A host of exemplary authors delivers stories of other worlds and unforgettable, sometimes-familiar characters.
An anthology of SF and fantasy tales that play with expectations.
In Sean Gibson’s “What’s Good for the Goose…,” Robin Hood, continuing his tradition of stealing from the rich, contemplates his next target: “heartless blighter” Ebenezer Scrooge. As an alternative, Scrooge suggests a “valuable resource” that will keep on giving. Many of the 16 stories that editors Pyle and Mastro have compiled here are takes on such familiar tales as “The Three Little Pigs” or popular characters like Peter Pan and Pinocchio. Sophia DeSensi’s “Fairly Dead,” for example, features the Snow White–like Princess Rayne, who tries to preempt her stepmother’s desire to see her dead; in doing so, she gets herself a poisonous apple that may be more effective than she anticipates. Authors Demi Michelle Schwartz and Natalie Duvall have reimagined lesser-known stories from the Brothers Grimm. Both are delightfully unorthodox love stories; Schwartz’s “Dabria’s Shadows” centers around a soul reaper while Duvall’s eponymous “Maleen” is a woman whose father sent her to outer space for refusing to marry someone. Other entries have no discernible source of inspiration; one of the more intriguing of these is Michael La Ronn’s “A Baby’s Love,” in which a faerie knight’s mission involves living in the body of an infant human baby. The stories offer a hearty mix of genres, from absorbing romance and absurdist comedy to relentlessly dark SF and the occasional bleak ending. Indelible prose throughout evokes distant lands and planets. In the case of Gigi Monique Waddell’s “Coco Bronze and the Seven Martians,” a simple scene with a Mars-based princess stands out: “The staff scrubbed the rover oil from Coco’s skin, scraped the dirt under her fingernails, made her soak in lavender and milk, and combed her long hair into soft black curls.”
A host of exemplary authors delivers stories of other worlds and unforgettable, sometimes-familiar characters.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9798227718044
Page Count: -
Publisher: Cabbit Crossing Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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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