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Shea, Brian & Byrnes, Raquel: Aurora Fragment (Severn River 9781648756221, $18.99, 312pp, formats: trade paperback, ebook, 01/14/2025)
Science fiction murder mystery novel. Detective Morgan Reed is drawn to an isolated Alaskan town, haunted by the intrusive memories of a killer. He teams up with the local detective to find a missing intern, ...Read More
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Compound Fracture, Andrew Joseph White (Peachtree Teen 978-1-68263-612-1, $19.99, 384pp, hc) September 2024.
Teens fighting against the forces of empire or capitalism is a common theme in young adult fiction. Oftentimes, the teen protagonist has a couple sidekicks and a love interest or two who help them wage battle, but it’s up to our hero to defeat the Big Bad and save the day. The empire or corporation is ...Read More
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The Kwaidan Collection, Lafcadio Hearn, illustrated by Kent Williams (Beehive Books 978-1-948886-32-1) $100.00, 144+pp, hc) April 2023. Cover by Kent Williams.
The Kwaidan Collection is not only a fascinating illustrated volume of vintage supernatural Japanese folk tales, brilliantly interpreted by acclaimed multimedia artist Kent Williams, it’s historically significant. These stories were literally rescued by the eccentric multilingual world traveler Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) in the early 20th century when the ...Read More
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Suite 13, David J. Schow (Subterranean 978-1645241621, hardcover, 384pp, $45.00) November 2024
When I reviewed Cixin Liu’s story collection A View from the Stars a few months ago, I made a big deal of how Liu had pulled a radical move by issuing a hybrid volume of fiction and non-fiction. Well, now comes an identical blend from master of shocks David Schow, half tales, half essays. There must be ...Read More
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A Conventional Boy, Charles Stross (Tordotcom 978-1-250357-847, $28.99, 224 pp, hc) January 2025.
Charles Stross expands his series about the highly secret and secretive counteroccult-threat agency nicknamed the Laundry with a volume made up of a new short novel, accompanied by a pair of previously published pieces. The novel, A Conventional Boy, is the origin story of a particular Laundry employee, as well as an homage to tabletop fantasy ...Read More
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We Are All Ghosts in the Forest, Lorraine Wilson (Solaris 978-1-83786-144-6, 400pp, £18.99, hc). November 2024. Cover by Jo Walker.
The image that I think will stay with me longest from Lorraine Wilson’s resonant new novel, We Are All Ghosts in the Forest, comes a little over halfway through the book. The novel’s protagonist, Katerina, has completed a trade in a village on the shore of Lake Peipus, ...Read More
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The Bog Wife, Kay Chronister (Counterpoint 978-1-64009-662-2, $28.00, 336pp, hc) October 2024. Cover by Nicole Caputo.
Like all conscientious and well-meaning readers, I strive to bring an open mind unsullied by prejudice and bias to any fiction work. However, based solely on the title and cover of Kay Chronister’s new novel, The Bog Wife, I assumed it was a revisionist fairytale based on Celtic mythology that takes place ...Read More
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Good Night, Sleep Tight, Brian Evenson (Coffee House Press 978-1-56689-709-9, $19.00, 256pp, tp) September 2024.
The best horror fiction is about dislocation, the growing feeling that something is askew or lopsided with the world and only you, no one else, is aware. Brian Evenson gets this. In a recent article for Lit Hub, he points out that:
Writing Horror is about tapping into something that resonates for you, something ...Read More
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The Tapestry of Time, Kate Heartfield (Harper Voyager 978-0-00-856781-1, £16.99, 384pp, hc) October 2024.
Sometimes a trope seems so familiar that it begins to feel like a tire that’s lost its tread, even though it’s still fun to drive on. The Nazi preoccupation with occult powers has itself been a preoccupation for writers from all over the spectrum – horror (F. Paul Wilson, Robert McCammon), fantasy (Katherine Kurtz, Ian ...Read More
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Absolution, Jeff VanderMeer (MCD 978-0-37461-659-6, $30.00, 464pp, hc) October 2024.
While I try not to pick favourites, I have been looking forward to this month’s column (and not just because October is my birth month). Jeff VanderMeer, Laura van den Berg, and Jesse Ball are three authors who have made an art form of the weird, and, as you already know, I love my fiction seasoned with a generous ...Read More
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Cicada, Tanya Pell (Shortwave 978-1-95956-534-5, $13.99, 192pp, tp) September 2024. Cover by Alan Lastufka.
Tanya Pell’s Cicada is a fun, fast, pulpy horror novel that’s part survival narrative and part creature feature. It’s also a book that’s packed with tips of the hat and the kind of writing that lets you know an author is really a fan of the genre and has a great time doing what they ...Read More
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Hampton Height, Dan Kois (Harper Perennial 978-0-06335-875-1, $16.99, 208pp, tp) September 2024. Cover by Jackie Alvarado
Dan Kois’s Hampton Heights: One Harrowing Night in the Most Haunted Neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin is very much like its title in that it shouldn’t work, but it somehow does. Entertaining, touching, and funnier than I expected, this short novel about a group of kids spending a night trying to sell newspaper subscriptions in ...Read More
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Crypt of the Moon Spider, Nathan Ballingrud (Nightfire 978-1-25029-173-8, $17.99, 85pp, tp) August 2024. Cover by Sam Araya.
Nathan Ballingrud is one of the finest purveyors of speculative fiction working today, and Crypt of the Moon Spider, the first book in what will be The Lunar Gothic Trilogy, further cements him as one of the strongest voices in the field. Wonderfully atmospheric and very strange, Crypt of the ...Read More
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The Wilding, Ian McDonald (Gollancz 978-1-39961-147-3, £25.00, 314pp, hc) September 2024.
