THE BOOK OF THE JAGUAR, alt-hist post-Conquest fantasy

THE BOOK OF THE JAGUAR
VICTOR LADIS SCHULTZ
Fairwood Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$6.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The legions of New Serraña have a sacred custom: when a legionnaire falls in battle, a member of their company must bear the body home to the dead soldier’s family. Álbaro Ceynos is the only surviving member of his company. He’d been garrisoned at Presidio Los Primos, known as the realm’s safest assignment, until a fabled monster emerged from legend, crept down from the mountains, and laid waste to the old fortress.

Now, with one horse, one wagon, one sword, and all his slain brethren, Álbaro the bonebearer roams a decaying empire, bringing home his comrades' remains. As he meets an array of mourners who move him to question past choices and future commitments, he’ll reveal how the tragedy unfolded, death by death, and how it is that he yet lives.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Survivor guilt meets Odyssey in a fantasy-tweaked New World, one that's in a timeline not much like our own. and yet it's still recognizably the culture of merged Indigenous and Spanish Mexico...a bit like a folded down the long axis sheet of paper is still folded in half, just not what you're used to. I was fascinated.

The Presidio of Lost Souls has been obliterated. As is incumbent on a survivor of a group of soldiers, Álbaro bears his comrades' earthly remains...their bones...back to families that mourn, families that barely notice, families that want Álbaro to bear witness to the fallen man's existence...all the normal responses that accompany a person into their afterlife. It's a tidy way to do both world-building and character development in enough depth to keep we-the-reader invested and interested in both things.

It was a success to me in more ways than the usual following a story. I lost interest in the why of Álbaro's presidio's destruction almost immediately...invisible creatures aren't going to hold my interest for long as objects of folklore. As Álbaro met his companions' families and learned the whys and wherefores of their presence in the Presidio of Lost Souls among the other "slow horses," to use the Apple show as touchstone, I was more and more invested in the cultural landscape he inhabits. The different histories Álbaro learns that conflict with or outright contradict what his companions presented, the ones that minimized troubled pasts and magnified happiness...well, that just plain ol' human nature.

And that's the thing I most enjoyed about this novel. Chapters are episodes, the framing device isn't always as integrated into the chapter's story as I'd expect it to be, but the humanness, the humanity, the humane response of Álbaro to each family, outweighed any niggling nitpicks I could come up with. In my memory, this is a way of experiencing a cultural landscape I did not recognize in a physical landscape I often did. I was always interested in the different families' grief responses. I was always aware that Álbaro was responding to the grief as a kind of atonement. I was always involved in the lives lived, and all too often that's not an investment I can make in other SFnal stories.

It's a fascinating debut in a well-thought-through not-quite-consensus reality. I hope you escape seeking readers will give it your time and treasure.

THE TAKEN GIRLS, Glenn Cooper thriller in his classic mode

THE TAKEN GIRLS
GLENN COOPER
Lascaux Media (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From Glenn Cooper, the internationally bestselling author of the Cal Donovan thrillers, comes a gripping thriller of kidnapping, conspiracy, and what powerful men will do to hold on to what they have.

Two little girls vanish from a villa on the Calabrian coast—Victoria, five, and Elizabeth, eight, sisters, the granddaughters of an American billionaire. It looks at first like a kidnapping for ransom.

But no demand ever comes. No ransom means no one wanted money—they wanted the girls.

Years pass. Their grandmother's hair goes white. And then, on an ordinary afternoon, the girls come home. Victoria is still five. Elizabeth is still eight. The same faces, the same small hands—not a day older than the night they disappeared, and dying of something no child should carry.

Everyone wants a story that lets them sleep. The Vatican opens a quiet file on a miracle. The tabloids sell something stranger. But one man keeps pulling the thread everyone wants left alone—until it leads to an old Spanish estate, and to what the powerful will do to hold on to what they have.

Victoria and Elizabeth were not the first children taken. And they are still collecting.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: It's never aliens. Or god. Never.

Just like the only monsters are people. For something to be SUPERnatural, we'd need to know everything that could ever happen naturally. A glance at the news will tell you we do not know everything that could happen naturally. So reading his very complex puzzle-box of a story was an exercise in seeing if the author could get me to the end without making me feel I'd been treated like a mushroom. (Kept in the dark and fed a lot of shit.)

I've read several of the author's religious-themed stories before, and found them like this one: Pleasantly diverting. I do wish he'd stop writing female characters, or take a sensitivity course...they're ciphers or stereotypes.

The patriarch who hires our omnicompetent investigator grated on my nerves. Marcus, said investigator, doesn't put a foot wrong that does not, in the end, result in the solution being moved forward. It's a bit annoying, but in line with most books in this chase-thriller genre. By the midpoint of the story there was a clutter of problems that were either going to get solved or niggle at me as unfinished business; nothing got left behind but it made the ending a breathless rush. That's fine for me but y'all who prefer endings that peel back layers will not enjoy it because it will feel rushed. I myownself would say it's calculatedly fast-paced, but that'a a poTAYto poTAHto argument I've found is not worth anyone's time getting into.

It was a read that engaged me but gave me no one to root for because the people were believably shitty. It's a good distraction that will never play games with your trust, people you don't like don't suddenly turn out to be sweetness and light playing a role (a trope I abhor) or suddenly doing other about-faces. The story resolves in line with its parameters only not quite so simply as one is led to expect. Nice work on that, Glenn Cooper!

QUEEN MAB, debut surreal mother-fiction

QUEEN MAB
EMILY McBRIDE
FSG (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this debut novel, a new mother—a scholar steeped in fairy lore—wrestles with the legacies and madness of motherhood.

There is a changeling in this story—but who is it?

Madeleine is young for motherhood, a promising grad student in Victorian and modernist literature, twenty-three and not long married. Even her mother worries about the timing. But Madeleine’s ambivalence is pushed aside by Tom’s elation and her own desire to bring new life into a world marked by loss.

Then comes Maud, perfect and fresh, despite a traumatic labor. But just a few nights into their life, something seems amiss. Maud is changed. The child never stops crying. Her hunger is insatiable. Her eyes glint with some kind of ancient mischief. Could Maud be a fairy child, swapped when Madeleine wasn’t paying attention? Is the real Maud dancing in the half-light, with the fairies and the foxes? Did the gray cat hide her behind the hedge?

Tom goes about the day-to-day, working toward a promotion and urging Madeleine to connect with other moms. Her parents come to clean out her grandmother’s house, her father newly obsessed with genealogy and DNA tests. Madeleine, interrupted by violent visions, panicked at her lack of maternal love, shut out from her old life, frantically searches for answers. The old stories end in sorrow and bloodshed, and the fairies don’t just kidnap babies—they’re also partial to young women. Is Maud the changeling, or is Madeleine? And if she’s been swapped, how will she find her way back?

Emily McBride’s Queen Mab is a riveting portrait of madness, motherhood, the myths that haunt us, and the families who keep us tethered.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I speak from experience when I say psychosis is terrifying to experience. I do not wish it on the very lowest, worst human beings on the planet.

Not even MAGAts. Besides, most of 'em are already there.

Queen Mab is probably the best fictional evocation I've ever read as to *why* psychosis is utterly terrifying. Something Madeleine lnows cannot be true...is true. Everything she is, has learned, made her own mental world with, tells her this hideous impossibility: her child is a faery changeling. It is simply the truth.

What ensues is the other horrifying reality of psychosis: to get back to consensus reality means admitting you've left it, and that is a terrible, terrible moment in a person's life. It does not help that her career is the study of Victorian literature. Irish folklore. Made-up stuff that's now horrifyingly real in her brain, and she has to tell the people in her life that this is where she is. And she has to grapple with, not only having given birth, something her mother could not do and did not do so has no insights to offer but now Madeleine has to re-grapple with her status as an adoptee. Is this congenital? Is there something permanent wrong?

I'm well-known for not being in the Cult of Mother. Madeleine is probably burning her membership card. But a story like this one that carefully flenses the bullshit rainbows-and-lollipops stuff off the bones of the life-altering disaster-movie destruction of pregnancy, delivery, neonatal care, social rearrangement, marital instability...and all without making the process feel artificially predetermined....

