Revelator, Daryl Gregory (Knopf 978-0-525-65738-5, $27.00, 352pp, hc) August 2021.
As he demonstrated again earlier this year with The Album of Dr. Moreau, Daryl Gregory is among our most inventive and eclectic writers, but there are a few themes that recur often enough that they begin to seem like preoccupations, if not quite obsessions. One is that families are weird, and dealing with them can be especially trying ...Read More
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For the Wolf, Hannah Whitten (Orbit 978-0-356516363, £8.99, 480pp, tp) June 2021.
Hannah Whitten’s debut novel, For the Wolf, is one of those books I could wish I had enjoyed more. It almost certainly does not need my approbation, for it has all of the traits of a novel that should find broad-based success: a young, headstrong protagonist; a handsome, self-sacrificing, broody male love interest; an easy-to-read, relatively ...Read More
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Folklorn, Angela Mi Young Hur (Erewhon 978-1645660163, $26.95, 416pp, hc) April 2021.
It’s rare that I finish a book and find myself at a loss as to how to review it, but here we are with Angela Mi Young Hur’s sophomore novel Folklorn. Ostensibly, it is a novel about the daughter of immigrants trying to solve the mystery of what happened to her sister, but it is so ...Read More
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The Angels of L19, Jonathan Walker (Weatherglass Books 978-1-838-01813-9, £10.99, 240pp, tp) August 2021.
Jonathan Walker’s The Angels of L19 is the second offering from newly established small press Weatherglass Books. Founded by Damian Lanigan and Neil Griffiths, Weatherglass is part of the vanguard of micro- and small publishers, including Galley Beggar Press, Sublunary Editions, Tramp Press, Fitzcarraldo Editions, Boiler House Press, and Influx Press, breathing life into a ...Read More
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What Big Teeth, Rose Szabo (Farrar, Straus, Giroux Books for Young Readers 978-0374314309, 400 pp, $18.99, tp) February 2021. Cover by Aurora Parlagreco.
Eleanor Zarrin’s family is a weird and violent bunch. They read fortunes in the guts of birds, go running in the woods just for the hell of it, and also don’t have any table manners, among other quirks. But, they’re the only people that Eleanor can ...Read More
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The Infinity Courts, Akemi Dawn Bowman (Simon & Schuster 978-1534-456495, $19.99, 465pp, hc) January 2021. Cover by Casey Weldon.
It is not a spoiler to say that the protagonist of Akemi Dawn Bowman’s The Infinity Courts spends most of the novel dead. Nami Miyamoto is shot and killed by an armed robber in a convenience store by page 18 of the narrative. From that moment, she spends her time ...Read More
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No Gods, No Monsters, Cadwell Turnbull (Blackstone 978-1-9826-0372-4, $23.99, 330pp, hc) September 2021.
I have to confess that I’m probably losing track of all the monsters. There was a time, before even I was born, when Universal Studios effectively created the first multi-movie franchise by teaching a generation that monsters consisted of some very specific properties – Dracula, Frankenstein’s creature, mummies, werewolves, invisible men, all the way up to ...Read More
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The Shipbuilder of Bellfairie, M. Rickert (Undertow 978-1-988964-32-4, $17.99, 248pp, tp), August 2021.
Even though her short fiction is consistently brilliant on its own terms, occasionally a story by M. Rickert leaves us with the feeling that there’s a good deal more to learn about these haunted characters or equally haunted settings. Such was the case a few years ago when Rickert’s collection You Have Never Been Here included ...Read More
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Whether Change, Scott Gable & C. Dombrowski, eds. (Broken Eye Books 978-1-940372-62-4, $19.99, 180pp, tp) August 2021.
Whether Change is a new anthology subtitled ‘‘The Revolution will be Weird’’ – hence, stories about (leftist) radical change; but with a weird component. I thought the best pieces had the weirder ideas – in particular stories from Nick Mamatas and S.B. Divya. Mamatas’s ‘‘The Nth International’’ shows a billionaire (rather obviously
You Sexy Thing, Cat Rambo (Tor 978-1-250-26930-0, $25.99, 304pp, hc) September 2021.
You Sexy Thing, Cat Rambo’s first space opera novel, is in fact a romp. If you’re the kind of person who likes Mass Effect, or enjoyed Valerie Valdes’s Chilling Effect and Prime Deceptions, or fell head-over-heels for Tim Pratt’s Axiom trilogy (The Wrong Stars and sequels), then this book is definitely for you. This is ...Read More
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Appleseed, Matt Bell (Custom House 978-0063040144, 480pp, $27.99) July 2021.
