Detective Vicky Paterson has seen more than her fair share of murders in the town of Fort Halcott, New York. But this one is the strangest yet, an unnerving ritualistic killing of a woman with hoarding disorder discovered amid the already horrific backdrop of her home. Meanwhile, hot on the trail of a missing girl, professional fixers Will and Alicia stumble on another disturbing ritual in an abandoned factory that seems to stretch the boundaries of what is possible. Vicky is ready to blame her case on a potential serial killer; Will and Alicia are willing to call the ritual nothing more than the work of a deranged sex cult. But both investigations stumble to a halt when the world erupts in a cicada emergence of biblical proportions. Far from the harmless, droning creatures one would expect, these cicadas are driven to attack, forcing themselves down humans’ throats and taking residence there. As people everywhere fight to survive, Vicky, Will and Alicia begin to wonder: How is this infestation related to their cases? And how can they ever hope to stop a swarm so immense?
Even if they lack the drive to infest and kill, a cicada emergence can feel like an invasion. The Swarm, Andy Marino’s latest horror novel, pulls on this thread and amplifies it. Marino turns cicadas’ already otherworldly drone into a malevolent force, their haphazard way of flying into a learning algorithm bent on human destruction. While that premise might seem hokey to anyone who has spent time around harmless, bumbling cicadas, in execution, it is anything but. Marino’s insects are horrifying, alien creatures with unshakable drives and unknowable goals. And they don’t just come in ones and twos. In the tradition of Hitchcock’s seminal classic The Birds, the cicadas of The Swarm are inescapable, blotting out the sky in great streams of wings and writhing masses of bodies. Marino balances this ecological horror with a sympathetic look at a cast of characters whose lives were already on the brink far before the cicada emergence. Sometimes gruesome and always creepy, The Swarm rides the balance between good horrific fun and grisly speculation.
Andy Marino rides the balance between good horrific fun and grisly speculation in The Swarm, a tale of a cicada emergence of biblical proportions.
Run by Blake Crouch is a thriller that dips its toe just far enough into the world of science fiction to be deeply unsettling. In the lower 48 states of America, an aurora borealis has beamed brainwashing light into the eyes of unwitting citizens, turning them into homicidal, cultish maniacs.
Crouch’s story follows a single family, the Colcloughs. After a narrow escape from several people of murderous intent, they head north from their home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, looking for anywhere that could provide shelter. For the entirety of Run, Crouch focuses on the beat-to-beat action of their journey, providing a ground-level view of the world going to hell, through the eyes of one family in a greater apocalypse.
Those affected by the aurora can spot others affected, but the unaffected are none the wiser, which makes every encounter with humans outside the family a chance encounter with death. The various antagonists in Run are psychopathic and brutal: Those affected by the aurora enjoy killing those who are not. They hack their victims with knives, burn them at the stake or crucify them, and there is no hesitation or regret during their assault—they even go so far as to joke with one another while slaughtering their victims. They also instinctively work together, forming bands of roving vehicles that round up the unaffected for mass execution. All of this sets the tone for the Colcloughs (and the reader) early on: There is no negotiating or appealing with these aggressors. The result is a sense of absolute, uncompromising fight-or-flight.
In the midst of this extreme and violent world, our protagonists are incongruously human, grounding the story in realism. Patriarch Jack is struggling to reconnect with his wife, Dee. Their daughter, Naomi, is an angsty teen who hasn’t felt close to her father in years. Their son, Cole, is a child, too young to really understand what is going on but too old to forget the images he will most likely carry forever. Each of the characters feels realistic: Naomi never wanders into “You just don’t understand me” tropes, nor do Jack and Dee devolve into petty, drama-for-drama’s-sake arguments.
Taut and sparsely written, Blake Crouch’s Run is an unnerving thriller set in the early days of the apocalypse.
The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door by H.G. Parry (The Magician’s Daughter and The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep) provides a dazzling escape for lovers of magical universities and fantastical adventures that span both the human realm and the wilder, more unpredictable faerie world. When Clover Hill gets the opportunity to attend the school of her dreams, Camford University of Magical Scholarship, she is initially met with the ostracization that she expected as the only student not from an affluent magical Family. Clover does her best to keep her head down, determined to learn how to undo a possibly fatal fae curse that was inflicted upon her older brother during the Great War. But much to her surprise, one of the most popular students in school, Alden Lennox-Fontaine, takes an unexpected interest in “the scholarship witch,” and his posse of equally elite and fabulous friends takes her under their wing. But even as Clover befriends Alden, Hero and Eddie, dark and sometimes unforgivable secrets are revealed that will test not only their bond, but also the tradition of the Families and the students’ trust in the revered institution of Camford itself.
