Full of heart and wonder, Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales is a conclusion fitting for its heroine: thoughtful, fantastical and dotted with thoroughly informative footnotes.
Full of heart and wonder, Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales is a conclusion fitting for its heroine: thoughtful, fantastical and dotted with thoroughly informative footnotes.
With a sharp sense of dark humor and a stunning voice, Neena Viel uses well-worn horror tropes in deliciously terrifying ways in her debut, Listen to Your Sister.
With a sharp sense of dark humor and a stunning voice, Neena Viel uses well-worn horror tropes in deliciously terrifying ways in her debut, Listen to Your Sister.
With a sharp sense of dark humor and a stunning voice, Neena Viel uses well-worn horror tropes in deliciously terrifying ways in her debut, Listen to Your Sister.
With a sharp sense of dark humor and a stunning voice, Neena Viel uses well-worn horror tropes in deliciously terrifying ways in her debut, Listen to Your Sister.
A considerable wave of hype has grown around Victorian Psycho. Well before it hit bookstore shelves, Virginia Feito’s follow-up to her hit debut (Mrs. March) was set to be adapted into a Hollywood film starring Thomasin McKenzie and Margaret Qualley, cementing it as a horror story we’ll be discussing for quite some time.
And, happily, there’s good reason to keep talking about Victorian Psycho, well beyond a movie deal. Sleek, deadly and paced like a runaway train, Feito’s novel is an absolutely delectable mashup of horror sensibilities, and one of 2025’s must-read genre releases.
The “psycho” of the title is Winnifred Notty, a young woman who’s taken a post as a governess in a stuffy, shadowy old manor house in Yorkshire, a setting full of all the requisite repression and strange fascinations of the Victorian era. As Winnifred narrates the story with a mixture of black-hearted wit and misanthropic glee, we learn that she has plenty of strange fascinations of her own, many of them springing from an unhappy childhood that taught her to survive and to make her own rules. Now, with Christmas fast approaching, Winnifred’s way of life is about to be unleashed on the unsuspecting Pounds family, and no one is safe.
Fittingly, Winnifred’s voice is the star of this particular show. Feito draws on her novel’s namesake, Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, when it comes to portraying Winnifred’s inner turmoil, and blends that with the polished Victorian intricacy of writers like Henry James and Charles Dickens. We learn about the jealousy and rage inherent in Mrs. Pounds; the lecherous curiosity of Mr. Pounds; Winnifred’s young charges, Andrew and Drusilla, who are tiny monstrosities in their own right; and, of course, the darker side of the servants stationed throughout the labyrinthine home. Through Winnifred’s eyes, we see all of these elements quickly stacking together, a delicate house of cards primed not merely to tumble, but to burst into flame.
At just 200 pages, Victorian Psycho is lean, lithe and clear in its purpose and its violent delights. It’s a book you can easily finish in a single sitting, yet Feito’s prose is so dense with meaning and subtlety that you may just pick it right back up again. The novel whistles along at a breakneck pace but also immerses you deeply in everything, from the tapestries adorning the house’s walls to the joys of Victorian mummy unwrappings. You won’t want to leave Winnifred’s dark world.
Perfect for fans of CJ Leede’s Maeve Fly and Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw alike, Victorian Psycho is one of those books you won’t just read. You’ll get lost in it, and you’ll be delighted by what you find in its sardonic embrace.
Sleek, deadly and paced like a runaway train, Victorian Psycho is an absolutely delectable mashup of horror sensibilities.
Every daughter contains a part of her mother. An imprint buries deep down, binding the two together, indelible. For Margot, the young protagonist of Lucy Rose’s dreamlike, visceral horror novel The Lamb, the connection with Mama is bloodsoaked, painful and unrelenting. Can a child ever sever herself from her mother?
Mama and Margot have lived in the woods ever since Margot can remember. Apart from the occasional lost soul looking for shelter, they are alone. Mama calls the lost people “strays,” with a certain amount of affection. She eagerly settles them in the house, feeds them and serves them wine. It’s not until it’s too late that the hemlock in the drink takes deadly effect. Then, Mama and Margot can feed. Sometimes they have a lot to eat, and sometimes they go hungry. When times are bad, Mama is inconsolable, violent and harsh. Margot covers the bruises with her coat as she rides the bus to school. However, when a new stray named Eden comes to the woods, an entranced Mama welcomes her into the family. Margot feels a change come over the house with Eden’s presence, something she’s not sure if she likes. She must decide what sort of future she wants, but will it mean leaving Mama, Eden and the gruesome truth of their lives far behind? It may be the only chance she’s got for something new.
