Cassidy (Nestlings) balances gut-wrenching horror and jaw-dropping twists in this stellar outing. Jess, an unsuccessful actress who works at an L.A. diner, has a history of putting her compassion for others over her personal happiness and safety. So when she discovers a terrified little boy in her backyard being attacked by birds, she invites him inside and out of harm’s way. But as she’s figuring out her next steps, a naked man appears outside; he seems to be after the child, who panics when the two make eye contact. Jess and the boy watch through the window as the stranger gets into an argument with two of Jess’s neighbors, who are then attacked by a huge, wolflike creature that breaks into Jess’s home. She escapes with the boy, the start of a desperate flight for survival that leads to a shocking revelation about the neglected child: whatever he fears becomes manifest in the real world. There’s a wonderful Twilight Zone feel to this clever conceit, but even as the threat level rises, Cassidy keeps Jess’s choices plausible and grounded, making the nightmare she’s found herself in all the scarier. This is a hair-raiser. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

This fun, pulpy space opera from DeMornay (Stiletto Sisterhood) opens with Nimah Dabo-124 eager to prove herself at the STARS military academy even as her fellow cadets look down at her as a RIM-rat, someone from the poor outer reaches of the galaxy. Her hopes are dashed when the school discovers that she is the granddaughter of infamous space pirate Capt. Indira “La Voz” Roscoe; Nimah is deemed unfit to serve and expelled. She’s despondent—until two of her grandmother’s former crew members, Dorothy “Dobs” Dobrevnic and Mumbles, barge into her life. Indira—a Robin Hoodesque folk hero, famed for helping the poor—has been framed for a terrorist bombing and turned herself in rather than be chased down. Convinced that Indira is innocent, Dobs and Mumbles recruit Nimah for a jailbreak. Nimah agrees, though she’s reluctant to aid the grandmother who abandoned her as a child. Together, they must gather the rest of the crew, with a couple of surprise additions, and free Indira before the pirate captain is executed for a crime that she very well may not have committed. The worldbuilding feels ripped straight out of the TV series Firefly, but the complex plot and banter between the scrappy heroes is unique. This colorful adventure is sure to win fans. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

The fate of a vast mystical library is decided in the stunning final installment of Lawrence’s Library trilogy (after The Book That Broke the World). Protagonists Livira and Evar have been separated once again, divided by the factions warring over the future safety of the library that stretches out beneath their world. Livira has chosen to follow those who wish to save the library, joining them in venturing through one of its many portals first into a familiar and then a distant past. As they follow the tracks of the library’s history, Livira’s group comes across an unexpected friend and an old enemy. Meanwhile, Evar is taken by those who seek the library’s destruction, falling farther into the library itself and only surviving by unexpected means. A third group, led by Yute, seeks a compromise. This middle path leads to a past recognizable to the reader, but no less dark than the present the characters were fleeing. Meanwhile, unbound by time or space, Livira’s powerful book continues to wreak havoc on the library, speeding along its destruction. In the final hour, all of the players are on the board, and the circumstances are dire. Lawrence pulls out all of the stops for the thrilling last chapter of Livira and Evar’s story. Series fans will not want to miss this jaw dropping finale. Agent: Ian Drury, Sheil Land Assoc. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

Malfi (Come with Me) takes readers on a tense thrill ride that evokes the thickest and nastiest paperback horror novels of decades past. In the first of three connected threads, a mutilated body in the California dessert draws Los Angeles detective Bill Renny back into a murder case he hoped would stay closed. Meanwhile, in the Hollywood Hills, struggling writer Maureen and her fiancé, Greg, celebrate their engagement—until Greg’s violently unstable son, Landon, crashes the party. When a partygoer confides that he’s discovered evidence connecting Landon to the recent murder, Maureen is drawn into the same web of intrigue as Bill. The final and freakiest thread follows Toby Kampen, who identifies as “the Human Fly” and haunts the dive bars of downtown L.A. When he meets a woman who might be a vampire, he devotes himself to proving he’s worthy of a monstrous transformation. Malfi allows these characters to orbit and intersect with each other in surprising ways as the plot’s complex mysteries play out, balancing enjoyably creepy supernatural elements with a gritty detective yarn. Some sections feel shaggy, and the ending isn’t particularly neat, but there’s fun to be had in all the goopy, gory weirdness. Seasoned horror readers will find plenty to enjoy in Malfi’s darkly intricate world of arcane surprises. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

In Hugo Award winner Vo’s mesmerizing companion to The Chosen and the Beautiful, Great Gatsby narrator Nick Carraway, here imagined as a paper doll brought to life via magic, encounters a ghost from his past. Nearly 20 years after Jay Gatsby’s death, Carraway hears Gatsby’s unmistakable voice during a near-fatal encounter, launching him on a supernatural quest to uncover what became of Gatsby’s essence. As Carraway delves deeper into this mystery, he confronts unsettling truths about his own past and reckons with how the magic that keeps him alive also continues to pick away at him, preying on his desires, memories, and pain. While familiarity with both The Chosen and the Beautiful and The Great Gatsby enriches the reading experience, this haunting tale stands confidently apart from its predecessors and newcomers will have no trouble diving into Vo’s lyrical exploration of identity, longing, and the price of immortality. Meanwhile, the expansion of the paper magic system, previously glimpsed through Jordan Baker’s perspective, adds fascinating depth to this alternate history. It’s an unadulterated joy to return to Vo’s queer, phantasmagoric take on Fitzgerald’s world. Agent: Diana Fox, Fox Literary. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/07/2025 | Details & Permalink