The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door is an excellent magical twist on dark academia, drawing upon now-beloved tropes such as ivy-strewn, cobblestone pathways and cavernous libraries, then adding a dash of spellcasting and hedgewitchery: The pathways can shift in the blink of an eye, and the library is guarded with enchantments. But the novel offers more than the superficial pleasures of the aesthetic, as Parry explores in detail the very human relationships at play during Clover’s time at Camford, from the platonic to the romantic and everything in between.
Clover’s adventures with her charming new companions are entrancing, and Parry infuses them with a never-ending series of exciting twists, keeping readers on their toes. Clover initially sees both Camford and her friendships through rose-colored lenses, describing the campus in romanticized, atmospheric terms. The reader is therefore often at the mercy of the protagonist’s perspective—tricked, as in one of the fae’s infamous deals, into thinking we’ve figured her situation out. Parry keeps the magic flowing as her characters battle to save the early 20th-century human world from dangerous faerie magic, constantly surprising readers in this accomplished take on the popular dark academia aesthetic.
The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door is a magical twist on dark academia that presents an entrancing vision of an alternate post-World War I England.
With his breakthrough 2014 novel, The Troop, which was one of the most acclaimed horror novels of the last decade, Nick Cutter established himself as a writer of propulsive, muscular, unrelenting journeys into terror. His latest book, The Queen, reaffirms his place as one of the genre’s most entertaining storytellers, delivering a creature feature and the story of a doomed friendship in one unputdownable package.
Told over the course of a single day, the novel follows Margaret Carpenter, a young woman still reeling from the disappearance of her best friend, Charity Atwater. Margaret wakes up to find that an iPhone has been mysteriously delivered to her doorstep, and it begins pinging with messages from someone claiming to be her vanished friend. The Queen soon descends into something even darker, as Margaret embarks on a journey to find Charity and get to the bottom of an increasingly violent mystery that’s gripping their small town.
Cutter wastes no time in throwing Margaret into the deep end, and the book moves like a freight train even when he’s pulling off some surprisingly tender moments between characters. Margaret’s narration is crisp, relatable and full of the kind of urgency that you’d expect from a someone in such an extreme situation, but Cutter’s great gift is his ability to go beyond that, to build a world even as he’s building a character. There are no trade-offs in his prose, no sense that we’re slowing down to lay the groundwork for something that’ll come next. It’s all multipurpose, expertly designed to keep you turning the pages as the book’s horrors grow deeper.
As for those frights, many of which involve a fascination with insects and how they interact with the natural world, Cutter is once again in top form. If you loved the body horror of The Troop, you’re going to get that in spades, along with an element of Promethean, sci-fi terror that’s almost cosmic in its levels of dread—and, of course, buckets of gore.
Because of these ingredients, and so many more, The Queen is a must-read for horror fans, for Nick Cutter fans and for anyone hoping to stay up late with a good scary yarn.
The Queen reaffirms Nick Cutter’s place as one of the horror genre’s most entertaining storytellers.
As she begins the second of the three duologies that will make up her Crowns of Nyaxia series, author Carissa Broadbent leaves the House of Night and takes her characters straight to hell—the underworld, that is. The Songbird & the Heart of Stone picks up in the months after the events of the Nightborn Duet (The Serpent & the Wings of the Night and The Ashes & the Star-Cursed King), as former acolyte Mische is still reeling from losing her connection to the sun god after being Turned into a vampire. When she is captured by the House of Shadow, one of three vampire courts, Mische is spared from death by the mysterious Asar, the bastard prince of the House of Shadow and brother to the vampire who Turned her. But Asar saves Mische not out of compassion, but to help him complete a task given to him by the goddess Nyaxia: Descend into the underworld and resurrect Nyaxia’s long-dead husband, the god of death. It’s an offer Mische can’t refuse, especially when her own god breaks his silence, ordering Mische to aid Asar and then betray him by killing the god of death after his resurrection.