It's quite a feat. It's a first novel so it can go over the top at times. It can seemingly forget where it's been to go where the author wants it to go. But it never fails to ground itself in Madeleine's world as she sees it at thee moment. It makes for a deep, unnerving reading experience. Madeleine's fear is we-the-reader's fear.

I'm very impressed. I'm intrigued by what Author McBride will create next.

HONEY IN THE WOUND, Korean magical realist family saga

HONEY IN THE WOUND
JIYOUNG HAN
Avid Reader Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A lyrical and suspenseful debut novel about a mysteriously gifted Korean family confronting the brutality of the Japanese empire, Honey in the Wound is an epic tale of survival and the reclamation of power.

A sister disappears and returns as a tiger. A mother’s voice compels the truth from any tongue. A granddaughter divines secrets in others’ dreams. These women are all of one lineage—a Korean family split across decades and borders by Japanese imperialism.

At this saga’s heart is Young-Ja, a girl who infuses food with her emotions. She revels in her gift for cooking, nourishing the people she loves with her cheerfulness. But her sunny childhood comes to an end in 1931 when Japanese soldiers crush her family’s defiance against the Empire. Young-Ja is cast adrift, her food turning increasingly bitter with grief. When a Korean rebel fighter notices her talents, however, she is whisked off to Manchuria to join a secretive sisterhood of beautiful teahouse spies. There, Young-Ja finds a new sense of belonging and starts using her abilities for the resistance. But the Imperial Army is not yet finished with her…

Decades later, Young-Ja lives alone in Seoul, withdrawn from the world until her Tokyo-born granddaughter Rinako bursts into her life with the ability to see into dreams. In cultivating a tentative bond, they confront the long-buried past in a stunning emotional climax.

As an unforgettable family perseveres in the long shadow of colonialism, Honey in the Wound transports readers to mountain forests where tiger-girls stalk, to Manchurian teahouses and opium dens where charming smiles veil secrets, and to the modern metropolises of Tokyo and Seoul where restless ghosts stir. This debut novel is a tender yet powerful multi-generational drama that shines light onto the twentieth century’s darkest corners and gives voice to those who bore witness.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Brutality is colonialism's sole common legacy across all colonial regimes. Korea's half-century as part of Japan's empire was certainly no exception. Many are the stories of families ravaged by slavery, by economic disadvantages imposed to benefit the colonizers, by the horrors of the comfort women's suffering. It's not unique to Japan's imperial project...go look at Briseis' life after the fall of Troy, and I promise you she was nowhere near the first to suffer this fate...but its systematic, intentional social sanction somehow makes it a vile twentieth-century model of efficiency in evildoing.

So much of modern US culture is Korean inflected. I've reviewed a fair few Korean translations, Korean-themed stories written by members of its diaspora, stories set in Korea, all sorts really, because the culture of the place is ancient, rich, and deeply rooted as it smoothly takes on the modernity of this century as an economic, therefore cultural, powerhouse. As I gain more and more experience with the stories Koreans send into the Anglophone readership, I see one very, very frequent strand appearing: the Japanese occupation, usually framed in apocalyptic, folkloric ways to distance the reader from the brutal reality and to restore some agency, some meaning, to the country's suffering.

No exception this time. Starting in 1902 when Korea was an independent monarchy, the family we come to know and invest caring into is gradually Japanesed in personal names (pay careful attention, context will tell you if someone is being addressed or referred to as a Korean or as a Japanese imperial subject) and place names. It's like the British stealing India and naming "Mumbai" as "Bombay." (There are so many examples from all over the colonized world, that example is just the one I felt Anglophones would relate to most easily.)

The first 40% of the story is the slowest, with the highest concentration of double names. It's a debut novel. The fact is this is exactly reflective of the reality Author Han relates to us as we start our journey in 1902. Put in some effort and it will all begin to feel second nature to you quite quickly. The delight of a writer whose planning makes your reading more fluent with her intentional shifts in register is one who gets my highest regard. Time changes within few pages of each other are all quietly indicated with characters giving us clues, not with bold chapter or section headings that bring your readerly attention to the shifts themselves not the flow of the story.

This might not sound like it will suit you. I recommend reading a sample after publication day on the 7th. It feels more fluid than I'm making it sound. For example, you'll notice as you read through the book that there is a lot of use of, and description using, the color yellow. It would behoove you to go look into musok, the people's religion of Korea, and its use of colors. Like the shifts of names this is an enriching detail that clues the reader in to the larger thematic purpose of a passage, or a name, or an evocative word.

It made this read one I really looked forward to getting into, immersing myself into again and again. And a good thing indeed these moments were there because the horrific cost to the people of the colonial occupation, then the war, demanded much fortitude of me-the-reader to stay invested in people enduring so much. I had reservoirs of interested, sympathetic caring to draw down as horrors mounted up.

I will say I wish there had been a map in the book. I'm not sure where some place names were, whether they were really elsewhere or were Korean places I had read about renamed. Its lack was not fatal to my pleasure; but I felt it nonetheless.

A story I urge on readers and enjoyers of Pachinko and Whale. A story with depths deeper than its modest 320pp page count implies. An author who is a fine discovery in her debut novel.

THE BULLET SWALLOWER, La Frontera's reckoning on the page

THE BULLET SWALLOWER
ELIZABETH GONZALEZ JAMES
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A dazzling magical realism western in the vein of Cormac McCarthy meets Gabriel García Márquez, The Bullet Swallower follows a Mexican bandido as he sets off for Texas to save his family, only to encounter a mysterious figure who has come, finally, to collect a cosmic debt generations in the making.

In 1895, Antonio Sonoro is the latest in a long line of ruthless men. He’s good with his gun and is drawn to trouble but he’s also out of money and out of options. A drought has ravaged the town of Dorado, Mexico, where he lives with his wife and children, and so when he hears about a train laden with gold and other treasures, he sets off for Houston to rob it—with his younger brother Hugo in tow. But when the heist goes awry and Hugo is killed by the Texas Rangers, Antonio finds himself launched into a quest for revenge that endangers not only his life and his family, but his eternal soul.

In 1964, Jaime Sonoro is Mexico’s most renowned actor and singer. But his comfortable life is disrupted when he discovers a book that purports to tell the entire history of his family beginning with Cain and Abel. In its ancient pages, Jaime learns about the multitude of horrific crimes committed by his ancestors. And when the same mysterious figure from Antonio’s timeline shows up in Mexico City, Jaime realizes that he may be the one who has to pay for his ancestors’ crimes, unless he can discover the true story of his grandfather Antonio, the legendary bandido El Tragabalas, The Bullet Swallower.

A family saga that’s epic in scope and magical in its blood, and based loosely on the author’s own great-grandfather, The Bullet Swallower tackles border politics, intergenerational trauma, and the legacies of racism and colonialism in a lush setting and stunning prose that asks who pays for the sins of our ancestors, and whether it is possible to be better than our forebears.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Inherent in any story set in the western part of the US is racism, is settler colonialism is the trauma of violence...institutionalized all the way to interpersonal. "The past is not so far away as you might think. Nor the future, for that matter. No man lives free from history." This is the beating heart of the story, in fact of the entire setting in real world terms. No one is free from history.

Jaime, in his reckoning with that aperçu's truth, receives...non-corporeal, I guess...divine, malign, either, probably both, but certainly not of consensus reality assistance from the aptly named Remedios. He's made privy to the, well, Akashic records of his family's deeds. I can only imagine the horrible burden of knowing the inalterable and undeniable facts of your very roots in reality.

Are we in fact our relatives' keepers after all? Is that the myth of Cain and Abel's longevity explained? I know Jaime believes the information he now has is true but he does not question what truth it tells. If an entity asserted I was responsible for balancing the scales of an entire lineage, I'd want to see some ID proving the authority of this assertion.

Jaime not being so suspicious and mistrustful, off we go into the blood-soaked deeds and violent cruelties of the past. It's an open question if this results in a better book than a "straight" magical-realist tale, as these limit their violences more than this full-throated shout of rage does.

When it comes to the acceptance of personal accountability for actions rendered unchangeable by time's passage I'm of two minds. We unquestionably live within the blast radius of our predecessors' decisions, actions, inactions. It is not logical to deny this fact. What do we owe the present for the actions of the past? Not nothing, that's absurd and greedy because it's only ever applied to the beneficiaries while the descendants of those who suffered and lost bear the consequences forever. Where is a reasonable balance point?

