In her debut novel, Sign Here, author Claudia Lux presents a modern vision of hell as a capitalist bureaucracy of the most inane, obnoxious variety.
Souls arrive in Hell on different levels, depending on how badly they sinned in their former lives. The worst of the worst head to what is known as Downstairs. Some sent there become line workers, tasked with applying various methods of torture. In other cases, they’re the ones on the rack. Protagonist Peyote Trip, however, is a resident of the fifth floor of Hell, so his afterlife is a little less bleak: He lives in an apartment and works in an office as a caseworker. Peyote tracks the plights and problems of mortals, and when one of them has a dire need, to the point that they’re willing to do anything to achieve what they desire, he arrives to make a deal via infernal contract. The mortal gives up their soul, and Peyote uses his abilities to make all their earthly dreams come true.
Despite being an agent of Hell, Peyote tries to treat both his “clients” and his co-workers with dignity and honor, especially when it comes to helping his new co-worker, Calamity, adjust to the myriad annoyances of life on the fifth floor. Peyote and his peers bring five pens everywhere, because the first four will never work. If a soul hates country music, it will be the only station available on their radio and it cannot be turned off. No food is truly hot or cold, and neither is any living space. Lux’s Hell is the epitome of absolute discomfort, like an itchy wool sweater on a humid day.
Calamity soon gets involved in Peyote’s ultimate career goal: securing his fifth and final contract from the wealthy Harrison family. Attaining five souls from the same family, also known as a Complete Set, will grant Peyote an important promotion. Lux tells much of this story from the perspectives of three members of the Harrison family: Silas; his wife, Lily; and Mickey, their daughter. Lux takes the reader deep into each Harrison’s point of view, highlighting their dark temptations, shame and awkwardness in equal measure and creating such a high level of empathy for her painfully realistic characters that it borders on uncomfortable. It all adds to the ever-growing, nearly palpable feeling of imminent disaster. With their desires on such clear display, it’s impossible to forget that any one of the Harrisons could be Peyote’s next victim.
Lux’s unique iteration of hell is consistently engaging, grounded in relatable discomforts yet spiked with surrealist imagery, but readers will also be enthralled with the sheer humanity displayed on each page. No character comes off as mostly good or evil; they’re all just products of their natures and upbringings. With surgical precision, Sign Here captures the difficulties of morality in a complicated modern world.
Sign Here is both a hilarious reimagining of hell as a corporate nightmare and a painfully realistic exploration of morality in the modern world.
Peyote Trip is an office drone on the Fifth Floor of Hell, which resembles a particularly soul-crushing corporation. But a promotion is within Peyote’s grasp, and all he has to do is snag a fifth soul from the wealthy Harrison family. Peyote sets out with Calamity, his potential new workplace bestie, to snare his final Harrison and escape the doldrums of the Fifth Floor, but complications both logistic and ethical soon arise. We talked to author Claudia Lux about finding humanity in an infernal bureaucracy.
Have you ever worked in a corporate environment? If so, are there any specific memories that inspired the idiosyncrasies of Hell’s office spaces? What were some of your other inspirations for Hell-as-bureaucracy? I’ve worked in the social work version of a corporate environment, which is like a normal corporate environment with less money and loftier aspirations. But the initial scene in the Fifth Floor’s kitchen before the morning meeting was based largely on the kitchen in that office, in which the coffee machine never worked and people hoarded plastic silverware like we were preparing (poorly) for the apocalypse.
The first kernel of the idea started when I was streaming TV shows on a work trip and the same insurance commercial started for the millionth time. Without thinking, I yelled, “THIS IS HELL.” Of course, it was not. It was a nice hotel room. But I started noticing it more: How quick we are to compare our momentary discomfort to eternal damnation; how low the colloquial bar has gone for suffering. I began asking people for their most recent “Hell” moments, and, unsurprisingly, a lot of them took place at work. The conversations were so fun and unifying, and soon I had a world to explore and a character to explore it.
Sign Here is told from several different perspectives. How did you decide how much time each character would spend narrating the story? Did any of them take over the plot more than you initially expected? I wish that I had an answer to this that made me sound like a put-together writing mastermind, but honestly, I didn’t really decide, I wrote it as it came, switching perspectives when it felt like the previous section was complete. Besides the broad strokes, I was in the dark about what would happen until I got there. That being said, the character who took over the plot more than I could’ve possibly anticipated was Calamity.
One night, after a long bout of writing, I got this kind of cheeky, mischievous feeling, like right before you challenge someone to eat a pepper you know is super hot, and I typed: “Calamity Gannon, human name redacted, got her taste for blood the first time one of her brothers beat another to death in front of her.” Before that moment, I didn’t have any plans to go into Cal’s background. And I certainly had no idea how I would explain that sentence the next day. But I found myself really excited to get back to it, to rise to the challenge. Now Cal and her background are some of my favorite content.
“Realistically uncomfortable is my whole jam.”
Your characters have such realistic (and realistically uncomfortable) tendencies and thoughts. Were any of them based on real people? Thank you! Realistically uncomfortable is my whole jam. As far as the characters being based on real people, the answer is both yes and no. Yes, in the sense that I mine my daily life for character traits. For example, Silas Harrison’s childhood bedroom in New Hampshire is verbatim my high school friend’s bedroom, down to the Playboy poster and the hidden pot. (Sorry, Mom!) But that’s all. The rest of Silas, and everyone else—as scary as it is to admit—is just me and my wacky, disturbingly curious imagination.
What excites you about digging into a character’s psyche? Part of my work as a therapist, my profession before transitioning to writing full time, was designing and facilitating group therapy programs. At first, I was super intimidated by the concept. One-on-one therapy was already intense; why add in nine more people? But I wound up completely won over by its therapeutic power: the realization that we’re not alone in our thoughts or feelings, especially the darkest ones; that there is nothing we’ve experienced that no one else could understand, even if no one else lived it exactly. If a writer makes a character real enough, reading can provide the same realization. So that’s what excites me the most about developing a character’s psyche—the catalyst for empathy. The possibility that someone who didn’t yet know that feeling seen was possible might feel seen by a character I write.
What’s your favorite way to work? Do you have any drafting or editing rituals? Up until recently, I have always worked full time while writing, whether as a social worker or in the gig economy, cobbling five wages into something livable. So out of necessity, I developed the ritual of only writing at night, which has continued even though it’s no longer required. I write for long chunks, five hours at least at a time, and I love the stolen quiet of the night. I also have a specific candle from Paddywax Candles that I used the whole time I was writing/editing Sign Here. Not cheap, but whether placebo or genuine sensory memory tool, it really helped get me in the zone. I need a new one for the next book (it’s a one-scent-per-book kind of deal), so I’m currently on the hunt for that, if anyone has any suggestions!
I also love setting up a specific writing space wherever I live, and I always include a framed copy of “Berryman” by W.S. Merwin on my desk. It is a brilliant take on the writing process that never fails to give me goosebumps and makes me feel so insanely lucky that I get to do this.
What is your favorite piece of media (book, movie, TV show, anything) from the last year, and why? Oh man, what a big question! Off the top of my head:
I just finished Before Everything by Victoria Redel, and it completely rocked my world. I studied with Victoria at Sarah Lawrence when I was in college, and I have always been in awe of her and her work, but Before Everything had me full on ugly-crying in the middle seat of a transatlantic flight and also cackle-laughing like a maniac. (The people next to me were thrilled!) She writes about grief and friendship with equal parts humor and raw sadness, and that makes every single character feel so real that I keep finding myself missing them. She’s got that writing-as-empathy-catalyst thing down pat.
I’ve also been totally captivated by “Reservation Dogs” on FX. The writing and the acting are incredible, and it’s one of those rare shows that provides both escape and nourishment. It’s hilarious and completely captivating, and at the same time, watching it makes me feel like I am being fed only the best ingredients. Like its quality is improving my own.
Finally, anything Phoebe Robinson does blows me away. I just read her third book of essays, Please Don’t Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes, and I am devouring her new show, “Everything’s Trash.” She’s my Bono.
If you could pick one author from the past or present to have tea with, who would it be? Honestly, my dad, Thomas Lux. I would give anything to have tea (well, not tea. Coffee? Screwdrivers?) with him again.
