At its best, fantasy fiction is transportive, taking us away from the world we know. Sometimes that journey sends us to alien and mythic realms, but sometimes—as in this trio of powerful new novels—magic can be found in a strange and wondrous reflection of a world we already recognize.

In his stunning debut, The City of Lost Fortunes, Bryan Camp crafts a spellbinding vision of one of America’s most magical cities. In a post-Katrina New Orleans, magician and grifter Jude Dubuisson is adrift, hiding from his exciting former life and keeping quiet about his gift for locating lost items. All that changes when a sudden invitation catapults him back into a world of gods, vampires, angels and tremendous power.

What begins as an enticing introduction to a mythic version of the Crescent City and its characters quickly deepens as Camp weaves through strange haunts and schemes. Indeed, magic is woven into every page with such mesmeric precision that the reader has no idea what to expect next and can’t risk turning away for a moment. Camp takes us through his world with the self-assuredness of a seasoned novelist, leaving no word wasted and no moment of exposition without a little spell twisted into it.

The novel journeys deeper still, beyond its own imagined mysteries and into the unanswered questions of the American experience. The cultural melting pot of New Orleans becomes enchanted, as ritual chalk circles lead to doors, doors lead to hidden rooms, and hidden rooms lead to other realms. As Jude rediscovers a world he left behind, we discover a magical and uncharted landscape that perhaps has always existed before our very eyes.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Camp for The City of Lost Fortunes.

CITY ON THE WATER
In Blackfish City, the first adult novel from Sam J. Miller (The Art of Starving) imagines a rough, cobbled-together future, then brings forth a little magic from its potential darkness.

In a world ravaged by climate change, corruption and other disasters, humanity has reorganized itself into a series of new settlements. In the floating city Qaanaaq—a mesh of intertwined cultures, vastly different income levels and technology merged with raw survival instinct—a group of seemingly disparate characters are united by a single jarring event: the arrival of a mysterious woman, called an “orcamancer,” who emerges from the sea on a killer whale, with a polar bear in tow. Who is she? What does she want? Will she be the city’s doom, its salvation or some frightening hybrid of the two?

As this mystery unfolds, Miller introduces a rich kid suffering from a strange disease, a battered journeyman fighter, a city administrator, a crime lord with bigger ambitions, a gender-nonbinary messenger and other compelling personalities linked by the aura of the orcamancer. Providing one more voice to the narrative, a mysterious guidebook seems to function as the voice of the city itself. As these varying points of view take their turns telling the story, an addictive tale of redemption and hope emerges from a grimy future.

INTO THE WOODS
What Should Be Wild, the magical debut novel from Julia Fine, begins with all the makings of a dark fairy tale. There once was a girl named Maisie who grew up in an old manor house on the edge of a strange forest. Maisie was born with the power to kill living things and resurrect dead things with a single touch, and so she was locked away by her anthropologist father, who considered her too dangerous and puzzling to be allowed to explore the outside world. When her father goes missing, Maisie’s mixture of curiosity and concern sends her on a journey to the heart of the forest. There, she discovers a dark curse that has plagued the women of her family for centuries.

What follows is a captivating tale that explores the fears, desires and mysteries of growing up through the clouded lens of a dark fantasy. Fine begins with elements we all recognize—a girl with strange powers, a dark old house, a mysterious forest that could be waiting just beyond our doorstep—and delightfully warps them until a new tale emerges. Maisie is a complex heroine worthy of the story’s luxurious prose. In telling her story, Fine reveals her own gift for walking the tightrope between the universal truths of human experience and the hidden magic within those truths.

This article was originally published in the May 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Science fiction, more than perhaps any other genre, has an established tradition of social and political critique. Such iconic works as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Frank Herbert’s Dune all used future human civilizations as stages to play out contemporary struggles such as Golden Age hedonism, class-based societies, modern imperialism and plutocracy. This pattern, dating back to the genre’s inception in the 19th century, has created an expectation that new science fiction must also contend with some contemporary crisis of the human condition, preferably in some novel fashion.

Both Peter Watts and Claire North (the pen name of Catherine Webb) have established themselves as unique literary voices. Watts is known for his exhaustively researched fiction and tight narrative structure, while North is a linguistic gymnast in the tradition of T. S. Eliot and Thomas Pynchon. Their most recent offerings, The Freeze-Frame Revolution and 84K, do not disappoint, and although each of their plots is strongly reminiscent of other novels, the delivery sets them apart from their compatriots.

