Sea Monster Villages and Soul Traders: August’s Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books

This month’s list comes to you from smoky orange skies and toxic lettuce, so what better time to distract ourselves with haunted seaside villages, mysterious salt pillars, and demon hunters? Robert Jackson Bennett’s fantasy detectives are on a new case, while new mothers fight to save their realm in Laura E. Weymouth’s latest fantasy. Meanwhile, Suyi Davies Okungbowa brings his Nameless Republic trilogy to an end, while C.L. Clark bides their time between epic series with another novella that packs so many punches into a tiny package. And don’t miss K.S. Shay’s debut Portrait of a Witch Undone from our 2026 SFF preview!

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Laura E. Weymouth, The Castle & the Cloister
(Saga Press, August 4)

Give me all the epic fantasy in which women reach across different stations to bond over shared experiences and pledge their allegiances in times of instability. Young mother Fia is a postulant of Honoria’s sun goddess Raea, but she must prove her loyalty by delivering a message to Honoria’s queen—a three-day errand, and then she can return to her infant child with the guarantee of protection. But when Fia arrives at court, Queen Ariana is recovering from a difficult labor; upon recognizing her from their shared service as battlefield nurses, Fia agrees to become Ariana’s wet nurse. But Ariana’s husband threatens Honoria’s fragile peace with the conquering Inver clan. And let’s not forget the Inver Priest plotting within the heart of a mountain…!

Kim Bo-Young (translated by Sophie Bowman), A Plagued Sea
(Tor Nightfire, August 11)

The English translation of Kim Bo-Young’s taut novella transplants a familiar Lovecraftian tale in Korea: the isolated seaside village devastated by an earthquake, and the otherworldly transformations wrought upon its inhabitants. Bodyguard Mu-young winds up trapped in Haewon Village when she insists on accompanying her niece there; three years later, the girl is dead and Mu-young reluctantly works as security, enforcing the island’s quarantine against fishy monsters. But when a bureaucrat from Seoul arrives, stubbornly ignoring all warnings to avoid the infection, Mu-young must decide who she is truly meant to protect.

Suyi Davies Okungbowa, Season of the Serpent
(Orbit Books, August 11)

As his West African-inspired Nameless Republic trilogy draws to a close, Suyi Davies Okungbowa writes to his readers, “We come to epic fantasy because we desire a book—nay, a trilogy of books—where magic meets mayhem, where wonder meets monsters, where order meets disorder.” On the cusp of the Third Great War, he will seal the fates of the trio of characters introduced in Son of the Storm: scholar Danso, caught up in war; warrior Lilong, searching for her lost powers; and fixer Esheme, dabbling in dark destinies. The continent of Oon is entering a new age of uncertainty and change, where characters’ relationships can reshape the continent on a grand scale.

Robert Jackson Bennett, A Trade of Blood
(Del Rey, August 11)

It’s been a minute since we’ve had a proper ongoing SFF series that doesn’t wrap up in a trilogy, and the third (but by no means final) installment of Robert Jackson Bennett’s fantasy-mystery series Shadow of the Leviathan keeps things intriguing without any sign of stopping. Detective duo Ana and Din initially stoop to investigate the seemingly simple murder of a gentry girl, but each detail gets more bloodily fascinating: she and her paramour were star-crossed lovers from rival clans; he’s accused of her murder, yet Din can sense with his enhanced abilities that some of the crime was staged postmortem; and then the suspect’s siblings start dropping like flies.

Natasha Pulley, The Salt King
(Bloomsbury, August 18)

A priest inexplicably turns into a pillar of salt, but is it a biblical miracle or a harbinger of the end times? In Natasha Pulley’s kaleidoscopic novel, a Vatican priest returns to the mining town of his youth to confront the cult following behind the eponymous Salt King. Meanwhile, eerie salt-related phenomena at mining sites all around the globe build to a worldwide reckoning. Pulley’s latest balances macro stakes with delightful burgeoning romances and connections between unlikely allies thrown together against the unbelievable.

Chuck Wendig, The Calamities
(Del Rey, August 18)

Chuck Wendig’s new horror-fantasy duology answers the question we’ve all secretly been asking: What if the richest families controlling everything were literally demonic? With hints of Leigh Bardugo, Clive Barker, The Library at Mount Char, and Evil, the first installment of The Fiends follows feckless heir Mourning Mayne as his estranged father demands he return home to embrace his dark legacy. But the Maynes’ empire is built on trafficking human souls, forcing Mourning to decide to which side his allegiances belong.

C.L. Clark, Fortune’s Wake
(Grimdark Magazine, August 24)

Sapphic beastslayers? Say more, but make it a tight, grimdark novella—which, as C.L. Clark recently shared, takes place over “one really shitty afternoon/evening” of a fledgling warrior’s life. Kova of Stormwatch leaves her mother and sweetheart behind in order to study beneath the legendarily fearsome Sayre Boarbane… only for the stubbornly solitary Sayre to immediately drag her back home. But Kova is shocked to discover her sweetheart taking up with someone new, who may be linked to the monsters dragging Stormwatch’s inhabitants into the ocean. Looks like Kova will get that taste of adventure after all.