Matt Bell is a writer whose whole oeuvre (a couple of previous novels and several story collections) is plainly steeped in the elements of fantastika; a writer who is manifestly cognizant of all the hardcore tropes of the genre, able to deploy them deftly. But he is published outside the genre fences, and hailed as non-denominational Literature with ...Read More
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The Final Girl Support Group, Grady Hendrix (Berkley 978-0593201237, $26.00, 352pp, hc) July 2021.
With his fiction and non-fiction, Grady Hendrix has spent the last five years analysing and redefining the tropes that made horror fiction so popular during the ’70s and ’80s. His “Freaky Fridays” column, which he wrote for Tor.com back in 2017, was Hendrix’s hilarious look back at the out-of-print, garish paperbacks that I’m sure many ...Read More
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Big, Dark Hole, Jeffrey Ford (Small Beer Press 978-1-618-73184-5, $17, 320pp, tp) July 2021.
No matter how bizarre a situation is or may rapidly become in a Jeffrey Ford story, the reader feels instantly at home, open and accepting of everything that one should never be open and accepting of. In “The Match”, from new collection Big, Dark Hole, an adjunct professor gets a letter in the mail ...Read More
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Kim Harrison, Million Dollar Demon (Ace 978-0-593-10144-5, $28.00, 464pp, hc) June 2021.
Rachel Morgan’s got plenty of problems in this 15th book in the Hollows series. Everyone now knows she’s a demon, the church that was her home and office is in ruins and no contractor will work on it, her efforts to find a new place keep falling through, she’s on the outs with her demon mentor, her rich ...Read More
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Notes from the Burning Age, Claire North (Orbit 978-0-316-4988-49883-8, $14.99, 448pp, tp) July 2021.
Having garnered a World Fantasy and a Campbell Award under her Claire North pseudonym, it probably shouldn’t be surprising that the prolific English writer Catherine Webb should turn her unique vision to climate fiction. As others have discovered before her, however, the generations-long trashing of our planet is, by itself, pretty unwieldy as a plot ...Read More
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The Girl from Shadow Springs, Ellie Cypher (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 978-1-534-46569-5, $19.99, 311pp, hc) February 2021. Cover by Lente Scura.
In the extremely gritty survival story, The Girl from Shadow Springs, 17-year old Jorie and her sister Brenna carve out a sad living in the frozen wasteland surrounding the barely there town of the title. Jorie finds the corpses of treasure hunters out on ...Read More
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Slipping, Mohamed Kheir (Two Lines Press 978-1949641165, $16.95, June 2021, pb) June 2021.
It still amazes me how long it takes for acclaimed writers in non-English speaking countries to have their first novel, book of poetry, or short story collection translated into English. I know it’s a question of economics, that translated works are a labour of love for those, primarily small presses, who do publish these books. But ...Read More
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The Tangleroot Palace, Marjorie Liu (Tachyon 978-161696-352-1, $16.95, 256 pp, tp) June 2021. Cover by Sana Takeda.
Dangerous women and magic lurk in Marjorie Liu’s The Tangleroot Palace, a collection of short fiction that spans a variety of subgenres. In these imagined worlds, the bones of the innocent bring liberation to fledgling witches, crystal skulls power war machines, and the Amish lead post-apocalyptic villages through nights of terror ...Read More
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Everything in All the Wrong Order: The Best of Chaz Brenchley, Chaz Brenchley (Subterranean 978-1645240112, 568pp, $45.00) August 2021.
Starting in 1974 with The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum, Ballantine Books began issuing a series of best-of volumes that became a definitive record of canonical authors and stories, providing a reading map and sense of history for a generation or two of readers. (To a lesser extent, ...Read More
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The Queen of the Cicadas, V. Castro (Flame Tree Press 978-1-787-58603-1, $24.95, 224pp, hc) June 2021.
Fortyish Belinda Montoya, protagonist of The Queen of the Cicadas by V. Castro, has overcome a great deal in her life. Despite racism and a disadvantaged Texas childhood, she became an attorney in Philadelphia, but things aren’t going all that well now. After two divorces and in the midst of a strained relationship ...Read More
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The Fallen, Ada Hoffman (Angry Robot 978-0-857-66868-4, $14.99, 400pp, tp) July 2021.
I should probably confess that I don’t remember very much of the detail of Ada Hoffmann’s debut The Outside, except that I enjoyed it and wanted to read the sequel. I read it before this endless year of our pandemic, after all, and so many other things have crowded my skull since. Now that The Fallen ...Read More
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Roger Zelazny, F. Brett Cox (University of Illinois Press 978-0-252-08575-8, $27.95, 224pp, pb) May 2021.
