Click on stars to FIND REVIEWS BY RATING:
Recommended: 
Not Recommended: 
In Warm Bodies (2010), our world has been overrun by the zombies, and the few humans who are left are fighting a rearguard action. They huddle in walled enclosures, sending out occasional armed expeditions for food and supplies. Regular school classes have fallen by the wayside, replaced by classes and demonstrations on how to best kill a zombie permanently (head shots).
R is a zombie who doesn’t remember his past life, except that his name maybe started with the letter R.
March 14th, 2017. Tadiana Jones´s rating: 4.5 | Isaac Marion | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |
Tea starts her story by accidentally raising her brother from the dead. This is surely a traumatic enough experience for a young girl, but it marks her with the dark magic of the bone witch, unlike her sisters who possess ‘normal’ magic. So on top of having to deal with her corpse brother, Tea is now spurned by the village she’s grown up in. The Bone Witch (2017) explores Tea’s journey of coming to terms with the darkness within her and finding her place in a world that fears her.
March 6th, 2017. Ray McKenzie and Skye Walker´s rating: 4.5 | Rin Chupeco | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
There is an old saying that goes: Evil never dies; it merely sleeps. And when that evil awakes, it does so soundlessly — or almost so.
Nick Cutter has built upon the foundations laid by Stephen King, H.P. Lovecraft and Clive Barker to deliver a thoroughly thrilling novel that should be on the lists of top horror of 2017. There were points where I actually smiled while reading Cutter’s Little Heaven.
March 2nd, 2017. Jason Golomb´s rating: 4.5 | Nick Cutter | Horror | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |
Foreign espionage and sabotage undermining the credibility of American armed forces. A counter-intelligence group mocked and silenced for its theories. Shadowy plans, decades in the making. The fate of the world caught in the balance between devastation and salvation. Pat Frank describes all of these in Forbidden Area, which was first published in 1956 and is still terrifying sixty-one years later.
Harper Perennial’s 2016 re-issue of Forbidden Area only clocks in at just over 200 pages and contains four interlocking plotlines,
February 27th, 2017. Jana Nyman´s rating: 4.5 | Pat Frank | Edge, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Smash by Sara Latta & Jeff Weigel
Smash, written by Sara Latta and illustrated by Jeff Weigel, is a clear and concise explanation for young people of the standard model of physics (including the newly discovered Higgs Boson) and in particular of how the giant CERN supercollider contributes to furthering the model’s accuracy/completeness. Saying the book is aimed at the young, however, does it a bit of a disservice, as it works just as well for adults looking for that same clarity and concision.
In tried and true format,
February 25th, 2017. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4.5 | Comics, Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Amberlough by Lara Elena Donnelly
While Lara Elena Donnelly’s debut novel Amberlough (2017) isn’t quite the Fleming-esque spy thriller it purports to be, Amberlough certainly doesn’t disappoint. Set in Amberlough City, a decadent, Industrial-era locale reminiscent of Paris in the early 1900s, Amberlough tells the story of Cyril DePaul and his lover Aristide Makricosta, who also happens to be the city’s greatest crime lord. Cyril, a former field operative in Amberlough’s Federal Office of Central Intelligence Services who landed a cushy desk job after an assignment went awry,
February 23rd, 2017. Kevin Wei and Jana Nyman´s rating: 4.5 | Lara Elena Donnelly | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |
It may be obvious from reading some of my previous reviews that I really enjoy books in which authors successfully blend elements of detective fiction into their speculative fiction. Six Wakes (2017), by Mur Lafferty, folds the concept of a locked-room mystery into a generation-ship tale, much to my delight.
Six Wakes begins when Maria Arena, a clone, comes to consciousness in the cloning bay of the Dormire and discovers that the exterior of her clone-vat is smeared with blood.
February 6th, 2017. Jana Nyman´s rating: 4.5 | Mur Lafferty | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
Dreams of Distant Shores by Patricia McKillip
Dreams of Distant Shores is a collection of seven shorter fantasy works ― five short stories and two novellas ― and a non-fictional essay by one of my favorite fantasy authors, Patricia McKillip. Several of these works are reprints of stories originally published elsewhere; “Mer,” “Edith and Henry Go Motoring” and “Alien” are the only ones original to this collection, but since I had never seen any of these stories elsewhere, they were all doorways to new and enchanting worlds for me.
February 1st, 2017. Tadiana Jones, Jana Nyman, Skye Walker and Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 4.5 | Patricia McKillip | Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 6 comments |
The Sandman Mystery Theatre Book One by Matt Wagner
The Sandman Mystery Theatre is a near-perfect noir comic book series written in the 1990s by Matt Wagner, though the stories are set in the late 1930s. In some ways, Wagner is making a return to the older, original Sandman character created in 1939 (who also went by the name of Wesley Dodds), but the Sandman has had various incarnations since then, including Kirby’s in the 1970s. And of course, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman is the most famous of them all,
January 28th, 2017. Brad Hawley´s rating: 4.5 | Comics | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
Martians Abroad by Carrie Vaughn
In Martians Abroad (2017), Carrie Vaughn re-envisions aspects of the “juvenile” novel Podkayne of Mars by Robert A. Heinlein, turning his classic spacefaring story into something refreshing and new while retaining the sense of limitless adventure. Kat has mentioned in her reviews of Heinlein’s juveniles that they were instrumental in forming her love of science fiction, and the same is true for me: books like Have Space Suit — Will Travel and Red Planet captured my imagination and made me dream of embarking upon my own interplanetary journeys.
January 27th, 2017. Jana Nyman´s rating: 4.5 | Carrie Vaughn | Stand-Alone, Young Adult | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |
What a fascinating exploration of Edwige Fenech's contributions to the giallo genre! I love how the post highlights her unique…
Pretty challenging book. Cut by half, speed up the cadence. Trying to figure out the plot, the main point of…
Thanks for the kind words, Marion! Coming as they are from a professional writer, they are much appreciated!
Wonderful review, Sandy.
The "body count" bothered me a bit less because being dead seemed more like an inconvenience than anything else... unlike…