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 …

Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz is about a group of robots in an unidentified dystopian future of California who discover not only that they have been offline for months, but also that the owners of their restaurant have fled the country. They decide, instead of serving the mix of all the hodgepodge of food their …

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. …

The Devils by Joe Abercrombie feels fresh while still retaining the style of writing the author has become famous for. It’s set in a new world, our world in an alternate timeline Europe, where the church wages war with elves that eat the flesh of man and are waiting for their chance to wage war …

Brighter Than Scale, Swifter Than Flame by Neon Yang is written like a folktale, not about slaying dragons but finding yourself again after you’ve lost who you were to protect yourself. It’s a tale of identity, isolation, and culture. The fact that its main character, Kunlin Yeva, is a famous dragon slayer is less crucial …