Ian McDonald may be one of the most accomplished SF writers of his generation, but he isn’t particularly known for horror – though that may change with the very creepy ecological fable The Wilding. I’m using “creepy” in a quite literal sense here: There’s a lot of creeping going on. A project to restore and “rewild” a ...Read More
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Drill, Scott R. Jones (Word Horde 978-1-95625-209-5, $19.99, 256pp, tp) August 2024. Cover by Matthew Revert.
Sometimes you’re reading a book and suddenly ask yourself, “What the hell am I reading?” This can be a bad thing or an excellent thing. In the case of Scott R. Jones’s Drill, it’s the latter. Slightly surreal, angry, smart, Lovecraftian, chaotic, and written with the kind of prose that dances between ...Read More
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Smothermoss, Alisa Alering (Tin House 978-1-959-03058-4, $17.95, tp, 256pp) July 2024.
Alisa Alering’s debut novel Smothermoss is a master class in conveying both a physically and psychologically oppressive atmosphere. Set in a small rural Appalachian town in the early 1980s, the novel follows the tough adventures of sisters Sheila and Angie. At seventeen years old, Sheila is acutely aware of her ‘‘otherness,’’ a kid all too often bullied and ...Read More
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Nether Station, Kevin J. Anderson (Blackstone 979-8200688449, hardcover, 316pp, $27.99) October 2024
The crew of a small survey spaceship voyages out to investigate a spacetime anomaly, and encounters deadly supernatural (?) entities. Am I about to take a second pass at reviewing Adam Roberts’s recent Lake of Darkness? Not at all! But by phrasing the plot of that novel generically, I can point out that although certain adjacent ...Read More
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Annie LeBlanc Is Not Dead Yet, Molly Morris (Wednesday 978-1-250-29006-9, $20.00, 336pp, hc) June 2024.
The town of Lennon, California has a secret that only the residents (and a few chosen former residents) can know. The Welcome Back contest allows the townspeople to nominate someone to come back from the dead for 30 days. This year, Wilson Moss has won, and that means her friend Annie is returning, but ...Read More
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Model Home, Rivers Solomon (MCD 978-0-374-60713-5, $28.00, 304pp, hc) October 2024.
“Everyone believes in haunted houses,” says Ezri, the narrator of Rivers Solomon’s Model Home, and who’s to argue? Based on the resurgence of the theme in the past couple of years alone, it’s proved to be not only a durable framework for supernatural shenanigans, but a kind of magical mirror for all sorts of issues ranging from ...Read More
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Your Shadow Half Remains, Sunny Moraine (Nightfire 978-1-25089-220-1, $16.99, 176pp, tp) February 2024.
If you look at someone, you’re dead. Not just dead, but dead in some horrible, violent way. That’s the premise at the core of Sunny Moraine’s Your Shadow Half Remains. Yes, readers familiar with Josh Malerman’s Bird Box may see a similarity to that novel in that premise, but Your Shadow Half Remains is very different, ...Read More
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Cinderwich, Cherie Priest (Apex Book Company 978-1-955-76520-6, $21.95, 162pp, tp) May 2024.
Cherie Priest’s novella Cinderwich gifts readers with a bit of a haunted tree folktale, some true crime detecting, a frustrated ghost, and a couple of academic ladies with a sometimes prickly friendship who are more than willing to sit through countless diner dinners to get to a much-needed truth. In other words, it’s catnip for readers who ...Read More
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Reactor 6/5/24 to 7/10/24 The Sunday Morning Transport 5/26/24 to 7/14/24 Nightmare 7/24
Reactor continues to present top-quality fiction. Rich Larson’s “Breathing Constellations” (June 5) is small-scale but excellent SF story revolving around a struggling human commune in Argentinian Patagonia seeking the permission of a pod of orcas to begin harvesting plankton in their waters.
In the heartwarming “Reduce! Reuse! Recycle!” (June 12) by TJ ...Read More
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Haunt Sweet Home, Sarah Pinsker (Tordotcom 978-1-250-33026-0, $20.99, 170pp, hc) September 2024.
I seem to have found myself reading a number of haunted house novels in the last year or so, and it’s always fascinating to watch how authors still find ways to ring new changes on a template that goes back to the earliest Gothic novels. In Haunt Sweet Home, Sarah Pinsker’s witty approach is to focus ...Read More
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One of Our Kind, Nicola Yoon (Knopf 978-0-59347-067-1, $28.00. 272pp, hc) June 2024.
Jasmyn, her husband Kingston, and their young son Kamau are excited to move to the new all-Black community of Liberty, just outside Los Angeles in Nicola Yoon’s One of Our Kind. King’s new job and higher income landed them a sprawling home in a luxury community where everyone from the retail workers to the cops ...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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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
Read moreThe 2010 Edgar Award nominees were announced by the Mystery Writers of America. There are two fantasies in the YA category: 7 Souls by Barnabas Miller & Jordan Orlando (Delacorte) and Dust City by Robert Paul Weston (Razorbill). Expiration Date by Duane Swiercynski (Minotaur), a fantasy, has been nominated in the Best Paperback Original category.
2010 Grand Master Sara Paretsky is one of ours as well. For additional nominees in ...Read More
Read moreWhile thinking about horror stories for a forthcoming post, I stumbled upon the Gaslight Archive, a repository for out-of-copyright stories “from the genres of mystery, adventure and the Weird”. (There’s also a discussion list attached, but it appears to be defunct.) The archive includes Charles Dickens’s “The Signal-Man” (1866), Thomas Hardy’s “The Three Strangers” (1903), Robert Hichens’s “How Love Came To Professor Guildea” (1900), E T A Hoffman’s “The Sandman” ...Read More
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