A collection of wonderfully creepy gems in which each story goes its own way, to frightening effect.
Fifteen tales of horror, suspense, and macabre encounters that recount moments when the fantastic finds a crack in our everyday world.
Ford is a prolific writer with a shelf of well-deserved rewards for his novels, but short stories are his sweet spot. Armed with the paranoia of Poe, the psychological terror of Shirley Jackson, and Stephen King’s empathy for everyday people, this latest collection is both subtle and nightmare-inducing, depending on the story. The opener, “The Thousand Eyes,” is a noir-tinged period piece about a mysterious bar, an obsessed painter, and a frightening singer with a “voice of death.” Many of the stories are subdued creature features: “Hibbler’s Minions” is about a flea circus gone awry while “From the Balcony of the Idawolf Arms” features a werewolflike shape-shifter. Finding the minor magic in the everyday world is another thread, but the shifts in style between stories are impressive, from gothic horror in “Inn of the Dreaming Dog” to mythology in “Sisyphus in Elysium” to the long-suppressed grief in the title story. Several of the stories—some of the most experimental and intriguing—find the author narrating his own experiences through fantastical events. In “The Match,” sporadic writing teacher Ford is informed that in order to keep his job, he must fight an angel, as one typically does in academia. Elsewhere, in "Monster Eight," the author’s fictional counterpart has a run-in with the local monster just doing his “monster thing,” and in "The Bookcase Expedition," he witnesses a minor war between fairies and spiders. In "Five-Pointed Spell," the final story and one of the longest, Ford deftly spins a tale that starts with shades of Duel or Mad Max and turns into something that more closely resembles The Blair Witch Project.
A collection of wonderfully creepy gems in which each story goes its own way, to frightening effect.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-61873-184-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Small Beer Press
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
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
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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