These extraordinary tales prove to be both spine-chilling and profound.
Characters in this debut collection of dark short stories struggle with escaping their pasts—often with terrifying results.
In this volume’s opening tale, “Skeletons,” five friends, one of whom seemingly mesmerizes the others, go camping. They live in a bizarre world where animals roam in skeletal form, from dinosaurs to saber-tooth tigers. The other stories follow suit, blending familiar characters with disturbing imagery and circumstances. “The Lifespan of Shadows,” for example, sees a house go to spooky lengths to ensure that feuding sisters will not leave behind their inherited childhood abode. Stufflebeam infuses her collection with a somber theme of letting the past go, with nostalgia as a glaring detriment. In one tale, Nostalgia is literally a drug. In the title story, a woman, using a machine to relive her long-ago relationships, likens it to an illness without a cure. While the author shrouds her narratives in metaphors, it doesn’t make horrific sights any less gruesome. That’s certainly the case in the superb “The Split.” Emma moves away from her parents to live with her girlfriend, a decision that literally splits her—half of her body stays in the Texas home where she grew up. Recurring characters among the predominantly female cast link many of these tales, including the collection’s final three stories, which form a short but grand SF trilogy. It begins with a woman named Robin Kirkland, who works at a company that makes synthetic companions. She becomes obsessed with the glitchy, damaged ones, many of which end up in a subway mingling with the homeless. The second tale explores shady tech firms that may be harming female employees, and the concluding story focuses on hackers infiltrating a billionaire’s beta virtual reality game. Throughout the volume, Stufflebeam writes with masterful pithiness and genuine insights. At one point, the woman in the title story muses: “I grip her skin and remember why I loved her. But, also, why I stopped.”
These extraordinary tales prove to be both spine-chilling and profound.Pub Date: July 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-952283-22-2
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Vernacular Books
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.
Using mystery and romance elements in a nonlinear narrative, SenLinYu’s debut is a doorstopper of a fantasy that follows a woman with missing memories as she navigates through a war-torn realm in search of herself.
Helena Marino is a talented young healer living in Paladia—the “Shining City”—who has been thrust into a brutal war against an all-powerful necromancer and his army of Undying, loyal henchmen with immortal bodies, and necrothralls, reanimated automatons. When Helena is awakened from stasis, a prisoner of the necromancer’s forces, she has no idea how long she has been incarcerated—or the status of the war. She soon finds herself a personal prisoner of Kaine Ferron, the High Necromancer’s “monster” psychopath who has sadistically killed hundreds for his master. Ordered to recover Helena’s buried memories by any means necessary, the two polar opposites—Helena and Kaine, healer and killer—end up discovering much more as they begin to understand each other through shared trauma. While necromancy is an oft-trod subject in fantasy novels, the author gives it a fresh feel—in large part because of their superb worldbuilding coupled with unforgettable imagery throughout: “[The necromancer] lay reclined upon a throne of bodies. Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him…[He] extended his decrepit right hand, overlarge with fingers jointed like spider legs.” Another noteworthy element is the complex dynamic between Helena and Kaine. To say that these two characters shared the gamut of intense emotions would be a vast understatement. Readers will come for the fantasy and stay for the romance.
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593972700
Page Count: 1040
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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