In Watts’ The Freeze-Frame Revolution, Sunday Ahzmundin is a biological engineer on the spaceship Eriophora, whose unusually close relationship with the AI autopilot, Chimp, is tested when she learns of a rebellion being conducted by certain members of the crew in their brief gaps between decades-long periods of stasis. Although this is, by Watts’ admission, more scientifically speculative than his other work, purists will be pleased by his handling of machine learning, evolutionary time scale and even names—Eriophora is a genus of orb-weaving spider that creates spiral webs, and the Eriophora is building a spiral web of faster-than-light travel routes. The Freeze-Frame Revolution is closer in length to a novella than a novel, which enables the cover-to-cover tautness of the plot and makes the character development, especially of the relationship between Sunday and Chimp, all the more remarkable.

84K, by contrast, is both large and dense. Theo Miller is a man of uncertain provenance, living in a near-future United Kingdom that is dominated by a single massive monopoly called the Company. Theo determines the price in pounds sterling that convicted criminals must pay for their offenses, but when a woman from his past reappears, he must face the blight at the heart of his society. North constructs a linear plot out of disjointed slices of time, resulting in a book that never shows its hand and only snaps into focus at the very end. This unusual plot structure makes 84K a challenge for the reader, but it feels necessary. After all, North is painting a portrait of a society that hides its true form behind a facade of advertising and euphemism. Her heroes miss crucial details, and it is unclear whether “heroes” is really the right thing to call them.

Although The Freeze-Frame Revolution is strongly reminiscent of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and 84K contends with a similar autocracy to George Orwell’s 1984, each book distinguishes itself both by its author’s technique and by its treatment of moral ambiguity. In each case, the protagonist possesses imperfect and likely biased information and is embroiled in a revolt that, for all its humane intentions, is anything but benevolent in practice. Watts leaves the essential conflict tantalizingly unresolved and writes from the perspective of Sunday retelling the events. This casts doubt on the veracity of Sunday as narrator, transforming what could otherwise have been a relatively cliché story of man versus machine into an engaging tale that leaves the reader with more questions than answers. And North consistently justifies her writerly contortions by using them to convey her protagonist’s state of mind. Her carefully chosen run-on sentences, unusual phrasing and jarring jumps (frequently mid-sentence) from thought to thought, character to narrator, or present to past convey Theo’s progress from being a deliberately boring, utterly confused bureaucrat to a man who has finally attained a sense of purpose.

Perhaps modern science fiction is somewhat hamstrung by its need to reflect our current society in its speculative funhouse mirror. There are only so many great debates to be had, after all. But these latest contributions, from such eminently skilled writers as Watts and North, are worthy voices in their respective conversations, and thoroughly engrossing stories in their own right.

What does one do when one is kidnapped by vampires with atrocious fashion sense and an unhealthy fondness for body glitter? Or when one is sent across the Pacific Ocean to confront flying soup ladles, a distressing lack of appropriate headgear and an inconveniently amorous werelioness? How on earth is one supposed to manage with neither accurate aerial charts nor adequate hellphone service? And most importantly of all: how is a writer to confront such ghastly events while also contending with questions of consent, sexuality and femininity?

Dreadful Company by Vivian Shaw and Competence by Gail Carriger are each later books in their respective series. But unlike books in other fantasy sequences such as the Kingkiller Chronicles or A Song of Ice and Fire, these books operate more like episodes in a long-running television series. There are certainly plots that began in earlier entries, and others that have yet to conclude, but each book is a well-constructed story on its own and is both violently British and Britishly violent. They share other similarities as well, especially in their rather more nuanced depiction of the supernatural than is typical. In both books, for instance, there are multiple species of vampire with distinct capabilities, weaknesses and diets, as well as a complicated set of social and ethical practices surrounding supernatural culture. And in each novel, the protagonists find themselves in the midst of a cultural crisis which is only solvable because they are confident, no-nonsense, utterly unique and extremely well-written women.

Fantasy has always been chock-full of brooding men with nominal pretensions of humble origins, wielding swords and hurling fireballs or lightning bolts at horned demons and vast, shadowy cabals of necromancers. And although vampirism has long been associated with sexuality and abuses thereof, modern vampires are often too busy sparkling or sulking about in thoroughly impractical capes or getting into intra-coven drama for the analogy to play out much. But in the world of Dreadful Company, the worst things a vampire can do to a mortal are turn one against their will or turn one too young; demons are friendly, slightly aloof folks in dapper pinstripe suits; and the undead have extremely capable doctors who obey their oaths even under duress. Shaw’s prose is quick and funny without resorting to kitsch or unironic cliché, and heroine Dr. Greta Helsing, esteemed physician to the undead, is far from an archetype of either her profession or her gender. That character complexity turns a story about daring escapes, incompetent overseers, literal femme fatales and a magical rift in reality into something of an allegory without sapping any of its entertainment value. Dreadful Company is an adventure yarn, a vampire novel and a story about a serial abuser getting what’s coming to him all in one. There is also a graveyard conversation between Oscar Wilde and Freddie Mercury.

