Bestseller Schwab (The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue) unfolds an epic and emotionally resonant tale about three lesbian vampires connected through the centuries. In 16th-century Spain, wild Maria avoids pregnancy and eventually escapes her lonely marriage with the help of a mysterious herbalist widow, but poorly rewards the woman’s offer of the gift of eternal life by killing her and taking on her name, Sabine. After centuries of wandering, only rarely finding others of her own kind, Sabine hunts and then turns Charlotte in 19th-century London—but Charlotte flees when their loving connection sours under mercurial Sabine’s jealousy. In 21st-century Boston, Scottish Harvard student Alice seeks novelty and reminisces about her sister, but after a postparty hookup with Lottie leaves her as a vampire, she is determined to find Lottie again and get some answers. Schwab crafts intricate backstories for her leads, beautifully balancing the humanity and monstrosity of all three women while chronicling their transformations over time. The result is a haunting and worthwhile story about cruelty, grace, love, and what it means to live forever. (June)

Reviewed on 04/25/2025 | Details & Permalink

YA fantasy author Steven (The Society for Soulless Girls) takes an adult turn with this competent romantasy. Orphaned as a young girl, Saffron Killoran dedicates her life to bringing down her parents’ killers, the Bloodmoon Gang. About to graduate from the Silvercloak Academy of magic-wielding law enforcers, she is offered an undercover assignment to infiltrate the Bloodmoons, an opportunity that accords with her strange prophetic vision of kissing and killing the mob boss’s son, Levan. The deeper she enmeshes herself with this crime family, however, the more conflicted she becomes by her growing attachment to Levan and her estrangement from her former colleagues. She also discovers her talent for a forbidden branch of timeweaving magic, leading her to question if her vision is foreordained or escapable. Steven takes her time in developing the romance, with family connections and secrets coming to light along the way. Though this pulls focus away from the police work, leaving Saffron’s investigation stuttering along uncertainly, readers who come for the enemies-to-lovers arc will be rewarded with some lightly kinky sex scenes and plenty of angst. Steven should win a whole new set of fans. Agent: Chloe Seager, Madeleine Milburn Literary. (July)

Reviewed on 04/25/2025 | Details & Permalink

A young man lured back to his North Carolina hometown to learn the true circumstances of a family tragedy becomes ensnared in a larger web of weird events in Julian’s auspicious debut. Eighteen years before the start of the book, Jesse Calloway, age two, was found on the banks of the Miskwa River in Blacknot beside the decomposing corpse of his mother, Connie. Now Jesse receives a series of cryptic messages on social media from someone who goes by “Cat” and claims to have documents pertaining to the mother he never knew. He returns home from college hoping to learn more and crosses paths with Alice Catherine, a psychologically troubled young woman whose history of family loss similar to his own leaves little doubt as to “Cat’s” true identity. Central to both Jesse’s and Alice’s interests is the Night House, an abandoned local mansion of dark repute where time seems to stand still and ghostly events crucial to understanding the past endlessly repeat themselves. Though Julian doesn’t tie up all of the tale’s loose ends, her story is borne along by well-shaded characters, whose complex inner lives abound with mysteries that can’t all be easily solved. The result is a chilling dark fantasy that readers will savor. (July)

Reviewed on 04/25/2025 | Details & Permalink

Urbanski (After World) delivers a quietly haunting collection of nine speculative shorts that employ the recurring motif of portals to other worlds to explore themes of loss, longing, and transformation. The narrator of “The Promise of a Portal,” a chilling meditation on desire and consent, revisits childhood memories of girls from her neighborhood who vanished into mysterious vans and returned changed. “A Few Personal Observations on Portals” follows a woman as she navigates her disintegrating family’s obsession with portals, probing the tension between responsibility and escape. In “Hysteria,” a less obviously portal-centric story, a woman’s therapy session spirals into a surreal interrogation of trauma, repression, and the monstrous within. Urbanski’s prose is both clinical and intimate, grounding high-concept ideas in emotionally precise psychological realism. Throughout, portals function less as escapes than as mirrors, revealing each character’s private ache. The result is a sharp, off-kilter collection that uses the uncanny as a lens for deeply human concerns. Agent: Kate Garrick, Salky Lit Management. (May)

Reviewed on 04/25/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this thrilling if somewhat long-winded meditation on extraterrestrial life and the trouble that awaits humanity if it tries to exploit the outer terra, Hugo Award winner Tchaikovsky (Service Model) imagines a distant galaxy being eyed for Earth’s Third Stage Commercial Expansion. Within this galaxy, the planet Shroud appears uninhabitable, with no light source and an atmosphere of “roiling smoker’s fug.” But when the space vessel Garveneer detects an “all-frequencies storm of radio traffic” emanating from the planet, a Special Projects team awakens from deep-freeze hibernation to investigate. Using drones, the scientists discover the planet is crawling with a “hive mind” of tubular creatures. Before any theory about the worms’ origin can be developed, however, a collision disrupts research and sends two team members—narrator Juna and macro engineer Mai—hurling toward Shroud in a two-person pod. Stranded, they manipulate the pod to cross the planet’s cavernous landscape hoping for rescue even as they take the opportunity to observe Shroud’s strange inhabitants—who study the humans right back. The old-fashioned Vernian adventure meshes well with the vividly rendered world full of bizarre creatures. This space fable is sure to please Tchaikovsky’s fans. (June)