Rose’s use of Margot’s first-person perspective in The Lamb allows for full authorial control over the shifting tones and feelings within the cabin. Much of the story happens in only a handful of locations, imbuing the plot with a sense of claustrophobia. Margot can’t escape the horrors of the house, how strays are harvested and eaten as the cycle continues. These happenings are at once terrifying and perfectly ordinary, the only thing she’s ever known. This is the genius of Rose’s folktale: She blurs the lines between hunger and gluttony, human and animal, love and revulsion. It’s hypnotic, grotesque and beautiful all at once.
Rose’s writing confidently carries the reader through some seriously disturbing moments, with blood and more staining nearly every chapter. Coming-of-age shouldn’t be this bloody, should it? Maybe it’s the only way—feeding on what came before, new and full at last.
Lucy Rose’s horror-folktale hybrid, The Lamb, is hypnotic, grotesque and beautiful all at once.
Neena Viel’s debut speculative novel, Listen to Your Sister, is both deliciously terrifying and belly laugh-inducing, offering fans of horror and dark comedy the ideal blend to keep them up all night.
After 25-year-old Calla Williams reluctantly becomes the legal guardian to her youngest brother, Jamie, she finds that taking care of a teenage sibling is a round-the-clock responsibility, as Jamie is constantly getting himself into trouble. It doesn’t help that their middle sibling, the put-together, well-meaning but often absent Dre, is off handling his own issues. Calla grows disillusioned as she realizes she is losing control over her life thanks to shouldering the weight of being a single mother in all but name. But perhaps the most frustrating thing is that Calla’s constant protectiveness and die-hard loyalty to her not-so-little brothers has ramped up the Nightmare, a series of labyrinthine dreams deep-rooted in family and personal trauma that she cannot escape and always end poorly for her brothers—until she wakes up in a cold sweat, screaming. When an unfortunate series of events force the Williams siblings to lie low in a creepy cabin in the woods, Calla is pushed to her breaking point, and Jamie and Dre soon learn how intensely their sister cares for them and the true cost of her repeated rescues.
Listen to Your Sister focuses on a different sibling of the trio every chapter, and Viel excels in getting under each of their skins to explore the emotions at stake. On the surface, Jamie’s identity seems to revolve around his life on the streets and work dealing illegal substances, but his steadfast belief in standing up for civil rights and Black lives shows readers a more caring, less self-obsessed facet to him. Likewise, Dre may complain about being overlooked as the middle sibling, but his closeness in age to Calla means he viscerally remembers their shared past—both the sentimental and the secret, scary moments. But Viel’s deepest expression of the strange but beautiful relationship between siblings is found in Calla’s chapters: Her powerful emotions radiate from the pages, a maelstrom of undying devotion, frustration, repulsion and love for her brothers.
In addition to supernatural horrors, the siblings also face the scariest and ugliest parts of modern society, from violence at protests to the racism and discrimination running rampant in their Seattle hometown. With a sharp sense of dark humor and a stunning voice—alongside some gruesome body horror scenes—Viel incorporates well-worn genre tropes in new ways and provides plenty of bloodcurdling surprises along the way.
With a sharp sense of dark humor and a stunning voice, Neena Viel uses well-worn horror tropes in deliciously terrifying ways in her debut, Listen to Your Sister.
Dryadologist Emily Wilde employs research methods that may occasionally make her colleagues shake their heads. That doesn’t seem likely to change now that she’s engaged to a faerie prince and responsible for the overthrow of his stepmother, the former queen. All that’s left is for Wendell Bambleby, Emily’s former academic rival and newly betrothed, to take the throne. But Wendell’s stepmother is not so willing to give up her hold on life or the realm. As Wendell and Emily adjust to their new roles, they must contend with a growing malignancy in the land of Silva Lupi, one that threatens to corrupt its landscape and destroy its residents. But faerie is ever ruled by the conventions of fairy tales, and Emily knows that if she can just find the right story, she’ll also find the way to cure the rot. Her only fear is that the story—like so many of its kind—won’t give her the happy ending she wants.
