“So Shanna got a new job at the movie theater, we thought we’d play a fun prank on her, and now most of us are dead, and I’m really starting to feel kind of guilty about it all.” As first lines go, Stephen Graham Jones’s opener for Night of the Mannequins is pretty close to …

Rejoice! For the necromancers are back, and they are gayer than ever. Pansexual, polyamorous lusts and even a few chaste passions simmer beneath more layers of  mystery and necromantic magic than ever before, and dear grim little Harrow is our guide. Which is both fortunate and challenging, because she’s going places you wouldn’t believe. No …

Emily Tesh has done it again. She’s taken old and frankly overused staples of the Western/English canon and imbued them with new vigor and fresh surprises. Fairies? Vampires? Why not both together, each in a new and mutually illuminating way? It’s madness, and it works. It works magnificently. Drowned Country is even more of a …

The heroine of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, Noemí, is a modern woman, as eager to drive her shiny new convertible to a party as she is to enroll in a Master’s program in anthropology. Her interests are broad, her charm indefatigable. She enjoys her glamorous life to the full, which is why she’s initially put …

Flyaway is exquisite, exquisite, exquisite. Saying it once is not enough. And not just for emphasis: I’m hoping I can invoke even a fraction of the magic contained within Kathleen Jenning’s masterful little book. Bettina lives with her mother in sleepy serenity, venturing out from her just-so home and her fragrant garden only when necessary. …

Hopefully you are already reading Ta-Nahesi Coates, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Ibrahim X. Kendi. Obviously if you like SFF you should read Toni Morrison*, Octavia Butler, N.K. Jemisin, and Samuel Delany. But to round out your reading here are other Black voices you can embrace and support in your reading of YA and SFF. *No …

I don’t really go in for short story collections and I don’t really like the original Alice or her twee wonderland. But ah, Christina Henry is such a master that I forget all about that when I read her work. These stories are interconnected novelettes, complex and complete unto themselves, but even better when taken …

If you’re struggling to find ways to contribute during the pandemic, a small way you can help several communities at once is to buy books by Asian or Asian American authors from your local independent bookstore. Debut authors especially, but really anyone with a book out recently is hurting. Small retailers are hurting. And the …

Like many people during this pandemic, I’ve been in a bit of a reading funk. A bit of a doing-anything-at-all funk, if I’m being honest. I lose interest in things quickly, if I do them at all. I can’t read more than a few pages. I do the dishes in stages. Heck, I got up …

If you want an engrossing book or two that will help you enforce social distancing and keep you inside for as long as possible, consider these long series or massive tomes (or, in a few instances, both) that don’t have anything to do with pandemics. Priory of the Orange Tree (Samantha Shannon) – This extra-large …