Locus Online

A Vile Season, David Ferraro (Page Street YA 979-8-89003-072-6, $18.99, 400pp, hc) October 2024.

David Ferraro’s new young adult fantasy romance A Vile Season is comped as Bridgerton meets The Bachelor but with vampires. That’s exactly the vibe. Everything from the pacing, the intentionally and flamboyantly anachronistic diversity in the upper classes, the garish wardrobe, the playful disregard for historical accuracy, the overly dramatic rela­tionship conflicts, the marriage competition, ...Read More

At the Fount of Creation, Tobi Ogundiran (Tordotcom 978-1-250-90803-2, $21.99, 224pp, hc) January 2025.

Writers of duologies aren’t doing any favors for book reviewers. With a trilogy, we can blather on about middle-book syndrome and three-act structures; with an ongoing series, we can spec­ulate about metanarratives or simply rate each new volume as though it were the latest album from a familiar band, but a duology somehow seems to ...Read More

Fortress Sol, Stephen Baxter (Gollancz 978-1-39961-461-0, £25.00, 480pp, hc). October 2024.

Fortress Sol is classic Stephen Baxter. It’s driven by big ideas: Humanity’s response to a perceived existential threat includes both dispersing to the stars and mind-boggling engineering projects. Like 2021’s Galaxias, the focus is not so much on the alien threat as on humanity’s response. There’s a relatively small cast of characters, who are engag­ing enough but ...Read More

The Shutouts, Gabrielle Korn (St. Martin’s 978-1-2503-2348-4, $29.00, 304pp, hc) December 2024.

As climate change has become an ever-growing and more insistent presence in our lives, it has also begun inflecting and informing works of fiction, whose authors imag­ine how the remainder of the 21st century will play out. Interestingly, it is writers coming from outside the traditional venues of SFF writing and publishing who have most readily embraced this ...Read More

Days of Shattered Faith, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Head of Zeus 978-1-03590-152-4, £22.00, 544pp, hc) December 2024. Cover by Joe Wilson.

Days of Shattered Faith, the third book in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Tyrant Philoso­phers sequence, continues to examine the effects of the long-running, world-conquering program of the nation of Pallesand, a resolutely rationalist, religion-detesting nation determined to bring its notion of secular perfection to a world that is filled with supernatural ...Read More

It’s the end of January and we’ve got a great collection of the top new SF, Fantasy, Horror, and YA releases to share with you! Come by our YouTube channel to keep up-to-date on all the releases slated to hit shelves every week! While you’re there, don’t forget to subscribe to show your support for what we do! We’ll be back next week with another fantastic new video for you! ...Read More

We are so happy to release our second episode of The Storytellers, our series of Zoom-recorded author readings! We kicked off with Ai Jiang reading I AM AI (which you can find here), and today we have Tobi Ogundiran reading “Midnight in Moscow” from Jackal, Jackal.

Tobi Ogundrian is the award-winning author of the Guardian of the Gods duology and the critically acclaimed collection Jackal, Jackal. He has ...Read More

Ellen Datlow is accepting submissions for her 17th Best Horror of the Year anthology, to be published by Night Shade Books and covering material appearing in 2025.

I am looking for stories and poetry from all branches of horror: supernatural, uncanny, sf horror, psychological, dark crime, terror tales, or anything else that might qualify.

This is an all reprint anthology, so I’ll only consider material published in 2025. Deadline ...Read More

Terese Svoboda, Shiva Kumar, Austin Grossman, and Grady Hendrix read at the Barrow’s Intense Tasting Room in Industry City, Brooklyn NY on November 19, 2024 as part of the Brooklyn Books & Booze Reading series, hosted by Randee Dawn

While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We rely on reader donations to keep the magazine and site going, and would ...Read More

Ludluda, Jeff Noon and Steve Beard (Angry Robot 978-1915998316, trade paperback, 400pp, $18.99) December 2024

I am happy to bring readers this exciting news: the genre known as New Weird is currently alive and kicking, despite any rumors of its moribund state, or lack of recent exemplars. The evidence? The fascinating and thrilling duology set before us, Gogmagog and Ludluda.

New Weird—with undeniably deeper roots, not to be ...Read More

Crows and Silences, Lucius Shepard (Subterranean 978-1-64524-217-8, $60.00, 520pp, hc) December 2024.

When discussing Lucius Shepard, it’s inevitable to bemoan that despite his abundant talent, his work received little mainstream recognition. I observed this when I reviewed The Best of Lucius Shepard: Volume 2, quoting an obituary of Shepard penned by Christopher Priest for The Guardian. Priest felt that Shepard’s preference for the novella and his association with ...Read More