An ambitious homage to Octavia Butler, this stunning near-future mosaic novel from debut author Jackson melds prose, poetry, memos, advertisements, and dream journal doodles. Linking the disparate elements is the story of archivist Xandria Brown, curator of ephemera at the Huntington Library, whose work cataloging the Butler Archives is interrupted by a hostage situation that involves Huntington’s new CEO. Fighting physical and neurological decline due to long Covid, Xandria contends with her overly concerned healthbots and a coworker intent on implicating her in the CEO kidnapping, all while attempting to protect her life’s work, an impossible collection of ephemera from the undersea city of Diwata, which won’t be founded for over a century. Glimpses of this collection chart the future history of Diwata, a city in Monterey Bay established after an asteroid strike rendered much of the Southwest uninhabitable, chronicling the varied hopes of its governor, her daughter, and an ex–Space Force captain who repurposes machines designed for extraterrestrial exploration to aid the oceanic colony. As the propulsive story barrels forward, Jackson trusts readers to keep up with the myriad time skips and tonal shifts while also finding the time to dive deep into African American history and art. Jackson is an exciting new voice in Afrofuturism. Agent: Kima Jones, Triangle House Literary. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/07/2025 | Details & Permalink

Mandelo (Feed Them Silence) presents a joyful and impressively varied array of speculative fiction centered on queer resistance and survival in imagined futures. The stories tend not to take themselves too seriously, as evidenced by Nat X Ray’s “Trans World Takeover,” in which trans teenagers whose high school is aggressively anti-trans decide to take over the world by sneakily administering hormones to trans the genders of those, like trig teacher Beryl Shanks, they dislike. Some entries are much more fantastical, such as Esther Alter’s “The Shabbos Bride,” in which the trans Jewish protagonist’s prayer to change her body is heard and responded to by “the divine feminine Shechinah,” who appears to her as a beautiful, seductive woman. There are times when the writer’s passion for their imagined future of queer community is such that it deprives the story of intrigue, as in Sam J. Miller’s “The Republic of Ecstatic Consent,” which paints a utopian vision of queer communal living, caretaking, and love, but doesn’t move beyond simply describing what that might look like to deliver a real story. For the most part, though, this anthology strikes a delicate balance between silliness and sincerity. It will give hope to readers who feel the future looks bleak. (May)

Reviewed on 02/07/2025 | Details & Permalink

Hawkins (Downpour) spins the familiar into the grotesque in this chilling collection of 13 horror shorts. The author excels at putting dark twists on everyday domestic circumstances. A painter escapes an unhappy marriage with some supernatural aid in “Moonrise Over Water with Sargassum, 2022. Oil On Canvas.” In “Green Eyes,” a child cares for her ailing mother even after the woman’s death. An uncanny children’s TV show takes center stage in “The Stumblyum Imperative,” while in “A Candle for the Birthday Boy,” a six-year-old’s birthday party goes horribly wrong. The exceptional gore—narrators perform revolting actions such as probing “the glistening yellow-gray” of their own exposed fat, which “yields beneath [their] touch like molded gelatin” (“Storms of the Present”)—makes looking away impossible. Not all the stories are quite as successful, however. If, as in “Interlude,” about a little boy whose parents think he has a rash, the buildup is too mundane in its purposeful misdirection, what should be a delightful shock ending turns into a cheap trick. Still, plenty of entertainment lies within these pages. Readers will be thinking about Hawkins’s skin-crawling fables long after they turn off the lights. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 02/07/2025 | Details & Permalink

In Dotson’s disjointed debut, young widow Sadie Miles flees her abusive new husband, Samuel Keller, with her toddler, Izzy. An unexpected pregnancy and a lack of other options compel Sadie to accept a job as a housekeeper at the Hotel L’Arpin, an antiquated bed and breakfast in rural Ohio. At first the hotel seems like a refuge, but soon guests start disappearing and Sadie becomes convinced she can see tentacled monsters in the water from the hotel’s faucets. Is this mere paranoid delusion, or is the hotel covering up something supernaturally sinister? The narrative is at its strongest when focused on Sadie’s inner life. Her perspective is nuanced, and her struggle to care for her daughter and find safety for them both resonates, making it easy to root for this small family as they navigate the creeping dangers at Hotel L’Arpin. Unfortunately, by comparison, the supernatural elements feel sketchy and shoehorned in, leading to an unsatisfying and predictable finale. Dotson does praiseworthy work crafting a unique horror protagonist, but the scares themselves fall flat. Agent: Chris Bucci, Aevitas Creative Management. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/07/2025 | Details & Permalink

Wong (The Circus Infinite) delivers a powerful intergenerational sci-fi tale set after the collapse of modern society in 2052, and the Bloom in 2072, which allowed psionic abilities, a range of psychic powers, to emerge in parts of the general population. In 2106, Maida Sun is a psion with the ability to see the history of any object she touches. She’s on her first work assignment at a cultural recovery site in San Francisco, when she finds a jade teacup through which she experiences visions and memories of two of its past owners: Li Nuan, who was forced into sex work in 1906, and Nathan Zhao, a hard-partying tech bro in 2006. Both also had visions of the past and future when in contact with the teacup. Through their stories, Maida comes to realize the deep impact of past events, and the unique connection she develops with both Li Nuan and Nathan may allow her to influence her dystopian present. While not shying away from themes of climate collapse and oppression, Wong also uses his well-shaded characters to highlight the courage it takes to effect change even in one’s small corner of the world. This stirring novel is an inspiration during trying times. Agent: Amy Collins, Talcott Notch Literary. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/07/2025 | Details & Permalink