What was the biggest thing you learned from this experience? What’s next for you? I’m just so amazed and grateful; I still can’t quite believe it. I first started writing novels in 2014. Sign Here is my third but the first to get picked up. So it’s been a long process, and I’ve definitely learned a lot. Most profoundly, I’ve learned to listen to myself. Not to the trolls who live in my head and tell me how terrible I am but to the me underneath their noise. The consistent beacon in the chaos, that steady blink. My whole life, no matter where I took my career or how much I loved social work, which was a lot, that beacon was there, telling me to write. But it terrified and intimidated and exhausted the hell out of me. Following it would require complete faith, against all odds, with little to no external validation, likely ever. So I tried to ignore it. I set the trolls loose to berate and mock and admonish it. Until eventually, I started to follow it. Nearly a decade later, I am grateful every single day that I did. Not only because of the publication, which is an absolute dream come true, but because now that I know I can hold the faith through the hard parts, listening to myself—in any area of my life—doesn’t scare me anymore. Now, it excites me.
I am currently working on my second book with Berkley, which will be out in a couple of years. It’s not a sequel, but it will have the same combination of humor, sincerity, darkness and nutty thought experiment!
The season is upon us: Wrap a scarf around your neck—tightly—and crack open a book of undead intrigue.
A Dowry of Blood
A queer, feminist reimagining of Dracula, S.T. Gibson’s A Dowry of Blood starts with its narrator, Constanta, reclaiming a small bit of power. She refuses to grant her abuser a name, instead referring to him as “you” throughout the book. Her abuser is a prototypical vampire, vulnerable to sunlight and silver, who sires new vampires by giving them his blood. He finds Constanta near death, grants her immortal life and, despite calling her his bride, sees her as a possession. Over the years, Constanta is joined by two other consorts—Magdalena, a politically savvy philosopher, and Alexi, a sprightly socialite and actor—who become her friends, lovers and allies.
A Dowry of Blood focuses on Constanta, her abuser and his other spouses; no other character is present for more than a handful of pages.This narrow focus, along with several time jumps and Constanta’s stream-of-consciousness narration, creates a dreamlike haze. As each new consort enters the narrative, the house’s atmosphere transitions from cloistered and dank to frenetic with need and simmering rebellion. The story’s specificity ebbs and flows according to Constanta’s memory: Events she struggles to recall are blurry, but she hyperfixates on what she remembers in rich detail.
In the tradition of the best vampire stories, Gibson uses her characters to explore how centuries of time would affect a once-mortal mind. A Dowry of Blood whisks readers through human history, arriving at the dawn of the 20th century, drenched in blood.
House of Hunger
In the fantasy world of House of Hunger by Alexis Henderson (The Year of the Witching), an industrial revolution is in full swing, condemning the ancient houses of nobility to a slow decay into irrelevance. The House of Hunger is one of these dying houses, but it’s still influential enough to continue indenturing bloodmaids like Marion Shaw, who is eager to accept the position when it is offered to her.
At the House of Hunger, she will be treated well, fully fed and paid enough to keep herself and her brother afloat before receiving an enormous pension once her service ends. But during her time as a bloodmaid, Marian’s blood will be harvested to grant health and beauty to the houses’ aristocratic members. In Henderson’s world, blood has magical properties and is also used in medicine, steam engines and other scientific endeavors.
Countess Lisavet, head of the House of Hunger, already has four other bloodmaids, and Henderson uses them to illustrate the dangers of Marion’s choice. Cecilia, the countess’ oldest bloodmaid, is also her favorite lover and primary blood donor. She is consumed with desire for Countess Lisavet and is extremely jealous when the countess’ eye turns toward Marion. Lisavet manipulatively distributes her favors, whether they be sexual, emotional or verbal. She makes her bloodmaids’ lives revolve around her until they find themselves defined by her attention.
House of Hunger begins with dark secrets and ends with secrets darker still. Readers will be on the edges of their seats as Henderson slowly unveils the grotesque horrors at the heart of her inventive, gothic society.
Sink your fangs into these two novels, both of which offer a unique spin on bloodsuckers.
Relentlessly cynical and sarcastic, Mat Johnson’s Invisible Things offers sociopolitical commentary wrapped in the trappings of a classic space adventure.
An unknown force has been plucking humans from Earth and bringing them to New Roanoke, an American city that has been constructed miraculously and mysteriously on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, and sheltered from the elements by an enormous dome. These humans, as humans do, have simply re-created everything that America represents today—all the same class struggles, hardships and, of course, consumption. (The word McMansion is used several times.) When the first manned mission to Jupiter discovers New Roanoke, the SS Delany‘s crew soon find themselves trapped along with the colonists.
