Like Sung-il Kim’s debut novel Blood of the Old Kings (translated by the incomparable Anton Hur), his follow-up Blood for the Undying Throne is a trove of badassery. It takes everything awesome about 90s fantasy, the bigness of it, the bombast, the refusal to get bogged down in grimdark or hyper-realistic details, and updates them …

Words, formerly normal, that now unnerve me thanks to Cathedral of the Drowned: meat, scoop, jelly. Words that were already uncomfortable that got worse: glutinous, birthed, slurry. Words that I use to describe Cathedral of the Drowned as a result: brilliant, disturbing, devouring. Yes, devouring. I had the sense, while reading, that rather than devouring …

Hope is the thing with feathers. Unfortunately, in Daedalus Is Dead by Seamus Sullivan, hope is Icarus, and Icarus, like his father, is dead. This isn’t a spoiler for many reasons—not only is it a cultural touchstone, he also dies within the first few pages of the novella. Daedalus spends the remainder of the book …

Now that the long, long-anticipated Silksong is finally here, I know that I and many others are torn between playing through the whole game in a rush and holding back in order to savor the atmosphere. Even the massive map and sprawling storyline don’t feel like enough! So if you’re looking for ways to extend …

There are certain settings that present a higher difficulty level for authors. Not that it’s easy to write a book even when the setting lends its heft to the narrative, but an old Victorian house looming behind iron gates for a horror story or a glittering high-rise for a locked room mystery certainly do some …

At this point it’s hard to write a review of a T. Kingfisher novel—not because of the pace of publication, though that is breakneck (four books this year! Four!), and not because of the quality of the prose, which is unwaveringly compelling, or even the narratives, which are consistently innovative. It’s the rare combination of …

Grappling with the philosophical reality of clones is a trope as old as sci-fi. Teaming up with them comes up a lot. Killing them, too. But outsourcing killing your clones to another clone is a new one, and with a book a fun as Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock by Maud Woolf, I’m. Here. …

Anji Kills a King wastes absolutely no time. With a title like that there’s no reason to beat around the bush, but Evan Leikam doesn’t even bother with setting the scene before we’re watching Anji coping with cleanup and escape. It’s bold, it’s striking, and it makes for a pulse-pounding introduction to the land of …

Every time a new Robert Jackson Bennett book comes out, I read it way too fast and then feel something I mostly otherwise feel after eating an entire bag of Cadbury mini-eggs: not regret—never!—but longing to return to the start, to experience the whole thing over again. I want to have both the anticipation and …

It’s not really the done thing, but in talking about The River Has Roots, the first offering from Amal El-Mohtar since she co-authored This Is How You Lose the Time War with Max Gladstone, I have to first at least mention Margaret Atwood. Or really, I have to mention Atwood’s famous “Spelling” poem, which so …