City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff VanderMeer What a long strange trip City of Saints and Madmen is! Jeff VanderMeer’s first book about the city of Ambergris is a tour de force of imagination and style. It’s a hard book to review, though. First of all, what is it? It’s not a novel. Is […]
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Shriek: An Afterword by Jeff VanderMeer Shriek: An Afterword is Jeff VanderMeer’s second novel set in his AMBERGRIS cosmology. There are a lot of elements with regards to the book that I want to talk about, so please bear with me. The first is that this is a sequel, yet it’s not. I won’t talk […]
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Finch by Jeff VanderMeer Finch, by Jeff VanderMeer, is an intricate, immersive fantasy novel with grace notes of detective noir and even espionage thriller. VanderMeer’s setting, the city of Ambergris, is one he is very familiar with and he uses specific detail to paint the city, decaying rapidly under the assault of its fungal overlords, […]
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Veniss Underground by Jeff VanderMeer Avoiding the trappings of fragile motifs, Jeff VanderMeer’s debut novella — err, novel — Veniss Underground shows every sign of a writer who is confident in his ability to put a fresh perspective on well-worn tropes. The framework of Veniss Underground is based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, […]
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The Situation by Jeff Vandermeer I’m a big fan of both Jeff VanderMeer and PS Publishing, so imagine my surprise when I found a copy of The Situation in my hard drive, a giveaway from Wired that I had downloaded but forgotten, mainly because it wasn’t in my immediate must-be-read-for-review-or-else-we’ll-send-ninjas queue. The first scene immediately […]
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Strange Tales of Secret Lives by Jeff VanderMeer I had absolutely no idea what to expect from Strange Tales of Secret Lives and this book certainly did surprise. Jeff VanderMeer explains the origins of Secret Lives in the introduction: this is a collection of various short stories of (hopefully) fictional what-ifs of real people: a […]
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The Third Bear by Jeff Vandermeer The Third Bear is an excellent collection of Jeff VanderMeer’s category-defying short fiction, filled with stories that are unique, mostly excellent, and often incredibly hard to describe. Asking someone who has read this book (say, a reviewer) what one of the stories is about could well get you a […]
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Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer So yeah. That was strange. You should read it. Here endeth the review. Uh…. Seriously? Try again, please, Bill. What? It’s Kat, our managing editor, sticking her bold red italic text into my review! Oh, alright. Start over: Loren Eiseley, Charlotte Perking Gilman, Sigmund Freud, and Franz Kafka have a literary […]
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Authority by Jeff VanderMeer I just finished reading Jeff VanderMeer’s Authority, the second book in his SOUTHERN REACH trilogy. When I reviewed the first book, Annihilation, Kat (our tyrannical managing editor, in case you didn’t know) butted into my review because she didn’t like what I originally wrote and she made me change it. I’m […]
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Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer I wouldn’t be surprised to find that Jeff VanderMeer’s first two books in his SOUTHERN REACH series, Annihilation and Authority, end up on my top ten list for the year, so it was with great excitement and high expectations that I opened up Acceptance, the third and final book of the […]
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Borne by Jeff VanderMeer Amorphous shapeshifting blobs, winged children, and giant flying bears, oh my. Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne (2017) is a lyrical and lovely novel whose stylistic aplomb, weird inventiveness, and great heart more than compensate for what might have ordinarily been noted as flaws in the book. Sure, there are issues, but I loved nearly […]
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Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer Jeff VanderMeer has been on a hell of a roll lately. His SOUTHERN REACH trilogy is on my personal list of best series in the past quarter-century, Borne (I argued) was both an imperfect book and a great one, and now his newest, Dead Astronauts — set in the same […]
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Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer Hummingbird Salamander (2021) is Jeff VanderMeer’s newest work, and it may also be his most accessible. Certainly it’s his least strange, though admittedly with VanderMeer that’s not saying much. Though if he’s working in more familiarly popular territory — the thriller novel — there’s no doubt VanderMeer puts his own […]
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I am happy to report that Weird Tales has grown weirder since Ann VanderMeer has taken the helm as Editor-in-Chief. This is to be expected of the co-anthologist (with her husband, Jeff VanderMeer) of The New Weird, an collection of tales essential to the library of everyone who loves the truly strange; and the co-anthologist […]
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There is so much free or inexpensive short fiction available on the internet these days. Here are a few stories we read this week that we wanted you to know about. “Aye, and Gomorrah” by Samuel R. Delany (1967, free at Strange Horizons) “Aye, and Gomorrah” was first published as the final story in the ground-breaking […]