F. Brett Cox’s superlative entry in the Modern Masters of Science Fiction series contains a circular arc of sorts, perhaps in a subtle nod to the narrative games often played by the subject of Cox’s study, Roger Zelazny. Our initial sense of Zelazny the professional writer, and the close, caring friend of notable figures ...Read More
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Seanan McGuire, Angel of the Overpass (DAW 978-0-7564-1689-8, $17.00, 309pp, tp) May 2021. Cover by Amber Whitney.
The third book in the Ghost Roads series finds Rose Marshall, the hitchhiking ghost also known as the Girl in the Green Silk Dress, facing serious changes in her world. Word has come down that the Crossroads is dead (seen in InCryptid novel That Ain’t Witchcraft). No one’s sure what the death ...Read More
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The Witch King, H.E. Edgmon (Inkyard 978-1-335-21279-5, $18/99, 432pp, hc) June 2021.
Wyatt Croft is angry. Born a witch in the kingdom of Asalin, a magical realm hidden inside our own, Wyatt was raised at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Witches are the “corrupted” and “abnormal” children of the fae. Where the fae can do big, powerful nature magic, witchcraft must be taught and controlled. His whole life ...Read More
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Reclaimed, Madeleine Roux (Ace 978-0451491855, 320pp, $17.00) August 2021.
Not many tropes derive their name from one specific seminal work of art. And yet such a thing did happen with the 1932 Karloff spookfest, The Old Dark House. Over the decades, the movie gradually lent its name to a whole genre or iconography, whose lineaments are now so familiar that their invocation often results in cliché. But mashing ...Read More
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Muse, Brittany Cavallaro (Katherine Tegen, 978-0-062-84025-7, $17.99, 332 pp, hc) February 2021. Cover by Florian Schommer.
In Brittany Cavallaro’s alt-history Muse, the first book in a duology, readers immediately learn that George Washington decided in 1782 to assume the crown of the First American Kingdom. One hundred years later, the Washington family has formed an enduring monarchy and the country is divided into regions with provincial governors (a ...Read More
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The Good Neighbours, Nina Allan (Quercus 978-1529405170, £16.99, 304pp, hc) June 2021.
I remember exactly where I was when I fell in love with Nina Allan’s fiction. I was eating lunch in the work cafeteria, finishing the final story in her first book, The Silver Wind. I recall being in awe of the collection’s bold sense of experimentation, a time-travel narrative told through five interlocking stories that subverted ...Read More
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Moon Lake, Joe R. Lansdale (Mulholland Books 978-0-316-54064-3, $28 352pp, hc) June 2021.
Joe R. Lansdale is a masterful storyteller with a distinct, often drawling voice. His novels are vivid yarns that connect with the reader faster than greased lightning. Set in the fictional town of New Long Lincoln, East Texas, Moon Lake begins in 1968 – just past the “time when cars were big and the American dream ...Read More
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Firebreak, Nicole Kornher-Stace (Saga 978-1-9821-4274-2, $26.99, 416pp, hc) May 2021.
Nicole Kornher-Stace’s Firebreak has the kind of dead-end future that hits a little too close to home – people working numerous part-time jobs to eke out a living, sharing an overpriced, shitty apartment with numerous roommates, and barely surviving under an evil megacorporation that gives out company credits instead of a living wage. The same company, by the way, ...Read More
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Appleseed, Matt Bell (Custom House 978-0-06-304014-4, $27.99, 480pp, hc) July 2021.
It may be that the overriding theme in the recent spate of Anthropocene apocalypse novels isn’t disaster, but complicity. It’s what sets them apart from earlier secular eschatologies dating back at least as far as Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, in which plagues or floods or asteroids just sort of show up and do their thing, with ...Read More
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The Assassins of Thasalon, Lois McMaster Bujold (Spectrum Literary Agency, $6.99, 244pp, eb) May 2021.
Lois McMaster Bujold is a household name in science fiction and fantasy at this point. She is perhaps best known for her Miles Vorkosigan space opera novels, but personally I’ve always enjoyed her fantasy more: the four-book Sharing Knife series, and the stories in the world of the Five Gods – The Curse of ...Read More
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The High-Rise Diver, Julia von Lucadou (World Editions 978-1642860764, $16.99, 288pp, tp) March 2021.
In Julia von Lucadou’s dystopian novel, The High-Rise Diver (translated from German into English by Sharmila Cohen), a psychologist, Hitomi Yoshida, is assigned to assess Riva, a professional high-rise diver (she literally jumps off skyscrapers). The latter has abruptly broken her contract with her employer. This is a shocking development, partly because Riva is an ...Read More
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