In The Songbird & the Heart of Stone, Carissa Broadbent marries a thoughtful look at religious and family trauma with epic adventure and romance. Fan-favorite Mische was originally introduced as a seemingly happy-go-lucky sidekick in The Serpent & the Wings of Night. But now, she struggles to choose a path that could bring her happiness in her new life as a vampire, afraid of destroying her tenuous hold on her humanity—and her god. Not to be outdone in the personal baggage department, necromancer Asar has a past as bloody as it is tragic. You could argue that his actions go slightly beyond the “morally gray” territory so beloved by fantasy romance readers, edging into downright villainous. But his devotion to Mische and desire to help her find love that doesn’t hurt make him a compelling (and swoon-inducing) romantic lead. Mische and Asar’s story isn’t over yet, but this first half of their romance makes clear that they are destined for an adventure that will shake the very foundations of their world and its pantheon.
In The Songbird & the Heart of Stone, Carissa Broadbent marries a thoughtful look at religious and family trauma with epic adventure and romance.
Comforting, kindhearted and soulful, Julie Leong’s The Teller of Small Fortunes offers a welcome reprieve from the dreary and violent stab-a-thons that often dominate the fantasy genre. Pull up a chair, grab your favorite mug and sink into this lovely debut’s warm embrace.
Tao, a fortune teller from the Empire of Shinara, loves her life of solitude. Crisscrossing the neighboring kingdom of Eshtera with her covered wagon and faithful mule, she makes a living telling small fortunes wherever she goes. You may be wondering, “What is a small fortune?” Well, Tao can tell when the spring rains will come, how many calves will be born this year or when the inn’s common room will be full again. However, when one of her fortunes reveals a missing girl is still alive, Tao finds herself enlisted to help Mash, the girl’s ex-mercenary father, and his similarly reformed companion, former thief Silt, track her down. But what about Tao’s coveted peace and quiet? Being alone is the only way she can keep her secret safe, because Tao can tell big fortunes: ones that can hurt people. As their journey continues, Tao must decide how much to tell her companions about her true powers, even as time runs short to help an innocent in need.
In The Teller of Small Fortunes, Leong paints with primary colors, leaving very few shadows in her portrait of friendship and family. Each member of Tao’s party has distinct regrets and murky pasts, but these backgrounds simply reveal how the characters will heal one another. Leong homes in on small moments, carefully calibrating each step toward trust and companionship. But that is not to say that The Teller of Small Fortunes does not have tension. The party’s mission to find the lost girl is not without real pain. But always there is a sense of peace, that whatever happens, the group will endure and grow.
If you’re looking for an epic told at the end of a bloody sword, this one may not be for you. But in between all the hacking and slashing, sometimes you find yourself in need of a pleasant diversion. Sweet-natured and therapeutic, The Teller of Small Fortunes is the perfect pick for such times. It feels like coming home.
Sweet-natured and therapeutic, Julie Leong’s The Teller of Small Fortunes is cozy fantasy done right.
Ezri Maxwell and their sisters fled the house they grew up in—a malevolent McMansion in a gated community where the Maxwells were the only Black residents—as soon as they were old enough. Their parents stayed, and now they’re dead, seemingly in a murder-suicide. To finally face the traumas of the past, Ezri and their sisters will have to return to the nest.
Model Home is a striking take on a haunted house novel, and in its pages you make it clear that you know the trope’s lineage well. What are some of your favorite haunted houses, and what drew you to the house-as-monster motif? Having a favorite haunted house feels a little like having a favorite serial killer—it’s hard to hold something in any kind of esteem when what gives it its cultural hold is its degree of terror. I came first to the haunted house genre, if it can be called a genre in its own right, via film. Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001) upset all my ideas about how we define a haunting in the first place, and for that reason was extremely formative for me when dreaming up Model Home.
I also can’t talk about Model Home without discussing Toni Morrison’s Beloved. They don’t have much in common at first glance besides families surviving in, to use Morrison’s word, spiteful homes, but both books also deal with the United States itself as a kind of specter, an entity that possesses. There’s so much that cannot be exorcized, no matter how much we will it.
“When writing about a place, I ask, what would I miss about it were I to leave it?”
Model Home is a very internal novel. Can you talk a little about what it was like getting inside Ezri’s head? Ezri has an extremely fractured, poorly realized identity. At many points in the novel, it’s evident they don’t see themself as a person or self at all. Still, they’re extraordinarily observant and self-examining. Getting into Ezri’s head was a little like writing about a subject the way a scientist might, with a very keen, cold, objective eye. I wrote Ezri the way I’d write someone filling out a lab report about themselves, trying desperately to understand something they never could.
