A god destroys kingdoms to win over a mortal in Erriu’s solid but familiar romantasy series launch set in a world governed by personified stars. Human princess Elara Bellereve of Asteria flees the Star Ariete after he discovers the prophecy that they are meant to fall in love—a romance that, it’s foretold, neither will survive. Soon after Ariete murders Elara’s parents for hiding Elara from him, she’s kidnapped by the neighboring kingdom of Helios. There, she’s trained by King Idris D’Oro and his son, Prince Enzo, to serve as a weapon against Ariete in their war on the Stars. In the process, Elara and Enzo strike up a predictable, slow-burning enemies-to-lovers romance. Meanwhile, to defeat Ariete and avenge her family, Elara must overcome a childhood trauma and unleash an ancient power that has long been hidden. Not much is done with the celestial worldbuilding, and the plotting, while competent, feels paint-by-numbers. Sarah J. Maas fans seeking more of the same will eat this up, but there’s little here that feels fresh. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

YA author Baker (The Scarlet Alchemist) puts a supernatural twist on the early days of Covid in her searing adult debut. Cora Zeng is an underemployed art history major-turned New York City crime scene cleaner, eking out a living scrubbing bodies off the walls. In early 2020, she’s disconcerted to notice an uptick in murdered Asian women. Cora, who is mixed-race, does not believe in either Asian ghost stories or Western religion and always does what her aunties tell her to do—otherwise they might place her back in the psychiatric unit. Then her half sister, Delilah, is murdered in a hate crime, and Cora thinks she sees Delilah’s ghost in their shared apartment. As the Hungry Ghost Festival approaches, she starts seeing more and more restless spirits. She confesses these visions to her fellow cleaners, Harvey and Yifei, who help her hatch a plan to hold a feast for the ghosts, even as people around them are picked off one by one. Baker successfully uses fear, both supernatural and human, to shine a spotlight on anti-Asian hate. Fans of creepy ghost stories and social horror will want to snap this up. Agent: Mary C. Moore, Kimberley Cameron & Assoc. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

Viel’s frenzied and addictive supernatural thriller debut follows Calla Williams, a Black 25-year-old who must play surrogate parent to her reckless younger brothers, Dre and Jaimie, after their father dies and their mother abandons them. Calla makes for an anxious parental figure, driven by fear of what she calls her Nightmare: a vivid, paralyzing dream in which she is powerless to prevent her brothers’ gruesome deaths. After a night of separate incidents in which both Dre and Jaimie are saved from certain slaughter by mysterious female figures who savage their assailants, the trio—fearing persecution from the law—hightail it from their home in Seattle to a creepy remote Airbnb. There, Calla’s Nightmare erupts into reality, subjecting all three to a harrowing and bloody confrontation with their subconscious demons given visceral life. Viel depicts her characters’ terrifying ordeals as phantasmic expressions of the racial and social forces that have shaped their lives, and her portrayal of Calla as a sacrificing martyr whose love for her family is curdling into resentment gives her story powerful emotional ballast. Though the plotting is chaotic in spots, it nimbly focuses Black American experience through the lens of horror fiction. Viel should win many fans with this. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

Darwin’s immensely satisfying conclusion to his Combat Codes trilogy (after Grievar’s Blood) pulls no punches, returning to a world where international clashes are settled via one-on-one combat. Cego, a gifted Grievar fighter, seethes following his discovery that, as an infant, his body was suspended in a vat called the cradle while his mind was put through countless simulated fights at the behest of the Daimyo empire. Now he’s reunited with his older brother Silas, aka the Slayer, who is targeting the Daimyo in a series of brutal attacks. Cego joins Silas’s violent crusade against the empire, becoming known as the Slayer’s shadow and earning the moniker the Strangler. Murray Pearson, the legendary Grievar Knight who’d been Cego’s mentor, resolves to do whatever he can to reclaim Cego’s soul from the hyper-violent mindset Silas has inculcated in him, hoping to find some traces of the innately honorable boy he’d known, who “always stood up for the weak.” That mission coincides with a desperate rebellion against the Daimyo as the many plotlines hurtle toward an explosive finale. The martial arts scenes are as expertly devised as ever, and the riveting plot keeps the pages flying. This sends the series out on a high note. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

Crocker’s intricate debut explores the politics and power struggles in a stratified vampire city. Sam Ingle is a Worn, one of the lowest caste of vampires who are afforded only the worst blood. In her job as a palace maid, she learns that the youngest son of First Lord Azzuri has been found dead outside the city walls, killed by the sinister Grays, who all vampires have been taught to fear. Sam hopes to rise in station by investigating the murder, a search which leads her to the Leeches, a group of women spies who use their menial jobs within the halls of power to gather blackmail material for the betterment of all Worns. Working with the Queen Leech; her guard, an infamous wolf-shifter and assassin; and two mages who arrived in the city also hoping to investigate the murder, Sam discovers that there was more to the young Azzuri’s death than meets the eye. But the more they uncover of what turns out to be a vast conspiracy, the more their own lives are in danger. The worldbuilding is classic paranormal fantasy, but the many players and complex politics lend this an epic fantasy feel. Crocker shows plenty of promise. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

