The Warm Hands of Ghosts, Katherine Arden (Del Rey 978-0-593-12825-1, $28.99, 318pp, hc) February 2024.
As The Warm Hands of Ghosts opens, former field nurse Laura Iven is still reeling from the deaths of her parents following the catastrophic explosion of a cargo ship laden with explosives in the harbor of her hometown, Halifax, Nova Scotia. (This is based on a real event in 1917.) Laura was home after ...Read More
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The Butcher of the Forest, Premee Mohamed (Tordotcom 978-1250881786, $18.99, 160pp, tp) February 2024.
I’m pretty sure that tales of forests that are haunted (or enchanted or forbidden or cursed or simply hallucinogenic) predate haunted-house tales by several centuries – in fact, they probably predate houses – and they’ve long provided powerful templates for fantasy (William Morris, George MacDonald, Tolkien, Robert Holdstock), horror (Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood) and even ...Read More
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Wicked Problems, Max Gladstone (Tordotcom 978-0-76539-593-1 $19.99, 464pp, tp) April 2024. Cover by Goñi Montes.
Max Gladstone’s new Craft Wars novel Wicked Problems feels like the sort of book that should have a relatively clear-cut binary of heroes and villains. Maybe the heroes would be tarnished, maybe the villains have some redeeming features; but the overall story – terrible things from beyond the void are coming and maybe the ...Read More
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House of Open Wounds, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Head of Zeus, 978-1035901388, $27.99, 585 pp, hc) December 2023. Cover by Joe Wilson.
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s House of Open Wounds is a follow-on to The City of Last Chances that repeats many of the structural features of its predecessor: a large cast of viewpoint characters; ‘‘mosaic’’ chapters that provide authorial overviews and comments; a rambling story line that nevertheless draws the reader through ...Read More
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Bookshops & Bonedust, Travis Baldree (Tor 978-1-250-88610-1, $17.99, 288 pp, tp) November 2023. Cover by Carson Lowmiller.
Don’t get me wrong; I love a book that challenges my idea of what a story is or how language can work or both. But the last few years have given me a new appreciation for a story where the biggest hurdle is which character can be the most humane, even if ...Read More
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House of Open Wounds, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Head of Zeus 978-1-0359-0138-8, $27.99. 608pp, hc) December 2023. Cover by Joe Wilson.
Although it is set in the same world as City of Last Chances, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s House of Open Wounds is very much a standalone sequel. The previous novel introduced us to a large cast of characters in Telmark, a formerly independent nation conquered by the aggressively expanding Palleseen Sway. ...Read More
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The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years, Shubnum Khan (Viking 9780593653456, $28.00. 320pp, hc) January 2024.
When I started Shubnum Khan’s first novel to be published in the US, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years, I had no idea what to expect. I haven’t read much South African speculative fiction, and nothing that delves into Indian culture transplanted to Africa. It’s not a history or culture I’m familiar with, ...Read More
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Paladin’s Faith, T. Kingfisher (Argyll Productions 978-1614506096, $6.99, 422pp, eb) December 2023.
T. Kingfisher (AKA Ursula Vernon) ventures back into her Saint of Steel universe with Paladin’s Faith. Each book in the planned seven-book series is nominally about one of the paladins whose spirits were broken when their animating saint died. But Kingfisher expands what we know about these paladins, their god, and his demise with each volume. ...Read More
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The Sunday Morning Transport 10/24/23, 9/10/23, 9/3/23 Apex #140 The Dark 9/23, 10/23
I know I am repeating myself, but every story The Sunday Morning Transport publishes should be read. Of the nine original stories published from the end of August through October 22, I’ll mention only my absolute favorites. Nura – in ‘‘We Will Witness’’ by Martin Cahill – is a 30th-century Witness, sent back in time ...Read More
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Swim Home to the Vanished, Brendan Shay Basham (Harper 978-0-0632-4108-4, $30.00. 240pp, hc) August 2023. Cover by Elina Cohen.
Brendan Shay Basham’s debut novel Swim Home to the Vanished is a gorgeously written story of magical transformations, and of grief. Following a Diné man cast adrift by loss, it’s a novel both fluid and sharp, full of shapeshifters and enchanted landscapes, rich in dialog and insight.
After the death ...Read More
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Again and Again, Jonathan Evison (Dutton 978-0-59318-415-8, $28.00, 336pp, hc) November 2023.
I’ve been a massive fan of Jonathan Evison’s fiction since encountering his 2012 novel The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving. Not only does Evison have a cracking sense of humour, but he can see beauty and humanity in the darkest and most challenging of situations. I never thought, though, that I’d be reviewing one of Evison’s books ...Read More
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Fathomfolk, Eliza Chan (Orbit US 978-0-316-56492-2, $19.99, 448pp, tp) February 2024. Cover by Kelly Chang.
