Alongi’s entertaining debut matches familiar SF tropes with strong characters and fascinating worldbuilding. Four centuries after a colony ship crashed on the planet Edalide, the descendants of the survivors eke out an increasingly meager and cramped existence in their only city, Citadel. Outside Citadel’s walls is the Flooded Forest, drowned by biweekly high tides and home to packs of vicious animals known as demons. Citadel’s holy scripture states that demons kill any human they can catch and commands the settlers to kill every last demon in return. Olivia, the nonverbal autistic daughter of the captain of the city guards, goes to the forest on a mission to source desperately needed medicinal plants when she meets a demon face-to-face—and instead of attacking her, it brings her the plants she’s seeking. Indeed, everything that Citadel has taught Olivia about demons is wrong, putting Olivia on the trail of a conspiracy that runs all the way to Citadel’s revered founder and everything the city was built on. As the first in a series, Alongi’s novel ably sets up a sequel, leaving plenty of exciting questions still to answer. Olivia makes a refreshing protagonist, and her youth will ensure this has crossover YA appeal. Readers who grew up on Cressida Cowell and Patricia C. Wrede will be especially delighted. Agent: Julie Gwinn, Seymour Agency. (June)

Reviewed on 04/07/2023 | Details & Permalink

Saxey’s unnerving full-length debut (after the collection Lost in the Archives) is a hothouse flower of a book: delicate and undeniably beautiful, but perhaps a little forced. More gothic than all-out horror, with ambience that’s more akin to Charlotte Perkins Gilman than Shirley Jackson, the tale traces the psychology of an unreliable narrator as she descends into paranoia. Judith Sachs is a middle-class Jewish woman in 1893 London whose life is upended, first by her father’s death and then by the disappearance of her sister’s fiancé, Samuel Silver, in a flood. He has been presumed dead for nearly a year when he appears one night just beyond the Sachs’s garden, walking onto a half-frozen lake and plunging through. From that improbable moment, Judith’s reportage is in question. She takes Samuel in, dries him off, and flails through increasingly desperate efforts to investigate his apparent amnesia while hiding his presence, primarily from the live-in maid Lucy. Though atmospheric and rich in allusion, the pace drags; mysteries are too few and nuggets of fact emerge too slowly to sustain readers’ curiosity. Far more fascinating is Judith’s alienated experience of gender, which lurks beneath the surface of most scenes. The narrative succeeds most as an eerie, tragic tone poem. (July)

Reviewed on 04/07/2023 | Details & Permalink

A paean to turn of the 20th century Galveston, Tex., Rountree’s romp of a debut novel (after the collection Fantastic Americana) combines a historical disaster with fantastical elements, including a creature who would fit right in, in the Black Lagoon. Floyd Betts meets orphaned siblings Nellie, a 12-year-old telepath, and Hank, a nine-year-old marksman, while in Old Cypress, Tex., for his father’s funeral and decides to take them back with him to Abigail Elder’s boarding house in Galveston. On the way, Floyd, Hank, and Nellie infuriate of a pair of circus charlatans calling themselves Professor Finn and Kentucky Jim by liberating the scoundrels’ big score, a human-fish hybrid the children name Charlie Fish. Nellie’s “whisper talk,” or empathetic telepathy, allows her to communicate with Charlie, who longs to reunite with his fellow fish people. Meanwhile, both Professor Finn and Kentucky Jim and an incoming hurricane pose threats even after the makeshift family is welcomed at Abigail’s. Despite a somewhat unfocused plot, which jumps around in both time and alternates between Floyd and Nellie’s points of view, a sense of looming doom keeps tension high, and Rountree’s talent for scene setting is on full display in lush descriptions of the Old West. This weird western should win Rountree plenty of fans. Agent: Kristopher O’Higgins, Scribe Agency. (July)