One of the more unique features of the prose in Model Home is the lack of dialogue punctuation when Ezri is remembering a conversation, rather than actively taking part in it in the present. Why did you choose to use quotation marks for conversations in the present but not in the past? Everything that happens in the past is happening in Ezri’s memory, which necessarily has a dreamlike quality to it. When writing, I aim as much as possible to use the tools of language and prose to mirror various feelings and phenomena. The lack of quotations in the memories calls to attention the haze and murkiness inherent in the act of remembering.
A narrative featuring a heavily racist community could have (obviously) been set in a lot of places. Why did you decide to set Model Home in the suburbs of Dallas? I spent a lot of time as a kid in the North Dallas suburbs, and it will always have a really intense hold on my imagination. Texas, in general, actually. It’s a strange place with strange people (though, of course, that can be said of anywhere). My mother and I used to visit houses for sale in fancy gated communities just like the one in Model Home, fantasizing about what life there would be like. There was a short-lived TV series set in Dallas called Good Christian Bitches, based on a memoir of the same name. I’ve never seen the show or read the book, but I remember when I heard that name and learned it was about Dallas, I was like, oh, yes, absolutely, correct.
Over the years, I’ve loved seeing the breadth of places where your mind has taken readers—and how strongly you’re able to invoke those places. How do you go about instilling that sense of place within your work? I was always that kid who could get lost in a fantasy, and I haven’t outgrown that. I live in the worlds I create in my head, fall asleep thinking about them. It’s genuinely a pleasure. The realm of the imaginary, even when what I’m imagining is something awful, is a refuge for me. It’s like real life but more. Or sometimes less. But in just the right ways I need at a specific time. I like to think that by spending a lot of time in these fantasy worlds, I can pull out the details that give a place its uniqueness. I moved around a lot growing up. I am always longing for places I’ve been before. So when writing about a place, I ask, what would I miss about it were I to leave it?
I love the environmental contrasts that come up constantly in Model Home—from the heat of Dallas versus the cool of the interiors to the difference between Texas and the U.K. Why did you highlight the extreme contrasts of these environments? Contrast makes things easier to see. The fake sterility of a new-build development appears sharper against a crumbling old Victorian. But also, I love place. It’s strange how every city, and every pocket within a city, has a flavor and a history and a strangeness. It feels right and correct to write about it and draw out that uniqueness.
Emmanuelle, Ezri, Elijah, Eden, Eve—why the “E” names? There’s nothing special about the letter “E” in particular—They used to have all “F” names in a previous draft!—but I thought Eudora might be the sort of parent who would give all of her children names with a similar theme or sonic motif. Since she and her husband shared “E” names by coincidence, she decided on the letter E for her offspring: Ezri, Emmanuelle and Eve. I think the fact that Eve and Ezri kept up the tradition shows the hold their mother still has on them.
We mainly see the siblings’ father through Ezri’s eyes: a distant man who, while not particularly harmful to their upbringing, certainly has his own shortcomings. Do you think that Emmanuelle and Eve would have the same things to say about him? I think for all the siblings, their mother was such a massive force in their life that no matter what kind of father their dad was, he would’ve been overshadowed.
Your work spans several media. Has working with different forms—and video in particular—affected how you approach your writing? I absolutely think through a multimedia lens when I write. Through playwriting, I’ve learned specifically how to think about bodies in space, how they move, how they interact with the objects in a scene. And I always think about each scene as if it were in a film. What is being communicated through the actions of the characters? What does the space look like? What’s the geography of the room they’re in?
Photo of Rivers Solomon by Wasi Daniju.
The author’s new horror novel, Model Home, is a terrifying new take on the haunted house.
Read if your Halloween plans are: A horror movie marathon, specifically A24 horror movies
Ezri Maxwell doesn’t know whether their childhood home had ghosts, exactly, but they do know that it was haunted and determined to maim, traumatize and scare them and their Black family into leaving their mostly white Dallas suburb. Desperate to distance themselves from a childhood of constant dread, Ezri and their sisters fled the former model home as soon as they were old enough. Their parents, however, stayed where they were—right until the day they died under mysterious circumstances. At its core, Rivers Solomon’s Model Home is a study of the interior landscape of someone trying to make sense of their life in the wake of extreme tragedy. Ezri’s head is cluttered with the detritus of trauma, from their mother’s ambivalence toward them as a child to the repercussions of living with mental health issues for years, (“a host of diagnoses—which change with whatever clinician I see”). A disturbing tale that explores self-doubt, family drama and childhood trauma, Model Home is a powerful and gut-wrenching addition to the haunted house pantheon.
