B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth (vol. 11): Flesh and Stone by Mike Mignola (writer), John Arcudi (writer), James Harren (art), Dave Stewart (colors), Clem Robins (letters)

There are multiple stories going on in this volume: Johann and Howards are on a clean-up mission for the air force, Iosif has a new suit made for him as his health is stabilized, and we get some background on Howards’s sword in the distant past, including one hunting scene with the ancient warrior who once had the sword. Back at headquarters, Liz is starting a garden with a little advice from Fenix. Zinco continues with its inhumane testing back in New York with the new Black Flame as ruler.

With Winter comes harsher conditions, and the battles against the monsters continue. Iosif and his associates work together to take down large monsters with massive explosives. Meanwhile, Enos, Howards, and his team go deep in the snow to seek out one parti... Read More

Walk the Vanished Earth by Erin Swan

Walk the Vanished Earth by Erin Swan is a debut novel with great potential in its underlying premise, structure, and characters, but while the story does at times rise to meet that potential, it does so unevenly and by the end, for me at least, unsatisfactorily.

The story opens at the close of a buffalo hunt in the Kansas prairie in 1873, with a young Irishman named Samson doing the last bit of work amidst the bloody carnage and recalling the harsh life that led them here and making plans for the better one he hopes to forge for himself: “In this New World, he told himself, he would be a new man.”

From there, the narrative leaps forward in time to 2073 and outward in space to Mars and a young girl named Moon who has spent much of her remembered life traversing the Marscape with Uncle One and Uncle Two, a pair of beings that are clear... Read More

Nerds of a Feather review K.J. Parker’s How to Rule An Empire and Get Away With It.

Over at Tor.com, they introduce us to the possibility of Count Dracula Daily, as a Substack blogger is emailing out Dracula in serial format every day.

Fantasy writer Faith Hunter has publicly apologized for harassing behavior, and withdrawn from conventions for the rest of the year, after several incidents at JordanCon this year. File 770 has two long articles on this for those who want the details.

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Payback’s a Witch by Lana Harper

In 2021’s effervescent Payback’s a Witch, the stakes are low, hearts are worn on people’s sleeves, and love is the answer. (Note: No hearts are literally outside the body in this book.) Lana Harper, who writes YA fantasy as Lana Popovic, enters the world of adult paranormal romantic comedy with a story of two modern witches who plot to win a magical tournament while navigating the rocky path of their increasing mutual attraction.

A few hundred years ago, four magicians founded the town of Thistle Grove. Three of them, Avramov, Blackmoore, and Thorn, had powerful magic. The fourth, the actual founder of the town, Elias Harlow, was a far weaker magician. Since the founding, the four families have presided over the magical town. Every fifty years they hold an event called the Gauntlet, and the sci... Read More

The Last Days of the Dinosaurs by Riley Black

As just about any child can tell you, roughly 65 million years ago a nearly ten-mile-wide asteroid crashed into the earth in the Yucatan, unleashing planet-wide firestorms, geography-changing tsunamis, and years of acid-rain and dark days. In short, it was not a good day for Planet Earth. Or for the more than 75% of animal species wiped out by the impact, including, of course, its most famous victims, the dinosaurs. In The Last Days of the Dinosaurs (2022), Riley Black gives a wonderfully evocative and vivid accounting not just of those horrible days following the asteroid’s impact, but of life’s slow recovery during the following million years, making the book, in Black’s words, not a “monument to loss [but] an ode to resilience.”

Her particular focus is on the Hell Creek area of the western US as it is one of the most explored site... Read More

Marion: The Select Committee on the January 6 events took up a lot of my time this week, but I managed to finish Nicola Griffiths’s luminous novella Spear, and The Extraordinaries, a fun YA superhero-rom-com by T.J. Klune. Now I’m at the nail-biter ending of Leigh Bardugo’s Crooked Kingdom, the sequel to Six ... Read More

The Grief of Stones by Katherine Addison 

The Grief of Stones (2022) is Katherine Addison’s newest work focusing on Thara Celehar, a Prelate of Ulis and, more importantly, a Witness for the Dead — someone who can communicate (albeit it in very limited fashion) with the recently deceased. In the prior novel, titled aptly enough The Witness for the Dead, Celehar uses that gift to help solve several murders.

They also, much to their dismay, end up the go-to-person (or the hapless person in the wrong place at the wrong time) for dealing with various types of undead, such as ghouls. Both elements — murder and undead — crop up here as well. Which, along with other reasons, makes Read More

Reposting to include Marion's new review.

Last Exit by Max Gladstone

Here is Max Gladstone’s recipe for a Last Exit (2022) cocktail:

One part fervent, confident intensity of young adulthood
One part fever dream (or nightmare) of magic and alternate worlds
Add bitters in the form of mid-life fears, regrets, and resignations born out of both trauma and simple aging
Splash of Mad Max
Zest of Zelazny
Stir with a rusty spoon of entropy
Pour slowly into a clear (eyed) glass filled one-quarter with the crushed ice-dreams of Americana myth and rimmed with sugar for a little bit of innocent sweetness
Serve with a shot of hope (the kind that burns on the wa... Read More

A Google engineer in an AI project states that they have created a sentient AI. The engineer is currently on administrative leave from Google. The article uses the word sentient, which basically means having emotions, or consciousness, but the text from the article makes it sounds like we’re discussing sapience, which is self-awareness.

Charlie Jane Anders writes about the balance to grimdark, which she has dubbed sweetweird.

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Scary Stories for Young Foxes: The City by Christian McKay Heidicker

Three young fox kits, romping through their first heavy snow, come upon a gravely injured older fox in the woods. The wounded fox asks for their help, and the kits are understandably reluctant. Then the stranger fox says that he needs to tell them a story first. A scary story, but not of predators and dangers of the forest. The City and a nearby farm have equally horrifying dangers for foxes.

The Stranger’s story begins at a fox farm, where cousins O-370 and R-211 (all of the foxes at the farm have numbers and letters for names) retell the adventures of Mia and Uly, told in the first book in this series, Chris Heidicker’s Newbery Honor book Scary Stories for Young Foxes... Read More