The Year in Review 2024 by Tim Pratt

Ten for 2024 by Tim Pratt

Well, here we are, right down at the closing of the year (though you’ll read this near the beginning of the next one). 2024 was some­thing of an annus horribilis, but as usual, I found comfort and refuge in fiction, and sometimes even inspiration to keep fighting for a chance at better tomorrows.

Still, since I’m in a dark turn of mind, I’ll start by talking about some of my favorite horror; I read a lot of that this year. My favorite collection (horror or otherwise) was Good Night, Sleep Tight by Brian Evenson, the master of literary dread and vicious endings. Nobody delivers better short, sharp shocks, and the spare, matter-of-fact prose he uses to describe the dissolution of reality – and the horrible, just-too-late realiza­tions of his characters – makes those shocks even more effective. Some of the stories are contem­porary, and some science fictional, but they’re all disquieting in the best way. My favorites are the title story, “The Other Floor”, and “Untitled (Cloud of Blood)”, but they’re all great.

Stephen King’s latest collection, You Like It Darker, reveals a master still at the top of his game. There’s not a dud in the collection, and some rank among King’s best stories ever, including the previously unpublished “Rattlesnakes” (a sequel of sorts to Cujo, featuring dif­ferent terrifying animals, plus ghosts) and “Two Talented Bastids”, a medita­tion on old age and the nature of talent (plus weird encounters in the woods).

For horror novels, my favorite this year was Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin; it has shades of The Thing and King’s It, but it’s very much its own story, about a group of queer teenagers forced to attend a conversion therapy camp that’s even more sinister than those usually are. This sopho­more novel is even more assured and accomplished than her debut, Manhunt, and has a stellar cast of queer and gender-nonconforming characters that made my own queer and nonbinary heart sing (though sometimes it was singing dirges). There’s some truly squicky body horror and gross monsters in here, too, which I always consider a plus.

I also really loved Horror Movie: A Novel by Paul Tremblay, another unset­tling and compulsively readable work by one of my favorite writers. I’m a big fan of “cursed movie” narratives, and this is an exemplar of the form, about an indie horror film project derailed by a hor­rible tragedy on set, and a much later attempt to remake/reboot the picture. The novel is narrated by a survivor of the original film, who played the (sort of) monster, and the terrible facts of the past are revealed as new terrible things unfold in the present. This book does feature Tremblay’s trademark ambiguity, but don’t worry, lots of bad stuff definitely happens.

Moving on to science fiction, I was excited to pick up Ray Nayler’s The Tusks of Extinction. I loved his debut novel The Mountain in the Sea (I was on the jury that gave it the Ray Bradbury Prize), and this novella explores some similar thematic territory: the nature of consciousness; the place of humans in the natural world; and a deep love for, and understanding of, animals, in this case elephants and woolly mammoths. This is a fast, sad read, with a split timeline, one thread set earlier among dwindling populations of wild elephants under threat from poach­ers, and the other set later on a preserve for mammoths who’ve been resurrected from extinction… and are also threatened by poachers. The big SFnal element is that one of the mammoth bodies hosts the consciousness of a human scientist who fought poachers in the old days, and who is teaching these reborn mammoths… well, how to mammoth. My only complaint is, I wish it had been longer, which is a good complaint to have.

The Man Who Saw Seconds by Alexander Boldizar is one of the more audacious and emo­tionally brutal thrillers I’ve ever read. The titular character has limited precognition, allowing him to look a few seconds into possible futures, so he can manipulate events to a small extent; he uses his power for gambling and playing speed chess, and as an amateur boxer, all to make a living to support his wife and kid. But he has a bad interac­tion with some cops on a train, things escalate, the government discovers his ability, and he’s deemed an existential threat to national (even world) security who must be neutralized. You wouldn’t think a few seconds of precognition would be that formidable a power, but the author makes a compelling case for how someone could pretty much take over and/or destroy the world if they leveraged the skill properly. The protagonist just wants to live in peace with his family, but that world won’t allow it. This one hit me hard in the dadfeels.

Cory Doctorow’s premise for 2023’s Red Team Blues was to write the final book in a long-running mystery series without actually writing any of the earlier installments, and it was super fun, with an engaging forensic accountant-for-hire detective character in Martin Hench. This year’s sequel The Bezzle is set earlier in the character’s chronology, in the distant past of 2006, and includes a lot of fascinating observa­tions about rich weirdos in California, along with a compelling mystery. I hope Doctorow writes a lot more of these; Picks and Shovels, the third volume, set in 1986, comes out next year.

Let’s talk debuts! I picked up The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown because I love stories about magic books and magic doors, and this has both. When a beloved old customer dies in the shop, bookseller Cassie Andrews picks up the last volume he was reading, which turns out to be the titular magic book, allowing her to travel through any door to any place… and that’s just its most obvious application. She soon comes to the attention of the strange and often sinister collectors of other magical volumes, and then things get very dan­gerous and tangled indeed. The story is a delight, with some great time-travel shenanigans, inven­tive magic, and satisfying resolutions that pay off emotionally. It’s not perfect (I could quibble with the pacing), but debuts get some leeway, and I’ll look for more by the author.

I was really impressed by the ambition and structure of Shanghailanders by Juli Min. It’s science fiction, at least a little bit, about a cast of interconnected individuals who live in Shanghai. The novel starts in the near future, but it’s told in reverse chronological order, each chapter jumping farther into the past, so you don’t get to see how the events of the opening turn out; instead, you get to see how all those people got to be that way. It’s a sad, melancholy, strange reading experience, but quite rewarding.

I saved my absolute favorite for last. This year’s can’t-miss, read-it-as-soon-as-you-can title is The Book of Love, the long-anticipated debut novel by Kelly Link. It’s a marvel­ous contemporary fantasy, beautifully strange, about complicated and endearing characters, with wonderful antagonists. It’s a strong contender for the coveted distinc­tion of “Tim’s favorite fantasy novel ever” award, long held by The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins, though I’ll have to read it a few more times to be sure. Read­ing this book was like sinking into a warm cozy bath and then belatedly realizing there are piranha under the surface. Give it a look.

That’s ten books; that’s enough. Here’s hoping 2025 surprises us by being a better year than the last, but if not, at least we’ll always have stories.