Read if your Halloween plans are: Exploring potentially haunted places—abandoned strip malls, creaky old houses, creepy caves … you get the idea.
If you’re in the mood for some spine-tingling stories, cozy up to Djinnology: An Illuminated Compendium of Spirits and Stories From the Muslim World, a fictitious (or is it?) compendium that is both fascinating and creepy, and made all the more so by Pulitzer Prize-winner Fahmida Azim’s striking illustrations. Seema Yasmin, a journalist, professor and physician, has created a fictional narrator named Dr. N, a taxonomist and ontologist who has traveled the world to investigate the sometimes benevolent, sometimes malevolent djinn. Djinn, Dr. N writes, have been “haunting humanity since pre-Islamic times.” He submits the fruits of his research to his academic committee to explain his long and unexplained absence from class, in this volume of stories from around the world that capture the long history and great variety of djinn. Many of these stories are related to human events, such as one concerning a ghostlike horseman who allegedly appeared in Cairo’s Tahrir Square at the height of the Arab Spring. Another terrifying tale of more dubious origins takes place in London, when a woman delivering her husband’s specimen to an IVF clinic spots what she thinks is an abandoned baby in the middle of the road. She stops, of course, but things do not go as she expects. Djinnology is beautifully designed, with maps, English and Arabic inscriptions and more, gamely selling a high-octane, between-two-worlds vibe. Most of all, Azim’s haunting illustrations in smoky colors perfectly portray this menagerie of spirits. Readers will find themselves looking over their shoulders.
Read if your Halloween plans are: A bar crawl in a tiny costume, weather be damned
Quite often in fiction, the figure of the vampire has represented loneliness, but we’ve arguably never seen that sense of yearning quite the way Rachel Koller Croft portrays it in her new novel, We Love the Nightlife. Croft’s protagonist, Amber, is frozen in her party girl prime, turned in the waning days of the 1970s by her maker, the beautiful and manipulative Nicola. Decades later, Amber begins to imagine what life might be like without Nicola, and considers an escape plan. But Nicola’s influence is powerful, her ambitions are vast and her appetite for control deeper than Amber ever imagined. Despite her vampiric nature, Amber feels like one of us. This is mainly due to Croft’s skill; her conversational, warm and relatable prose depicts Amber not as a lonely monster, but as a person longing for freedom in a savage world covered in glitter and awash with pulsing music. We also get to see Nicola’s side of the story and her own brand of yearning, giving the book an antagonist who’s not just remarkably well-developed, but human in her own twisted way. These dueling perspectives, coupled with memorable side characters and a beautifully paced plot, make We Love the Nightlife an engrossing, darkly funny, twisted breakup story that’s perfect for vampire fiction lovers and fans of relationship drama alike.
Read if your Halloween plans are: Watching a brainy horror documentary, or peeking at spooky clips on YouTube
Any horror writer doing their job knows how to tap into the fears that plague us most. Jeremy Dauber’s American Scary:A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond provides a robust account of how art has reflected American dread for centuries. As it turns out, our history is rife with foundational fear, making it prime territory for some scary storytelling. Dauber starts his “tour of American fear” with our country’s bloody beginnings and proclivity for blaming the devil for everything from bad weather to miscarriage (hello, Salem!). He then passes through slavery, the Industrial Revolution, the Civil War and beyond to more contemporary paranoias reflected in film: murderous technology (The Terminator), individual indifference (the Final Destination series) and surveillance (Paranormal Activity), to name a few. Dauber’s attention to the details of myriad cultural touchstones, both famous and obscure, will entice those who care to tiptoe deeper into the darkest of the dark. American Scary’s greatest success is making readers consider what art may be born of our late-night anxieties. Spooky stuff, huh?
