The 10 Best Upcoming Fantasy Books To Read in Fall 2026
Diego Pineda has been a devout storyteller his whole life. He has self-published a fantasy novel and a book of short stories, and is actively working on publishing his second novel.
A lifelong fan of watching movies and talking about them endlessly, he writes reviews and analyses on his Instagram page dedicated to cinema, and occasionally on his blog. His favorite filmmakers are Andrei Tarkovsky and Charlie Chaplin. He loves modern Mexican cinema and thinks it's tragically underappreciated.
Other interests of Diego's include reading, gaming, roller coasters, writing reviews on his Letterboxd account (username: DPP_reviews), and going down rabbit holes of whatever topic he's interested in at any given point.
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Any bookworm knows what the arrival of fall means: the publication of what are bound to go down in history as some of the best books of perhaps not just 2026, but the 2020s as a whole. Indeed, publishers often save some of their biggest heavy-hitters for September, October, and November, and that most certainly includes fantasy books.
Fans of the genre can expect cozy fantasy books that coincide with the weather getting significantly colder, dark academia novels that fit the back-to-school vibes of the season, and spooky dark fantasy that's perfect for a quick Halloween season read. All in all, fall of 2026 is likely to see the publication of many a fantasy novel that fantasy bookworms should definitely consider checking out.
'Strange Is the Light' - September 8
Irish writer, poet, and podcaster Sarah Maria Griffin has been writing substantially acclaimed novels for the young adult market since 2016. Ten years after the publication of Spare and Found Parts, her debut novel, the world will be treated to her fifth novel to date: Strange Is the Light, an adult science fantasy and dark horror gem where estranged childhood friends must return to a coastal Irish village twenty years after inadvertently opening a reality-warping rift into a dangerous dimension.
Perfect for those who love tabletop RPGs and nostalgic coming-of-age tales like Stranger Things, Strange Is the Light is a uniquely atmospheric and deeply emotional exploration of childhood friendship. Fantasy fans who love when the genre gets cleverly genre-blending should love this novel, which was published earlier this September and can be purchased on Amazon.
'The Rouse' - September 15
Weird fiction is a subgenre of speculative fiction that blends horror, fantasy, and sci-fi with the specific purpose of eliciting feelings of uncanniness, genre-bending confusion, and cosmic dread. Among weird fiction authors, China Miéville stands out as one of the most important, a hugely influential and radical novelist perhaps best known for his masterpiece Perdido Street Station. This year, he's releasing The Rouse, an epic about a mother's profound grief spiraling into a vast paranormal and military conspiracy.
For people who love novels that go off the rails, the absolute 1,300-page behemoth that is The Rouse will more than likely prove to be absolutely essential reading. It's a sweeping love letter to literary maximalism which, while definitely not for everyone, should resonate with those who love fantasy that's emotional, complex, stunningly written, and politically timely. Miéville, whose contributions to the New Weird movement helped permanently transform modern speculative fiction, has written a novel deserving of being considered his magnum opus. The Rouse came out earlier this September and can be purchased on Amazon.
'Bodies of Magic' - September 15
USA Today bestselling author Freya Marske is a prominent author in the realm of queer romantasy, whose debut novel A Marvellous Light earned her significant praise and awards. Her latest work is Bodies of Magic, a dark academia mystery where five healer mages from a magical medical school have five days to solve a murder while passing a high-stakes group exam.
Pitched as a sort of love child between Grey's Anatomy and A Deadly Education, Bodies of Magic functions equally well as a gripping murder mystery, a cozy dark academia novel, and a refreshing story where society is queer-normative. Its multi-POV structure is quite compelling, and its slow-burn romances are delightful. The book came out this past September and can be purchased on Amazon.
'The Court of Venus' - September 29
Romance has been around in the fantasy genre since pretty much the invention of fantasy storytelling, but romantasy as an actual, proper genre didn't explode in popularity until after the COVID-19 pandemic. From that wave of popularity now comes Bel Banta's The Court of Venus, about a magician blessed by the Moon who must team up with her childhood rival in order to solve a murder in a deadly royal court.
