Is it weird to call a horror novel charming? Because Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke is definitely charming. Disturbing, upsetting, and frightening yes, but it just starts out so endearingly, with a quirky little exchange about an antique apple peeler via emails. Agnes, a young woman trying to sell her family’s kitchen …
How important is a story to you? Important enough to hear? What about important enough to learn, so that you can tell it again? Is it important enough to preserve—important enough to write down, if you know how to write, important enough to recite if you can’t? Important enough to die for, to kill for? …
Zychtykas Three—Kas—is a broke mecha scholar from offworld. Zhi is a broke mecha fighter and also a broken mech fighter, using whatever she can scrape together to enhance an antique model for modern pit fights. When their lives collide, all manner of sparks start flying, although they have to risk everything to keep those sparks …
The WyldBoyZ aren’t your average boyband. Sure, they have “the smart one,” “the cute one,” “the shy one” and so on, but “the smart one” really does have an elephant’s memory, and “the cute one” really is kittenish. That’s because the boyz are genetic hybrids, each with the features of a specific animal: Matt the …
You might have known one. You might have been one. Or you might only have heard about them as yet another mythic creature on the internet: the girls (and boys, and nonbinary folks) who were obsessed with all things equine. Highly imaginative and yet necessarily down to earth, these special individuals might have been a …
Sometimes a book is so good that you go look up whatever else the author has written and devour that, too. And then sometimes a book is so very, very good that when you learn the book is a debut, you nonetheless go find the press that published such an audacious novel and start planning …
The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey made me really consider that term: “the other woman.” Other. College English classes asked me to consider: who is the Other? And they made it a verb: to Other, to render something that could be taken in terms of its similarities and instead treating it only in terms of …
American stories about people with powers often involve organizations and the general public getting swept up in their struggles. The government wants to use them! Scientists want to study them! The media will hound them! Those stories are always a bit fatiguing to me in their paranoia (not unjustified paranoia, but still), because in reality, …
In time for the holidays, Amazon has published a collection of five short stories centered roughly on the theme of fairy tales. The five authors chosen to create it are very different, and they set off in very different directions at once, their works running the gamut from very literal, with Snow White and Cinderella …
As 2020 finishes up, one of the very few things I’m sad to see go is the Wells of Sorcery trilogy, a bright spot full of action, romance, and magic that took me out of this waking nightmare. A Siege of Rage and Ruin keeps to that trend set by the previous two books and …