As with previous installments in Heather Fawcett’s bestselling series, Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales is charming in both its presentation and its main character. Presented as a mildly edited version of the titular professor’s personal notes—complete with the occasional dry citations and footnotes—the novel captures its narrator’s eccentric love of faerie and perpetual difficulty in understanding the rest of the world. But where the Emily of Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries was closed-off and curmudgeonly at best, the Emily we meet in her latest adventure has somewhat softened. Although she usually remains more interested in research than her fellow humans, and still struggles to understand other people’s unreasonableness, the once hermit-like Emily now has a small group of comrades who she loves and who love and accept her in return. Her eccentricities, once a force that drove others away, are now the assets she uses to show her affection. Full of heart and wonder, Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales is a conclusion fitting for its heroine: thoughtful, fantastical and dotted with thoroughly informative footnotes.
Full of heart and wonder, Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales is a conclusion fitting for its heroine: thoughtful, fantastical and dotted with thoroughly informative footnotes.
Grief is a complicated thing. Sometimes it manifests as denial, anger or even a kind of numbness. But for young Violet Webb, who can see ghosts, death isn’t cause for grief, even after her parents die climbing the deadliest mountain in the world. So when Violet and her older sister, Lily (who, full of adolescent intransigence, believes Violet’s sightings are the figments of a child’s imagination), find themselves under the questionable guardianship of their estranged Aunt Clara in a house filled with ghosts, Violet tries to help the spirits. But unquiet ghosts have their own reasons to linger, and they rarely bode well for the living.
Camilla Bruce’s At the Bottom of the Garden is in some ways a classic example of gothic horror, dealing more directly with fear and hauntings than the viscera of other horror subgenres. Bruce uses these supernatural elements to probe earthly things: namely the Webb sisters’ grief, and their Aunt Clara’s greed. To achieve this, Bruce adopts a multifarious approach, shifting narrators every chapter and adroitly morphing her writing style to suit the characters. Violet’s chapters, for instance, are notably guileless and direct, while Clara’s are filled with overweening self-regard. Bruce presents two layers of horror, balancing the real and surreal. Clara is plagued by the supernatural revenants Violet inadvertently strengthens; meanwhile, the Webb sisters face the all-too-real threat of an abusive guardian. This symmetry allows Bruce to honor the sisters’ grief, how they wrestle with the meaning of death, and to contend thoughtfully with mortality within a story filled with literal ghosts.
Never manipulative but genuinely cathartic, At the Bottom of the Garden is a story of two children coping with the dissolution of their entire world, and discovering a new one in the process. If that sounds rather optimistic for a piece of gothic horror . . . well, genres are only suggestions, after all.
Camilla Bruce’s cathartic At the Bottom of the Garden uses the trappings of gothic horror to wrestle with the meaning of death.
What are your bookstore rituals? For example, where do you go first in a store? As a coffee addict, I’ll definitely stop by any coffee bar first. Then I like to sip and wander the new releases and sale tables. I’ll wind up seeing books written by my friends and internally (hopefully) I’ll say hello. I’ll always check graphic novels for my kids. But no trip is complete without shopping the journals section.
Tell us about your favorite library from when you were a child. My father managed the Brooklyn Public Library, so the central branch is my perennial favorite. However, I also loved the Staten Island Public Library and I still remember that old book smell.
While researching your books, has there ever been a librarian or bookseller who was especially helpful, or a surprising discovery among the stacks? Most of my research has shifted to quick Google questions due to time constraints, but booksellers have been instrumental in getting the word out about Five Broken Blades, and librarians have championed my career from the start.
Do you have a favorite bookstore or library from literature? A favorite fictional bookseller or librarian? My favorite library from literature is easily the one in The Starless Sea. If you’ve read it, you know why. I designed an amazing bookstore for The Jasmine Project. It was one of those times I spent weeks researching and thinking about it for approximately three sentences to land in the finished book, but I don’t regret it.
“There isn’t a bookstore or library I don’t want to see, honestly.”