Court of Venus should be considered nothing less than a must-read for people who love murder mysteries and tropes like magic tournaments, slow-burning romance, and rivals-to-lovers relationships. Beautifully romantic and endlessly creative, Banta's book should satisfy all of those cravings and more. It came out late this past September and can be purchased on Amazon.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes What Fantasy World Do You Belong To? Middle-earth · Grand Line · The Continent · Camp Half-Blood
Pick your magic, your crew, where you want to wake up and who you would rather be fighting, and we will tell you which world you actually belong in. Four are open to you: an ancient kingdom living through its last good age, an endless sea full of pirates, a continent that pays people to kill monsters, and a summer camp where the Greek gods are extremely real and mostly a nuisance.
💍Middle-earth(Rings of Power)
👒Grand Line(One Piece)
🐺The Continent(The Witcher)
🔱Camp Half-Blood(Percy Jackson)
01
What kind of power do you want? Every one of these worlds runs on a completely different sort of magic.
02
Who is travelling with you? Nobody gets through any of these stories entirely on their own.
03
Where do you want to wake up tomorrow? The best fantasy is usually just somewhere you would genuinely like to live.
04
How are you making a living out there? Even in fantasy somebody has to pay for the horse.
05
There is something in the woods. What do you do about it? All four of these worlds keep something unpleasant out there in the dark.
06
Who is the villain of your story? The enemy tells you far more about a world than the hero ever does.
07
What do you actually believe in out there? Every world hands its heroes one rule and asks them to hold onto it.
08
A thousand years from now, how are you remembered? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your world.
The Map Is Drawn Your World Is…
Four worlds and four completely different ideas of what a good life looks like. This is where you belong, what it would ask of you, and what you would get back in return.
Middle-earth
You belong somewhere old enough that the mountains have names and somebody can still tell you who gave them. Middle-earth is for people who think the right thing is worth doing even when it will not be finished in their lifetime.
- This is the only world on the list where doing good is understood as a very long defeat, fought anyway, by people who will never see how it ends.
- You are drawn to grandeur, to white cities and deep forges and the sense that almost everything you touch is older than your entire family line.
- The Rings of Power is set in the last good age before it all goes wrong, which gives every quiet scene in it a slightly unbearable weight.
- You would take the hard road, and you would take it on foot.
The Grand Line
You want the sea, a crew, and absolutely nobody telling you where you are allowed to go. The Grand Line is the world for people whose main ambition in life is finding out what is over there.
- One Piece has run for decades on one very simple engine, which is a group of people who each want something impossible and have decided to go and get it together.
- You collect people. Your ideal crew is a set of misfits who were each written off somewhere else before you turned up and offered them a better idea.
- The world is enormous and deliberately ridiculous, and the emotional gut punches land harder because of that rather than in spite of it.
- You would set sail knowing the map runs out, which is more or less the entire point of it.
The Continent
You would rather be feared and useful than liked and useless. The Continent is a world where the monsters are the straightforward part of the job and the people are where it all gets complicated.
- Witchers get paid to do what nobody else will and resented for existing at all, which is a trade most people would refuse and you would probably accept.
- You have no real illusions about which side is the good one, largely because on the Continent that question tends to have a disappointing answer.
- The best of these stories are not about the fighting. They are about somebody with a rigid code being repeatedly cornered into caring about people.
- You would take the coin, finish the job properly, and be out of town before the story got told wrong.
Camp Half-Blood
You want the myths to be real and loose in the actual world, and you want to find out at about thirteen that you were never anywhere near as ordinary as everybody kept telling you.
- Percy Jackson takes the oldest stories we have and drops them into car parks and diners, which makes the gods considerably funnier and a great deal worse.
- You would be the kid every school gave up on, who turns out to have been built for something nobody thought to test for.
- The series is genuinely about friendship rather than destiny, and it says so out loud every time a prophecy tries to get in the way.
- Camp Half-Blood is the real fantasy here: a place where the thing that made you difficult everywhere else is the thing that makes you belong.
'The Scarlet Ball' - October 6
Self-advertised as a marriage of The Gilded Age and Guillermo del Toro, USA Today bestselling author Nghi Vo's The Scarlet Ball is one of the must-read historical Gothic fiction novels of the year. Its plot follows Judith, a clever thief in an alternate Gilded Age New York, who assumes the identity of a missing debutante to infiltrate a deadly elite society bound to demonic entities.
