An impressive collection brimming with originality.
Editor Berman (Wilde Stories 2012, etc.) compiles an eerie, moving volume of gay-themed speculative fiction.
The various authors anthologized here write on different subjects ranging from a gay, humanoid cephalopod couple to a man tormented by the dead after his lover’s suicide. Despite the disparities, the collection comes together as a remarkably coherent whole, and none of the characters’ queer identities outweigh the telling of the tales. Furthermore, much of the work edges toward magical realism rather than standard sci-fi or fantasy. Several stories, such as Ray Cluley’s “Night Fishing” and John Langan’s “Renfrew’s Course,” are hauntingly sad; others, like Steve Vernon’s “Wetside Story” and Hal Duncan’s “Sic Him, Hellhound! Kill! Kill!” are comic romps with a side of the supernatural. In Duncan’s story, a visceral werewolf feels devotion and bloodlust with equal depth, while in Cluley’s story, Terrence, a fisherman of sorts, is inexorably pulled to the area around the Golden Gate Bridge, where his young lover had previously jumped. Every night, Terrence pulls strangely animate corpses from the water and follows their directions toward others of their kind. Cluley’s emotionally demanding story beautifully explores grief, love and ultimately futile efforts to save the dead. Berman expertly blends them, creating a work whose overall effect is entrancing, not depressing. Berman writes in his introduction, “Even in 2012, when it is far easier for two men to meet, to dine out, to hold hands, to dare kiss in public, to announce to open public their love or their parting…there are dangers. Men are still silenced. Men perish.” The stories’ occasionally horrific and fantastic bent adeptly conveys this danger as well as its daring.
An impressive collection brimming with originality.Pub Date: June 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1590211311
Page Count: 274
Publisher: Lethe Press
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.
On the orders of her mother, a woman goes to dragon-riding school.
Even though her mother is a general in Navarre’s army, 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail was raised by her father to follow his path as a scribe. After his death, though, Violet's mother shocks her by forcing her to enter the elite and deadly dragon rider academy at Basgiath War College. Most students die at the War College: during training sessions, at the hands of their classmates, or by the very dragons they hope to one day be paired with. From Day One, Violet is targeted by her classmates, some because they hate her mother, others because they think she’s too physically frail to succeed. She must survive a daily gauntlet of physical challenges and the deadly attacks of classmates, which she does with the help of secret knowledge handed down by her two older siblings, who'd been students there before her. Violet is at the mercy of the plot rather than being in charge of it, hurtling through one obstacle after another. As a result, the story is action-packed and fast-paced, but Violet is a strange mix of pure competence and total passivity, always managing to come out on the winning side. The book is categorized as romantasy, with Violet pulled between the comforting love she feels from her childhood best friend, Dain Aetos, and the incendiary attraction she feels for family enemy Xaden Riorson. However, the way Dain constantly undermines Violet's abilities and his lack of character development make this an unconvincing storyline. The plots and subplots aren’t well-integrated, with the first half purely focused on Violet’s training, followed by a brief detour for romance, and then a final focus on outside threats.
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374042
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2024
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