Johnson uses the astronauts of the Delany and their reactions to the world of New Roanoke to represent strains of modern politics: Sociologist Nalini Jackson is a left-leaning moderate who provides dry, dissociative commentary; Dwyane Causwell, a highly accredited astrogeologist, is a liberal eager to spark revolution; and born-to-money engineer Bob Seaford, who is eager for any semblance of control and power over his fellow humans, represents the capitalist hard-right.
As you might imagine from these descriptions, Johnson’s political stance is clear. However, Invisible Things avoids soapbox territory as Johnson focuses instead on engaging, often funny conflicts between his well-drawn characters while the plot circles around two key questions: Will New Roanoke’s inhabitants and the crew of the Delany band together to escape the colony? And who put them there in the first place? The intriguing mystery combined with Johnson’s irreverent sense of humor make it easy for the reader to engage with the satirical elements—a refreshing trait given that social commentary in modern sci-fi is often either watered down, thrown in by default or both.
Invisible Things is a wonderful sci-fi ride full of lovable characters that dissects modern American capitalism with a barbed, sardonic wit.
Invisible Things is a wonderful sci-fi ride full of lovable characters that dissects modern American capitalism with a barbed, sardonic wit.
With dashes of inspiration from One Thousand and One Nights, Chelsea Abdullah’s debut fantasy kicks off in a world of sand and magic. The Stardust Thief follows Loulie al-Nazari, aka the Night Merchant, a trader of illegal magic who is ordered by the sultan to find a powerful relic—a lamp that will heal the land but destroy all jinn in the process. With the help of her jinn bodyguard, Qadir; the sultan’s son, Prince Mazen; and Aisha bint Louas, a relentless jinn hunter, Loulie must cross through treacherous territory and endure brutal trials to recover the lamp.
Rather than overwhelming the reader with multiple plotlines and a sprawling cast of characters, The Stardust Thief focuses on its central trio and the locales they visit. The various settings never feel empty or underpainted, especially in the sections told from Prince Mazen’s perspective: Forced to live cooped up in the palace for most of his life, his eager delight at finally experiencing the broader world is infectious. As the party draws closer to the lamp, Abdullah slowly unveils new truths about this world, resulting in a narrative that grows richer as it intensifies in pace. With each revelation, from the nature of relics to the existence of ifrit (hyperpowerful jinn), Abdullah propels the reader forward, heightening anticipation for what the next few pages will bring.
Loulie, Aisha and Mazen are drawn in exacting detail, with all their strengths, faults and feelings on full display, and The Stardust Thief is full of captivating intrapersonal conflict. Abdullah does a fine job creating realistic protagonists with clear differences and opposing philosophies: Loulie despises the task she has been given, Aisha despises the work Loulie does and Mazen just wants everyone to stop fighting.
Abdullah has put together a strong start to a series, setting up characters readers can root for even when those characters are opposed to one another, building a world that promises new twists every few pages, and crafting an ending that clearly leads into the next two books in the series. With its healthy balance of intrigue, character growth and action, The Stardust Thief is an enjoyable read that slowly enchants its readers.
Inspired by One Thousand and One Nights, The Stardust Thief will enchant fantasy readers with its captivating balance of intrigue, action and character growth.
Max Gladstone spins a story from the perspective of several unreliable narrators in Last Exit. That unreliability is the point in this standalone fantasy, which is intentionally cerebral and difficult to follow. The dynamics of alternate dimensions and conflicting viewpoints are not background to the plot: They are the plot.
Set in modern-day America, Last Exit revolves around alternate dimensions, nicknamed alts. Alts can only be visited with the help of spin: an individual’s understanding of possibility. If someone has a limited belief in what is possible, then they will only see what is currently in front of them. But if you can overcome skepticism and accept various possibilities, you can force possibilities to materialize. A door that should be locked just happens to be unlocked.
Zelda, Ish, Ramon, Sarah and Sal were once a dimension-hopping fellowship, fighting a mysterious rot that corroded worlds. The group imploded after the loss of Sal, and Last Exit begins as Zelda, convinced that Sal isn’t lost forever, tries to get everyone back together to save Sal and defeat the rot once and for all. The realistic rifts between characters, conveyed via broody monologuing from each unique perspective, allow readers to compare each person’s opinions, providing a rich depth of relationships for readers to explore despite the relatively limited core cast. Last Exit has a relentlessly oppressive atmosphere, with the rot barely giving Zelda and her companions room to recover, but the compelling protagonists keep things engaging.