Jaime's resolution is the source of my missing star. In the final chapter there is a revelation that emphasizes the magical realism throughout the story was baked in from giddy-up to whoa. It vitiates the journey Jaime has been on from my point of view, but it is very much of a piece with the spooky frame we're looking at the picture within.

Solidly four stars, transported me to my kidhood in Mercedes, Texas, and will transport you, too. Needing to be somewhere your family is not for the Yuletide celebrations? Here's a book that's set in a uniquely characterful corner of the US that has a lot to answer for historically. What could be more apt for reading in family-togetherness time?

DARK LONDON: A Journey Through the City's Mysterious and Macabre Underworld, for the ghoulish giftee closest to your heart

DARK LONDON: A Journey Through the City's Mysterious and Macabre Underworld
DR. DREW GRAY
Frances Lincoln Ltd (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$22.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Dark London brings together the history of the city’s seamier side, picking out the most scandalous, curious and bizarre aspects of London’s shadowy and fascinating underbelly.

From dark crimes of passion to shocking tales of grave robbing, gruesome murders, dens of iniquity, Victorian séances, and haunted houses—not far beneath London’s everyday bustle and glitter there has long been a fascinatingly rich underworld of criminality, superstition, scandal, and macabre debauchery.

In Dark London, social historian Dr Drew Gray, a specialist in the history of crime and punishment, delves into the city’s grim yet compelling past, uncovering the people and places that shaped its darker identity.

Across more than 100 real-life cases and curiosities, he explores how London became both the heart of a growing empire and a stage for vice, greed, and human fallibility.

Highlights include:

The London Burkers, a notorious gang of resurrectionists whose leader confessed to stealing and selling nearly 1,000 bodies to London’s medical schools in the 1830s.

The Whitechapel Murders of 1888, still the world’s longest running serial murder mystery.

The prisons of Newgate and Pentonville, where shifting attitudes towards justice revealed the tension between punishment, reform, and moral control.

The legend of Spring-heeled Jack, the terrifying, leaping figure who caused panic across London’s streets.

The Great Stink of 1858, when London’s polluted Thames brought the city to a standstill and forced a revolution in sanitation and public health.

Dark London brings together the history of the city’s seamier side, picking out the most scandalous, curious and bizarre aspects of London’s shadowy and fascinating underbelly.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: London's been a world city, most of the time, since the Romans lost Colchester in 60CE and moved their colonial government there. Lots of scope for serious weirdness of the supernatural stuff sort, and viciousness (or just misguided trying to help) of the human sort. Both leave separate kinds of stains on the memory of society, locally as well as internationally.

Author Drew Gray's biography as provided by Frances Lincoln Ltd:

Dr. Drew Gray is a social historian of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who specialises in the history of crime and punishment. Drew is Head of Subject for Culture (Humanities, Media, & Performance) at the University of Northampton and teaches modules on both the History and Criminology programmes. His previous works include Murder Maps: Crime Scenes Revisited; Phrenology to Fingerprint 1811-1911 and London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City.

That's one helluva CV. The gent knows how to present the facts and images in tandem, all illustrated books from him to date, so why would this one fail? Spoiler: It doesn't.

The history of crime, the historical context of punishment, the social context of these dark patches of London's history aren't exhaustively explored in this handsome gift book. I felt the illustrations were well-chosen and -presented; but sometimes pulled well above their weight in explication of societal details. I can't give full five stars because I was niggled by this, despite this being the book's literal purpose for being an illustrated overview.

We all have a well-loved ghoul somewhere on our gifting list. Someone who really enjoys the frisson of crime and punishment, who wants that extra thrill of knowing what humans are capable of...and this is the book for them. It's also very much a book for your Londonphile/Anglophile giftee. I think you, faithful reader, might like it for your own coffee table.

Here, look at some of the more than a hundred images:

contents

punishment

murder

spooky stuff

humanitarian harms done

A very nice gifting idea for Yule...especially suitable for the Goth nibling/grandchild.

8114, a podcasting horror novel

8114
JOSHUA HULL
CLASH Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$5.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: After returning to his hometown, Paul, the beleaguered host of a small-time podcast, discovers a longtime friend committed suicide in the dilapidated ruins of Paul’s childhood home. Desperate to find answers, Paul interviews friends and locals hoping to find closure. He finds himself in a chilling downward spiral of his memories and the land he grew up on. Has his past caught up with him or is there something far more sinister at play?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Podcasting as horror...that scans. It's a modern medium that's neither rare nor well-done most of the time. Particularly troubling is the true-crime podcasting that can get so destructively out of hand in the information age. Mobs have lots more data to use in tracking down and harassing their targets, so the innocent feel the wrath of the ignorant and ill-informed much as Adam Benny, Paul's childhood pal and podcast subject did.

Does this teach Podcaster Boy some circumspection? Of course not. There wouldn't be a story!

A different childhood friend, Matt, tells Paul about a mutual called Kyle's suicide...Kyle even painted Paul's old house address onto the walls of the room in that very house that he diced himself up in, using his own blood. A new podcast is born! Plus, adding to the foolishness of this dude, he's got some awful botanical...thing...growing in his arm.

Not on. Not under. IN.

I myownself would be on the way out of that place, and I'd swear off the very sight of a lavalier to propitiate whatever the hell supernatural thing it was that had it in for me! The moldy walls and stuff like that make me shudder more than any ghosty/demony/Lovecraftian horror. Really, in 2025 reality is way more horrible and scary than any made-up thing could ever be. In this story, the horror that scares me witless is the podcast that's already done such damage.

Author Hull's made some very good craft decisions, like setting the story in rural Indiana...not a spooky gothic place, but one where the horror can really bloom without competition. The structure of "found audio, in effect, is achieved by the inclusion of podcast transcripts between chapters. It serves to make a point: the place, the medium, the man, are all being consumed by a guilt, a rot, a creeping nastiness inside hollow forms.

Had the author trimmed this a thousand words or bloated it five thousand in exactly this style, I'd be warbling my fool head off with praise. As it is, we're just short of a novel, just too much for a novella. There's a lot to be said for compactness in horror stories. I don't think this one benefited quite as much from it because the creeping rot was never really woven into the characters' motivations, or even awareness. Just a wee bit more, please, Author Hull.

It's too creepy and good an idea to leave just shy of its best!

COLIN GETS PROMOTED AND DOOMS THE WORLD, sneaky, mean-spirited, and all the more fun for it

COLIN GETS PROMOTED AND DOOMS THE WORLD
MARK WADDELL
Ace Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: WARNING! Under no circumstances must employees strike a deal with unauthorized personnel on Dark Enterprises property. Such behavior may result in death…or the end of the world.

Colin is a low-level employee at Dark Enterprises, a Hell-like multinational corporation solving the world’s most difficult problems in deeply questionable ways. After years of toiling away in a cubicle, he’s ready to climb the corporate ladder and claim the power he’s never had.

The only problem is, he’s pretty sure he’s about to be terminated. Like, terminated. That’s tough, because his BFF has just set him up with a great guy. In fact, maybe he’s a little too great. And he asks a lot of questions . . .

When Colin meets a shadowy figure promising his deepest desire in return for a small, unspecified favor, he can’t resist the urge to fast-track his goals. He asks for the one thing that will improve his life: a promotion.

But that small favor unleashes an ancient evil. People in New York are disappearing, the world might be ending, and Management is starting to notice. Getting to the top is never easy, and now it’s up to Colin to save the world. It’s the ultimate power move, after all

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Who had "corporate horror comedy" on their 2025 bingo card? Anyone? Well if you did, and be honest! you didn't did you, cover the square. I was pretty lukewarm about Horrorstör, the famously comedic workplace horror novel all y'all were cooing over in 2015, but I give this book a far better, far more amused, rating.

I enjoyed the Everyman at the center of this absurd story of diabolical shenanigans, our blah, sculpted cream cheese MC Colin, because he seemed exactly and precisely the kind of good-enough average white dude who would fall for any trap set for him. He's got no excellence in his being; he's got no interest in better-than, only good-enough; he's so bloodymindedly solipsistic that he scores in negative numbers on any empathy test.