Reviewed on 04/25/2025 | Details & Permalink

This bizarre and often baffling sapphic horror novella from Wilde (I Do Not Apologize for My Position on Men) centers on a doomed love story. Narrated by an unknown observer who warns of a coming disaster, the plot follows Johnny as she reunites with her ex-girlfriend Alice, with whom she is unhealthily obsessed. There’s an odd feeling of déjà vu when the women run into each other at a bar, after which Alice invites Johnny back to her place, where she seems willing to reignite the relationship. Johnny is thrilled and eager to make it work this time, even if they both have to change aspects of themselves. The next day, however, strange glitches appear: Alice’s dog is a different breed, and Alice’s hair is cut in a different style. As these strange occurrences ramp up in frequency and impact, readers will struggle to understand the rules guiding this series of fantastical events—and struggle even more to understand why Johnny is so into Alice, who comes across as entirely unpleasant. Without investment in the women’s relationship to ground the surreal plot, it’s hard to care about what’s going on. Wilde’s concept has promise, but the execution leaves something to be desired. (June)

Reviewed on 04/25/2025 | Details & Permalink

YouTuber Hardcastle (Fuck Yeah, Video Games) shakily melds sci-fi and offbeat humor in his quirky fiction debut. Osheen Shupple, “one of the most trusted scientists” in the “galactic utopia” known as the Affinity, has made it his life’s work to decipher the meaning of a message sent from outside centuries earlier: “Kill Austin Lang before he wipes out the universe.” His efforts lead to a potential breakthrough in 2783; the time machine he’s invented could allow a select, if eccentric, team of four to travel back to trace the source of that communication. The complications of time travel are suitably mind-bending, and Hardcastle deploys a rapid-fire barrage of space opera tropes, including violent deaths, a mole hunt, and a race against time, Though the potential destruction of the universe is on the line, the persistently jokey tone undermines the stakes and dilutes the drama. The humor is occasionally satirical, but more often it’s zany for zaniness’s sake, as when the narrative digresses to discuss “neo-new-age,” a new genre of music that’s performed by “baby butterflies,” or a quiz show champion aided to victory by “two chickens he’d trained to spot anagrams of famous rivers.” This aims for Douglas Adams territory but doesn’t quite hit the mark. (June)

Reviewed on 04/25/2025 | Details & Permalink

Haynes’s spellbinding solo debut (after Nubia, written with Omar Epps) reunites estranged cousins with otherworldly powers. A terrible accident made teen medium Giselda flee from her gifts, reject her heritage and her family, and change her name to Gwendolyn. Now a top executive at a PR firm, she sees her past literally come back to haunt her when a client’s Brooklyn fashion show is disrupted by a shocking supernatural display. Meanwhile, her cousin Fonsi reels from a bad breakup with his boyfriend but continues practicing as a medium, interacting with spirits in El Intermedio, a limbo for ghosts who haven’t let go. When he realizes there’s a rift in El Intermedio through which a vast number of ghosts may be able to escape, he knows he must find Gwendolyn, the only medium powerful enough to fix it. As the pair band together to save the world, Haynes delivers emotional payoffs to both of their arcs, with Gwendolyn learning to accept her power and Fonsi coming to value himself enough to seek out a healthier relationship. This dovetailing of external and internal stakes keeps the pages flying. The result is an accomplished urban fantasy that’s sure to win Haynes plenty of fans. (June)

Reviewed on 04/25/2025 | Details & Permalink

Belardes (The Deading) sets this creepy and immersive horror novel in the wilds of Wyoming and uses intermittent narration from local wildlife to create a palpable sense of unease. In the early 20th century, cattle barons made a bargain with the “mother canyon” through which they had to drive their herds—and which demanded payment in blood. That obligation was fulfilled by back from the dead gun-for-hire Tom Horn, who massacred two families who’d been squatting on the barons’ land. More than one hundred years later, Greta Molina heads out on a 10-day cattle drive through the canyon. She and her two companions find their journey complicated by mysterious visions of unsettling creatures, including a giant bird strong enough to carry off a calf, and a reanimated taxidermy specimen. Greta’s fraught experiences alternate with sections recounted by animals, including a courageous prairie dog seeking to fend off unusual threats to its clan. Belardes adroitly keeps readers guessing about whether his protagonists will survive their harrowing journey, while demonstrating a mastery of daylight terror. Matthew Lyons fans will be riveted. (June)

Reviewed on 04/25/2025 | Details & Permalink

In the light and somewhat underwhelming follow-up to The Dallergut Dream Department Store, Lee moves away from episodic accounts of customers and their dreams to instead focus on the ins and outs of the dream-making industry itself. It’s Penny’s first anniversary at her job at Dallergut’s dream store, and she renegotiates her salary with her boss. One of her additional benefits is the privilege of entering the Company District Central Square, where dreams are manufactured. There, she and her colleagues drop by the Civil Complaint Center, where Penny gets a feel for handling complaints from some of the store’s longtime customers. As she becomes even more deeply involved in the business of dream selling, she must help her colleagues discover what made these customers so unsatisfied and how to bring them back. The stakes are characteristically low, lending the plot a slice-of-life feel. While Penny proves an appealing protagonist and there’s some joy to seeing Lee expand her whimsical worldbuilding, the plot feels disjointed and the setting is strangely sterile. Though it lacks much of the first book’s charm, series fans looking for a cozy reunion with Penny will still find something to enjoy. (June)

Reviewed on 04/18/2025 | Details & Permalink