Do you have a bucket list of bookstores and libraries you’d love to visit but haven’t yet? What’s on it? There isn’t a bookstore or library I don’t want to see, honestly. There are libraries and bookstores in France, China and Budapest, Hungary that look amazing. I just saw a bookstore in California with bookstore collies. I am nothing if not easily influenced by the cuteness of bookstore pets or read-to-me dogs in libraries.
What is the most memorable bookstore or library event you’ve participated in? Saratoga Springs Public Library in New York puts on a book festival each fall with panels all over town, and it’s one of my favorite events of the year. With every bookstore event I’ve done or even stock signings, I’m blown away by how the staff is always helpful, enthusiastic and kind, regardless of whether I’m signing three books or over 500.
What’s the last thing you checked out from your library or bought at your local bookstore? My last books from my library were graphic novels for my kids. They are voracious and tear through them in a day. For me, my last purchase was Heartless Hunter. I am lucky and was sent arcs of Rebel Witch, The Bane Witch and Meet Me at Blue Hour, and I can’t wait to read all of them.
How is your own personal library organized? Ugh, it is not. I’ve had rainbow shelves and alphabetical, but my collection is currently in stacks spread in various places around my house. I keep talking about built-in bookcases. This might’ve shamed me into getting that project underway.
Is the book always better than the movie? Why or why not? Actually, I don’t think it is. I can think of two off the top of my head where the creators of the series took the concept to better places. However, generally, yes, I think the book is better, solely because it’s so difficult to get all the internal thoughts and motivations of a character across in film.
Bookstore cats or bookstore dogs? Both! Bookstore raccoons and I’ll live there.
What is your ideal post-bookstore-browsing snack? Hmm. It would have to be something that didn’t dirty my fingers because I’d want to read. Maybe rice cakes (tteokbokki).
Photo of Mai Corland by Leila Evans.
The author of the Broken Blades fantasy series shares her favorite literary libraries and gets real about bookshelf organization—or a lack thereof.
I set pen to white paper and brainstormed around the circled word “MOTHER.” What were my word associations and allusions? The Queen of Coins. Marmee March and Cersei Lannister. Josephine Rabbit. The Capitoline wolf.
A she-wolf nursing infant twins is an unforgettable image. Strange, certainly. Unnatural, perhaps. It is the emblem of Rome itself, found on coins and football club jerseys, and has traversed the world as its empire once did—to Parisian parks and U.S. city squares. The mother wolf has become an established part of our communal iconography.
“Retelling is a trendy word, but these stories are more than a reimagining, they are also a resurrection.”
This trope persists in other mythologies, too. Atalanta raised by bear cubs. Enkidu. Mowgli and Tarzan. These feral children prevail as symbols of hope and survival. Of life, against all odds, finding a way. And yet, while our oral tradition and literature may love the babies, we think and talk and write much less about their mothers.
Most people with a grasp of European history know Romulus and Remus, but before there was a wolf, there was a woman, breaking herself in birth. Who was she? Why was she separated from her children? The answer is Rhea Silvia, princess turned pregnant priestess, who lost her babies because she lived in a time when nefarious powers governed what she could and couldn’t do with her body.
I scoured the primary sources for Rhea, finding the clearest narrative in book one of the Roman Antiquities by Dionysius of Halicarnassus. I thought I knew Rome because I was raised on sword and sandal epics, Ben-Hur and Spartacus. But Latium is something else entirely. It’s a confederation, a league of small cities under the loose rule of Alba Longa—a site that no longer exists. It may have been where the pope’s summer residence, Castel del Gandolfo, is located, but there are no remaining pillars or foundations to visit. Rhea and her sons are one of the old myths, occurring outside the cultural assumptions of Roman Empire, the stock images of Coliseum and Caesar.
I read of the kings that descended from Aeneas, a lineage almost Shakespearean in nature, so reminiscent of the Bard’s best tragedies, so rife with rivalry and revenge. King Numitor’s daughter, a Vestal Virgin, is impregnated by the god of war, and delivers Romulus and Remus in an almost biblical narrative: babes sent down the river to escape death, fulfilling a prophecy. Afterward, however, Rhea Silvia fades from the record like the brightest colors in an ancient fresco. She’s not even in the background; she’s gone.
In SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, Mary Beard raises the question: What does Rome’s founding myth reveal about its values and character?
A redundant brother. A divine birth. Patriarchal values. Male protagonists.