He is, in short, the masked guy in ICEstapo. Practically literally. His actual job is so vile, so over-the-top evil, that his Eichmanning above it all to assume that following orders is somehow exculpatory...well, we know where that got the real Eichmann. One of the few cases where real life gave the world real catharsis, that.

Then Colin meets Eric, his love! Surely he'll be redeemed by luuuv, right? Eric is such a sweet, supportive block of blancmange, he *must* exert a positive influence on cream-cheesy Colin, right? Right?

This story was finely calibrated for my ever-darkening sensibilities. It uses its familiarity of tone and topic to slide into your "amuse-me" centers without pinging an alarm. Then, at some individually-determined point, the penny drops and the game is given away.

A far more effective takedown of the amusement-industrial complex than any strident polemic. Ring a tocsin for the world...we are doomed.

I can't quite get to five stars because, by its nature, the story leads the reader into certain assumptions about its trajectory and gives no indication that the game's afoot. Or if it did I'm too dimwitted to have caught it. The bait-and-switch technique runs the very real risk of switching readers off...I switched off, couldn't figure out why, went off to read some reviews and voilà! All was clear, so I finished it up knowing where I was going. Enjoyed it hugely. (Take that Spoiler Stasi!)
Not really for everyone, perhaps even most; but please, if you do start it, remember that you're **NOT** headed where you think you are.

I recommend it.

MRS. CHRISTIE AT THE MYSTERY GUILD LIBRARY (Mrs. Christie #1), new cozy-mystery series with literary ghost-sleuth

MRS. CHRISTIE AT THE MYSTERY GUILD LIBRARY (Mrs. Christie #1)
AMANDA CHAPMAN
Berkley Books /Berkley Prime Crime (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Book conservator Tory Van Dyne and a woman claiming to be Agatha Christie on holiday from the Great Beyond join forces to catch a killer in this spirited mystery from Amanda Chapman.

Tory Van Dyne is the most down-to-earth member of a decidedly eccentric old-money New York family. For one thing, as book conservator at Manhattan’s Mystery Guild Library, she actually has a job. Plus, she’s left up-town society behind for a quiet life downtown. So she’s not thrilled when she discovers a woman in the library’s Christie Room who calmly introduces herself as Agatha Christie, politely requests a cocktail and announces she’s there to help solve a murder—that has not yet happened.

But as soon as Tory determines that this is just a fairly nutty Christie fangirl, her socialite/actress cousin Nicola gets caught up in the suspicious death of her less-than-lovable talent agent. Nic, as always, looks to Tory for help. Tory, in turn, looks to Mrs. Christie. The woman, whoever or whatever she is, clearly knows her stuff when it comes to crime.

Aided by a found family of unlikely sleuths—including a snarky librarian, an eleven-year-old computer whiz, and an NYPD detective with terrible taste in suits—Tory and the woman claiming to be her very much deceased literary idol begin to unravel the twists and turns of a murderer’s devious mind. Because, in the immortal words of Miss Jane Marple, “murder is never simple.”

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Need a puzzle to solve to see summer out? Something with just enough unreality to feel low-stakes and just enough emotional reality to make investing in it worth your time?

Berkley Books' Prime Crime imprint gotcha covered with Amanda Chapman's first offering.

I expected to be politely dismissive of this first in a proposed series by Amy Pershing's alter ego. I haven't read her other cozy series. I don't think I will because there's cozy, then there's so cozy you can't breathe, like an oppressively crowded Victorian living room. That's Cape Cod to me, where her other series is set.

I'll take Manhattan.

It's fun to find the call-outs to Christie's works scattered around, and it's fun...to my surprise...to have Dame Agatha just appear out of nowhere to work with Tory on solving what they know is a murder but are having trouble convincing others has that feel to it. For that matter how Tory becomes convinced that Dame Agatha is who she says she is gets handled the same way: tough and disbelieving attitude at first, then it just is part of reality in the story. In my own experience that's exactly how the unthinkable, the unbelievable, gets trojan-horsed into becoming the way things are. It's very much helped along in this narrative by the fact that Dame Agatha is only seen inside the library setting, not out wandering the Village.

It did not escape my notice that the first-person narrator, Tory, has the unbelievably cush life she has because she's a nepo baby. It's not really made much of, just presented as fact. There's no real pushback, but the situation isn't set up to draw attention to itself...Tory's a woman with a life and a style not available without lucky draws in the birth lottery.

That's all so very cozy as a backdrop. It is meant to offer the reader maximum comfort as rents in the fabric of society get repaired and ma'at is restored as it must be in a series mystery. A concern I felt going in was that the Christie-facing bits would really *require* the reader to know already what that particular story referred to was about, or the reference would fall flat; not at all the case. I found the varying levels of familiarity with Dame Agatha's works never impacted my understanding of the plot in any negative way. It offered a frisson of fun when I got it, but nothing was lost when /i didn't see the story connection for myself because that was dealt with in dialogue.

Tory, as the main character and the first-person narrator, will of necessity need to appeal to you for the read to work.

Later, when I'd had a chance to process our little encounter, I realized it made a kind of weird sense that if my guest was indeed Agatha Christie (which I did not believe for a minute), and if she had indeed decided to visit New York City some fifty years after she'd been airlifted to the Great Beyond (which I also did not believe for a minute), she might indeed choose New York's Mystery Guild Library as a home base.

Not quite the first words in the book, but darn close. This is what you're getting, so if you don't like it already, then horseman, pass by.

Me, I'm all in. And the next one, too. Fair enough play, a fun narrative voice, a premise silly enough to make me smile but never played for laughs at anyone...if only I'd liked the love interest I'd be raving!

ANOTHER FINE MESS (Bless Your Heart #2) is the kind of fun supernatural urban fantasy I miss

ANOTHER FINE MESS (Bless Your Heart #2)
LINDY RYAN
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available tomorrow

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Making sure dead things stay buried is the family business...

For over a hundred years, the Evans women have kept the undead in their strange southeast Texas town from rising. But sometimes the dead rise too quick–and that’s what left Lenore Evans, and her granddaughter Luna, burying Luna’s mother, Grace, and Lenore’s mother, Ducey. Now the only two women left in the Evans family, Luna and Lenore are left rudderless in the wake of the most Godawful Mess to date.

But when the full moon finds another victim, it’s clear their trouble is far from over. Now Lenore, Luna, and the new sheriff—their biggest ally—must dig deep down into family lore to uncover what threatens everything they love most. The body count ticks up, the most unexpected dead will rise–forcing Lenore and Luna to face the possibility that the undead aren’t the only monsters preying on their small town.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Silly Southern fantasy. It's cozy, and fun...the undead in Lufkin/Port Arthur country? I am not only in, I'm pretty convinced it's factually correct...and resonant with the East Texas matriarchal culture I know well.

I haven't read Bless Your Heart, the first in the series, but I felt the ringing curse in its bones on first reading the title. The subtext of those three words is brutal in my childhood culture, and not obvious to non-Southerners. It sets up perfectly the basis of the series: These women, the Evanses, are restoring ma'at, are guarding the rightness of the world against Evil and evildoers. That's a story I always enjoy reading.

As is so often the case in families, there are a lot of secrets in the Evans line and some that never made it to those who need them most now. There are undead beings to slay and, unfortunately, no one alive who knows for sure how to do the slaying. The present duo of survivors must thus root around and find out what they need to know on their own. Their support system is robust. They learn both to expand family and how to let others help them heal from last book's events.

There is gore, there is a dread in the atmosphere, and a lot rides on the Strigoi (Romanian undeadies, see Eliade's Miss Christina for some background) not staying risen for one instant longer than can be managed. It's the kind of fun I had with True Blood, with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and all transposed to a part of East Texas I know well enough to feel the story in my water.

If fun's the aim, and gore's not a deal-breaker, here's a good read. Expect the storytelling to mirror the characters' perceptions of events, ie not everything is linear and none of it is spoon-fed to you. This was an enhancement to me after I settled into the rhythm of the story, but that took some time. I can't quite say I bought into the ending's motivating factors but it was certainly of a piece with a series on this kind of supernatural-inflected topic.

I'll offer a solid four stars with a push to anyone in Southern culture to check it out.

