New Books, 22 October 2024
Anderson, Kevin J.: Science Fiction Stories, Volume 2
(WordFire Press 9781680577259, $18.99, 350pp, formats: trade paperback, hardcover, 10/22/2024)
Second volume in Anderson’s short story series, including science fiction stories about asteroid miners, time travelers, body swappers, giant robots, space cadets, futuristic prisons, and more.
Carroll, Jordan S.: Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right
(University of Minnesota Press 9781517917081, $10, 120pp, formats: trade paperback, ebook, 10/22/2024)
Critical non-fiction about ways the far right extremists use SF film and literature to show how only white men can invent a high-tech future. Part of the publisher’s Ideas First series.
Chizmar, Richard: Memorials
(Simon & Schuster/Gallery 9781668009192, $29.99, 480pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, 10/22/2024)
Horror novel. In 1983, three students from a small college take a road trip to film a documentary on roadside memorials for their American Studies class. But as they venture deeper into the Appalachian backwoods, the memorials become strange and unsettling, something seems to be following them, their vehicle is tampered with, and the students start to wonder if these roadside deaths were really accidents.
Clarke, August: Metal from Heaven
(Kensington/Erewhon 9781645660989, $28, 448pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, 10/22/2024)
Adult lesbian fantasy novel. Ten years ago, child worker Marney was the only survivor of a strikebreaking attack as she and her family and best friend protested low wages and unsafe conditions at the ichorite foundry, leaving her the ward of the ambitious industrialist who owns the factory. Now Marney has decided to masquerade as an aristocrat and plan her revenge.
Clarke, Susanna: The Wood at Midwinter
(Bloomsbury USA 9781639734481, $16.99, 64pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, 10/22/2024)
Fantasy short story set in the universe of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. The teen Merowdis Scott can talk to animals and trees, and is only happy in the woods, until one day she meets a strange figure as darkness falls, and her life is changed. Introduction by Clarke.
Clements, Mikaella & Datta, Onjuli: Feast While You Can
(Grand Central Publishing 9781538742259, $30, 304pp, formats: trade paperback, ebook, audio, 10/24/2024)
Queer thriller/horror/romance novel about a lesbian in a remote town. Angelina’s life gets shattered when her brother’s ex returns to town, awakening an ancient evil that feasts on passion and heartbreak.
Crouch, Blake: Run
(Penguin Random House/Ballantine 9780593874790, $18, 336pp, formats: hardcover, trade paperback, ebook, audio, 10/22/2024)
SF novel. After a bizarre rash of murders sweeps the country and increases tenfold, the president begs for calm and peace. Killers begin to mobilize, all the power goes out, and the Emergency Broadcast System starts reading out the names of those who are going to be killed.
Dawson, Delilah S.: It Will Only Hurt for a Moment
(Penguin Random House/Del Rey 9780593156650, $28.99, 368pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, 10/22/2024)
Thriller/horror novel. Sarah Carpenter decides to start her life over by going to a secluded artists’ colony in a closed hotel, but she discovers a body when digging her pit kiln, the other artists start acting strange, and when she investigates, Sarah unearths a chilling past that refuses to remain buried.
Dimova, Genoveva: Monstrous Nights
(Tor 9781250877352, $18.99, 352pp, formats: trade paperback, ebook, audio, 10/22/2024)
Fantasy novel mixing Slavic lore and elements of soviet-era city life, second in the Witch’s Compendium of Monsters duology begun in Foul Days. Kosara has reclaimed her magic and her role in the community of Chernograd and is now in possession of twelve witch’s shadows. Holding them grants her unprecedented power, but they aren’t always willing to do her bidding.
Draeger, Manuela: Kree
(University of Minnesota Press 9781517915124, $21.95, 280pp, formats: trade paperback, ebook, 10/22/2024)
Postapocalyptic, posthuman novel. Kree, raised as a warrior but devastated by the death of her dog, finds peace in a city run by totalitarian Brothers, but can’t toe the line for long. Translated by Lia Swope Mitchell from the French. Part of the publisher’s Univocal series.
Manuela Draeger’s Kree is so immediately violent that I wasn’t sure it was going to be for me. Somehow, though, within just a few chapters, the novel’s mix of haunting imagery and almost humorous unpredictability grew so compelling that I found myself wanting to track down everything else the author has written. A midapocalyptic story set in a succession of afterlives, rife with intense bodily detail and hallucinatory visions and ideas, Kree is a bizarre but entrancing meditation on endings and returns.
–Jake Casella Brookins, Locus, October 2024
Gwynne, John: The Fury of the Gods
(Orbit US 9780316539951, $19.99, 576pp, formats: trade paperback, ebook, audio, 10/22/2024)
Epic Norse-inspired fantasy novel, third and final in the Bloodsworn series. Varg has overcome the trials of his past and become an accepted member of the Bloodsworn, but now he and his newfound comrades face their biggest challenge yet: slaying a dragon.
Harrison, Kim: Demon’s Bluff
(Ace 9780593639986, $30, 464pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, 10/22/2024)
Urban fantasy novel, 19th in the Hollows series featuring Rachel Morgan. To undo a curse, Rachel must travel back in time to get a special spell component from the insane demon Newt.
Howey, Hugh & Adams, John Joseph, eds.: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024
(HarperCollins/Mariner 9780063315785, $18.99, 384pp, formats: trade paperback, ebook, audio, 10/22/2024)
Best of the year anthology, the tenth in the series, with 20 stories from 2023 by authors including A.R. Capetta, P. Djèlí Clark, James S.A. Corey, Amal El-Mohtar, Andrew Sean Greer, Grady Hendrix, Ann Leckie, Sam J. Miller, and Rebecca Roanhorse. Authors provide notes on their stories with their biographies. Introduction by Howey; foreword by series editor John Joseph Adams, who also provides a list of additional notable stories.