Gladstone avoids in-depth detail, leaving the reader to conceptualize a scene by leaning on their imagination (their spin, you might say) to flesh out the details. For example, Gladstone uses the phrase “cracked the sky” with no description of the crack’s appearance or its effect on the rest of the skyline. He then reuses the phrase multiple times, challenging the reader to recall their own mental imagery. As a result, Last Exit is a book enriched through sharing; it’s easy to see a book club discussing their varied interpretations of this phrase.
The beginning of Last Exit feels like the start of an archeologist’s excavation: new clues are popping up in unexpected places and nothing makes sense. But that process of discovery and excavation is where Gladstone’s novel shines, as each chapter revises and adjusts the reader’s understanding. By the end of the book, their individual vision of Gladstone’s world reaches something like clarity, enough for the intrepid archeologist to piece together most of the picture. While not a light undertaking, Last Exit is a satisfying read for those with a lot of imagination—and a little spin.
While not a light undertaking, Last Exit is a satisfying fantasy read for those with a lot of imagination.
A motley crew, their skilled leader and a living ship walk into a bar—and the bar explodes.
You Sexy Thing kicks off with a literal bang (and ends with one), but the rest of the story is dialogue and flashback-driven as Cat Rambo shifts perspectives and timelines to color in their cast of characters. Captain Niko Larson, her first mate, Dabry, and a handful of their fellow soldiers escaped their former Hive Mind overlords by declaring that their true calling lay in the culinary arts, not warfare. But when the space station that their restaurant is located on is attacked, they end up seeking refuge on the titular sentient bioship. Shenanigans including space pirates and galactic politics ensue.
Set in a far-flung future teeming with diverse alien life, Rambo’s novel incorporates both magic and science in neat harmony. All denizens of this universe understand that magic and science both exist, and accept both in equal measure. You Sexy Thing’s setting is rife with intrigue, but was clearly designed to accommodate character and plot, rather than the other way around. Which isn’t to say that Rambo’s world building is flimsy or thin, rather that their focus is firmly on their characters and the relationships between them.
With this commitment to character development above all else, You Sexy Thing’s characters need to be engaging, and Rambo absolutely nails it. Captain Niko and Dabry are standouts, solid compatriots who are earnestly seeking both master chefdom and continued freedom from the Hive Mind. One of the greatest characters is the ship itself:You Sexy Thing is a living spacecraft that learns and adapts to its crew, and (not surprisingly) becomes a member of the crew itself.
Rambo does an impressive job of thrusting the reader into the middle of relationships with rich history. The dialogue always feels natural and avoids forced or excessive exposition. Instead, a new crewmate is introduced just after the first act, and her experience learning about the crew and their relationships serves to fill in the gaps for readers. Rambo describes and demonstrates all the unspoken communication between the crew, engendering a wholesome atmosphere suffused with the feeling of warm, deep trust among the closest of friends. There is very little conflict between the crew members and what conflict does spring up is resolved quickly.
You Sexy Thing is a fun start to a hopefully long-running series about the lives of a close-knit fellowship of soliders-turned-chefs-turned-adventurers. Readers will be immediately sucked into Rambo’s light-hearted, camaraderie-filled space adventure and fall in love with their earnest characters.
Cat Rambo’s warmhearted space adventure is light on plot but overflowing with earnest and engaging characters.
Conventional fantasy settings (often Tolkien-inspired landscapes) can be useful for establishing easy-to-understand lines between good and evil, or to skip the onboarding process of learning new systems and races. However, some authors choose to step away from the industry standard, creating a separate, distinct experience.
In Elle Katharine White’s Dragonshadow, the landscape of her Austenesque fantasy world drives each conflict. Sequel to Heartstone, which was a magical retelling of Pride and Prejudice, White’s latest book finds Alistair and Aliza Daired (her Darcy and Elizabeth avatars) happily married and called upon to defeat a mysterious monster threatening the castle of a powerful lord. The core conflict in White’s world is a direct result of an ancient pact between humans, wyverns and dragons, who fight together against the other dangerous magical creatures that opposed the pact.