SACRIFICIAL ANIMALS, the kind of uneasy horror-inflected thriller I enjoy reading the most

SACRIFICIAL ANIMALS
KAILEE PEDERSEN
St. Martin' s Press
$29.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Inspired by Kailee Pedersen's own journey being adopted from Nanning, China in 1996 and growing up on a farm in Nebraska, this rich and atmospheric supernatural horror debut explores an ancient Chinese mythology.

The last thing Nick Morrow expected to receive was an invitation from his father to return home. When he left rural Nebraska behind, he believed he was leaving everything there, including his abusive father, Carlyle, and the farm that loomed so large in memory, forever.

But neither Nick nor his brother Joshua, disowned for marrying Emilia, a woman of Asian descent, can ignore such summons from their father, who hopes for a deathbed reconciliation. Predictably, Joshua and Carlyle quickly warm to each other while Nick and Emilia are left to their own devices. Nick puts the time to good use and his flirtation with Emilia quickly blooms into romance. Though not long after the affair turns intimate, Nick begins to suspect that Emilia’s interest in him may have sinister, and possibly even ancient, motivations.

Punctuated by scenes from Nick’s adolescent years, when memories of a queer awakening and a shadowy presence stalking the farm altered the trajectory of his life forever, Sacrificial Animals explores the violent legacy of inherited trauma and the total collapse of a family in its wake.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The pleasure I felt reading this book about a bisexual man embroiled in a failing family that's falling to pieces under a culturally unexpected malevolence...! If your mood says, "make it fast," move on to the next cookie-cutter thriller. If your mood says, "give me the literary equivalent of edging," you opened the right book.

The pacing of the read itself is fast. The way the short chapters propel your reading is not, however, equaled by the pace of the story unfolding. The relocation into different periods of time that unfold the wide fan of motives and motivations is much more deliberate. I was surprised by this at first, but in time found my footing in this technique of moving the pages at a different rate from the story itself. In the end, the mechanism I used for dealing with this mismatch was the same one I'd used eons ago when I watched All My Children...the stories moved slower than the episodes.

That said...the story is very familiar. Using this technique helped a Gothic romance-cum-horror tale feel more exciting than that description does. Emilia, the exoticized Other, gets the modern reader's sympathy at first. She's rejected and devalues based on her Otherness. We respond to this behavior nowadays with complete sympathy for the Othered, as goodness only knows it was long past time for us to do as a default.

...but what if that could be used to wreak havoc...?

The author, an ethnic Chinese adoptee into Midwestern culture, decided she would use this very, very clever repurposing of the wide paranoid streak in US culture to create a Gothic story of supernatural entities causing havoc for, apparently, the hell of it. The nine-tailed fox of East Asian folklore seems, more often than not, to just do stuff to see what'll happen next. That seems to me, when attributed to conscious entities, like a wicked, immoral, rotten-souled thing to do, as it is guaranteed to hurt someone who does not know what they're getting into when they fall for the fox-spirit's lures. One can argue that, really basically, Nick fucking his brother's wife for any reason at all is just cause for everything that follows.

I agree.

But everyone else? They didn't ask for this.

So runs my usual horror-themed read response. Like Walschots's Hench, I've always seen super"heroes" as agents of chaos and misery; I watched Poltergeist and asked my then-date, "what the hell are these people gonna do when their insurance won't replace the house?" (He broke up with me a few weeks later.) It doesn't help that I do not believe in The Supernatural, or spirits, or gods. (The vastness of just measurable spacetime isn't awe-inspiring enough for you?) That's one steep hill of disbelief to climb for one little story.

Where I got invested in Author Pedersen's iteration of it was back to that soap-opera technique of unfolding the fan behind the shadowplay of the story. I was constantly thinking "what's that going to mean?" and "what's his zipper doing down?" not focusing on the action in the moment.

For some of y'all, that's the nail in the coffin right there. Good. This will not be a good read for someone whose story in-the-moment expectations are to move from cause to effect and ever onwards, kicked in the hindquarters by heavy boots of Action. A more satisfied reader will come from the ranks of the curious ones who climb hills to look around from the top, then walk down to look at the top.

Satisfying reading, though not in the easy, ordinary way.

ROUGE, more than a color...a way of life and a (bad) reason to live

ROUGE
MONA AWAD
Simon Element
$28.00 hardcover, available now

One of Literary Hub's Best Reads od 2023!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the critically acclaimed author of Bunny comes a horror-tinted, gothic fairy tale about a lonely dress shop clerk whose mother’s unexpected death sends her down a treacherous path in pursuit of youth and beauty. Can she escape her mother’s fate—and find a connection that is more than skin deep?

For as long as she can remember, Belle has been insidiously obsessed with her skin and skincare videos. When her estranged mother Noelle mysteriously dies, Belle finds herself back in Southern California, dealing with her mother’s considerable debts and grappling with lingering questions about her death. The stakes escalate when a strange woman in red appears at the funeral, offering a tantalizing clue about her mother’s demise, followed by a cryptic video about a transformative spa experience. With the help of a pair of red shoes, Belle is lured into the barbed embrace of La Maison de Méduse, the same lavish, culty spa to which her mother was devoted. There, Belle discovers the frightening secret behind her (and her mother’s) obsession with the mirror—and the great shimmering depths (and demons) that lurk on the other side of the glass.

Snow White meets Eyes Wide Shut in this surreal descent into the dark side of beauty, envy, grief, and the complicated love between mothers and daughters. With black humor and seductive horror, Rouge explores the cult-like nature of the beauty industry—as well as the danger of internalizing its pitiless gaze. Brimming with California sunshine and blood-red rose petals, Rouge holds up a warped mirror to our relationship with mortality, our collective fixation with the surface, and the wondrous, deep longing that might lie beneath.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I had the kind of mother who told her daughters, "you have to suffer for beauty, girls." Noelle reminded me a lot of Mama. Deeply shallow, focused to the exclusion of all else on irrelevancies, fripperies, and appearances, Noelle's my definition of toxic womanhood. Also very much the embodiment of what women were and are told they were supposed to be, to care about, and to focus on.

How horrifying. How titanically wasteful.

And how ripe for a loud, satirical takedown, which Author Awad delivers. Adding a supernatural edge to it, no less.

This kind of dark, menacing take on consumerism's extra-toxic focus on women and the messaging aimed squarely at their money is something I wish more women wrote. I remember my mother's obsessive regimens for her skin and how many perfumey unguents and masks she would bring home from the department store. I never saw the dentist and got one pair of glasses, one pair of shoes a year...she had dozens of these things littering her bathroom counter. Yep. I know this obsession is real.

The reality of it made, for me, the supernatural element...humorous, in a very black and cynical way. Of course there must be some awful, evil outside agent making us feel this way...no rational person would surrender to obsession so easily, you can hear the self-justifiers and excusers say. It was genius for Author Awad to make those evil outside agents the malevolent supernatural entities of La Maison de Méduse instead of the blandly corporate agents of evil called Lanvin, Coty, Revlon, et alii.

This gives her so much more latitude to poke fun, too. She's got her sights on the obsession with surfaces, and the ease of trapping women with such simple lures as beauty and youthful appearance. There's a whiff of colorism in the discussions of "managing one's skin tone" that made me cringe. It rang all the more loudly in my ears after I read her sketch of the beauty obsession that's gripped her middle-aged self in The Walrus (here). What a wonderful, wry way to send up one's own foibles and insecurities, I thought. What a talent this author has to make me, a certifiable man and victim of neglect by a beauty addict, read the story with such intensity and interest.

It didn't hurt that Author Awad wrote in that piece:

A bookseller once told me that when you buy a book, you’re also buying the idea of time in which to read it. A down payment on an extension of life, a shimmer of immortality. With my growing collection of serums, I was perhaps seeking something similarly existential. An illusion of control. A staving off of death.

Yep, as the saying goes, thass me.

Why I'd say to read it is that it's a great antidote to the huge ocean of mediocre man-blaming same-ol' same-ol' women's fiction. It's bracingly honest about the internal roots of obsession without ever excusing the forces outside that drive to turn it, purely for profit, into addiction.

If You Hear "ANYBODY HOME?" for gawdsake say no! & FALTER KINGDOM, horror-adjacent YA bodysnatching

ANYBODY HOME?
MICHAEL J. SEIDLINGER
CLASH Books
$18.99 trade paper, available TODAY!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: What came first, the home or the desire to invade?