Nghi Vo's work is well-known for its lush, elegant prose and its consistently smart subversions of classic storytelling tropes. Always infused with folklore and marginalized perspectives, her oeuvre points to a pattern that indicates that The Scarlet Ball may likely be one of the most enrapturing fantasy books of the season. It comes out on October 6th and can be pre-ordered on Amazon.
'Victorious' - October 6
Fans of dark fantasy, subverted superhero tropes, and science fantasy focused on fascinating antiheroes love V.E. Schwab's Villains trilogy, which comes to an end this year with Victorious. This triumphant conclusion to the series brings us back to Eli and Victor, two men who used to be best friends and became mortal enemies.
After Vicious and Vengeful, originally perceived as a duology and both among the best fantasy books of the last 20 years, Victorious comes as the momentous conclusion to Victor and Eli's conflict. Emotionally complex and thoroughly cathartic, the book deepens its changing morally grey characters in all sorts of fascinating ways while offering a riveting and hectic cat-and-mouse narrative. After years of waiting, Victorious comes out on October 6th and can be pre-ordered on Amazon.
'The Book of Blood and Roses' - October 6
Few things get along with romantasy better than vampires, and that's precisely the subject matter of Annie Summerlee's debut novel, The Book of Blood and Roses, the first chapter in The Callisto Chronicles. Promoted as a seductive sapphic paranormal fantasy, it's about a vampire hunter who goes undercover at a mysterious university and falls in love with her roommate, an alluring vampire.The Book of Blood and Roses is already available in ebook and hardcover formats, and reviewers have praised its inventive dark academia elements and compared it to the likes of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. It's hard to go wrong with a well-written vampire romance, and this book is precisely that. Book of Blood and Roses will come out in paperback form on October 6th and can be pre-ordered on Amazon.
'The Tarot Trials' - October 20
Romantasy fans are in luck, because there's another hugely exciting entry that the genre will see this fall, and that's Katee Robert's The Tarot Trials. Robert is a major, bestselling voice in modern fantasy romance and erotica, having helped popularize spicy fairy tale novels. Tarot Trials is her latest, about a young woman who has been training her whole life to enter a deadly, high-stakes competition centered around tarot magic.
Though it's definitely romantasy, Tarot Trials isn't actually particularly spicy. Instead, the novel is far more focused on its high-octane, fast-paced epic fantasy plot. As such, it should be a perfectly suitable introduction to romantasy for people who have never actually properly dived into the popular subgenre. The novel will come out on October 20th and can be pre-ordered on Amazon.
'Lethal Kiss' - October 20
Self-promoted as Jennifer's Body meets Ninth House, Taylor Grothe's adult debut novel is part sapphic romance, part horror fantasy. It's a revenge tale where Marcella, the newest monster at Preston University, teams up with an assistant professor to discover who murdered another professor under mysterious circumstances.
Early reviewers who love dark fantasy that blends with elements of dark academia have done nothing but express their love for Lethal Kiss, which they already call one of the most romantic and enrapturing romantasy novels of the year. It's mysterious, delightfully campy, and an essential spooky season read. The book will be released on October 20th and can be pre-ordered on Amazon.
'The Killing of a Chestnut Tree' - October 27
Oliver K. Langmead is a novelist and poet based in Glasgow, with an academic background in terraforming and ecological philosophy. Needless to say, he has an incredibly unique authorial voice, and that should quite likely come across in The Killing of a Chestnut Tree. This cozy fantasy mystery will be the first installment in the Havelock Harper Mysteries series, about the eponymous queer gentleman detective solving the murder of the Duke of Farleigh.
"Be gay, solve crimes!" reads The Killing of a Chestnut Tree's blurb; and for people who find Sherlock Holmes stories to be literary comfort food but wish they were a little more queer, this remarkable blend of genres should be an absolute delight, perhaps even one of the best fantasy books of the 2020s. The Killing of a Chestnut Tree will be released on October 27th and can be pre-ordered on Amazon.
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