Upon arriving at Castle Selwyn, the Daireds find themselves embroiled in a murder mystery, complicated by ancient grudges and secret avengers. White builds out her fantasy world naturally, setting pieces into categories: bad guys, good guys, neutral guys. This seemingly simplistic scheme plays into the novel’s central mystery—without spoiling anything, the story’s twists go to interesting and surprising places.
As a whole, dragon and human (and valkyrie!) relationships keep the beat-to-beat energy going, but they are ultimately in support of White’s primary story: the relationship between the newly married Alistair and Aliza. Their relationship’s growth and conflict mirror the entire arc of the murder mystery. White carves a metaphor into the setting and plot, and allows her fictional married couple to grow naturally within the space that the story creates. Similar to Heartstone, the epic setting and heroic events in Dragonshadow play second fiddle to the romantic struggles of Aliza and Alistair.
With the dynamic setting firmly in place, chock full of independent factions with ulterior motives and rich history, White paints her power-couple romance with a vibrant brush, splashing sorrow, joy and solidarity generously across the canvas.
On the other side of the spectrum, the setting of Mirah Bolender’s City of Broken Magic is the primary engine of her story and characters. The first in a series, Bolender’s debut thrusts the reader into a world where magic can take form as a hungry hive mind, consuming everything. This infestation’s only weakness? Locked and loaded sun-bullets (and other sun-things, but the sun-bullets were my favorite).
The city of Amicae claims to have eliminated such infestations entirely, and newbie exterminator Laura is a member of the Sweepers, a team responsible for keeping that farce alive. Each facet of Bolender’s magical steampunk island is fully fleshed out, with motivations and schemes mapped onto each faction and character. This incredible attention to detail is vital to City of Broken Magic, as Laura is generally responsible for trying to micromanage, overcome or save every single character she encounters. If that sounds exhausting, being a Sweeper most certainly is, and the city’s Renaissance Italy-level intrigue makes Laura and her boss Clae’s plight entirely believable. The pair’s banter and genuinely enjoyable relationship serve as an accessible lens to view the intricate complexities of Bolender’s land (which is like if Rome invaded Japan and ruined it really badly). Laura and Clae are set up as underdogs from the start, and rooting for them to succeed comes naturally as they wage a war against the setting itself, cannily crafted by Bolender to fight them at every turn.
Both of these novels use the setting as powerful third party, both guiding the stories to their natural conclusions and acting as an instigator of adversity and hardship for the protagonists. White’s setting is a gorgeous caravan, carrying characters carefully to their conclusion, while Bolender uses her setting as a bludgeon, beating her proud, struggling characters into the ground with its oppressive constraints. Neither novel would be nearly as engaging and fun to read without the energy of its colorful, fantastic world pushing the story along.
P.S. I strongly advise not reading the back of the book summary for City of Broken Magic. It quite literally spoils a major plot point.
Conventional fantasy settings (often Tolkien-inspired landscapes) can be useful for establishing easy-to-understand lines between good and evil, or to skip the onboarding process of learning new systems and races. However, some authors choose to step away from the industry standard, creating a separate, distinct experience.
Cassandra Khaw’s horror novella Nothing but Blackened Teeth brings readers to Japan, where a wedding of questionable taste is about to unfold. Nadia, who is engaged to Faiz, has decided she wants to be married in a haunted house. The couple’s mega-rich friend Phillip secures a venue for them: a Heian-era mansion in a forest, built on the bones of a bride-to-be and other girls killed to appease her loneliness.
Khaw roots the novella in the perspective of Cat, who along with Phillip and the group’s resident pot-stirrer, Lin, is one of the wedding’s three guests. Cat has recently emerged from six months of self-imposed isolation to treat her depression, the exact details of which are left purposefully vague. Cat thinks this retreat has done her some good, but Khaw does not shy from portraying Cat’s ongoing experience with depression in the form of long, spiraling trains of thought. These mental soliloquies color the entire story with Cat’s internal angst. Her barely controlled depressive energy bleeds through every page, punctured by curt dialogue among the small fellowship of supposed friends. Supposed is the key adjective, as each member of the five-person crew has some sort of sordid history with another member—or two. Their friendships, especially as seen through Cat’s eyes, are flimsy at best. Despite flying across the world to participate in this marriage ceremony, the bonds between them disintegrate as the haunting begins.
