In a certain part of Denver, there is a courtyard that holds four houses. Two of them are empty now, but when they were first built, they belonged to a quartet of sisters who had done plenty of traveling over their surprisingly long lifetimes: The sisters had come most recently from wooded, green, and rainy […]
Read more "A Family Saga with Bones in the Cellar: Melanie Tem’s Wilding"Linda Addison is one of the best kept secrets in speculative poetry, bar none. She has a terrific sense for language, a playfulness that veers into the darkest pockets of human experience and back out again into the realm of surreal whimsy. Who can fashion a punchline that also serves as a revisionist fairy tale […]
Read more "Just Me and the Forever Dead: Linda Addison’s How to Recognize a Demon Has Become Your Friend"Christi Nogle’s name is not a familiar one for me, and this is the first concentrated dose of the author’s short fiction I’ve had. The writing is lyrical, poetic. The characters are drawn well. The circumstances they find themselves involved in run a gamut from the chilling to the warmly inviting. Her characters live in […]
Read more "A Vague Sense of Unease: Christi Nogle’s One Eye Opened in That Other Place"To wrap up Black History Month, why not pick up a heavy hitter of a novel from one of the grandmasters of speculative fiction? Yes, Kindred has a weighty premise and an unflinching gaze at the horrible realities of the African American experience in the antebellum South, but it also has a lot of emotional […]
Read more "Seeing With Eyes Unclouded: Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred"There are the looming threats and anxieties we cannot do anything about, and there are the smaller tasks we can take on and triumph over. Millie Two Bears knows about the former—her husband was sentenced for manslaughter thanks to an auto accident, and she’s about to be forced out of her own home—so when the […]
Read more "Beware the Chicken Nuggets of the Prairie: Stephen Graham Jones’ The Backbone of the World"Halloween day and night, circa 1984, are the subject of Christopher Golden’s emotionally honest storytelling. During the daylight hours, Tony Barbosa and his daughter Chloe are putting together the evening’s Haunted Woods tour, a yearly tradition that finds people taking a spooky tour of their wooded grounds. As this is sadly seeing its last year, […]
Read more "This is Halloween, This is Halloween, Halloween, Halloween, Halloween, Halloween: Christopher Golden’s All Hallows"Evelyn and Claire Wainwright are twin sisters, partners in life, and tired of living in the shadows of their dead parents. It’s time to move out of the family’s stuffy, Yorkshire house and find somewhere a tad smaller. A country cottage nestled on the moors turns out to be the perfect opportunity, a place they […]
Read more "It’s All Fun and Games Until …: Catherine Cavendish’s The Garden of Bewitchment"Typically, summer brings hikers and tourists to the sleepy town of Moonwell. This year, someone else has come and his presence will make a mark upon the town, transforming expectations and unleashing old, buried guilts … as well as horrors. Godwin Mann is an American evangelist on walkabout in England. He’s made a habit of […]
Read more "Have a Little Faith: Ramsey Campbell’s The Hungry Moon"Evander “Andy” Mills was a cop’s cop until his fellow detectives found him on his knees in a gay club bathroom during an immoral activities bust. Because this was 1952, Andy was then drummed off the force for being queer and pretty well blacklisted. In a dive bar, drinking up enough courage to throw himself […]
Read more "Us and Them: Lev AC Rosen’s Lavender House"
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