Impressive in terms of both scope and lyricism, this collection from prolific fantasy horror author Kiernan (Bradbury Weather) proves a worthy introduction to their shorter works. The 25 stories span themes as diverse as paleontology (“The Man Who Loved What Was”) and labor history (“Crotalus (Murder Ballad No. 13)”) alongside more abstract meditations on the nature of dreams and psychology. Many stories, including “Threnody for Those Who Die December Deaths,” merge grounded Southern settings and cultural trappings with surreal imagery and frightening phenomena, providing lingering thrills that feel all too real. Others, including “The Jar” and “Still[er] Life, from Hunger,” dwell on cursed objects and human compulsions, providing not quite cautionary tales that feel in line with Shirley Jackson’s work. Kiernan’s prose is a particular joy, with richly described scenery and precise characterization underlining their eerie plots. Copious author’s notes will please Kiernan’s diehard fans, but become repetitive and somewhat self-indulgent as the collection goes on. Still, this is a minor quibble in an otherwise remarkably consistent volume. It’s an ambitious collection that refuses neat categorization, which is exactly what makes it such a delight. (July)

Reviewed on 04/11/2025 | Details & Permalink

What this prismatic avant-garde horror novel from Baer (Midwestern Infinity Doctrine) lacks in an easily summarizable story, it narrowly makes up for with stylistic adventurousness. Set in the year 3000, the plot ostensibly concerns a B-movie–style invasion of psychic vampires who drain hapless victims psychologically as well as physically. This setup is interwoven with slippery visions of gut-churning violence and queer sex, meditations on Kant and Plato, and scenes of the apocalypse. The narrator goes through several changes of consciousness as the world collapses around him and the plot finally melts into a conclusion more concerned with subconscious wanderings than with a clear description of events. Baer combines poetry, fragments, and hallucinogenic travelogue, and though it takes work to construct a story from the many disparate threads, readers may enjoy a gestalt of conflicting emotions if they make their way through this fantasmagoria. Baer’s descriptions of physical desire are the novel’s high points, and the prose is never more focused than when it’s zeroed in on the body. Readers up for the challenge will be rewarded with plentiful idiosyncratic word play, poetic turns of phrase, and haunting images. (June)

Reviewed on 04/11/2025 | Details & Permalink

Skrutskie (The Salvation Gambit) puts the Roman in romantasy with this well-crafted tale of soldiers struggling to live in peace after preparing their whole lives for war. Spear-carrier Kat and shield-bearer Emory are the hinge pair of their decade, or 10 soldier unit. Before their final battle against the king of hell, where they expect to die, they break the strict no fraternization order to hook up. Unexpectedly, they survive, saved by the sudden reveal of long-hidden prince Adrien Augustine, who destroys the Demon Lord. Adrien offers to release every soldier from service after they help construct his road home. Career soldier Emory can’t envision another life, while Kat juggles the possibilities of a romance with Emory; training as a magic-using centurion; or, in a comic subplot, advising Adrien as he’s targeted by both the three Lesser Lords of Hell, out for revenge, and marriage-minded social climbers. Down-to-earth Kat makes a refreshing narrator, giving a foot soldier’s perspective on a typical chosen one fantasy plot. Readers who come for the friends-to-lovers arc will enjoy watching Kat and Emory learn new ways to care for each other, and fantasy fans will find much to appreciate in the unique magic system and ancient Rome–inspired worldbuilding. It’s good fun. (June)