Read if your Halloween plans are:Curling up in a chair at home, reading a lightly spooky book or one of the more gothic Agatha Christies
Librarian Sherry Pinkwhistle resides in a quiet hamlet in upstate New York. The only out of the ordinary detail about Ms. Pinkwhistle is that she loves to solve a good murder mystery—not only those in the books she protects and enjoys at work, but also the real-life, grisly deaths in the otherwise sleepy little town of Winesap. But when a string of local murders hits a little too close to home, Sherry realizes that she can no longer remain an unattached bystander. A demon, or several, might be at the heart of these ever-increasing deaths, and Sherry will need the help of her skeptical friends and her possibly-possessed cat to root out the evil in Winesap. C.M. Waggoner’s The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society is a stunning blend of genres, a dark supernatural adventure masquerading as a cozy mystery—and by the time readers realize this, they, like Sherry, are too deeply entrenched in the case to let it go. Waggoner infuses the pages with darkly humorous scenes and snappy dialogue, as well as unexpected magical touches that hearken back to the author’s previous fantasy novels, a combination that’s perfect for fans of horror tropes as well as lovers of mystery. Sherry Pinkwhistle is a sleuth to be reckoned with, and beneath her frumpy and soft exterior lies a pleasant surprise: a clever, determined heroine who will stop at nothing to protect the place she calls home and the people who live there.
Read if your Halloween plans are: Circling up with friends and family for a night of scary stories
Eerie Legends: An Illustrated Exploration of Creepy Creatures, the Paranormal, and Folklore From Around the World arrives like Halloween candy, just in time for the spookiest season of the year. Austin, Texas-based artist Ricardo Diseño’s bold, offbeat illustrations don’t simply complement these spine-tingling stories, they lead the way. Each chapter blends elements of fiction and nonfiction, and includes a corresponding full-page illustration that stands on its own as a fully realized piece of art. The horror elements here are plenty scary, but skew toward the creature-feature end of the spectrum—think Universal Studio monsters, or even Troma’s The Toxic Avenger. The chapter on Krampus details the yuletide terror’s appearance with frightening specificity: “Part man, part goat, and part devil. . . . His tongue is red, forked, creepy, and always whipping around.” Diseño’s hoofed monster, straight out of the Blumhouse cinematic universe, is shown in the midst of abducting a child. Each chapter ends with a campfire-style tale about the designated monster, written with Lovecraftian zeal by Steve Mockus. As an added incentive, the cover glows in the dark—a feature I hadn’t noticed until after I fell asleep with it on my bedside table. Talk about eerie.
Read if your Halloween plans are: A hike contemplating the macabre beauty of seasonal decay—be sure to leave the woods before dark!
Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s fabulous novel, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story, opens in 1913, when Polish 24-year-old Mieczyslaw Wojnicz arrives in the village of Görbersdorf, Germany, to be treated for tuberculosis. Tokarczuk is known for her penchant for the mythical and her deft, dark satirical wit, and as the subtitle, “A Health Resort Horror Story,” would lead readers to hope, the forests above the village whisper and echo with eerie sounds. The narration seems to come from ghostly entities who at times “vacate the house via the chimney or the chinks between the slate roof tiles—and then gaze from afar, from above.” A cemetery in a nearby town discloses evidence of a ritual killing every November. It is September, and the clock is ticking. Translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, The Empusium is about the rigid patriarchal world of pre-WWI Europe, and the tension between rationality and emotion. It is also about a young person coming of age—like Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, from which it draws inspiration. Facing a threat he does not understand, Mieczyslaw responds to the mysteries around him with curiosity and seeks his own way forward. Tokarczuk also favors a new path and, as usual, casts her enthralling spell.
—Alden Mudge
Whether you’re a homebody or a thrill-hunter, we’ve got a seasonal, spine-tingling read for you.
Quite often in fiction, the figure of the vampire has represented loneliness; readers are very accustomed to the particular kind of yearning that immortality and blood thirst can bring. We’ve seen it in the work of Anne Rice, Stephenie Meyer and many more, but we’ve arguably never seen that sense of yearning quite the way Rachel Koller Croft portrays it in her new novel, We Love the Nightlife.
In Croft’s follow-up to her debut, the thriller Stone Cold Fox, the vampires of Nightlife are draped in yearning even as their never-ending revels mask what they really want. Croft’s protagonist, Amber, is frozen in her party girl prime, turned in the waning days of the 1970s by her maker, the beautiful and manipulative Nicola. Decades later, despite the comfortable life they share in a Victorian mansion, and Nicola’s ambition to open a new nightclub to be their personal playground, the old ways of doing things start to chafe at Amber. She begins to imagine what life might be like without Nicola, and considers what an escape plan might look like. But Nicola’s influence is powerful, her ambitions are vast and her appetite for control deeper than Amber ever imagined.