Reviewed on 04/07/2023 | Details & Permalink

Levy (The Glittering World) delivers a viscerally unsettling collection of 12 horror shorts rooted as much in human psychology as in the fantastical and speculative. The stories all start from an exploration of lost love, but blossom in myriad gruesome and strange directions: in “Conversion,” for instance, a gay boy sent to conversion therapy becomes a serial killer, to the mixed horror and delight of his perverted therapist. “My Heart’s Own Desire” follows a young man whose attempts to escape the influence of a powerful wizard (and the wizard’s hyper potent drugs) lead him to realize his love for his brother. Levy’s stories are made all the more powerful by his unwillingness to shy away from the illicit. By embracing the taboo with the tools of horror and speculative fiction, he at once demystifies these subjects while imbuing them with a magic of his own. “Anaïs Nin at the Grand Guignol,” the masterful novella that ends the collection, exemplifies this through its transformation of real historical personages—Anaïs Nin and Paula Maxa—into characters caught up at once in their feelings for each other and a relationship with the devil. The result is a triumph of aberration and whimsy. (June)

Reviewed on 04/07/2023 | Details & Permalink

Hugo Award winner Wallace’s conclusion to his epic fantasy Savage Rebellion trilogy (after Savage Bounty) is a mixed bag, neatly resolving multiple plotlines but relying on some hand-waving to get there. Readers return to Crache, an ostensible utopian nation, that’s in reality a “dark and brutal” entity. Crache’s secrets were discovered by a trio of capable and fearless women: Evie, a rebel army general; Dyeawan, who’s taken over the cadre covertly controlling the country in hopes of changing it from within; and Lexi, who was killed while advocating for change. Now Evie finds her forces dealing with threats to their rebellion, even after the successful conquest of a major urban center, and Dyeawan makes a foolish move that could cause her death. The two women are on a collision course, which keeps the tension high, but Wallace doesn’t make suspension of disbelief easy; illogical fight scenes—including one in which a character jumps atop a cage hanging from a chain without causing it to sway at all and another that hinges on a convenient deus ex machina—will take readers out of the narrative. Still, die-hard series fans will find this a satisfying conclusion. Agent: DongWon Song, Howard Morhaim Literary. (June)

Reviewed on 04/07/2023 | Details & Permalink

The ambitiously intertextual second installment to SFWA grandmaster Moorcock’s Sanctuary of the White Friars series combines autobiography and fantasy into a genre-bending whole that is as puzzling as it is engaging. Rather than pick up where 2015’s The Whispering Swarm left off, the story immediately introduces disorienting new elements, including several characters from Moorcock’s past works, before returning to the tale of the fictionalized Michael Moorcock in London. Even this, however, is a different version of Michael than the protagonist readers met in the first book, one who never found sanctuary in Alsacia. Instead, on a trip to Paris with his wife and young daughters, he meets Alexandre Dumas’s three musketeers, who drag him away on an international quest that teaches Michael important truths about the multiverse. Moorcock himself brought the term multiverse in its contemporary sense into speculative fiction in the 1960s, and he takes obvious delight in playing with the concept. The writer’s innovation makes the character’s stubborn skepticism in the face of the fantastical especially baffling, and readers may grow frustrated with the fictional Michael. The intricately woven plot threads and complex prose do not welcome the reader in gently, but it’s nevertheless an engrossing tale, especially in the lively second half. This will be best enjoyed by dedicated Moorcock fans. (June)

Reviewed on 04/07/2023 | Details & Permalink

Martial arts trainer Darwin skillfully deploys his expertise in this impressive debut and series launch to conjure a world where individual hand-to-hand fighting matches have replaced full-scale wars. The Grievar Knights subscribe to the eponymous fighting codes and were founded on the precept, “we fight so the rest shall not have to.” Acclaimed former Grievar Knight Murray Pearson now serves as a talent scout for the nation of Ezo, charged with finding young fighters worthy of admission to the Lyceum, an elite combat school. Murray believes he’s spotted a generational talent when he sees Cego, a 13-year-old slave, defeat a Grievar Knight in a match, and works to get Cego into the Lyceum. Darwin rounds out Murray and Cego into much more than just skilled combatants, and their developing relationship forms the heart of the story. Darwin’s also adept at making blow-by-blow descriptions of bouts vivid and engaging, even for readers with little interest in the martial arts. This is a perfect setup for the next volume and will especially appeal to fans of Pierce Brown’s Red Rising series. (June)