Reviewed on 04/11/2025 | Details & Permalink

Elliott (Furious Heaven) opens a new series with this page-turning epic fantasy, throwing lowly deputy courier Elen and her nephew, Kem, into peril as they unexpectedly encounter the high and mighty of the Tranquil Empire. Elen’s duties require her to make a circuit of backwater village Orledder Halt, keeping watch all the while for the deadly Spore, a contamination that mutates and kills all life it touches. Then Prince-Warden Gevulin arrives in town unannounced. He’s on a secret mission northward—but an avalanche has blocked the imperial roadway, a fact that the prince’s rival, Prince Astaylin, Exalted General of the Corps of Imperial Engineers, should have alerted him to. Gevulin is generally above noticing people like Elen, but she and Kem are the only two at Orledder who know a passable path. They join his party—and witness a bizarre change in Gevulin after he chooses to overnight at a haunted ruin. His unpredictability adds to the danger on the road, where threats abound in the form of the Spore, nonhumans, and human agents who seek to thwart their mission. Elliott builds an impressively complex world, combining a feudal social structure with a bio-magical threat and a history so ancient that much of it is unknown. Readers will be eager to see where this story goes next. (June)

Reviewed on 04/11/2025 | Details & Permalink

This charming, comic take on the Brothers Grimm’s “The Twelve Huntsmen” from Herman (Love Bites) takes readers on an irreverent tour of fairy tale tropes through the eyes of a wonderfully snarky princess. Melilot, the least magical stepdaughter of the sorceress-queen of Skalla, is surprised when the newly crowned King Gervase of the rundown kingdom of Tailliz asks for her hand in marriage. Afraid of disobeying her stepmother, Melilot agrees to the arrangement, despite learning that Tailliz has no magic and is haunted by unnatural creatures. Melilot gets a read on what she’s up against by disguising herself as her own maid to infiltrate Gervase’s castle before the wedding. There, mysteries abound; Melilot must learn why someone is plotting to assassinate her, how exactly the king’s 12 huntsmen are all identical, why Gervase called off his previous engagement, and what role she plays in the prophesy that a Skallan princess will save Tailliz from peril. Distracting her from her investigations is Gervase’s assertive and flirtatious sister, Angelique. Herman zeroes in on the hilarious absurdities of fairy tales writ large while crafting a queer heroine full of heart and self-confidence. Readers are sure to be won over by the cleverly deployed archetypes, snappy prose, and rollicking adventure. (June)

Reviewed on 04/11/2025 | Details & Permalink

A young dancer becomes entangled in a dangerous web of betrayal and violence in Arena’s ambitious debut. Vasalie Moran was King Illian’s “Jewel,” his most prized dancer, until she was falsely accused of murder and locked away. Two years later, he calls on her to perform at the Crowns’ Gathering, a royal summit where his two brothers will also be in attendance, and act as his spy in exchange for her freedom. Vasalie agrees, traveling to the Isle of Anell to perform while secretly navigating dangerous assignments from Illian. When he orders her to earn the trust of his charming younger brother, King Anton, and infiltrate his private circle, she finds herself in the center of a fatal power play between kings that could end her life before she gets a chance to see her freedom again. Arena successfully crafts a complicated political thriller with many moving parts though the spycraft grows frustrating as both Vasalie and the reader are kept in the dark about the purpose of her assignments for far too long. The action is also frequently interrupted by Vasalie’s melodramatic musings and overshadowed by her developing romantic connection with Anton. Still, the premise and worldbuilding feel fresh, and there’s enough substance that romantic fantasy readers will be invested. Agent: Jennifer Azantian, Azantian Literary. (June)

Reviewed on 04/11/2025 | Details & Permalink

The sweeping finale to Lee’s Magebike Courier duology sees her protagonists facing conflicts both personal and world-changing. Following the events of 2024’s Road to Ruin, courier Jin-Lu has lost the Talent, which allowed her to ride her magebike through the wasteland separating the far-flung cities that shelter mankind from destructive storms. Stung by this newfound vulnerability, she’s avoiding the two people she loves most, Prince Kadrin of Kerina Sol and Princess Yi-Nareen of Kerina Rut, who are meanwhile moving forward with their wedding. After another city falls to the storms, its refugees come to Kerina Sol, bringing with them whispers of the legendary First City, the rumored home of the gods. Now the race is on to find this place and claim its wonders, even as the storms grow ever more destructive. With Kadrin, Yi-Nareen, and Jin caught in the middle of this epic struggle for survival and dominance, they must still find time to redefine their complicated relationship. The unforgiving environment is as vividly drawn as ever, and the stakes feel sky-high. A sizable supporting cast allows for layers of moral and emotional complexity as the story races toward an intense conclusion. Fans will not be disappointed. Agent: Paul Lucas, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (June)