Retelling is a trendy word, but these stories are more than a reimagining, they are also a resurrection. In Mother of Rome, Rhea gets restored to the scene—rising out from under the classical author’s omission or neglect and into the game of thrones. In the novel, I write: “’This is the first lesson, Rhea. Men think they create the empires, but both are born of women.”
Mother of Rome is my ode to Rhea Silvia, to a mother’s life-giving love, but it is also a reminder: There is always a before. Before the city. Before the kings. This is that origin story, and it’s hers.
Photo of Lauren J.A. Bear by Heidi Leonard.
Lauren J.A. Bear’s Mother of Rome reorients the empire’s founding myth around the rebellious, passionate princess Rhea Silvia.
In Old Crimes and Other Stories, Jill McCorkle’s characters face moments of reckoning and work to make sense of the past. A father has trouble connecting with his daughter and adjusting to the digital era in “The Lineman.” In “Confessional,” a husband and wife buy an antique confessional for their house—a purchase that leads to surprising discoveries. “Commandments” features a trio of women dumped by the same man who meet to share stories about him. Wistful and wise, McCorkle’s fifth collection is the work of a writer at the top of her game.
Louise Kennedy explores the lives of contemporary Irish women in her bleakly beautiful collection, The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac. Kennedy’s protagonists—rendered with authenticity and compassion—contend with fraught or dangerous relationships, motherhood issues and economic woes. Sarah, the main character of the title story, pays an ugly price for her husband’s poor business decisions, while the main character in “In Silhouette” is tormented by her brother’s participation in IRA activity. Kennedy’s moving stories offer numerous discussion topics for book clubs, including female fulfillment and the human need for connection.
Salt Slow finds Julia Armfield leaning in to science fiction and the supernatural in stories that examine urban life and women’s experiences. “Mantis” focuses on the turmoil of adolescence, as a young girl’s body mutates in startling fashion. In “Formerly Feral,” two stepsisters form an extraordinary bond with a wolf. Whether she’s writing about giant bugs or a zombie ex-girlfriend, Armfield is clearly at home with the odd and the uncanny, and the end result is a captivating group of stories. Themes of sexuality, spirituality and loss will get book clubs talking.
GennaRose Nethercott’s Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart and Other Stories is sure to delight—and disquiet—readers. Ominous, imaginative and intriguing, Nethercott’s stories probe the tension between the wild and the tame as they exist in our daily lives. In “Homebody,” a young woman undergoes a strange physical transformation after moving into a new house with her partner. “Sundown at the Eternal Staircase” chronicles the goings-on at an eerie tourist attraction. Thanks to Nethercott’s remarkable narrative skills, the impossible becomes plausible. Inspired by folklore and fairy tales, she reinvigorates the short story form.
Round up your reading group and ring in 2025 with one of these fabulous short story collections.
For every reader, there are things that will make them politely but firmly close a book and never open it again. For me, it’s always been what I deem perverse ambiguity. “Who’s to say what really happened! People are unknowable!” a book will proclaim, and I will grip it by its metaphorical lapels and demand to speak to its author. However, for some books, the ambiguity is the point, and there is no better example of this than Henry James’ eerie novella, The Turn of the Screw. The tale of a governess in Victorian England who becomes convinced that the children she cares for are being haunted by the spirit of her predecessor, The Turn of the Screw is horrifying because of its inscrutability. It could be a traditional ghost story, but tilt it just a few degrees, and it’s a tale of a woman trying so hard to suppress her sexuality that it becomes a paranoid obsession. Is her quest to protect the children a noble one, or does something heinous lurk within her need to safeguard their “purity”? A novel might not have been able to sustain such ill-defined anxiety, but as a novella, it’s an undiluted sliver of dread.
—Savanna Walker, Managing Editor
Foster
In rural Ireland sometime in the past, a shy observant child has left home for the first time. Her long-suffering mother will soon have another child, so the girl will be looked after by the Kinsellas, a kind couple from her mother’s side of the family who own a small dairy farm. Though we don’t learn the girl’s name or specific details of her life at her home, it’s clear within two pages that her family is very poor, and her father is a layabout who would happily see her left on the side of a road, as long as another man didn’t put him to shame by helping her. And because the girl is telling the story, we know that she knows all this too. In the Kinsellas’ house, the missus tells her, there are no secrets and no shame, and the days the girl spends with the couple are filled with order and delight, as well as a mounting understanding that the Kinsellas are not entirely happy. Foster is filled with moments of ease, heartbreak and joy. Despite author Claire Keegan’s bucolic setting, the story never pretends that life is easy. Keegan’s writing is spare but never austere, and the hour spent in Foster’s quiet world will change you.
