A funny, terrifying, and unpredictable slice of Night Vale’s macabre history.
One of Welcome to Night Vale’s most enigmatic and terrifying characters reveals how she came to be.
The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home is one of the outlandish podcast’s most popular characters, partially due to writer/actress Mara Wilson’s evocative portrayal. In Night Vale, the character is a specter of sorts, visible only in glimpses, who takes great fun in toying with the town’s citizenry, living in all their homes simultaneously. Here, Fink and Cranor (It Devours!, 2017, etc.) diverge from the style of their previous books to craft a chilling ghost story. The book alternates between two timelines. The first concerns the life, death, and afterlife of the unnamed narrator, born in the Mediterranean in 1792 to an idyllic childhood with her beloved father. When her father is murdered by a covert criminal ring called The Order of the Labyrinth, she swears revenge and is recruited into a life of crime by her Uncle Edmond, a ruthless outlaw. What follows is a decadeslong, globe-spanning saga of adventure, betrayal, love, and fate as she becomes the swashbuckling captain of her own pirate ship, with a crew that includes a master of disguise, a bloodthirsty neophyte, a rakish comrade, and a giantess, among others. Robberies, schemes, battles, treachery, and a vicious conspiracy to destroy a rival ensue. In the storyline set in the present, the old woman adopts Craig, a struggling copywriter, as her pet project. While she does leave him the occasional dismembered animal to keep him in line, she also pays off his debts and steers him toward his wife-to-be, Amaranta, and a heavenly life to come—perhaps. How these stories converge and how the narrator becomes immortal are merciless in their ingenuity and immensely satisfying. As the Old Woman tells Craig, “There’s a thin line separating humor and horror, and this was that line.”
A funny, terrifying, and unpredictable slice of Night Vale’s macabre history.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-288900-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Another Psy/Changeling page-turner from the brilliant Singh.
After saving a woman from a serial killer, a wolf changeling will do anything to keep her safe, but the stakes get higher when her unique powers may signal the worldwide rise of aggressive rogue energy.
Nearing the first anniversary of his brother’s death, Alexei Harte picks up an overwhelming psychic broadcast of grief and discovers an empath imprisoned in an underground bunker. When he rescues her, at first her only emotions seem to be rage and grief for her recently deceased cat. But as Memory begins to trust Alexei and the world he helps her enter, her conflicted, negative emotions begin to calm. The other empaths she meets help her understand that her gifts are unique and powerful and reframe them beyond her violent past which forced her to use them to help a psychopath. The more they work with her, the more they come to believe that she might be particularly positioned to help strengthen the complicated PsyNet, the vast psychic network on which the Psy depend to keep them connected and healthy. Alexei, meanwhile, is wrestling with the death of his brother, who went violently rogue one year earlier. He’s definitely interested in making Memory his mate but worries he carries the rogue genes that threaten her even as he’s trying to keep her safe from a variety of other dangers. The Psy/Changeling Trinity series continues with another complex, fascinating angle to the fall of Silence and its manifestations. Alexei’s family represents the rogue component in the Changeling world, while Memory both represents and acts as the first line of defense against a rising rogue element within the Psy. Favorite alpha characters weave through the story, meeting the new challenge with their typical intelligence, flexibility, and collaboration.
Another Psy/Changeling page-turner from the brilliant Singh.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0359-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
Superb: a protagonist and a tale sure to please fans of smart, literate fantasy and science fiction.
“Once upon a time there was a piece of biotech that grew and grew until it had its own apartment”: an odd, atmospheric, and decidedly dark fable for our time.
VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy (Acceptance, 2014, etc.) set high standards for dystopian fantasy, and the wizardry was as much in the writing as in the storyline. This latest is much the same: supremely literary, distinctly unusual, its title character a blob of something or another that earns its name, in part, because it’s carried from place to place—when we meet it, in fact, it's tangled up in the fur of a giant bear that just now is busily marauding through the ruins of a once-thriving city in what would seem to be the very near future. The Company, an unfeeling and monstrously inclined biotech giant, once held sway there, but now what’s left is a whole bunch of one-time experiments gone awry. Mord, the bear, is one, Borne another. Alternately dodging and caring for them is Rachel, an eminently resourceful young woman who doesn’t quite know what to make of the little creature at first: “I knew nothing about Borne and treated him like a plant at first. It seemed logical, from my initial observations.” Logical, yes, but Rachel is no Mr. Spock: she brims with feelings, some of them for her fellow survivor Wick. Just as Borne is able to morph into semblances of other beings, though, including an uncanny other-Rachel, so Wick would seem to have logged some hours in the lab himself. The reader is treated to the intriguing spectacle of Borne’s acquiring consciousness in the middle of all the mayhem: “I became entangled in Mord’s fur. (Who entangled me?) Where did I come from before that?” That the genetic basis for life is nothing to tinker with is plain throughout, especially in the moments where VanderMeer’s deep talent for worldbuilding takes him into realms more reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road than of the Shire.
Superb: a protagonist and a tale sure to please fans of smart, literate fantasy and science fiction.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-11524-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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