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Our exploration of free and inexpensive short fiction available on the internet. Here are a few stories we’ve read that we wanted you to know about. “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian ExperienceTM” by Rebecca Roanhorse (2017, free at Apex Magazine, $2.99 Kindle magazine issue) Accolades have been pouring down on this 2017 SF short story, which won […]
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SHORTS is a column exploring some of the free and inexpensive short fiction available on the internet. Here are a few stories we’ve read that we wanted you to know about. “For He Can Creep” by Siobhan Carroll (2019, free at Tor.com, 99c on Kindle) This short story, told entirely from a cat’s point of […]
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Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology edited by James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel Is there really any difference between post-modernism, interstitial fiction, slipstream and New Weird? Does anyone know? James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel try to outline the boundaries of slipstream with their anthology, Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, particularly by including […]
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Best American Fantasy by Jeff VanderMeer (ed.) The first thing that stands out is that if I merely stuck to looking for fantasy stories from the usual sources, I probably wouldn’t have come across many of the short stories in this anthology. And that I think is the strength of Best American Fantasy — that […]
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The Solaris Book of New Fantasy by George Mann (ed.) I’m pretty much a novice when it comes to short fiction. Because of my lack of experience in this area, I hope that you will bear with me as I try to provide a thoughtful and comprehensive analysis of The Solaris Book of New Fantasy, […]
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Fast Ships, Black Sails edited by Jeff and Ann Vandermeer I was never a big fan of pirates (ninjas, on the other hand…) but nonetheless, the very word evokes adventure and the high seas. Fast Ships, Black Sails doesn’t really stray far from that expectation and delivers eighteen stories marked with action, treachery, and a sense of […]
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Steampunk edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer Steampunk is an anthology of, well, steampunk stories, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. If you hurry, you can still get to this first anthology before the second one, Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, appears in mid November. Based on the quality of the stories in this collection, I […]
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The New Weird by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer It’s easy to imagine two different readers reacting in opposite ways to The New Weird. One might find it delightfully odd; the other might find it as terrifying as Kafka on LSD. And a third might find it delightfully odd because it’s as terrifying as Kafka on […]
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Songs of the Dying Earth: Stories in Honor of Jack Vance edited by George R.R. Martin & Gardner Dozois Songs of the Dying Earth: Stories in Honor of Jack Vance is the best anthology I’ve ever read. These stories will be enjoyed by any SFF reader, but they’ll be ten times more fun if you’ve […]
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Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded is the second steampunk anthology edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, following 2008’s first installment. It contains about twice as many stories as its predecessor, but unlike the first collection the quality is more uneven here, resulting in a less impressive […]
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The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer I haven’t actually read every page of The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, yet I’m giving it my highest recommendation. Edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, Master and Mistress of Weird, The Weird is 1126 pages long […]
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Mixed Up edited by Nick Mamatas & Molly Tanzer Mixed Up (2017) is an anthology of cocktail-themed flash fiction and cocktail recipes, edited by Nick Mamatas and Molly Tanzer. The stories, like the drink recipes, are grouped by type and theme. I thought the editors took the most liberal view of “flash” here, because I […]
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Read Part 1 and Part 2. Lunch on Friday included a presentation by the scholar guest of honor, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. His talk was entitled “Undead,” and was a meditation on the meaning of that word — or, in other words, on zombies. Undead does not, Cohen noted, mean that the undead thing is alive; it is […]
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Predator: South China Sea — (2008) Young Adult. Publisher: On a remote South China Sea island, a deadly hunt is underway… but not the kind of expedition the participants expected. In this remote, jungle-covered island somewhere between Thailand and Indonesia some of the most exotic animals in the world have been gathered as the prizes […]
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We’re updating our theme, so things may be a little messy or slow until we’re finished.
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