—Erica Ciccarone, Associate Editor
A Small Place
OK, this isn’t a novella. But if you’re looking for powerful literature that you can read the whole of in a single dedicated burst, this 80-page essay by the great novelist Jamaica Kincaid fits the bill perfectly. Kincaid grew up on Antigua, an island in the Caribbean that was colonized by the British in the 1600s and became the independent country Antigua and Barbuda in 1981. In A Small Place, written just seven years after independence, Kincaid addresses the North American and European tourists who vacation on the 9-by-12-mile island, picking apart a tourist’s mentality to reveal its willful ignorance, and drawing connections between centuries of slavery under British colonialism and the corruption of Antigua and Barbuda’s government. There’s so much here—careful tracing of how history becomes cultural narrative, evocative descriptions of the island’s “unreal” beauty, anecdotes about Kincaid’s love of her childhood library. Everyone living in our so-called “post” colonial world, especially anyone who’s ever been a tourist, should read A Small Place.
—Phoebe Farrell-Sherman, Associate Editor
Train Dreams
Inside the worlds of Denis Johnson’s fiction, the mundane evokes great sadness, terror or joy. Simple acts are magnified in subtle yet staggering ways. Along with his straightforward, limpid prose, this aspect of his writing makes the National Book Award-winner (Tree of Smoke) exceptionally suited for the novella format, as proven by Train Dreams, which tells the story of Robert Grainier, an itinerant laborer in the American West during the turn of the 20th century. Johnson gracefully doles out disjointed portions of Grainier’s life as it unfolds in an era suffused with ordinary tragedy. All around Grainier, people die from dangers both natural and human-made. But just as a ravaged forest returns after a massive fire, “green against the dark of the burn,” so does the humanity that stubbornly persists in this rapidly changing landscape. Despite—or as a result of—its short length, Train Dreams showcases Johnson’s impressive capacity for creating memorable characters, whether it’s a dying vagrant, or a man shot by his own dog. It’s truly a wonder that a book can fit so much engrossing vibrancy within so few pages.
—Yi Jiang, Associate Editor
Our favorite quick reads pack an enormous punch in a slim package.
Artificial intelligence holds only so much power in the year 2024. Sure, it could help improve your cover letter or maybe suggest a better pumpkin pie recipe. But it doesn’t nurture human life. The future may be quite different, with a million harmonious systems calibrating and updating and sustaining whatever remains of our species. But what happens when the systems that serve us begin to erode? Erika Swyler ponders such a future in her thoughtful speculative novel We Lived on the Horizon.
The walled city of Bulwark protects one of the final pockets of humanity from an unlivable Earth. Controlled by a citywide AI system, the city is a near-conscious network of interconnected systems and data. Bulwark’s citizens survive in comfort or squalor based on how much their ancestors gave to the greater good, with the city’s elite, known as the Sainted, living lavishly. But when one of the Sainted is murdered in his home and all the data records are erased, Enita Malovis and her house AI system, Nix, sense something terrible is happening to Bulwark. Systems are quietly shutting down or failing to respond. Can they find out who, or what, is suppressing the truth?
AI systems take center stage in We Lived on the Horizon, and Swyler gives spectacular voice to these nonliving entities. Lines of code hint at emotion with small color changes; long database query times with no responses suggest recalcitrance or confusion. These passages are some of the most interesting and innovative in the novel, and Swyler deliberately paces her story to stretch them to their fullest potential. Moral reflections on the relationship between humanity and machines drive Enita and Nix’s ever-evolving relationship as she tries—literally—to make him human.
Lovers of Octavia Butler or Mary Shelley will easily see We Lived on the Horizon’s direct descent from such literary giants. The novel’s core, however, feels timely and urgent, wondrous and inventive. It’s a marvel and a triumph. At its conclusion, I felt a twinge of dread as I contemplated what our own creations may do to try to sustain us.
