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The Nectar of Nightmares by Craig Laurance Gidney
It’s horror season for me, the time of year where I usually settle in with a cozy haunted house story, but sometimes branch out into the region of the genuinely horrifying or the truly weird. Craig Laurance Gidney’s short story collection The Nectar of Nightmares, published in 2022, fits that bill. As with most collections, I loved several, and a few were misses for me. This is even more likely to happen with a horror collection than,
October 21st, 2022. Marion Deeds´s rating: 4.5 | Craig Laurance Gidney | Horror, Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
The Ink Black Heart by Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling)
Detective duo, Strike and Robin, are back for the sixth instalment of the CORMORAN STRIKE series, and they’ve got their work cut out for them. They’re presented with a case unlike any they’ve come across before and what ensues is a twisting mystery that might just be the best book of the series so far.
When Edie Ledwell enters the office of the detective agency, Robin Ellacott doesn’t know what to make of her. She’s disheveled, panicked and, when she asks the agency to investigate the online abuse she’s been receiving,
October 20th, 2022. Ray McKenzie´s rating: 4.5 | J.K. Rowling | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
What Lives in the Woods by Lindsay Currie
Ginny — or Gin — Anderson is looking forward to the summer writing workshop she’s going to attend with her best friend Erica, in their hometown of Chicago, until Dad upends the family’s plans because of a job. He’d going to restore a century-old house-turned-hotel, The Woodmoor Manor, in Michigan. The family will live there while he works.
This sounds terrible to Gin and her older brother Leo. While Leo is soon appeased by the news that Saugatuck, the nearby small town,
October 18th, 2022. Marion Deeds´s rating: 4.5 | Lindsay Currie | Children, Horror, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The October Faction (Volume one) by by Steve Niles (writer) and Damien Worm (art)
The October Faction is a family affair. Meet the Allans: goth girl and daughter Vivian who has just graduated from high school; Geoff, the son who is college-age but not in college; Frederick, the professor-husband and father and former monster hunter; and Deloris, the absentee and seemingly unfaithful wife and mother who used to assist her husband. Frederick ends his lecture on monsters and meets with an old friend, Lucas, with whom he used to fight monsters,
October 15th, 2022. Brad Hawley´s rating: 4.5 | Comics, Horror | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Abe Sapien (volume 4): The Shape of Things to Come by Mike Mignola (writer), Scott Allie (writer), Sebastian Fiumara (art), and Max Fiumara (art), Dave Stewart (colors), and Clem Robins (letters)
This volume consists of two stories: “The Shape of Things to Come” and “To the Last Man.” In the first story, we find ourselves in Arizona, outside of a militia-run Phoenix. Abe meets another group of people and is surprised to find himself welcomed and fed by them. They discuss old stories and myths and contemplate what role Abe may play in the continuing apocalyptic events.
October 1st, 2022. Brad Hawley´s rating: 4.5 | Mike Mignola | Comics | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Dark Sanctuary by H.B. Gregory
A very happy day it was for me – but a very unfortunate day for my bank account – when I first discovered the website for Ramble House books. Specializing in impossibly obscure sci-fi, horror, mystery and “weird menace” titles from the first half of the 20th century, the publisher has an overwhelming catalog of reasonably priced volumes that will surely make any fan of those genres salivate; books, for the most part, that are available nowhere else. I have already written here of Greye La Spina’s wonderful horror novel Invaders From the Dark (1925),
September 15th, 2022. Sandy Ferber´s rating: 4.5 | H.B. Gregory | Horror, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
Ithaca (2022), by Claire North, is another in a recent spate line of Greek myth retellings, with the source material here being The Odyssey and the House of Atreus storyline (Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Electra, Orestes). North greatly narrows the focus here in setting, time, and plot, lasering in what was happening at the periphery or in the gaps of those epic tales, giving voice especially though not solely to the women on the edges of those stories. It’s a wonderfully voiced, thoughtful reimagining story and a strong entry point into a new series.
September 9th, 2022. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4.5 | Claire North | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Turnabout by Thorne Smith
It has been a good number of years since I last read Thorne Smith’s ribald fantasy classic entitled The Night Life of the Gods (1931), but I can still recall how thoroughly enjoyable and hilarious the book was for me. In this wonderful romp, a NYC-based scientist, Hunter Hawk, invents a device that can turn people to stone. He soon meets Megaera, one of the Little People, who has the converse ability to turn statues into living people,
August 18th, 2022. Sandy Ferber´s rating: 4.5 | Thorne Smith | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |
Fevered Star by Rebecca Roanhorse
Fevered Star (2022) is the follow-up to Rebecca Roanhorse’s enjoyably original Black Sun, set in a fantastical Mesoamerica (with a few other cultures mixed in as well). As the second book, it does suffer somewhat from that dreaded middle book curse, but Roanhorse offers enough original worldbuilding here to compensate for the book’s weaker aspects, leaving the reader eager to see the trilogy’s conclusion.
As with Black Sun,
August 16th, 2022. Bill Capossere and Marion Deeds´s rating: 4, 4.5 | Rebecca Roanhorse | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The Liminal War by Ayize Jama-Everett
The third book in Ayize Jama-Everett’s LIMINAL PEOPLE series, 2015’s The Liminal War returns us to the near future and the world of Liminal healer Taggert, his daughter Tamara and the daughter of his heart, Prentis. Prentis is the orphaned Liminal young woman who communicates with animals. We met her in the Book One; as Book Three opens, Tamara, a powerful telepath and telekinetic, starts a firestorm of fear and anger with her realization that Prentis has been kidnapped and is nowhere on their earth.
August 12th, 2022. Marion Deeds´s rating: 4.5 | Ayize Jama-Everett | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Do it! One of the best things I've read in recent years.
This reminds me. I want to read Addie LaRue.
We’re in total agreement David!
I felt just the same. The prose and character work was excellent. The larger story was unsatisfying, especially compared to…
Hmmm. I think I'll pass.