Reviewed on 04/07/2023 | Details & Permalink

Chiles couches a high-stakes rescue mission in a fascinating and believable methodology for traversing space in this sequel to Frozen Orbit. Astronaut Jack Templeton and sentient ship AI Daisy reach the position of the hypothesized Planet Nine, only to discover something far stranger than a rogue planet: “a concentration of dark matter.” Though part of a series, this outing’s self-contained plot and interwoven backstory is easy for new readers to follow as mission control on Earth reacts to the reappearance of Jack’s ship at Planet Nine after disappearing from their radar five years prior. Jack’s former crewmates, Traci and Roy, immediately push for a rescue mission to extract Jack from a ship running dangerously low on supplies, but political red tape and maneuvering keep them grounded as their private space flight company clashes with the government. Much of this space opera’s enjoyment stems from Chiles’s use of convincing science; he doesn’t shy away from the inconvenient realities of space exploration, depicting the muscle wasting caused by extended torpor, the risks of rebreathing one’s own oxygen, and the travel times required to traverse space when Traci bets everything on a last-ditch effort to save Jack. This is sure to impress sci-fi fans. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/31/2023 | Details & Permalink

Leede’s bloody debut sends its nihilistic heroine down a twisted path in the footsteps of her literary idol, Patrick Bateman. Maeve Fly leads a split-life between her day job as a princess at a cheekily unnamed mouse-centric amusement park in Anaheim and the dive bars of the Sunset Strip, alternately fixated on her coworker Kate; her Hollywood starlet grandmother, Tallulah; and her own place in the midst of celebrity. When she meets Kate’s enigmatic hockey star brother, Gideon, the pair enter an increasingly twisted relationship and Maeve turns to murder, mutilation, and nocturnal perversions with no motive other than entertainment. (“Men,” Maeve muses, “have always been permitted in fiction and in life to simply be what they are, no matter how dark or terrifying that might be. But with a woman, we expect an answer, a reason.”) Leede does an excellent job of anchoring the story’s more chaotic excesses in Maeve’s narration, which offers equal parts trenchant insight and pitch-black humor. Though the plot occasionally loses focus, it quickly finds its footing again as Maeve’s deteriorating mental state drives things toward a satisfyingly visceral conclusion. The result is a gore-soaked love letter to Los Angeles that fans of American Psycho and Samantha Kolesnik’s True Crime won’t want to miss. (June)

Reviewed on 03/31/2023 | Details & Permalink

Wilde’s fulfilling third Gem Universe novella (after The Fire Opal Mechanism) pits science against myth—and the winner is not as clear as one might expect. The Jeweled Valley that once created the magical gems that power this world has long since been destroyed. Now Dev Brunai and her fellow Society scientists work to create synthetic gems—but Dev holds out hope that true gems may still exist, and she’s galvanized by an archaeological dig’s recent rediscovery of the Palace of Gems. When her mentor goes missing at the dig site, Dev uses the disappearance as an opportunity to visit the site herself. She’s met by frequent earthquakes and hostile locals, who know that the Society will plunder whatever bounty they find. She soon learns there’s more to the gems than she realized. Meanwhile, her cousin, Lurai, investigates the disappearance of her own mother, who also vanished from the dig site. Readers will root for the cousins to find answers, and even those new to the series will be swept up in Wilde’s inventive worldbuilding. This is a bite-size treat. (June)

Reviewed on 03/31/2023 | Details & Permalink