An impassioned story about rage, revenge, and how love can lay it to rest.
Wong debuts with a dark and unpredictable story, valiant worldbuilding, and a troubled protagonist who fights like hell.
Alma Ben is the rage-filled bastard child of an aristocrat of House Avera—one of the four noble lineages in Kugara possessing the abilities of the gods. But Alma, raised by her outcast single mother in the countryside, doesn’t know of her station, and has a lonely and isolating childhood, often conjuring an imaginary friend for comfort. When her mother falls terminally ill, Alma manages to send word to her unknown father begging for help, and is met with a powerful vessel of the Dread Beast—the god of death. In exchange for her mother’s healing, Alma agrees to serve House Avera in support of her father’s ascension to First Hand of the Beast, and the girl is whisked away by her father while her mother lies dying. Unaware of nearly everything about the gods and the families bound to them, she discovers the first step in service to the House and its deity is severing her arm in sacrifice to the Beast. Despite her actions, her mother dies, but Alma is forced to continue serving her father’s ambitions anyway. As her grief rages and her father’s betrayal is palpable everywhere in the Avera estate, the flames of revenge are fanned by her once-imaginary friend, Aster, who reveals himself to be so much more—a spirit that’s taken on human form. With Aster as proof of her strong connection to the Dread Beast, together they devise a plan to prove her worthiness as a vessel of the Beast and challenge her father’s rank. All that’s required is that she train for a Pilgrimage to the umbral plane—a twisted alternate dimension filled with monsters and terror—to kill a star and rise in rank to become the First Hand of the Beast herself. From the opening pages, with Alma’s arm strapped to a fountain and her father standing overhead with a sword ready to give her limb as an offering, the prose strikes hardest when Wong writes visceral body horror. This page-turning epic continually exposes the monster within each character, pushing them to confront it head-on and fight relentlessly for the good they possess deep within.
An impassioned story about rage, revenge, and how love can lay it to rest.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9780063446250
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
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 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
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