A seasoned invader with multiple home invasions under their belt recounts their dark victories while offering tutelage to a new generation of ambitious home invaders eager to make their mark on the annals of criminal history. From initial canvasing to home entry, the reader is complicit in every strangling and shattered window. The fear is inescapable.

Examining the sanctuary of the home and one of the horror genre's most frightening tropes, Anybody Home? points the camera lens onto the quiet suburbs and its unsuspecting abodes, any of which are potential stages for an invader ambitious enough to make it the scene of the next big crime sensation. Who knows? Their performance just might make it to the silver screen.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I am on record as loathing the chest-pokey, accusatory second-person narrative voice. Looking at the rating above, you're entitled to wonder what happened to that vat of extra-thick contumely I keep simmering away on the Stove of Rage firing my soul.

Author Seidlinger (MOTHER OF A MACHINE GUN, the ineffable six-stars-of-five THE FUN WE'VE HAD) pulls it off better than I have seen it done elsewhere. This post-apocalyptic Clockwork-Orange level story of the inevitable end of surveillance capitalism's seemingly unstoppable rise...Siri, Alexa, Ring, Google's absolute right to track your every move to earn more profits ring bells?...by poking your chest to remind you of who it is, exactly, who's consuming these "conveniences." The second-person feels accusatory because it is an accusation, a Zola-level J'accuse...! to our corrupt, passively complicit consumer ethos.

The joke here, it's no spoiler to say, is an "unscripted reality show" based around a home invasion. No one would watch that for real, would they, a group of people being terrorized for our amusement? I present In Cold Blood, book and film, as countervailing evidence for the antiquity of this trope being used for entertainment...there are other, older, examples of hostage-taking entertainments like Key Largo but they moved the action to a slightly less personal sphere...so no one's got any sound footing to tut and scoff at the premise. Not even me, the maharajah of TutAndScoff.

So what happens? You know already what happens, there's a family of sorts that gets home-invaded and different things happen to them. Nothing, in keeping with the reality-TV format, is personal. It's all done for the viewers, the audience (note that these words are from different senses and this should be very closely attended to), the dramatis personæ having only designations like "Invader #1" or "Victim #4". In his usual "you didn't imagine this would all be on the surface, did you?" style, Author Seidlinger slings his arrows into the tiniest cracks in the jaded consumer's armor, making this a book far better delectated than consumed. It is, in fact, horror in the sense it's really quite horrifying in what it says, but a supernatural-horror fan will leave the read unhappy, while a revenge-driven horror fan won't get far into it before discovering their needs are not being met. This is more existential horror, a horror that eases the bathroom door open inch by inch before ripping open the shower curtain and flinging cold water on you in order to elicit the screech of terror, outrage, and angry embarrassment at Being Caught.

Make no mistake: You're caught.

You're the one watching; you're the one there's a meta-home-invader to explain to, and to coach "Invader #3" and cohorts. You're the reason this story exists, is being enacted before your "horrified" eyes. You, consumer of the fear and anguish of others.

Which is why I will now say something I have never said before, and never expect to say again:

Second-person narration rocks.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

FALTER KINGDOM
MICHAEL J. SEIDLINGER
Unnamed Press
$16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Hunter Warden just wants some peace and quiet. He wants to watch unboxing videos and be lulled to sleep by the monotone voices and smooth talking YouTube hosts. He wants his parents that are always working to either totally leave him alone or be around for once. After a few beers, Hunter decides to get away from it all and go for a run in Falter Kingdom.

When you run the gauntlet at Falter Kingdom, a tunnel next to a park on the outskirts of suburbia where local high school kids go to drink and smoke, one of two things can happen — nothing or you catch a demon.

The cold spots, locked doors, scratches on the wall, and disappearing laptop immediately alert Hunter to the fact that a demon is haunting him. He knows the signs, he's seen the videos of people that are possessed, and everyone knows someone that has had to get an exorcism. Hunter knows that he should get rid of it, but he can't help but enjoy the company of "H," despite this demon's sinister intentions.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: Make friends with the Darkness Within. There's never going to be a way to get rid of it, so pick a coping strategy: Denial will fail in quicktime; submission will have dreadfully uncomfortable consequences; but making friends with the Darkness Within, making its vision and its urgings (not to mention urges) a source of strength...that way billionairedom lies!

The real question this book presents to its younger-skewing audience is: Who exactly is it that's possessed? What makes someone a possessor? Where, in other words, does the real power lie? (Wordplay decidedly not optional)

What makes this a four-star read but not a five-star one, for me, is Hunter as a stream-of-consciousness narrator. He doesn't think like a high-school senior, said the grandfather of more than one such being. It's only problematic, to be honest, because it's a book aimed at the high-school aged crowd. If it were simply another of Author Seidlinger's unease-inducing, perception-defying novels, I'd never even bring it up. But aimed where it is, I expect it to go there; it didn't make the trip in this reader's perception.

The story itself...how the Falter Kingdom is accessed, what the Falter Kingdom represents...is the usual Author Seidlinger-esque mindfuck of "sure, look at the pretty surfaces, but remember that this author dude laughed through the entire Saw franchise." It's perfect, in terms of believably attracting the teen-boy victims these demons are in search of. It's believable metaphorically..."don't go into that tunnel," says Adult, thus guaran-damn-teeing the kid will and thus will learn from this initiation...it's handled in a quite amusingly perfect way, and it satisfies the narrative need for a driver of action.

I'm all for it. Read, remember, respond with the desired shivers and frissons and half-laughs of memory.

***As an aside, this review vanished from Goodreads last year which caused me no little amount of angst. Must've been a victim of the stupid-people-friendly redesign's early stages. Luckily it's been safely parked on my YA tab, but this year's publication of ANYBODY HOME? brought it into the full glare of public scrutiny.

ŠRDN - From Bronze and Darkness, a paranormal fantasy set in the Bronze Age Collapse

ŠRDN - From Bronze and Darkness
ANDREA ATZORI (tr. Nigel Ross)
Acheron Books
$2.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The year is 1278 B.C. and the Mediterranean Sea is shared among the most powerful civilizations of ancient times. Greeks, Egyptians, and Phoenicians sail from port to port, ready to fight to protect their trade from the "Sea People," marauders who loot and disappear like ghosts. Among them are the fierce Shardan, who come from the "Island of Towers," from fortresses of basalt stone called nuraghes. These rise up all over the Shardan's land and, since the dawn of time, hide a curse feared by the people of the Mediterranean: the Island is the gateway to the netherworld. The Shardan live as hell-keepers, offering their loot to the Gods who protect their position. Now they are in Egypt, ready to wage war against the pharaohs when a messenger arrives from the netherworld with a warning: the Mamuthone demons have awakened.

My Review: You've heard tell of the Bronze Age collapse...the thing that probably triggered the historical Trojan War, caused Minoan, Mycenaean, and Hittite states to collapse, rocked the New Kingdom in Egypt to its core, and was blamed by them on the SRDN, the WSHSH, and a bunch of other "Sea Peoples." Oh, sure you have, the History Channel's made like a zillion documentaries about it! Eric Cline was all over YouTube after his book 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed came out in 2014.

No? Well, good lord, go read or at least watch that amazing story, and then you'll appreciate the opportunity this represents to a fiction writer.

Author Atzori, a Sardinian by birth, decided that his native island's Nuragic civilization was the "Shardan" of the Egyptian stelae complaining about the Sea Peoples. He flew that flag high and proud in this terrific dark fantasy.

The fall of the very interdependent, highly globalized world led to a Dark Age, one without writing or advanced technology...let's be clear, this is a *relative* term, no there have not been computer-using nuclear-armed civilizations before now!...that lasted four hundred years. The myth-making that led to Homer's long-ass poems and the Jewish Torah and so on and so forth are used here as grist for a supernatural explanation for the collapse.

The monstrous Old Ones awake!

Karnak, our PoV character, is in Egypt to extract tribute for the Mamuthone (demons his homeland, Sardinia, has the "honor" of keeping bottled up) when he gets the word that, well, it's too late. And then the loud pedal goes down, the battles begin to spread from all sides to all points, the world's on fire!