Timely and urgent, wondrous and inventive, We Lived on the Horizon is a fascinating mystery set in a city run by AI.
In an odd corner of Tokyo is a ramen restaurant that, for the right clientele, is actually a pawnshop. Walk inside and the shop owner will greet you warmly. You’ll apologize and say you are in the wrong place, that you were looking for a hot meal, you need to go, but the shop owner will stop you. And he’ll offer you the opportunity of a lifetime: the chance to pawn a regret, or to shed a choice that has been a burden.
All her life, Hana Ishikawa has anticipated and dreaded the day she will inherit her father’s magical pawnshop, a nook that rests between two worlds: bustling, modern Tokyo and Isekai, or the Other World. She understands it is necessary to collect human choices and to turn them over—in the form of glowing birds—to the Shiikuin, the mysterious, terrifying figures in “pale white Noh masks . . . [stinking of] rusting metal and decaying flesh” who guard Isekai. But on the morning of Hana’s first day as shop proprietor, she finds the place ransacked, her father missing and a choice stolen, presumably by him. To complicate matters, Keishin, a brilliant human physicist, stumbles into the shop on the morning of the disaster and insists on helping Hana find her father.
So unfurls a story that is equal parts adventure and romance, lighthearted and devastating, philosophical and emotionally resonant. Hana and Kei embark on a journey through Isekai, jumping into puddles and coming out in other realms, folding into paper, climbing ladders through clouds and witnessing the release of the stars. They run from the Shiikuin and chase after Hana’s father, who presumably holds answers to questions about Hana’s past; simultaneously, they circle each other, tentative but magnetic. It’s a Romeo and Juliet love story, after all. They’re from two different worlds: “She was the moon in the water,” Kei observes, “Close enough to touch, yet beyond reach.”
Author Samantha Sotto Yambao’s world building in Water Moon is marvelous and digestible, utilizing short chapters and precise, direct descriptions. And our protagonists, Hana and Kei, are refreshingly communicative and mature. Yambao has created a work of art that is atmospheric and, above all else, wondrous. Although there are stakes, Water Moon is a heartwarming, low-suspense read that reminds us to take hold of our lives and our choices.
Water Moon, Samantha Sotto Yambao’s atmospheric and wondrous fantasy, centers on a Tokyo pawnshop where people can sell their regrets.
Princess Rhea Silvia has had everything wrenched from her grasp. She has borne the loss of her mother and brothers, and seen her father stripped of his throne. Now forced into the life of a Vestal Virgin by her power-hungry uncle, Rhea has been divested of whatever power she once possessed. But she has a secret that will change the world forever—if she can live long enough for it to bear fruit. The night before she is to be commended to the virgins, Rhea takes Mars, the god of war, to her bed, violating her vows and consummating an affair that will birth one of the most powerful empires the world has ever known. Rhea’s story is one of gods and blood, of sacrifice and vengeance. Hers is the story of the birth of Rome.
In Mother of Rome, author Lauren J.A. Bear reinterprets the strange and tragic backstory of the twin founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, into a story of intrigue, determination and the raw ferocity of a mother’s love. Like most myths, Rhea’s intrigues even when stripped down to its most basic parts. But Mother of Rome gathers strength from emotional specificity: namely, Bear’s refusal to shy away from the uglier parts of a mythological retelling and her devotion to showing the emotional truth of the women she portrays. Rhea seeks vengeance in a world where men acknowledge her only when exerting control over her destiny and body, and her rage and frustration spring from the page—but so too does her unbridled joy at seeing her children for the first time. Similarly, her cousin Antho’s sense of helplessness at being tied to men who disgust and terrify her may loom large, but so too does her hope for her forbidden love. Because in Bear’s hands, women’s stories—and women’s rages, hopes and fears—matter. Cathartic and moving, Mother of Rome reimagines the founding myth of Rome in a way that transcends gods and empires, instead focusing on the humanity at the story’s core.
Cathartic and moving, Mother of Rome reimagines the myth of Romulus and Remus by placing their mother, Princess Rhea Silvia, center stage.
In 2019, we’ve enjoyed a number of good comic tales—but they’re dark, a little wicked, and even when they’re a little fantastical, they’re deeply, utterly real. Here are five of our favorites.
