Emily R. Austin’s Is This a Cry for Help centers on a woman whose life is increasingly defined by her own chaotic impulses and a complicated relationship with the concept of truth. After a series of questionable decisions lands her in a precarious position, she finds herself attempting to navigate a social and professional landscape […]
I really wanted to love this one. Kritzer has proven she can write smart, character-driven speculative fiction, and the premise — an OB-GYN, already prosecuted for performing a life-saving abortion, kidnapped by a fundamentalist cult that needs an obstetrician — felt like it had real teeth. The problem isn’t the setup. It’s that the book […]
Okay, the premise alone got me: a small Massachusetts town gets a “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND, SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER, THIS IS NOT A DRILL” alert, eighteen minutes of pure panic, and then… false alarm. Everyone’s fine. Except they’re not, because of what they did and said in those eighteen minutes. That’s the hook, but the […]
McCurdy’s fiction debut follows Waldo, a seventeen-year-old in Anchorage living with her single mother, a Safeway bagger cycling through one needy relationship after another. Waldo manages her own loneliness through compulsive online shopping, treating a Shein order like it might fix something deeper. Then Mr. Korgy arrives as her new English teacher, introducing himself to […]
Set in mid-1980s Longview, Texas, this is small-town suburban noir with a Southern accent. Nellie Anderson is the beautiful, entitled daughter of the town’s wealthiest family, counting down the days until she can escape it, even as her own ugly streak keeps her on the outside of the social circle she was born to rule. […]
“Never Flinch” is the fourth Holly Gibney novel, and King gives her two cases to juggle at once. In one thread, Buckeye City police receive a chilling letter promising thirteen dead innocents and one dead guilty party, in twisted retribution after a wrongfully convicted man is killed behind bars. Detective Izzy Jaynes brings Holly in […]
Six books in, the Dungeon Crawler Carl series keeps proving it’s smarter than its absurdist premise suggests, and Gate of the Feral Gods might be the darkest entry yet. Dinniman continues to use the game-show dungeon as a brutally effective metaphor for systems that consume the people trapped inside them, and this installment leans hard […]
Christopher Moore takes a wild premise—Lilith (a.k.a Judith), freshly unfrozen from a block of Arctic ice in 1911 Vienna, crossing paths with a young Carl Jung—and uses it as scaffolding for something more ambitious than his usual comic romp. At its best, the novel is a sharp interrogation of who gets to own a story, […]
There’s a particular kind of vertigo that comes from opening an 800-page anthology set in one of horror fiction’s most beloved universes. The Stand is at turns tragic and funny, romantic and gross, sentimental and nihilistic — a pandemic story, a Christian allegory, and an attempt to craft a distinctly American epic fantasy all at […]
An Arcane Inheritance arrives with considerable pedigree: Kamilah Cole’s debut adult novel after a well-regarded YA duology, set in the rich soil of dark academia, and draped in praise from some of fantasy’s biggest names. It has all the ingredients for something genuinely unsettling and intellectually resonant. Which makes it all the more disappointing that […]