When we meet her, Amber is not physically alone, but she is lonely, trapped in a domineering friendship she’d rather leave, desperate for a way to change her circumstances and yearning for a different life. It’s a place most of us have been at some point or another, and despite her vampiric nature, Amber feels like one of us. This is mainly due to Croft’s skill; her conversational, warm and relatable prose depicts Amber not as a lonely monster, but as a person longing for freedom in a savage world covered in glitter and awash with pulsing music.
The real magic trick of the novel, though, is how Croft fleshes out the world beyond Amber’s view. Nicola’s perspective is also laced throughout the narrative, from her childhood more than a century earlier to her very particular desires in the present day. We get to see not just Nicola’s side of the story, but her own brand of yearning, giving the book an antagonist who’s not just remarkably well-developed, but human in her own twisted way. These dueling perspectives, coupled with memorable side characters and a beautifully paced plot, make We Love the Nightlife an engrossing, darkly funny, twisted breakup story that’s perfect for vampire fiction fans and fans of relationship drama alike.
We Love the Nightlife is an engrossing, darkly funny and twisted story about a friendship breakup—between two vampires.
At first, C.M. Waggoner’s third novel appears to be quite the departure from the author’s previous fantasy narratives (Unnatural Magic and The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry). Waggoner quickly immerses readers in the humdrum, day-to-day life of librarian Sherry Pinkwhistle, who resides in a quiet hamlet in upstate New York. The only out of the ordinary detail about Ms. Pinkwhistle is that she loves to solve a good murder mystery—not only those in the books she protects and enjoys at work, but also the real-life, grisly deaths in the otherwise sleepy little town of Winesap. Typically, Sherry, a quiet older lady with an uncanny memory and knack for detailed observations, solves these murders and assists the local sheriff from behind the scenes, a la Hercule Poirot. But when a string of local murders hits a little too close to home, Sherry realizes that she can no longer remain an unattached bystander. A demon, or several, might be at the heart of these ever-increasing deaths, and Sherry will need the help of her skeptical friends and her possibly-possessed cat to root out the evil in Winesap.
The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society is a stunning blend of genres, a dark supernatural adventure masquerading as a cozy mystery—and by the time readers realize this, they, like Sherry, are too deeply entrenched in the case to let it go. Previously, Sherry loved piecing evidence and testimonies together, identifying the murderer and moving on with her life. However, Winesap’s resident demon doesn’t seem to want that tried-and-true plotline to play out this time: Sherry soon finds herself unable to recall key facts or cross the borders of town. Thus, she forms a demon-hunting society with her closest confidants, a motley crew composed of such lively characters as the young parish priest, Father Barry; cosmopolitan Manhattan-transplant Charlotte; and Sherry’s quirky counselor friend, Janine. The plan is to work on the case at hand, while clandestinely unearthing a way to exorcize the demon from Winesap forever.
The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society reminds readers that there is possibility for the mystical and supernatural even in the most mundane surroundings. Waggoner infuses the pages with darkly humorous scenes and snappy dialogue, as well as unexpected magical touches that hearken back to the author’s previous fantasy novels, a combination that’s perfect for fans of horror tropes as well as lovers of mystery. Sherry Pinkwhistle is a sleuth to be reckoned with, and beneath her frumpy and soft exterior lies a pleasant surprise: a clever, determined heroine who will stop at nothing to protect the place she calls home and the people who live there.
A dark supernatural adventure masquerading as a cozy mystery, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society is a genre-blending delight.
In his expansive and ambitious new novel, The Great When, Alan Moore pens a love letter to art, literature and London that’s sure to capture readers’ imaginations.
After the end of World War II, little in London remains intact. Lowly bookshop worker Dennis Knuckleyard strives to survive amid the rubble while running errands for his boss, Coffin Ada. Dennis doesn’t have a lot to hope for besides making a few pence here and there, getting a fresh meal at some point, and trying not to get tangled up in anything that could get him killed. If only it were that easy. On a routine job to buy some new inventory, Dennis finds a book that shouldn’t exist. But Dennis doesn’t know that the book is a key of sorts that reveals a truth hidden in plain sight: There’s another London, a parallel city full of mystery and magic and wonder. The book belongs there, in the Great When, as it’s called, and Dennis must return it before it costs him his life.
A veteran writer who penned some of the most important comics and graphic novels ever created (Watchmen, From Hell, V for Vendetta), Alan Moore is well-known for his ability to spin a good yarn. He illuminates every little detail of a London reeling from the end of the war, and his joy in doing so is palpable; this book is as much a celebration of our London as it is the creation of a new one. Characters are so vividly rendered that you can practically see them in full-color illustrations: Murderous mob bosses, beguiling dames, dashing lawyers and crackpot magicians all leap off the page with an extra dash of liveliness.