Eliza Chan has racked up several short fiction publications in recent years, but Fathomfolk represents her debut novel. And it is an interesting debut, albeit one that, on the whole, didn’t come together as I might have hoped.
Fathomfolk takes place in a world dominated by water, apparently in the aftermath of a process ...Read More
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The Parliament, Aimee Pokwatka (Tordotcom 978-1-25082-097-6, 320pp, $28.99, hc) Cover by Jaya Miceli. January 2024.
Aimee Pokwatka leans into the absurdist, and refuses explanations in her fiction. Her debut, Self-Portrait with Nothing (2022), has an artist with the ability to bring variants of her portrait subjects into this world; how this works is never explained. Rather, the focus is on relationships: between the artist’s own variants, between the artist and ...Read More
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The Butcher of the Forest, Premee Mohamed (Tordotcom 978-1-250-88178-6, $18.99, 160pp, tp) February 2024. Cover by Andrew Davis.
It seems to me that I’ve read more books that have to do with weird forests over the last couple of years (some kind of Otherness, other land, or strange and inimical powers deep within the woods) than I have in a long while: Hannah Whitten’s fantasy-romance For the Wolf comes ...Read More
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The Parliament, Aimee Pokwatka (Tordotcom 978-1-250-82097-6, $27.99, 320pp, hc) January 2024.
Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film The Birds was based, a bit, on a Daphne du Maurier short story of the same name which itself was inspired by du Maurier’s experience seeing a farmer attacked by a flock of seagulls. (If you never saw The Birds, head to YouTube for the phone booth scene.) Author Aimee Pokwatka takes the ...Read More
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Mislaid in Parts Half-Known, Seanan McGuire (Tordotcom 978-1-250-84850-5, $22.99, 160pp, hc) January 2024. Cover by Robert Hunt.
Seanan McGuire’s latest entry in her Wayward Children series includes several old favorites who come together and relearn the meaning of the word ‘‘home.’’ Mislaid in Parts Half-Known opens in Eleanor West’s School for Wayward Children and includes a foray through some doors that lead into the fairyland of Prism, a visit ...Read More
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All the Hidden Paths, Foz Meadows (Tor 978-1-250-82930-6, $29.99, 520pp, hc) December 2023. Cover by Micaela Alcaino.
Foz Meadows’s All the Hidden Paths is a direct sequel to their A Strange and Stubborn Endurance. Velasin and Caethari have survived the plot against their diplomatic marriage, though it cost the lives of Caethari’s father and his sister Laecia. Their newlywed status and tentative happiness, however, is about to run ...Read More
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Diabolical Plots 10-11/23 Understudies, Priya Sridhar (Hiraeth) February 2023. Samovar 10/23/23 Strange Horizons 10/30/23, 11/6/23
Over at Diabolical Plots, the publishing schedule has been temporarily compacted, leading to an October and November with only one story each instead of the regular two. Both stories are quite good, though, and both stay in the Halloween spirit with witches and ghosts aplenty. Both also twist expectations regarding these classic elements, as ...Read More
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Nordic Visions, Margrét Helgadóttir, ed. (Solaris 978-18378-60296, 341pp, $16.99, tp) October 2023.
The most haunting story in Nordic Visions is one of the shortest. “I am hanging from the lowest bar,” says the narrator of Rakel Helmsdal’s “The Abyss”, by way of introduction, “as I have been for a while now. Knowing there is nothing to see I still stare into the fog.” They cannot recall when they were ...Read More
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A Necessary Chaos, Brent Lambert (Neon Hemlock Press 978-1-95208-646-5, $13.99. 156pp, tp) October 2023. Cover by Cathy Kwan.
Switching gears, let’s dive into novella A Necessary Chaos by Brent Lambert. In a world where technology and magic collide live two gay Black men, Althus and Vade. Every so often, the boyfriends are able to carve time out of their busy work schedules to meet, usually at some touristy party ...Read More
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The Wolfe at the Door, Gene Wolfe (Tor 978-1-25084-620-4, $29.99, 480pp, hc) October 2023.
With its punny title, The Wolfe at the Door is the second collection of Gene Wolfe’s work to be published this year (and the third book to come out since his passing in 2019). Where The Dead Man and Other Horror Stories from Subterranean Press assembled Wolfe’s more chilling tales, Tor’s The Wolfe at the ...Read More
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Cocktails & Chloroform, Kelley Armstrong (Subterranean Press 978-1-64524-161-4, $45.00, 136pp, hc) December 2023. Cover by Maurizio Manzieri.