Nothing but Blackened Teeth is a brooding horror story that incorporates Japanese mythology in colorful, excruciating detail, including spirits such as yōkai and bake-danuki in addition to the malicious, ghostly bride. Cat’s relative familiarity with Japanese culture (she is Chinese and grew up in Malaysia) means that she is quick to identify certain beings but doesn’t spend unrealistic amounts of time explaining significant details for the audience, a careful balance of clarity and obscurity that will appeal to Japanese horror aficionados and newcomers alike.
Khaw builds horror slowly and evenly. Rather than sporadically appearing to frighten and terrorize the young squad of not-quite-friends, the spirits of the house appear with steadily increasing frequency until they are simply present in every scene. By the novella’s climax, the tension has increased to such an unbearable degree that the final burst of violence is more expected than surprising.
Readers looking for bite-size horror on a stormy night will appreciate Khaw’s twisted tale of foolish young adults, all of whom are poorly prepared for the effects their decisions will have on their psyches (and lives).
Cassandra Khaw’s horror novella Nothing but Blackened Teeth brings readers to Japan, where a wedding of questionable taste is about to unfold.
Short, sweet and chock-full of both existential joy and dread, Peter F. Hamilton and Gareth L. Powell’s novella Light Chaser is a hard science thriller set in a utopian future.
A lonely quasi-immortal, Amahle is a light chaser, a spaceship captain who travels the stars and takes advantage of enhanced genetics and lightspeed time-dilation to cross through millenia. Her mission is the dispersion and eventual retrieval of memory collars, fancy futuristic necklaces that record the memories of entire lifetimes: Imagine the 94-part Instagram stories of your most social media addicted-friends, but stretching across a century with fewer grainy, impossible-to-hear concerts. Between planets, Amahle uses these memory collars to experience the lives of those she met on her visits, with only the ship’s AI as her companion. That is, until she realizes that someone is trying to reach out to her through the memory collars, someone capable of communicating across centuries and galaxies.
Despite its short length, Light Chaser plunges into both soul-bound, possibly fated love and universe-spanning conspiracies. Readers who love unique science fiction settings will enjoy how Hamilton and Powell reveal new worlds with each new chapter. Both world building and suspense increase in tandem, complexity and depth building throughout the story while each new reveal amps up the tension.
An ideal read for a flight or a cozy afternoon at home, Light Chaser will make an afternoon seem like minutes.
Short, sweet and chock-full of both existential joy and dread, Peter F. Hamilton and Gareth L. Powell’s novella Light Chaser is a hard science thriller set in a utopian future.
Brian Staveley’s previous trilogy, Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne, followed intricately intertwined political machinations in a vast world with an extensive history. The Empire’s Ruin begins a new arc set in the same universe and tells the stories of three characters: Gwenna, a member of an elite group of soldiers who serve the Annurian Empire; Akiil, a monk turned con artist; and Ruc, a priest trying to survive in the dangerous swamp town of Dombang. Even readers unfamiliar with Staveley's earlier books will enjoy this lengthy, immersive fantasy.
Staveley frequently narrates from triads of point-of-view characters, and while the three protagonists of The Empire’s Ruin start in dramatically different places, they all serve to tell the same story: the slow, inevitable decline of the Annurian Empire, which is still reeling from the events of the previous trilogy. Ruc experiences the consequences of the empire’s weakened grip firsthand, as a victim of the violent streets of Dombang, which has seceded from the empire. Gwenna carries out the Empress’s orders to explore and scavenge undiscovered territory across a vast ocean as Akiil attempts to work a con on the Empress herself.
The world of The Empire’s Ruin is unremittingly bleak, and while Staveley embraces the physical violence that’s all too common in this world, he focuses far more on the psychological impact of living in a crumbling society. Each character here, even beyond the three main characters, battles external corruption and violence while simultaneously battling their own fears of inadequacy, internal corruption and severe depression (except for Akiil, who is a dirtbag who deserves the comeuppance he will eventually receive).
Gwenna, Akiil and Ruc are all prone to monologuing and soliloquies, to the point that it sometimes feels as if Staveley has written three separate fantasy versions of Hamlet. At times, this focus on introspection can make certain sections feel interminable. And while this feels like an intentional choice on Staveley’s part, to demonstrate each character’s narrow focus on their own struggles, it does hurt the book’s overall pacing.