Stylish, unnerving, and highly original, Pueyo’s debut novella (after the collection A Study in Ugliness) is a delightful genre mash-up combining gothic horror with monster romance. As one of the many servants of Capricious House, Dália spends her days taking care of the property and its mistress, Lady Anatema. An ancient, partially humanoid but mostly arachnid creature that seeks a bride, Lady Anatema has eaten every candidate after they see her true form because she does not like to be perceived. Dália inherits the prestigious but dangerous role of keeper of the keys after Lady Anatema suddenly eats her long-term predecessor. The Lady maintains that Dália’s predecessor stole some of her treasured belongings, but when that’s proven wrong, Dália must investigate which of the servants is the real thief and recover the stolen items. Along the way, she begins to unravel the secrets behind several of the servants’ lives and her relationship to Lady Anatema evolves past mere employer/employee. Despite their cautious closeness, Lady Anatema’s single-minded focus on retrieving her belongings could put Dália at risk of the fate that has befallen all brides before her. Dália’s personal growth and Anatema’s inventive monstrousness are highlights, and Pueyo makes their romantic tension palpable. Despite the limited page count, this packs an emotional wallop. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

For this earnest and nuanced collection, Das (The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar) brings together 10 writers to imagine artists, both human and non-, grappling with futuristic challenges, including generative AI and other “nascent technocapitalist singularities.” In “The Limner Wrings His Hands,” Vajra Chandrasekera conjures a large language model–like “monster” trained on Persian and other classics. Samit Basu’s “The Art Crowd” takes a satirical view of technology, authoritarian politics, and the Indian art world; the story features a publicity agent (“reality controller”) and her new virtual client, Cosmos Apsara, whose shtick is falling asleep with animals while fans watch. Three-time Nebula award winner Aliette de Bodard, in “Autumn’s Red Bird,” uses spaceships in love as a platform to explore grief and renewal through art. In “Encore,” by Wole Talabi, twin artificial intelligences (“Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020”) create art for the inhabitants of the planet Sunjata who “recently networked their consciousness together using a bioengineered version of a spore network.” The volume also includes photographs of artist Diana Scherer’s mesmerizing, living textiles and a lively interview with Neil Clarke, the publisher and editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, who discusses how the sci-fi journal roots out AI-generated submissions. Though some of the stories have an Edgar Allan Poe weariness about them, the collection as a whole offers plenty of hope. Fans of near-future sci-fi should check it out. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

Ives’s fascinating debut sets itself apart from the recent slew of mythological retellings by transporting figures from Roman mythology to the lost colony of Roanoke. In the timeline labeled “Before,” Thelxiope and her sisters are handmaidens to Proserpina, Ceres’s daughter and the goddess of spring. Thelxiope, called Thelia, has a special relationship with Proserpina that grows into a romance. When the women sneak away from Ceres’s home for a tryst, Proserpina is stolen into the Underworld, leaving Thelia and her sisters to face Ceres’s wrath. She transforms them into sirens and traps them on the island of Scopuli. In their new, monstrous forms, the women spend centuries feeding on the men who shipwreck on the island, sacrificing them to Ceres in hopes of appeasing her. These scenes are intercut with the timeline labeled “Now,” in which Thelia lands in Roanoke hoping to bring help to her sisters. The colony is starving, and Thelia figures out a way to use that to her advantage, though she must first face the machinations of a cruel man and his crueler mother. Complicating things is Cora, a colonist who looks uncannily like Proserpina and threatens to pull Thelia from her purpose. Ives skillfully blends old and new legends while lovingly crafting a nuanced cast of women characters. The result is perfect for fans of Madeline Miller and Jennifer Saint. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

Maniscalco (Throne of the Fallen) continues her Prince of Sin series in this alluring “Cinderella” retelling with an enemies-to-lovers twist. Gabriel Axton, or Prince Gluttony, is infamous for his indulgence in beautiful women, lavish parties, and thrilling dragon hunts. His notoriety is partly due to the efforts of feisty gossip journalist Adriana Saint Lucent, who has written scathing reports on the prince for years. When an ice dragon unexpectedly kills one of Gluttony’s men, the prince races to understand what provoked the attack. To distract his people from the possible threat, Gluttony holds a competition to find a wife, with one contestant from each noble House of Sin. Adriana’s younger sister, Eden, is among the chosen, and Adriana seizes the opportunity to dig up dirt on the prince when the family move into House Gluttony for the competition. The line between love and hate is blurred as Adriana and Gluttony’s barbed banter gives way to simmering sexual tension. As the threat of a dragon war grows, the pair comes together to confront a dark memory of their shared past. Despite a rushed ending and some underdeveloped subplots, Adriana and Gluttony’s slow-burning romance and electric chemistry carries the story and the vivid world is fun to revisit. Readers will eagerly await the next installment. Agent: Barbara Poelle, One World Lit. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

Picking up where Full Speed to a Crash Landing left off, this rollicking second installment of Revis’s intergalactic trilogy will keep readers glued to the page. Space looter Ada Lamarr infiltrates a Met Gala–esque fundraising event on a secret mission assigned to her by a mysterious rebel group—while also pursuing a hidden agenda of her own. There to intercept her is handsome bureaucrat Rian White, who readers will be delighted to see return. As before, Ada and Rian disagree over effective methods of enacting change while Rian works to stop Ada from putting into motion her secret plot, the details of which remain hidden from both Rian and the reader for much of the novel. The result is an un-put-downable page-turner helmed by a lovable heroine who is clever and passionate beneath her armor of sarcastic quips. Readers will need to come back for the concluding volume to fully understand all of Ada’s behind-the-scenes machinations—and to witness the culmination of Ada and Rian’s roller-coaster, cat-and-mouse romance. Revis makes the anticipation delicious. Agent: Merrilee Heifetz, Writers House. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink