A wonderfully weird horror romance that requires an acquired taste and a strong stomach.
A shapeshifting monster finds love with a human whose family hopes to exterminate her kind in this mix of fantasy, horror, and romance.
Shesheshen’s yearly hibernation is interrupted when a group of monster hunters disrupts the makeshift nest she’s made in the bowels of a ruined manor. She typically takes the form of an amorphous blob, but quick thinking leads her to construct a more humanoid appearance to trick the nosy hunters. Her hard work, constructing a new body from the remains of past feasts, isn’t convincing enough, and she’s driven off a cliff to her death. Her saving grace comes in the form of Homily, who nurses Shesheshen back to health, fully believing the alien creature is simply a young woman just like her. Homily’s nurturing ministrations cause Shesheshen to feel something foreign to her: love. However, Shesheshen begins to realize that her version of love doesn’t quite align with the very human Homily’s. Shesheshen wants to be honest with Homily and reveal her true form, until Homily confides that she’s a monster hunter of sorts, determined to seek revenge on a shapeshifter who cursed her family. In the realm of monster romances, Shesheshen is quite physically different from the typical humanoid love interests. For example, the book’s title is a direct reflection of the way Shesheshen initially wants to communicate her affection for Homily: by injecting the woman with her eggs until the young hatch and inevitably eat her from the inside. Shesheshen makes for an interesting narrator, as readers experience these new feelings and sensations right along with her. Seeing her find ways to describe and parse new emotions like friendship and love is often more interesting than the romance itself. Referring to this merely as both an opposites-attract and a secret-enemies-to-lovers romance doesn’t quite encapsulate the bizarro narrative that debut novelist Wiswell has created. While inventive enough to push the boundaries of romance and dark fantasy, this may appeal mainly to niche genre-fiction fans.
A wonderfully weird horror romance that requires an acquired taste and a strong stomach.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780756418854
Page Count: 320
Publisher: DAW
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
A unique concept that promises readers will find at least one, if not three, entwined but different narratives to enjoy.
When Vis is copied into two other realities, he must stop a god from repeatedly culling almost everyone back home.
Thousands of years ago, to prevent the Concurrence from enslaving everyone, the world was split into three near-identical copies: Res, Obiteum, and Luceum. To exist in all three worlds, to wield Will there, is to achieve synchronism. After the events in The Will of the Many (2023), which cost Vis his arm and the life of his friend, Vis achieves Synchronism. While Res-Vis must continue to play Hierarchy politics to find his friend’s killer, Obiteum-Vis finds a ruined world, where the dead are reanimated and used by Ka, the Concurrence, and the only other person to exist in synchronism. Meanwhile, Luceum-Vis is forced into a dispute between druids, their High Council, and their kings—with one king intent on killing him—and Vis has no idea why. On all worlds, Vis is as shrewd as ever, weighing his options, planning ahead, and doing what he must to survive. However, he, too, slowly diverges, doing things he swore he never would: cede his Will, use Will to control someone else, and reveal his true name. If at least one Vis cannot use his synchronism and power of Will to kill the Concurrence, no Vis will be safe, and another Cataclysm will cull those he loves on Res. Book Two of the Hierarchy series is a speculative fantasy that is at once Egyptian post-apocalyptic, Celtic medieval, and Roman dystopian, thanks to the multidimensional setting. Although the sprawling narrative at times overextends itself, Islington rewards patient readers with a compelling story, a cast of complex and diverse characters, and a glimpse into how far a good man can go before he’s lost. A symbol at the start of each chapter delineates which world and Vis it’s about. Readers should read The Will of the Many before attempting this volume, or they may be confused for the first several chapters and beyond.
A unique concept that promises readers will find at least one, if not three, entwined but different narratives to enjoy.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781982141233
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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