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Wrapped: November 2025

Everything notable on Horror × Hope in November.

Josh Sutphin

30 Nov 2025 — 5 min read

New fiction in November

When the Black Wind Blows is a haunting story about a pair of criminals caught between the police, the storm of the century, and their own ghosts. It employs a cyclic narrative structure—I’m an absolute sucker for these—and explores cycles of abuse, guilt and remorse, and the longing to escape your most self-destructive patterns.

We Are All Terrorists Now is a supernatural political horror story about a group of fascist vigilantes who raid an antifa coven. This piece was inspired by President Trump’s ridiculous executive order declaring “antifa” a “domestic terrorist organization”, and the subsequent NSPM-7 which declares a whole gaggle of widely-held—and frankly quite moderate—views on the political left as indicators of violent domestic terrorism.

New reviews in November

Witness featured by FicStack

My short story Witness was featured by FicStack, a very cool new project aiming to catalog, curate, and improve discovery for fiction on Substack. (Horror × Hope is canonically hosted on Ghost, but is also syndicated on Substack.)

Art imitates life imitates art

My story We Are All Terrorists Now asks what happens when the Trump administration weaponizes NSPM-7 against us. We didn't have to wait long to find out just how willing they are to declare their own citizens terrorists:

The memo did not provide any further details about the individual or their alleged past calls for violence and offered no specifics or evidence to explain why the FBI characterized them as “anarchist violent extremists”.

Trump accused the six Democrats of “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!,” but later claimed he was "not threatening death."

So that's going great.

Some recent favorites

My fiction focuses on occult horror with an undercurrent of hope, but it takes a lot of its inspiration from horror and hope in current events. In that vein, here's a pair of posts that perfectly encapsulate that dichotomy: first, the horror of impending economic collapse; then, the hope inherent in building resilience:

There’s a $38 trillion time bomb ticking in the heart of the American financial system, and in 2026, it’s going to detonate, not with the slow burn of a typical recession, but with the devastating speed of a controlled demolition.

Learn a sustaining skill and a sharing skill. Something that keeps bodies alive (gardening, preserving, mending) and something that keeps souls alive (storytelling, singing, circle facilitation). Communities survive when both are practiced.

I've also been thinking about what Horror × Hope looks like in 2026, and two things that are top of mind are a) experimenting with serialized long-form work, and b) improving my social media presence and strategy. To that end, here are two pieces that recently helped clarify my thinking: