She Who Knows, Nnedi Okorafor (DAW 978-0-75641-895-3, $23.00, 176pp, hc) August 2024.
As with any good fantasy setting, Nnedi Okorafor’s 2010 World Fantasy Award-winning Who Fears Death introduced us to a world that seemed far more expansive than what was contained in the text. Set in a far-future Sudan in which the Okeke people face brutal oppression by the Nuru, it combined hints of a bygone technological age with ...Read More
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Daughter of the Merciful Deep, Leslye Penelope (Redhook 978-0-31637-822-2, $25.99, 416pp, hc) June 2024.
When she was 11, Jane Edwards was pulled into a murder investigation. Soon after, her older sister Grace’s sweetheart, Rob, was lynched and the rest of the Black residents of Earnestville were driven out of town by a white mob. As they fled, Jane nearly drowned, and although she was saved, her voice was lost. ...Read More
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Hexagon 6/24 Fusion Fragment 6/24 Diabolical Plots 6/24 GigaNotoSaurus 6/24
The latest issue of Hexagon is devoted to stories focused on climate change and climate resilience – people coming together to push back against the forces that have led to ecological and societal disaster and trying to walk humanity back from the brink of ruin. As in Madi Haab’s “Heat Devils”, which features brisk action as two ...Read More
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Mouth, Puloma Ghosh (Astra House 978-1-66260-247-4, $26.00, 224pp, hc) June 2024.
Reading Puloma Ghosh’s debut collection, Mouth, brought me back to the pandemic and the months spent in lockdown. To be clear, not one of the eleven stories in the book takes place during or refers to COVID, but isolation and loneliness are so central to Ghosh’s work, her protagonist’s aching for intimacy, that my thoughts were cast ...Read More
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We Mostly Come Out at Night, Rob Costello, ed. (Running Press 978-0-76248-319-8, $18.99, 384pp, hc) May 2024.
We Mostly Come Out at Night, a new dark fantasy YA anthology, looks at the scarier side of queerness. The anthology opens with editor Rob Costello’s powerful introductory essay about queerness and its relationship to monstrousness, how we as a society and as individuals create monsters to reflect our fears and ...Read More
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How to Make a Horror Movie and Survive, Craig DiLouie (Redhook 978-0-31656-931-6, $19.99, 400pp, ppb) June 2024.
Funny horror is hard to do right, but Craig DiLouie delivers plenty of it in How to Make a Horror Movie and Survive. At once a send up of the movie industry, a brutal horror novel where a lot of people die in horrible ways, and an exploration of art and ...Read More
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Something Kindred, Ciera Burch (Farrar Straus Giroux 978-0-374-38913-0, $19.99, hc, 284pp) March 2024.
Seventeen-year-old Jericka is 100% not having, at all, the summer she was promised. Stuck in her mother’s hometown of Coldwater, Maryland, Jericka is supposed to be visiting all the beaches in New Jersey with her best friend, figuring out if she and her boyfriend are really as serious as they seem to be and taking pictures ...Read More
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Escape Pod 5/16/24 Strange Horizons 5/20/24, 5/27/24, 6/10/24, 6/17/24 Beneath Ceaseless Skies 5/30/24, 6/13/24
Rocky Cornelius returns to Escape Pod with Andrew Dana Hudson’s May story, “The Concept Shoppe: A Rocky Cornelius Consultancy”. Having left uncool hunting behind her, Rocky is a creative consultant for Primal, a new store that’s selling the postapocalypse experience in a future that feels in many ways postapocalyptic, right down to the ...Read More
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Analog 5-6/24
The May/June 2024 issue of Analog opens with “Uncle Roy’s Computer Repairs and Used Robot Parts” by Martin L. Shoemaker, a charming novella about a man who retires with his wife to her hometown and starts his own computer repair business only to find himself accidentally in a bitter rivalry with the town’s resident “whiz kid.” It’s a fun story that does a good job of capturing ...Read More
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Archangels of Funk, Andrea Hairston (Tordotcom 978-1-25080-728-1, $29.99, 384pp, hc) July 2024.
Andrea Hairston’s Archangels of Funk forced me to rewire my brain chemistry. The book contains a stew of dense but rewarding elements as people, dogs, spirits, and bots dot a literary canvas unlike anything I’ve read. It’s a cozy dystopia that demands attention, demands that you think on its wavelength. The book largely contains good but flawed ...Read More
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The Price of Redemption, Shawn Carpenter (Saga 978-1-6680-3373-9, $18.99, 358pp, tp) July 2024.
The Price of Redemption is Shawn Carpenter’s debut novel. Inspired by the exploits of the British Royal Navy during during the French revolutionary wars, it sets its story in a different world to ours and adds magic to the mixture. As a fan of both fantasy and of the naval adventure story (though frequently through gritted ...Read More
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Key Lime Sky, Al Hess (Angry Robot 978-1915998125, trade paperback, 304pp, $18.99) August 2024,
It has been said that Irish fantasist Flann O’Brien had a penchant for involving the humble bicycle in his surreal fiction, until the vehicle became a kind of numinous totem or idiosyncratic symbol. A few other writers of fantasy have deployed such a technique—recurring enigmatic touchstone with multiple meanings—and now Al Hess joins their ranks, ...Read More
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Small Wonders 5/24 Flash Fiction Online 5/24 Cast of Wonders 5/29/24
I’ll start off with May’s Small Wonders, a publication dedicated to flash fiction and poetry, which includes Angel Leal’s powerful poem ‘‘Music of the Seraphim’’. A child meets an angel and is filled with a desire for something new – new experiences, a new body, a new place to be – and find their prayers and ...Read More
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The Black Girl Survives in This One, Desiree S. Evans & Saraciea J. Fennell, eds. (Flatiron 978-1-25032-199-2, $19.99, 368pp, hc) April 2024.
Horror is in a golden age in young adult fiction. Just a few years ago, you could count the number of YA horror novels released each year on one hand. Last year I tracked more than 30 YA books marketed as horror. This year just in January ...Read More
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Tomorrowing, Terry Bisson (Duke University Press 978-1-4780-3068-3, $15.95, 168pp, tp) May 2024.
Terry Bisson, who died in January, began writing his ‘‘This Month in History’’ column of hilarious microfictions for Locus on April Fool’s Day 2004, and for the next two decades it became as much a fixture of this magazine as The New Yorker’s cartoons or Alfred Hitchcock’s cameos. (He’d actually begun a similar series for Eileen Gunn’s ...Read More
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khōréō 3.4
Due to an error in my logging stories for review, I accidentally left three stories out of my initial review of khōréō 3.4. The stories are reviewed here with apologies to the authors, editors, and publisher of the magazine.
“The Maiden Voyage of the Piranha Belle” by L.M. Guay is a diamond of a story, with beautiful glittering surfaces and a sharp, cutting point. The Piranha Belle of ...Read More
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Gogmagog, Jeff Noon & Steve Beard (Angry Robot 978-1-91520-282-6, $18.99, 353pp, tp) February 2024.
Gogmagog is the first novel I’ve read by Jeff Noon since the publication of Nyphomation in 1997. The books he wrote immediately after his Vurt phase – Needle in the Groove and Falling Out of Cars – didn’t appeal to twenty-something Ian (though Falling Out of Cars looks right up the alley of fifty-something Ian). ...Read More
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A Tempest of Tea, Hafsah Faizal (Farrar Straus Giroux 978-0-374-38940-6, hc, 336 pp) February 2024. Cover by Valentina Remenar.
Hafsah Faizal has written a banger of a caper novel with A Tempest of Tea. Her tale of thieves, forgery, and political malfeasance set in the town of White Roaring takes readers on a ride with twists and turns they can never expect. Reminiscent of 19th-century London, White Roaring ...Read More
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Time’s Agent, Brenda Peynado (Tordotcom 978-1250854315, trade paperback, 208pp, $16.99) August 2024
Would it be possible to write a piece of fiction that exhibited or contained no emotions? That seems highly unlikely. Humans are made of emotions—and intellect. Those two realms are—to truncate the famous phrase coined by Stephen Jay Gould when he was trying to categorize the barrier between science and religion—“overlapping magisteria.” Two vast territories with a ...Read More
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To Turn the Tide, S. M. Stirling (Baen 978-1982193539, hardcover, 464pp, $28.00) August 2024
Time travel novels—recently, a trendy favorite of non-genre slipstream authors—have reached a state of incredible complexity. Multiverses, paradoxes, change wars, closed loops, and doppelgangers proliferate. This is all very entertaining, but sometimes it’s nice to read a simple, straightforward “person visits past, gets stuck, makes do” kind of book. A chrono-Robinsonade. That’s exactly what S. ...Read More
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The Jaguar Mask, Michael J. DeLuca (Stelliform 978-1-77809-260-2, 348pp, $19.00, tp) August 2024. Cover by Julia Louise Pereira.
I was quite charmed by Michael J. DeLuca’s novella Night Roll, a solarpunk-adjacent fantasy set in Detroit. In his debut novel, The Jaguar Mask, DeLuca takes up a different kind of magic, but a similar kind of realism: a story of individuals and communities resisting oppression, on wounded but still ...Read More
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Blackheart Man, Nalo Hopkinson (Saga 978-1-6680-0510-1, $28.99, 384pp, hc) August 2024.
Those who have been following Nalo Hopkinson’s fascinating (and Grand Master-winning) career have long been aware that a major novel titled Blackheart Man has been in the works for some time. In a Locus interview a couple of months ago, Hopkinson said she’d been working on it for more than fifteen years, and she even mentioned the book ...Read More
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The Last Hour Between Worlds, Melissa Caruso (Orbit 978-0-31630-347-7, $19.99, 432pp, tp) November 2024.
If I tell you that I love The Last Hour Between Worlds to pieces, that I read it when I was miserably sick and it took me entirely out of myself from the first page to the last, that’s probably not quite enough information to constitute a proper review. Melissa Caruso’s latest novel, her first ...Read More
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Toward Eternity, Anton Hur (HarperVia 978-0-06334-448-8, 256pp, $26.99, hc) July 2024. Cover by Stephen Brayda.
Initially set in a near-future Cape Town, South Africa, and eventually taking us to ever more distant times and locales, Anton Hur’s debut novel Toward Eternity begins with scientist Mali Beeko confronting the mysterious disappearance and reapparance of “Patient One.” Mali specializes in a nanotechnology treatment that cures cancer by replacing the host’s cells with ...Read More
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Momma Durtt, Michael Shea (Hippocampus Press 978-1-61498-417-7, 310pp. $20.00, tp) July 2024. Cover by Tom Brown.
Michael Shea (1946 – 2014) is usually noted for his World Fantasy Award-winning fantasy novel Nifft the Lean, but he is almost as well-known among horror lovers for his Lovecraftian fiction. Among a multitude of short work in this latter category is a 2012 novelette: ‘‘Momma Durtt’’. It is a good allegorical ...Read More
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The Melancholy of Untold History, Minsoo Kang (William Morrow 978-0-06333-750-3, $28.00, 240pp, hc) July 2024.
Early in Minsoo Kang’s remarkable first novel The Melancholy of Untold History, a character known only as the historian makes an interesting observation about how civilizations tell their own stories. First, he says, come ‘‘tales of gods, monsters, and heroes,’’ followed by historical narratives of ‘‘important personages of the past who achieved great things ...Read More
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The Redemption of Morgan Bright, Chris Panatier (Angry Robot 978-1-9152-028-95, $18.99, 416pp, pb) April 2024. Cover by Sarah O’Flaherty.
Chris Panatier’s The Redemption of Morgan Bright is a great psychological thriller full of mystery that slowly morphs into a full-blown horror novel. At once the story of a sister looking for answers, a narrative about a crumbling psyche, and a tale that gets progressively more mysterious with each new revelation, ...Read More
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Long Live Evil, Sarah Rees Brennan (Orbit 978-0-35652-249-4, £20.00, 440pp, hc) August 2024. Cover by Syd Mills.
Sarah Rees Brennan has had a varied and interesting career to date writing YA novels, including tie-ins for The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and Fate: the Winx Saga in addition to her original work. Long Live Evil is her first novel aimed primarily at an adult audience. It is simultaneously a wholehearted ...Read More
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The Universe Delivers the Enemy You Need, Adam Marek (Comma Press 978-1-91269-775-5, £9.99, 244pp, tp) March 2024.
A large chunk of the 21 stories in Adam Marek’s new collection, The Universe Delivers the Enemy You Need – a magnificent title that’s sadly not shared by a single piece in the book – plays on similar concerns raised by Joel Dane in The Ragpicker: that technology is putting a ...Read More
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The Daughters’ War, Christopher Buehlman (Tor 978-1-25088-767-2, $28.99, 416pp, hc) June 2024.
Christopher Buehlman’s The Daughters’ War is the rare prequel that makes you want to pick up the first book – The Blacktongue Thief, in this case – again so that you can read it with all that you now know about this world and one of its characters. It helps, too, that both books are damn ...Read More
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The West Passage, Jared Pechaček (Tordotcom 978-1-25088-483-1, 384pp, $28.99, hc) July 2024. Cover by Jared Pechaček.
I went into Jared Pechaček’s debut novel, The West Passage, with absolutely no idea what I was getting into beyond a cool cover. Pechaček’s been a delightful person to follow on various social media for some time now – sharing illustrations and fashion commentary, and one of the hosts of the lovely Tolkeinalia ...Read More
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Clarkesworld 5/24
The May issue of Clarkesworld opens with a charming story, which also offers up some touching emotional moments. “Fishy” by Alice Towey sees a daughter tasked with going through her father’s office after his death, trying to track down a prototype he was working on that would provide clean water to millions. His shifty business partner is after the prototype as well, but it turns out ...Read More
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