We're not going to do any good recounting the Collapse. Either you know and it doesn't matter what I say, or you don't and should get yourself to a bookery to find out about this shocking, amazing event in human history. What matters here is what kind of read this book is: Good. Quite good. A bit underdeveloped in character terms, but I don't think they're so attenuated as to be uninvolving.

You're going to experience a battle-heavy, demon-fighting, very visual tale of what I suspect was the model for the Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah. The battle of Troy...Wilusa as it was known in this era...and the Olympian battles against the Titans, the Philistines battling Saul...all are echoes of this Collapse, and the story here makes the entire period a background for the eternal battle of good and evil. Karnak is a stand-up guy, but very ready to resort to violence.

But trust me, if you like the Antique epics, this story will make your taste for them purr.

THE DEVIL IN AMERICA, one of Kai Ashante Williams's deep & disturbing novellas

THE DEVIL IN AMERICA
KAI ASHANTE WILSON
Tor.com free online or 99¢ Kindle edition

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Scant years after the Civil War, a mysterious family confronts the legacy that has pursued them across centuries, out of slavery, and finally to the idyllic peace of the town of Rosetree. The shattering consequences of this confrontation echo backwards and forwards in time, even to the present day.

My Review: This 2014 novelette by the author of A Taste of Honey and The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps was nominated for a Nebula Award, a Locus Award, a Shirley Jackson Award, and a World Fantasy Award. I see why. What isn't as readily imaginable is why it didn't sweep them all...

Ma’am might be a challenge to love sometimes, but respect came easy.
–and–
He was a father who loved his daughter, but he was a husband first and foremost. I’m a terrible thirsty man, Pa had said once, and your mama is my only cool glass of water in this world.

Tell me that this isn't top-quality phrasemaking, beautifully economical characterization, pitch-perfect explication of the story's reality.

Easter, the belovèd daughter and last child of Wilbur and Hazel Mae, is twelve. She knows so much and still so little about the world. She is a prime target for the Others, the unseen ones she calls angels:

‘The Devil’ in Africa had been capricious, a trickster, and if cruel, only insomuch as bored young children, amoral and at loose ends, may be cruel: seeking merely to provoke an interesting event at any cost, to cause some disruption of the tedious status quo. For the Devil in America, however, malice itself was the end, and temptation a means only to destroy.

"The Devil" has agents or thralls or subjects, how would I know being the materialist meat-sack I am, but Easter knows:

And this whirligig thing’um, right here, was exactly what kept all the angels hereabouts leashed, year after year, to chase away pests, bring up water from deep underground when too little rain fell, or dry the extra drops in thin air when it rained too much.

When Easter listens to these angels, poor little lamb, she causes havoc on a scale her life is too short to know represents the normal state of humanity, that is to say struggle and striving. But the little love is so sorry for her mistake that she takes on a debt that can never be repaid. And that is when the world starts to set her up for the worst fall. Ma'am, she knows what "The Devil" is all about and she does what she can to make her Easter aware that something you don't, can't, comprehend fully is always the source of your troubles in life:

Ma’am. The white man’s gonna see that colored man can’t count, Ma’am, and cheat him out of all his money.

That’s right he is, Easter! And I promise you it ain’t no other outcome! Walk up in that bank just as rich as you please—but you gon’ walk out with no shoes, and owing the shirt on your back! Old Africa magic’s the same way, but worse, Easter, cause it ain’t money we got, me and you—all my babies had—and my own mama, and the grandfather they brung over on the slave ship. It’s life. It’s life and death, not money. Not play-stuff. But, listen here—we don’t know our numbers no more, Easter. See what I’m saying? That oldtime wisdom from over there, what we used to know in the Africa land, is all gone now. And, Easter, you just can’t walk up into the spirits’ bank not knowing your numbers. You rich, girl. You got gold in your pockets, and I know it’s burning a hole. I know cause it burnt me, it burnt your brother. But I pray you listen to me, baby child, when I say—you walk up in that bank, they gon’ take a heap whole lot more than just your money.

And take the payment Easter owes he does, this fine vile Devil we made for ourselves. The end of all good things seems to be slaughter, murder, lynching cruelty...and the pious and the safe say Never again...this time we mean it...never again.

Or next time...maybe the one after that.

But no, there's always a next time and never a never again. We don't learn because it wouldn't be near as much fun if we couldn't kill an anymore.

So Humanity goes on its violent, vile way, down and down.

Pay your buck or just go read the story on Tor.com. Either way you'll come away sure that Humanity (racist white "humanity" most especially) isn't pretty and maybe it's a good thing our time as "masters" is nearly done.

GHOSTLY DEMARCATIONS: Stories, linked novel-in-stories with the Halloween Spirit

GHOSTLY DEMARCATIONS: Stories
JOE TAYLOR
Sagging Meniscus Press
$19.95 trade paper, available now

Rating:

The Publisher Says: Everyone is constantly admonishing our narrator to keep quiet: "You're full of bull hockey, college boy...Shut up and drink your beer." Or, "'Shut up,' Michelle replied. 'Shut up,' Michelle repeated." Or, "Don't look up. At least don't shout when you do. She's here, on the balcony." Or, "'Shit.' Sarah spit this out like a too-hot cinnamon ball, pulled me off the dental chair, and led me to the closet with the skeleton, shushing me with her fingers." Or, "Hush, be still. Tacete, tacete." Everyone admonishes him, when all he wants to do is shout the wonders, the horrors, the terrors that he and his older adoptive brother Galen face as one spiritual incursion after another manifests in their lives, moving from trickster poltergeists to forlornly wandering ghosts to intent fetches to avenging revenants. Perhaps, instead of admonishing him, everyone would do better to heed his early, youthful deliberation: "I never heard his voice again after that night. If we humans could always recognize the last words we were ever to hear from each person we knew or even met, our lives would perch as fragile indeed, gathering tragedy every listening moment to lean over a dark cellar of dark farewells."

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME A REVIEW COPY AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU.

My Review: A further disclaimer: I've known Joe for over a quarter century. As he will somewhat sniffily tell you, this has never stopped me from letting him have it with both barrels if he dares to do less than his best. So, everybody clear on who did what to whom? Good. Let's begin:

This is a storytelling format that I'm fond of, the linked short-story collection or "novel in stories." Joe plays with identity in a lot of his fiction, and this format allows the issue to develop without ever making its presence feel forced.

As is my wont, I will use the time-honored and very efficient Bryce Method to view the stories as they come.

Galen's Mountain Child starts right off with creepy hillbilly ghosties of abandoned burned-alive kids, mothers without maternal instincts, and *retch* kittens.

His mom had been dating men starting the year after Galen's dad died and she hadn't been the gospel of kindness. Or maybe she was the gospel to the men, but not even the epistle to Galen.

True voice, I'm old enough to have heard exactly those locutions from older relatives. 4 stars

I Am the Egg

Kids Know

Angel's Wings

Hey-hello/hey-goodbye/hey-weep-no-more

Madonna on a Country Road

Faithful Companion

The Mansion, the Chandelier, and the Belle

Tacete

A Red Phase

Tit for Tat

The Perfect Ghost Story, Plus One

The Widow with the Hookah

I'll Be Home for Christmas

Louie, Louie and the Blonde Hippie

Ms. Sylvia's Home Care

Truly Mine

LANNY, which by the time y'all see this, we'll know the Booker fate of

LANNY
MAX PORTER
Graywolf Press
$24.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: There’s a village sixty miles outside London. It’s no different from many other villages in England: one pub, one church, red-brick cottages, council cottages and a few bigger houses dotted about. Voices rise up, as they might do anywhere, speaking of loving and needing and working and dying and walking the dogs.

This village belongs to the people who live in it and to the people who lived in it hundreds of years ago. It belongs to England’s mysterious past and its confounding present. But it also belongs to Dead Papa Toothwort, a figure schoolchildren used to draw green and leafy, choked by tendrils growing out of his mouth.

Dead Papa Toothwort is awake. He is listening to this twenty-first-century village, to his English symphony. He is listening, intently, for a mischievous, enchanting boy whose parents have recently made the village their home. Lanny.

I BORROWED THIS BOOK (THANK GOODNESS!) FROM MY LOCAL PUBLIC LIBRARY. THANK YOU!

