dangerous tendencies, but encounter something terrible from the sea instead. Piper blends parental desperation and hope with the eerie and sci-fi in this powerful tale.

Some stories examine the cultural and political generational spanning effect of roots. In Usman T. Malik’s terrifying timepiece “Laal Andhi”, we are transported to Pakistan in the 1980s and the horror that three young boys discover in an abandoned house, Malik expertly combining supernatural horrors rooted in the region’s lore with the violent political upheavals of the time to paint an unflinching picture of how both humans and legends can conspire to poison our roots as adults. In the unflinching, punchy, and nightmarish tale by Nuzo Onoh “The House that Gabriel Built”, the theme of infernal ancestral vengeance is examined when a villager seeking vengeance for the crimes against his family makes a demonic deal, with consequences for both his descendants and their colonial masters. This tale memorably blends The Fall of the House of Usher with the mythos of the Nigerian Igbo people.

The roots in this collection aren’t put off by concrete. In Erika T. Wurth’s “The Woods”—a bitingly well-written acid trip exercise in hope and horror—a troubled couple beset by grief, arguments, and misplaced machismo check into a Tennessee hotel to discover the vine wallpaper seems to be moving and the forest might have taken root inside as well as outside. And in “To Forget and be Forgotten”, Adam Nevill takes the unique approach of giving us a rootless protagonist, whose only wish is to be apart from a world they find annoying (I emphasised far too much with their wish to be “a gentleman of absence”). But when they get the perfect job as a nightwatchman in a nearly empty apartment block, they discover the place is more sinister than they realised. Like so many stories in this collection, the creeping sense of utter terror is fierce here.

The collection concludes with two intense hits of horror: V Castro’s “The Veteran,” a hauntingly powerful tale of a homeless veteran close to giving up who finds potential salvation in two strangers even as the dark closes in—as strong a story of hope among the horror you’ll read for a while—and Sarah Deacon’s “Chalk Bones”, whose shocking ending is the ultimate demonstrations of the dark power of the roots that bind us all.

Overall, Roots of My Fears is a stand-out collection whose sinister branches conspire to reveal your inner fears, exposing you to vividly well written horrors and the ills of family but also the hope that ties can bring. Amor has curated an unstoppable growth of beauty and terror here—let the roots take hold of you.

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