Reviewed on 04/11/2025 | Details & Permalink

O’Keefe (the Devoured Worlds trilogy) flexes her worldbuilding chops in this superior space opera, set in a future in which shards of “sacred cryst,” grown under women’s skins, are “plucked free to be nurtured into a woman, or something like a woman” who serve as spaceship navigators using their special ability to chart paths between stars. Cryst-born navigator Faven Sythe is suspicious when her mentor, Ulana Valset, who was unusually tense at their last meeting, disappears. She breaks several rules to trace the route of Ulana’s spaceship, finding that it traveled into the Clutch, a “dark fist of a dyson sphere seized around a whimpering star,” the home of the abandoned Black Celeste, a legendary ghost ship, where many navigators before Ulana have also vanished. Now Faven partners with “Bitter” Amandine, a pirate with knowledge of the Clutch, to find Ulana—and ascertain whether a conspiracy targeting navigators is at work. Nuanced characterization and a clever mystery keep the pages flying. It’s a thrilling standalone adventure that James S.A. Corey fans will relish. (June)

Reviewed on 04/11/2025 | Details & Permalink

Far-future historiography is the subject of Afifi’s dizzying sci-fi adventure (after The Transcendent). Azad, a triage doctor on the dystopian planet Nabatea, is rocked by a dying patient’s last words: “You look just like her.” This cryptic message renews his hope that his twin sister, Ledo, who ran away more than a decade ago, might still be alive. Desperate to find her, Azad rockets to a settlement on Nabatea’s moon, deliciously described as a counterculture mecca. There he encounters two historians who are also on Ledo’s trail and begs to join their mission, which involves sorting fact from fable about the colonization of Nabatea and the origin of its ruling class, the Vitruvians, using a gadget that turns quantum ripples from a millennium ago into hazy video footage. Afifi flings this offbeat plot back and forth between present day Nabatea and the early days of its mother planet, Mars, as the researchers track an ancient aerialist, Kezza, who, a thousand years earlier, plotted revenge on the space colonizer Barrett Juul, whom she blames for enticing desperate people to emigrate from Earth to Mars, where they were kept as corporate “slaves.” Afifi brings the story full circle, wasting no words on filler, with bone-crunching fight scenes and delicious suspense along the way. This thrilling cosmic history will have readers racing to turn the pages. (June)

Reviewed on 04/04/2025 | Details & Permalink

King’s powerful debut blends magical realism, family history, and the power of storytelling in a multigenerational tale of memory and identity. College freshman Monica Tsai is caught between her rigorous computer science studies program and caring for her grandmother, Yun, who has Alzheimer’s. When Monica stumbles upon a family secret—pencils made by her grandmother’s company in Shanghai during WWII possess the mystical ability to “Reforge” written words into lived memories—she unearths a hidden family history of espionage, betrayal, and survival spanning from wartime China to modern-day Massachusetts. As Monica pieces together the past, she forms an unexpected bond with Louise, an ambitious archivist with her own stake in the story, and grapples with the implications of her tech professor’s digital journal project, EMBRS, which echoes the Reforging ability in an unsettling way. King nimbly navigates themes of intergenerational trauma, privacy, and the evolving nature of storytelling to craft a novel that is simultaneously intimate and expansive. Though some elements, particularly the romance and EMBRS subplots, feel underdeveloped, the novel’s heart lies in its thoughtful exploration of who decides what history to preserve. It’s a poignant magical realist tale that’s sure to find fans. Agent: Seth Fishman, Gernert Co. (June)

Reviewed on 04/04/2025 | Details & Permalink