An unsettling bestiary of narratives for SF and horror readers with a taste for unease—and seafood.
Bizarre zoological phenomena feature in Ashley’s debut collection of eerie short stories.
These short narratives lean toward the macabre and largely fixate on the animal realm, in which odd mutations occur in somewhat dystopic futuristic settings. The title piece describes the Deep-Sea Atrium, a vast, multi-storied aquarium. Visitors behold rare, exotic, and sometimes monstrous maritime specimens in simulated abyssal depths (an angler fish “hangs in the water beneath a timid yellow light. Extendable jaw and elastic stomach full of shrimp and other tank debris”). The emotionally detached, college-dropout narrator, an Atrium guide in a troubled relationship, habitually steals from the premises—readers will sense that this cannot end well. One creature from the menagerie figures in another story, “Riding the Waves of Leviathan”—an immense sea beast that frequents a stretch the Atlantic coast, forcing the hard-drinking local fishermen to seek new employment as gold miners (faintly absurdist dream-logic is another recurring trait here). Their neglected children take to surfboards to master the waves the Leviathan stirs up in a sometimes fatal pastime. Another family bedeviled by water-dwellers, weird biology, and alcohol appears in “Last Stand of the Alligator Killers,” a story depicting a (literally) decaying household of swamp folk who grow scalier and less human while hopelessly fighting the amphibious encroachment of saurian “horn-tailed Joes” that have rudimentary intelligence. A sort of slime-mold “protist,” a subterranean species possessing sentience and near-human emotions, tries to co-exist with unusually accommodating Homo sapiens in “Skin,” but the social arrangement is heartbreakingly fragile. Many of the yarns have ambiguously open endings, but they are rarely less effective for leaving things not tidied up; the animal-free “An Execution” is narrated by a bereaved father in an America in which relatives of homicide victims have the right to ritually slay the guilty party in eye-for-an-eye manner (this provides dubious closure). These tales raise shudders of the existential dread variety rather than ‘Halloween-boo!’ scares, despite such Lovecraftian mainstays as tentacles, ichthyic environments, and creature-metamorphoses; one suspects the author has bigger fish to fry.
An unsettling bestiary of narratives for SF and horror readers with a taste for unease—and seafood.Pub Date: May 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781950413768
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Press 53
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.
In this long-awaited fifth installment of Shannon’s Bone Season series, the threat to the clairvoyant community spreads like a plague across Europe.
After extending her fight against the Republic of Scion to Paris, Paige Mahoney, leader of London’s clairvoyant underworld and a spy for the resistance movement, finds herself further outside her comfort zone when she wakes up in a foreign place with no recollection of getting there. More disturbing than her last definitive memory, in which her ally-turned-lover Arcturus seems to betray her, is that her dreamscape—the very soul of her clairvoyance—has been altered, as if there’s a veil shrouding both her memories and abilities. Paige manages to escape and learns she’s been missing and presumed dead for six months. Even more shocking is that she’s somehow outside of Scion’s borders, in the free world where clairvoyants are accepted citizens. She gets in touch with other resistance fighters and journeys to Italy to reconnect with the Domino Programme intelligence network. In stark contrast to the potential of life in the free world is the reality that Scion continues to stretch its influence, with Norway recently falling and Italy a likely next target. Paige is enlisted to discover how Scion is bending free-world political leaders to its will, but before Paige can commit to her mission, she has her own mystery to solve: Where in the world is Arcturus? Paige’s loyalty to Arcturus is tested as she decides how much to trust in their connection and how much information to reveal to the Domino Programme about the Rephaite—the race of immortals from the Netherworld, Arcturus’ people—and their connection to the founding of Scion, as well as the presence of clairvoyant abilities on Earth. While the book is impressively multilayered, the matter-of-fact way in which details from the past are sprinkled throughout will have readers constantly flipping to the glossary. As the series’ scope and the implications of the war against Scion expand, Shannon’s narrative style reads more action-thriller than fantasy. Paige’s powers as a dreamwalker are rarely used here, but when clairvoyance is at play, the story shines.
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781639733965
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
At turns spooky and funny, with bits of inside baseball and a swimming pool’s worth of blood.
Hill, son of the master, turns in a near-perfect homage to Stephen King.
Arthur Oakes has problems. One is that his mom, a social justice warrior, has landed in the slammer for unintentional manslaughter. And he’s one of just three Black kids at an expensive college (in Maine, of course), an easy target. A local townie drug dealer extorts him into stealing rare books from the school’s library, including one bound in human skin. The unwilling donor of said skin turns up, and so do various sinister people, one reminiscent of Tolkien’s Gollum, another a hick who lives—well, sort of—to kill. Then there’s Colin Wren, whose grandfather collects things occult. As will happen, an excursion into that arcana conjures up the title character, a very evil dragon, who strikes an agreement with fine print requiring Arthur and his circle to provide him with a sacrifice every Easter. “It’s a bad idea to make a deal with them,” says Arthur, belatedly. “Language is one of their weapons…as much as the fire they breathe or the tail that can knock down a house.” King Sorrow roasts his first victims, and the years roll by, with Arthur becoming a medieval scholar (fittingly enough, with a critical scene set at King Arthur’s fortress at Tintagel), Colin a tech billionaire with Muskian undertones (“King Sorrow was a dragon, but Colin was some sort of dark sorcerer”), and others of their circle suffering from either messing with dragons or living in an America of despair. There’s never a dull moment, and though Hill’s yarn is very long, it’s full of twists and turns and, beg pardon, Easter eggs pointing to Kingly takes on politics, literature, and internet trolls (a meta MAGA remark comes from an online review of Arthur’s book on dragons: “i was up for a good book about finding magical sords and stabbing dragons and rescuing hot babes in chainmail panties but instead i got a lot of WOKE nonsense.…and UGH it just goes on and on, couldve been hundreds of pages shorter”).
At turns spooky and funny, with bits of inside baseball and a swimming pool’s worth of blood.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780062200600
Page Count: 896
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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