Fans of Kelley Armstrong’s Rip Through Time series with protagonist Mallory Atkinson will be happy with her heroine’s latest exploits in the novella Cocktails & Chloroform. Trapped in the Victorian era after a mysterious circumstance found the homicide detective stuck in the body of Catriona Mitchell, a housemaid who was strangled ...Read More
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Lightspeed 11/23 Beneath Ceaseless Skies 11/2/23, 11/16/23 GigaNotoSaurus 11/23 Flash Fiction Online 11/23 F&SF 11-12/23
The November Lightspeed shows a keen interest in storytelling forms, with stories framed as recipes, as reviews, as confessions, and with Regina Kanyu Wang’s “A Record of Lost Time” (translated by Rebecca F. Kuang) as a series of personal narratives surrounding a new technology called FastForward, which allows users to experience “sped ...Read More
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Skin Thief: Stories, Suzan Palumbo (Neon Hemlock Press 978-1-95208-672-4, $18.99, 186pp, tp) September 2023. Cover by Mia Minnis.
Anytime a book published by Neon Hemlock lands at my doorstep, I drop everything to read it. Every story is unique in content and powerful in its queerness. I never know what I’m going to get, except that it’s going to be good. When Brent Lambert’s A Necessary Chaos and Suzan ...Read More
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Saevus Corax Deals with the Dead, K.J. Parker (Orbit 978-0316668903, $18.99, 359pp, tp) October 2023.
Saevus Corax Captures the Castle, K.J. Parker (Orbit 978-0316668910, $18.99, 352pp, tp) November 2023.
Readers of K.J. Parker are by now familiar with his affable scoundrels – by turns digressive, philosophical, deeply cynical, petulant, and somehow both self-loathing and self-justifying in the same breath. Saevus Corax, the playwright-turned-battlefield-scavenger who is the protagonist of ...Read More
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Beneath Ceaseless Skies 10/5/23, 10/19/23 Escape Pod 10/12/23, 10/19/23, 10/26/23 Worlds of Possibility 10/23 Cast of Wonders 10/14/23, 10/25/23, 10/27/23
Beneath Ceaseless Skies celebrated their 15th anniversary in October with a special double issue including Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko’s novella, “Between Blades”, which unfolds in a world where some people can adopt “swordform,” wherein one in a pair of people becomes a living weapon – a sword ...Read More
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Dry Land, B. Pladek (University of Wisconsin Press 978-0-29934-394-1, 264pp, $18.95, tp) September 2023.
Dry Land, B. Pladek’s debut novel, is historical climate fiction that meditates upon man’s fraught relationship with the natural environment and the limits of magical powers, enlivened with evocative sketches of the Wisconsin wilderness. Set against the backdrop of the First World War, the story revolves around Rand Brandt, a young man whose ...Read More
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The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023, R.F. Kuang & John Joseph Adams, eds. (Mariner 978-0-06-331574-7, $18.99, 292pp, tp) October 2023.
Now in its ninth year, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 predictably offers a stimulating and eclectic selection of tales, three of which made the Hugo ballot and a few of which are nothing short of brilliant. But it also raises a few questions of ...Read More
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Fantasy 10/23 Flash Fiction Online 10/23 GigaNotoSaurus 10/23 Baffling 10/23
Unfortunately, October brought the final issue of Fantasy, which closed in impressive fashion. First, in fiction, Ruoxi Chen’s “Fandom for Witches“, finds Lara, a Chinese-American girl lightly obsessed with the (definitely not Supernatural) fictional television show Sanctuary Road. The story deals with yearning, with fitting in, with all the messy bits of growing up and feeling alone and ...Read More
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Bittersweet in the Hollow, Kate Pearsall (Putnam 978-0-59353-102-0, $18.99, 384pp, hc) October 2023. Cover by Imogen Oh.
Linden James is the third of four sisters, and like all the James women, she and her sisters have some sort of magical ability. Linden can taste and recognize other people’s emotions; her second sister can tell when someone is lying, while the fourth sister can contact the spirits of the dead. ...Read More
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The Book of Love, Kelly Link (Random House 978-0-81299-658-6, $31.00, 640pp, hc) February 2024.
There are two things to be said up front about Kelly Link’s much-anticipated first novel. One is that it’s not what you’re expecting – although that’s pretty much what we do expect from any Kelly Link story – and the other is that there’s a reason why the title is The Book of Love rather ...Read More
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Midnight at the Houdini, Delilah S. Dawson (Delacorte 978-0593486795, $18.99, hc, 357pp) September 2023. Cover by Aurelie Maron.
Initially, Delilah S. Dawson’s Midnight at the Houdini is all about 16-year-old Anna Alonso’s very stressed-out day. Her beloved older sister is getting married, and because no one else in her family seems to worry about details to the degree that Anna does, she has organized the whole thing. While checking ...Read More
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