Next SFF Author: Gena Showalter

Previous SFF Author: Martin L. Shoemaker

Series: Short Fiction

Fugitive Telemetry: Pitch-perfect narrative voice

Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells

Martha Wells continues her popular and highly-acclaimed MURDERBOT DIARIES series with another novella, Fugitive Telemetry (2021), which actually takes place before the only novel in the series so far, Network Effect. (So you could read this one before that novel, but you do need to read books 1-4 first.) At this point in time Murderbot, the introverted and snarky cyborg who is the narrator and the heart of this series, is a fairly new resident on Preservation,

The Giant Anthology of Science Fiction: Of Stark and Crag and Court and Cord

The Giant Anthology of Science Fiction edited by Oscar J. Friend & Leo Margulies

For the past five years, all the books that I have read, be they novels or short-story collections, and whether in the field of sci-fi, fantasy or horror, have had one thing in common: The were all written during the period 1900 – 1950; a little self-imposed reading assignment that I have often referred to as Project Pulp. But all good things must come to an end, and to bring this lengthy series of early 20th century genre lit to a close,

January 18th, 2023. Sandy Ferber´s rating: 4.5 | A.E. Van_Vogt, Edmond Hamilton, Henry Kuttner, Jack Williamson, Leigh Brackett, Manly Wade Wellman, Murray Leinster, Ray Cummings, Robert A. Heinlein | Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |

House of the Restless Dead and Other Stories: Spelunking

House of the Restless Dead and Other Stories by Hugh B. Cave

In my ongoing quest to read every one of the selections spotlighted in Jones & Newman’s excellent overview volume Horror: 100 Best Books, I have come to the realization that some of those books are a lot harder to obtain than others. Oh, sure, with the search tools available on the Interwebs, pretty much any title is easy to find today, but getting it at a decent price … ah, that can be more problematic.

Mistress of Terror and Other Stories: Alabama getaway

Mistress of Terror and Other Stories by Wyatt Blassingame

By the time a reader gets to the fourth and final volume in Ramble House’s series of books dedicated to Wyatt Blassingame, he/she will almost inevitably have come to the realization that the Alabama-born author surely was a master of that peculiar horror subgenre known as “weird-menace” fiction. And indeed, those first three volumes – The Tongueless Horror and Other Stories: The Weird Tales of Wyatt Blassingame, Volume One,

The Unholy Goddess and Other Stories: Sweet Home Alabama?

The Unholy Goddess and Other Stories by Wyatt Blassingame

It would be hard to imagine anyone who experiences the first two Ramble House collections dedicated to the Alabama-born author Wyatt Blassingame – namely, The Tongueless Horror and Other Stories: The Weird Tales of Wyatt Blassingame, Volume One and Lady of the Yellow Death and Other Stories: The Weird Tales of Wyatt Blassingame, Volume Two – not being hugely impressed and wanting to read more.

Even Though I Knew the End: Powerful setting and period piece

Even Though I Knew the End by C.L. Polk

Let me start with what I loved about C.L. Polk’s 2022 novella, Even Though I Knew the End. I loved the premise of the magical system at play here, and the story delivered a 1940s Chicago, Illinois, that was both familiar and convincingly strange. The Wink, a lesbian bar that has rolled through several incarnations in its lifetime, is a sheer delight of evocative description.

I liked the fast-moving plot and Polk’s spin on the hard-boiled detective story.

Lady of the Yellow Death and Other Stories: Lepers and swamp men and ghosts, oh, my!

Lady of the Yellow Death and Other Stories by Wyatt Blassingame

I can’t imagine any reader who, having turned over the final page of the 2010 Ramble House offering entitled The Tongueless Horror and Other Stories: The Weird Tales of Wyatt Blassingame, Volume One, was not compelled to proceed on to Volume Two. That first volume had given us seven tales concerning inbred and homicidal swamp-dwelling junkies, a tongue-slashing serial killer, a swamp-dwelling spider woman, the vengeful ghost of a British seaman, a white slavery racket,

The Tongueless Horror and Other Stories: Seven tales from a Weird-Menace pro

The Tongueless Horror and Other Stories by Wyatt Blassingame

A little while back, I was very pleased to read my first collection in the genre known as “weird-menace” fiction, which genre mainly dealt, back in the 1930s and early ‘40s, with lurid, violent, supernatural stories that usually turned out to have rather mundane – and often far-fetched – explanations. That collection was Food for the Fungus Lady and Other Stories by Ralston Shields, a 2014 release from the publisher Ramble House. I enjoyed my first weird-menace exposure so well that I determined to seek out some similar fare from Ramble House’s immense catalog,

Food for the Fungus Lady and Other Stories: Ten Exemplars of the Weird-Menace Genre

Food for the Fungus Lady and Other Stories by Ralston Shields

Gathering together 10 remarkably grisly tales from the pages of three of the most lurid of the pulp magazines, Food for the Fungus Lady and Other Stories is the first collection of Ralston Shields’ work ever assembled. Released in 2014 by the Dancing Tuatara Press imprint of Ramble House, the book shines a long-overdue spotlight on an author whom John Pelan, in his introduction, calls the greatest writer of “weird-menace” fiction on a story-by-story basis.

The Nectar of Nightmares: Long may Gidney write!

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,

Next SFF Author: Gena Showalter

Previous SFF Author: Martin L. Shoemaker

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