Moore is an excellent wordsmith, but he can sometimes get ahead of himself, and the sheer volume of similes and metaphors can bog his writing down. But stay attuned, and you’ll get sucked in. Readers seeking big ideas and colorful splashes of language will love exploring The Great When—and look forward to future entries in the Long London series.
Readers seeking big ideas and colorful splashes of language will love exploring Alan Moore’s two parallel Londons in The Great When.
In The City We Became, N.K. Jemisin writes of entities that are the personification of cities, which emerge once a metropolis grows large enough to safeguard it against predatory forces. Nghi Vo’s most recent work, The City in Glass, inverts this, proposing a city that was created by a magical being—in this case, a demon. In Vo’s telling, demons have a magpie-like love for shiny, exciting things like stories and romance and betrayal. Deeply intertwined with humankind and the world around them, they can build, lose and grieve just like anyone else. So when angels descend to smite the demon Vitrine’s beloved city of Azril for some arcane transgression, she stands in their way, for what little good it does. And then she sets out to rebuild from the ashes left behind.
The City in Glass isn’t really about Azril; it’s much more about Vitrine herself, because her city is as much a part of her as anything. It is the physical manifestation of her sometimes capricious desires, constructed in defiance of the demon’s past and all its traumas. Azril grows and changes along with Vitrine, functioning as an extended metaphor in this character study of a novel. An entire city’s history may play out in the background, but only two figures are at the forefront: Vitrine herself, and the nameless angel she curses after he and his brethren destroy Azril, trapping him on Earth with her.
Already a Hugo Award-winner for the novella The Empress of Salt and Fortune, Vo is at the peak of her craft with The City in Glass, tackling the impact of war and the way even deep-seated ideological enmities can crumble in the face of individual relationships with flowing, often meditative prose. In a genre so often characterized by complicated magic systems and dystopian politics, Vo’s insistence on dwelling entirely on people making the best of things is both refreshingly straightforward and oddly hopeful. Sometimes, in a fantasy landscape suffused with thousand-page installments in epic, connected multiverses, a short and beautifully written tale of a bereaved demon and a cursed angel finding ways to coexist is all you need.
The City in Glass, a beautifully written tale of a bereaved demon and a cursed angel, finds Nghi Vo at the peak of her craft.
Sometimes, opening up a fantasy book is about leaving your world behind. But sometimes, it’s more about stepping into a brand-new one, so vividly detailed that you know the textures and tastes and the smells in the air. That’s the kind of world Freya Marske has created in Swordcrossed, set in the bustling city of Glassport. Detailed, intricate and meticulously planned, this fantasy romance will dazzle genre fans who crave an immersive experience and a rich love story to lead them through it.
When Marske’s tale begins, Mattinesh Jay doesn’t have time for a love story. What he needs is money, enough to keep his disastrously unlucky family from financial ruin. That money will come at Matti’s upcoming wedding to Sofia Cooper, via his bride-to-be’s bond price (i.e., her dowry). The wedding has to go without a hitch, and that means hiring the best swordsman Matti can afford to be his ‘best man,’ a role that includes defeating any challengers at the ceremony. Given the unfortunate fact that a talented duelist has strong feelings for Sofia, a challenge is all but inevitable. When Matti falls victim to a scam and his financial situation gets even worse, the best swordsman he can afford is . . . well, the scammer himself: Luca Piere, a man who is as silver-tongued as he is deft, as dangerous as he is tempting, and as infuriating as he is gorgeous.
This is a book for those who like their romance mixed with a hefty dose of world building—and more than a bit of intrigue, as it’s quickly revealed that the failing fortunes of the Jay family owe more to sabotage than to bad luck. Unraveling all the different factors and parties involved takes over a lot of the story. But the love light still manages to shine through as Matti and Luca fight each other, then fight against their feelings for each other, and then finally learn to give in to what they truly want. Their happy ending is one of the most satisfying I’ve read all year, showing that luck might be at the whim of the gods, but love is always a gift.
Freya Marske’s dazzling Swordcrossed is an immersive fantasy with a rich love story at its heart.
In 2019, we’ve enjoyed a number of good comic tales—but they’re dark, a little wicked, and even when they’re a little fantastical, they’re deeply, utterly real. Here are five of our favorites.