But by the end of The Empire’s Ruin, most readers will still be itching for more. Those looking for a thoughtful, dark fantasy with action and well-earned twists would do well to pick this one up.
Even readers unfamiliar with Brian Staveley’s first trilogy in this world will enjoy this lengthy, immersive fantasy.
P. Djèlí Clark’s A Master of Djinn is the literary equivalent of a cup of lovely mint tea: a refreshing, delightful and magical mystery to enjoy while absorbing vitamin D on a crisp spring day. The fourth installment and first full-length novel of Clark’s Dead Djinn Universe series, the smooth and welcoming A Master of Djinn provides the perfect amount of fan service to engage returning fans without alienating new readers.
In this fantastical version of our world, a man named Al-Jahiz tore a hole in reality in 1872, unleashing Djinn and magic across the earth. In the 50 years since, international governments have taken a variety of approaches to the new existence of the supernatural. In Egypt, magic has not only been allowed, but embraced. This decision put Egypt on the map as a world power, driving other countries (seemingly on the precipice of this world’s version of World War I) to meet for a peace summit in Cairo. The summit is only a few weeks away when a man claiming to be Al-Jahiz returned from the dead commits a series of grisly murders. Fatma, a famous agent of the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities is assigned to the case. She is one of the Ministry's few female operatives, and her success has made her one of the Ministry’s favorite agents for difficult cases.
Clark’s characters have wholesome, wonderful interactions with each other, never waiting long to address their interpersonal conflicts and always resolving on friendly terms. “Friendly” is an apt description of the book as a whole. While there is certainly conflict, tension and danger in A Master of Djinn, the reader will find themselves propelled along through the book by the likeability and relatability of Fatma. Even if you guess the plot's various twists and turns, Fatma’s endearing style, gruffness and no-nonsense approach make A Master of Djinn worth reading.
While A Master of Djinn admittedly breaks little new ground, Clark has created an engaging mystery and a vivid world with intrigue, arcane secrets and an epic climax.
P. Djèlí Clark’s A Master of Djinn is the literary equivalent of a cup of lovely mint tea.
With a magic system that’s two parts enchantment and one part pseudoscience, The Helm of Midnight is a well-executed fantasy set in a heavily religious world reminiscent of Renaissance Europe. Author Marina Lostetter (Noumenon) brings together a cast of relatable, remarkably human characters across three separate timelines to tell a beautiful story of struggle, loss and, eventually, triumph.
Rather than spells and grand wizards, the world of The Helm of Midnight is built on a foundation of “scientific magic,” which is similar to traditional representations of alchemy. Magic is accessed via specific metals that each represent one of the five gods of the pantheon: Emotion, Knowledge, Unknown and twins Time and Nature. The twins are male and female; Emotion and Knowledge go by unique pronouns to represent their genders; and the Unknown's identification is undisclosed (perhaps representing nonbinary or genderfluid identity). These gods are central to everything in Lostetter’s world. Magic follows their rules, government is modeled on them and the plot circles around their religion.
In the present-day storyline, Krona, a Regulator of magical items and enchantments, is searching for two lost items: a death mask imbued with the spirit of a religious fanatic and serial killer and a stone of pure despair, enchanted to bestow grief on its wearer. As Krona continues her search, Lostetter weaves in the other two storylines, which unfold in the past, to paint a broader picture of the city-state and the greater history at play.
While the setting is rich and full of layered, complex culture, the core draw of The Helm of Midnight lies in its characters and their plights. These characters have suffered, are suffering or will suffer serious hardship. Dealing with grief, loss and emotional damage is as much a part of the book as the enchantments and murder wrought throughout. The city’s currency is literally lost time, which is taxed at birth, then bottled and sold. Emotions are drained away into stones in order to embrace good feelings and wash away painful ones. Masks are enchanted with the knowledge of the dead to avoid their disappearance into oblivion.
While clearly setting up for a series, Lostetter tells a complete and satisfying story within the 400 or so pages of The Helm of Midnight. Tears, smiles and surprise await any reader that opens this book.
With a magic system that’s two parts enchantment and one part pseudoscience, The Helm of Midnight by Marina Lostetter is a well-executed fantasy set in a heavily religious world reminiscent of Renaissance Europe.
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