My Review: This book is on the Booker Prize longlist. That means I, to remain engaged with the literary world as much as I can be, want to read it. I should've made a moment in my headlong rush to consider the portent of finding this typographical sensibility-bashing right up front:

from p9 (set in the fashion of the spread above):
and then he hears it, clear and true, the lovely sound of his favourite.
The boy.

It would have the head of a dolphin and the wings of a peregrine, and it would be a storm-warning beast, watching the weather while we sleep.

Dead Papa Toothwart hugs himself with diseased larch arms and dribbles cuckoo spit down his chin. ... Surgical longings invade him, he wants to chop the village open and pull the child out. Extract him.
***
I am old enough to remember concrete poetry's last go-round in the 1960s. But good lawsy me, the concept of using text design, then typography, to force the reader to step outside the linearity of the ordinary reading experience has been around for quite some time (Aldus Manutius, anyone? Hypnerotomachia Poliphilii jangling a distant bell?), even predating by over one thousand five hundred years the invention of moveable type.

So yes, Dead Papa Toothwort's sections weren't a surprise to me, and I was a wee bit unhappy to encounter this dratted artsy-fartsy over-the-top goof in a book so short it needs to be marketed as a novella. Really. You, Author Porter, don't trust me to be swept along by your words, so you play silly buggers with the poor printers and binders. I wonder what the spoilage rate was on this title.

So let's look at this book's actual text, shall we? That way it's not me offering my opinion, as I can hear the GOTCHA!! Gangers tuning up their tutters to tut at me, in YOUR opinion, goes the intended-to-be-caustic dismissal of my tedious, overbearing man-ness daring to say I think something without hedging it about with disclaimers etc etc etc:
from p31 (Pete is speaking):

This, Lanny, is a significant place.

Why?

This is the point at which you can no longer be seen. The village is always watching, but past this point you're beyond their gaze.

Basically, a more loudly trumpeted and darkly foreshadowed plot twist I have not seen.

from p35 (dinner party narrated by "Lanny's Mum" the nameless-so-far actress/novelist):

I vote it's not the slightest bit weird, said Greg. He's Peter Blythe, he was pretty famous back in the day, so you're getting a bargain. And if they get on well, and he needs the company, go for it.

'Needs the company' is exactly why it's not right. It's unprofessional, said Sally.

Exactly, says Robert, waving his expensive salad tongs. Who needs the company? Are we lending out our son to stave off Pete's loneliness? Like conversational meals on wheels for sad old artists?

Oh, fuck off, Robert, I said. Is it beyond your shrunken world view to imagine that something nice might exist without money ever needing to change hands?

Mum, Dad, and the Village arranging themselves on the sides they'll occupy when The Twist twists their collective nose hairs.

from p47 (Dead Papa Toothwort speaking, hence the boldface):

He leaves the village riding the smells from the kitchens, spinning and surfing, wafting and curling, from Jenny's lasagne to Larton's microwave stroganoff, Derek's hotpot-for-one, such rich sauces, so much sugar, was never so varied as this, not-very-recently-dead meat dressed in fancy flavours, he laughs, funny busy worker bees of the village stuffing their faces and endlessly rebuilding and replacing things. All they are is bags of shopping and bags of rubbish. He takes such offence to the smell of Pam Foy's stir-in jalfrezi sauce that he tears a bit of his nightmare skin off and shoves it through her window. A truly horrid dream. Sleep well Pam, he chuckles, as he floats homeward across the field.

Portentous. Are the frissons frissonning up your horripilating arms?

p61 (Lanny's mum, whose name we still haven't learned yet, is speaking):

One morning, I heard a little scream. A pained noise. Animal rasping. I couldn't tell where it was coming from. I didn't know what to do. I felt I needed a rural life-advice number I could call. Hello, there is tiny screaming, there is a small beast whining, and I am a depressed out-of-work actress and my husband is a city slicker who wouldn't know a cow from a boar.
***
The next page and a half aren't pleasant.
***
Now how do you feel?

I felt good.

I felt capable, competent, and clear-minded. I bleached the sink, washed the knife and returned it to the drawer. You and I have a little secret now, I said to the blade.

1) Actress? An actress who never hears or even thinks her own name? 2) What's your husband got to do with what happens? 3) ::eyeroll:: MEN WRITING WOMEN: WOMEN ARE NOT ALWAYS THINKING ABOUT US. GET OVER IT.

p68 (Pete is speaking):

I can usually see a way to understand terrible things. Satanic worship, decaffeinated coffee, cosmetic surgery, but Renoir's portrait of Madame de Bonnières? No. It cannot be understood or forgiven. And framed in gold plastic and spot-lit from above? No offence intended, Charlotte, there is not a chamber in hell hot enough for a woman of your taste.

Portrait of Madame De Bonnières (Henriette Arnaud-Gentil, Gräfin De Bonnière), painted 1889
This is a meditation in response to a local mum whose...discomfort...with Mad Old Pete the faggot coming to pick up Lanny for his actress mum, as she makes him wait outside her sacred child-stuffed grotto while she calls actress-mum to be sure she's not sending the child to be raped and murdered by the slavering pedophile. *sigh* Familiar with that one, I am.

p76 (Pete still speaking):

In the bus shelter as we passed there was the Henderson boy with Oscar whatsisname from Yew Tree Cottage and they were passing back and forth a joint as big as a church candle, a floppy, knuckled, badly-built thing, and my word it smelled nice. We nodded as we passed and I raised a hand in greeting.

WEIRDO coughed one of them, spluttering into giggles.

We walked on.

I was a little stuck for what to say and then Lanny asked, Do you think they were talking about me or you?

Tedious petit-bourgeois snobs with the cultural nous of parsnips judge what they can't understand and, as The TWIST!!! approaches, Pete's gonna get it in the neck.

Seriously. Everybody got that? Are we all on the same page now? Permaybehaps not...

p85 (Peggy Something-or-other, the Town Crone, is speaking):

It says, in small letters at the end of the {Domesday Book} entry {about their dreary little village}, barely legible but I've seen a photograph of it, Puer Toothwort.

Oh Peggy, I tut, you rotter, what a load of old bollocks.

It says it, Peter. It is written. He's been here as long as there's been a here. He was young once, when this island was freshly formed. Nobody was truly born here, apart from him.

So he's older than you? Surely not. Right then, must deliver this little artist home to his parents.

Night night, Peggy, sweet dream, sings Lanny.

Sleep well good child, she says. Sleep well, Mad Pete, and she winks.

Now, are you there YET?! Seriously, do. you. get. where. the. train. is. headed.

Oh, and the horriblity of the w-bomb puts the moldy cherry on the shit sundae with extra worms we're being served, doesn't it.

p96 (Pete is speaking again):

The sound in the village was all wrong. I went for my walk around the block and got the ill feeling and hurried back. The darkness was uneven, slippery. I sought refuge in my kitchen but the pressure between different objects in my house was all wrong. Something was bad. I had a glass of drink on the table, a newspaper and a pen, and the three of them were fit to lift off and explode. Things were closing in.

Now. Not even the most backward, most challenged reader can possibly misunderstand The Import of that last sentence. Wait...can't count on it...best explain: PETE IS SOMEHOW AWARE THAT HE'S ABOUT TO BE BLAMED FOR A BAD BAD THING. Would you care to guess what that bad bad thing is, who the bad bad thing relates to? Anyone?

Now there are two more sections of this overblown sludge. I read them, but honestly, I do not think you need to. If you don't already know what happens, and allow me to assure you that there is indeed A Twist, please send me a message and I'll tell you.

Or I'll mess it up so the shy can still read it: Lanny survives to adulthood but Jolie the actress/novelist divorces tedious Robert and by goddesses they are well and truly better apart. The Toothwort thing doesn't end, it just stops. There's Pete and Lanny (now called something else) drawin' and drankin' in the purged-of-evil woods.

Seriously. We go all this fucking way and there are pages of typographical shenanigans and THAT. IS. FUCKING. IT.

I think Author Porter deserves some serious kudos for making the points he makes about how the very bones of reality are malevolent in some deeply alien ways. He doesn't spend a lot of time soppily sloshing tears and humidly summoning sobs, either, so there's that going for him. Hence all three of my stars. Seriously? Spare yourself. If this wins the (now-Man-less) Booker I'll eat your hat.

FLASH 3 SEPTEMBER 2019

But the news is *excellent*: This book wasn't on the shortlist!