Competence, however, is a remarkable work of character development, starting with its protagonist, Miss Primrose Tunstell, daughter of a vampire queen. Its plot, if abstracted from its setting, is deliberately bland, because that setting is what is worth experiencing. Carriger’s steampunk Victorian fantasia is instantly addicting and lushly detailed. The sheer range of characters within it is staggering, from the dyspeptic Professor Percival Tunstell and the brashly seductive Templar Rodrigo to the tassel-obsessed werecat Tasherit Sekhmet and the impudently imprudent Captain Prudence Akeldama. Hilarity abounds, entirely derived from the interactions among this beautifully drawn cast of miscreants (and a few extremely British swipes at the United States in general and California in particular). And underneath it all, Carriger discusses cultural norms surrounding transgender marriages and homosexuality, compares excessive liposuction to vampirism and analyzes the philosophical implications of not having a soul. It is a gender-bending, unexpectedly philosophical work of modern fantasy clad in a muslin blouse, chocolate duster and a matching skirt with precisely as many petticoats as necessary. Oh, and with an armored parasol and a tasselled fez.

Both books are well worth reading, relishing and then regretting that there aren’t more like them, and that there are as few heroines as well written and compelling as Greta Helsing and Prim Tunstell in contemporary fantasy.

Debut novels can be tricky, and in the fantasy realm, debuts frequently define entire careers. Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shannara marked him as a leading proponent of high fantasy; Susanna Clarke’s towering Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell established her reputation as a master of Victorian fantasy; Neil Gaiman’s solo debut, Neverwhere, defined his trademark wry humor and knack for mythologizing everyday life; and China Miéville’s King Rat sparked his career as a progenitor of today’s ethically complicated urban fantasy. In each case, the expectations established by the success of these authors’ debuts irrevocably shaped their future work. Debuts carry power. In this vein, the inventiveness demonstrated by both Tasha Suri’s Empire of Sand and Alexandra Rowland’s A Conspiracy of Truths carries fascinating implications for the future development of their individual styles.

These two novels are, in some ways, polar opposites: Suri’s tale revolves around two isolated, naive people whose personal relationship might save the world, while Rowland’s protagonist is a storytelling traveler who wields his enormous trove of global mythologies to save his own skin. Suri’s world is self-contained within Empire of Sand’s pages. Rowland casually references entire continents and magics that are never visited or explained, giving the impression of an unknowably massive universe that surrounds this story that takes place almost entirely within prison cells.

Suri’s Empire of Sand follows her headstrong protagonist, Mehr, the illegitimate daughter of an imperial governor and an Amrithi woman, as she navigates the deadly conspiracies and complicated politics of a Mughal India-esque empire. The Amrithi are desert nomads who claim divine descent and have a special connection to the natural world, and are thus viewed with scorn and fear by the ruling elite. When Mehr’s uneasy position within her father’s court grown untenable, she accepts a marriage proposal from one of the empire’s mysterious, feared mystics and is thrust into an even more dangerous world. As she tries to unravel the secrets of her new husband, Mehr begins to discover the true extent of her powers and the dark secrets at the heart of the empire. Suri’s tightly focused, propulsive story blends multiple simultaneous storylines without resorting to flashbacks or post-hoc descriptions. This style is evocative of George R.R. Martin but unfolds on a much more intimate scale, and sleeping gods take the place of Martin’s dragons.

By contrast, Rowland frames the entirety of A Conspiracy of Truths as a recounting of an elderly raconteur known as Chant, whose adventurous wanderings are put on hold when he is arrested on suspicion of espionage. Chant wades through the hilariously byzantine bureaucracy of Nuryevet, a country ruled by powerful queens and plagued by all manner of superstition, and peppers his life story with various forms of folk tales, complete with different narrative voices and linguistic characteristics. Rowland conjures tension out of the interminable prison sentence as Chant must both determine why he was arrested in the first place and who he can actually trust in order to avoid execution. The sheer variety of linguistic forms at play contributes to the overwhelming scale of Rowland’s world, and the overall conceit of the book as a story recounted to one of its characters is reminiscent of Patrick Rothfuss’ The Kingkiller Chronicles. However, Chant is a much more approachable character than Kvothe, and the world he evokes through his stories hints at a world as grand and varied as any in contemporary fantasy.

The next step for both writers is to determine which aspects of their debuts they will sustain, and which characteristics they will jettison or warp as they continue. Will Suri fill her next novels with tense relations between misguided mortals and a sleeping divine? Is Rowland plotting a lineage of Chants as protagonists of their future stories? At this stage, it is impossible to say how either writer’s follow-up effort will unfold, but both authors have demonstrated more than enough to be worth that second look.