Kaplan, Ariel: The Republic of Salt
(Kensington/Erewhon 9781645660958, $29, 480pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, 10/22/2024)
Fantasy novel, second in the Mirror Realm Cycle series. Toba, Naftaly, and their allies must defend a city under siege — while the desperate deals they’ve made begin to unravel around them.
Kessel, John: The Presidential Papers
(PM Press 9798887440583, $16, 160pp, formats: trade paperback, ebook, 10/22/2024)
Collection of short stories deconstructing the character and politics of five imagined presidents. Includes an interview with Kessel and a bibliography. 31st entry in the Outspoken Authors series.
Leung, Muriel: How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnamable Disaster
(Norton 9781324076186, $18.99, 272pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, 10/22/2024)
SF novel set in an alternate present, where New Yorkers adapt to acid rain that destroys buildings and causes deadly burns, while ghosts long for the past. A first novel.
missaghi, poupeh: Sound Museum
(Coffee House Press 9781566896993, $14.95, 136pp, formats: trade paperback, ebook, 10/22/2024)
Horror novella. A museum exhibit in Iran plays audio recordings of state-sanctioned torture in interrogations and prisons, and its curator, a woman obsessed with the barriers she’s faced as a woman, remains blind to her own depravity as one of the torturers.
Oakes, Colleen: Eleven Houses
(Simon & Schuster 9781665952583, $19.99, 416pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, 10/22/2024)
Young-adult vampire romance novel. On a Nova Scotia island Mabel of House Beuvry, spends her time like all the other teens, preparing for the once-a-decade Storm, that brings both hurricane level winds, and opens a gate between the living and the dead.
Okosun, Ehigbor: Exiled by Iron
(Harper Voyager US 9780063112681, $32, 544pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, 10/22/2024)
Fantasy novel, second in the Tainted Blood duology, drawing on Nigerian lore. With the end of Alistair Sorenson’s tyrannical reign, Dèmi has accepted Jonas’s proposal to rule as his Queen with hopes to finally free her people, the magical Oluso, while struggling to control her newly awakened iron blood magic.
Onoh, Nuzo: Where the Dead Brides Gather
(Titan Books 9781835410561, $17.99, 288pp, formats: paperback, ebook, 10/22/2024)
Horror novel set in Nigeria, with malevolent ghosts, family tensions, secrets, and murder. Eleven-year-old Bata battles a ghost bride targeting her cousin, then dies and goes to the spirit realm and is given special powers to battle evil ghost brides.
Parry, H.G.: The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door
(Orbit US/Redhook 9780316383905, $19.99, 464pp, formats: trade paperback, ebook, audio, 10/22/2024)
Historical fantasy novel set in 1920 England. Clover, a commoner without magical blood, goes to Camford, a secret magical academy, to find a cure for her brother who was one of the few survivors of a faerie attack in WWI, but makes no progress until she catches the eye of some magical aristocrats.
Raines, Camilla: The Hollow and the Haunted
(Titan Books 9781803369976, $17.99, 384pp, formats: trade paperback, ebook, 10/22/2024)
Queer fantasy romance novel, first in the Hollow and the Haunted duology. Closeted gay teen Miles Warren spends his nights using his psychic powers to wrangle angry ghosts in creepy cemeteries, until he starts having visions of an unfamiliar boy, who turns out to be from a family in a feud with his own, and the visions are a premonition of his murder. A first novel.
Robins, Eden: Remember You Will Die
(Sourcebooks Landmark 9781728256030, $16.99, 336pp, formats: trade paperback, ebook, audio, 10/22/2024)
SF novel. An AI woman grapples with grief after the death of her human daughter, in a disconnected world on a dying planet, written in linked obituaries and newsfeeds.
While there’s an inner core of characters who personally interacted with Peregrine and Poppy, there are many more who never knew them, who couldn’t place themselves in this story if asked. The way Robins ties those stories into the larger tapestry is what really fascinated me, the way recurring images, ideas, inventions and architecture connect people who never even know about each other’s existence. It’s a kind of pattern-making that could easily grate on my nerves, but Robins handles it with a careful touch that makes it constantly engaging rather than oppressively saccharine. The novel is chock full of that the kind of ‘‘huh!’’ feeling one gets on discovering some mind-expanding historical coincidence.
–Jake Casella Brookins, Locus, October 2024
Silver, Josh: HappyHead
(Penguin Random House/Delacorte 9780593812020, $19.99, 400pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, 10/22/2024)
Young-adult dystopian SF novel, the first in a duology. Seb has been selected for an experimental mental health center, meant to solve the crisis of teen depression. He is determined to win the various assessments the participants go through, until he meets Finn, who is resisting the program’s rules. A first novel.
VanderMeer, Jeff: Absolution
(Macmillan/MCD X FSG Originals 9780374616595, $30, 464pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, 10/22/2024)
SF novel, a fourth volume in and prequel to the Southern Reach trilogy. Told in three parts, each about a new expedition to the place that would be called Area X.
I’m going to dance around the plot. Partly to avoid spoilers but mostly because, much like the multiple failed expeditions to Area X, I want you to enter this novel wholly unprepared. I will say that Absolution is a prequel; the action takes place well before the events of Annihilation, in fact, two decades before the formation of Area X. The familiar faces it does feature – and I won’t say who – are individuals who play minor (though in hindsight pivotal) roles in the trilogy.
