The epigraph of Louisa Morgan’s The Ghosts of Beatrice Bird comes from Emily Dickinson: “One need not be a chamber—to be haunted— / One need not be a House— / The Brain—has Corridors surpassing / Material Place—”. This brief passage beautifully encompasses the novel’s core idea, that plumbing the depths of one’s past trauma can reveal, and hopefully abolish, the shades that haunt us all.
Dr. Beatrice Bird is quite happy being alone. Self-isolated on a remote island in the Pacific Northwest in 1977, she takes care of simple things in her small cottage. She milks the cows the previous owner left behind. She watches the shoreline. She picks up groceries when they come over on the ferry. She misses her partner, Mitch, whom she left behind in San Francisco.
But Beatrice’s solitude keeps the ghosts at bay.
She sees them whenever she encounters another person: Their fears, pains and shames orbit grimly around them where only Beatrice can see. When a young woman named Anne Iredale arrives on the island to escape her own past, Beatrice senses a kindred spirit and offers to take her in. A psychologist by trade, Beatrice slowly uncovers Anne’s story. But the ghosts that haunt Anne are some of the foulest Beatrice has ever seen. Can she and Anne heal enough to banish the ghosts once and for all?
This book has a healer’s heart, revolving around Morgan’s inquisitive, sensitive and measured look at trauma. Yes, ghosts are present and yes, they do inject tension, but they’re used more as conduits for the real work of psychological examination. As Morgan jumps between both women’s perspectives, including some flashbacks to key moments before the island, the reader feels as if they’re putting together the pieces alongside Beatrice as she helps Anne start her healing journey. Morgan knows how to let a conversation develop slowly, and Beatrice and Anne’s friendship blooms at the same natural pace. Trust is earned, truths are confessed and time passes. No one can rush someone like Anne into a breakthrough. It has to happen naturally.
The importance of women healing other women appears in many of Morgan’s other novels (The Great Witch of Brittany, The Age of Witches), and The Ghosts of Beatrice Bird is an especially kind and empathetic expression of the same theme. Though Beatrice sets out to help Anne, Anne inevitably helps Beatrice. Pain is wiped clean by understanding, like a gust of air off the ocean. Find a comfy seat and settle in. You’ll be glad you did.
In this inquisitive, sensitive novel from Louisa Morgan, ghosts become a vehicle for psychological examination—and a healing friendship.
Twins Natasha and Clara have always been two sides of the same coin, cursed and blessed in equal measure by their godfather, the sorcerer Drosselmeyer. Clara is beauty and light incarnate, but has little interest in understanding the world around her; Natasha may be dark and homely, but she has a penetrating mind. On the night of their family’s Christmas Eve soiree, Natasha seeks revenge for another of her sister’s thoughtless betrayals. Using one of her godfather’s magical gifts to travel to the deceptively beautiful Kingdom of Sweets, Natasha meets the Sugar Plum Fairy, a demonic being whose power and vindictiveness are neither sweet nor fanciful. Natasha’s deal with the fairy sunders the sisters and changes her life forever, pulling her into a web of power far greater than her godfather’s paltry tricks.
Set in the wintry, decadent atmosphere of late-19th century Russia, Erika Johansen’s The Kingdom of Sweets puts a disturbing twist on the classic Nutcracker, transporting readers into a world where dark bargains lurk beneath ornate facades. Johansen explores the casualties of the era’s gender and beauty politics, and every display of the excesses of the Russian Empire comes with the knowledge that revolution is only a few years away.
In this retelling, even the traditional wonders of the holiday tale, from its delicate dancing fairies to its sugared delights, are but illusions hiding the Sugar Plum Fairy’s true identity and motives. Hers are not the only obfuscated intentions, however. Johansen delves into the dissonance between how her characters present to the world and the truth of their hearts. From Conrad, Natasha’s former lover whose straightforward nature Natasha mistakes for true kindness, to Drosselmeyer, whose cruelty is just a byproduct of his greater aims, The Kingdom of Sweets is rife with characters who use their status or polite misdirection to hide their true faces.
Just like its characters, The Kingdom of Sweets has hidden depths: Lyrical and terrifying, itis just as likely to disturb as it is to enchant.
Erika Johansen’s lyrical and terrifying retelling of The Nutcracker is just as likely to disturb as it is to enchant.
Ally Wilkes takes readers on a journey beyond their wildest nightmares in Where the Dead Wait, which follows two 19th-century Arctic expeditions gone extremely wrong.
William Day is a young sailor who reluctantly steps up to take command of the crew of Reckoning when the men are marooned in frigid waters in 1896. Day depends on the guidance of his ruthless, mysterious right-hand man, Jesse Stevens—and grapples with clandestine romantic feelings for him. Chaos and cannibalism ensue before their rescue, after which Day is castigated as the heartless butcher of the North, while the lauded Stevens evades ostracization. An ominous 13 years later, Stevens goes missing in the Arctic and Day is called upon to lead the crew sent to uncover whatever might remain of him—and, horrifically, the trail of mutilated and dead bodies he’s left behind.
Where the Dead Wait is an exemplary (and gruesome) character study. Day begins his seafaring career as a hopeful 24-year-old, only to find himself making increasingly heinous judgment calls when matters get out of hand. Nightmarish flashbacks to that traumatic time plague Day as he helms the rescue expedition for Stevens, memories that Wilkes makes increasingly chilling. To make things even more difficult, Day is also saddled with Stevens’ spirit-medium wife, an American reporter who is too nosy for his own good and a crew that is all too familiar with his reputation and ready to mutiny at any moment. As the waters grow more perilous and his post-traumatic stress symptoms swell with every wave, Day must contend with the ghosts of all his worst sins, which may be on the verge of taking corporeal form.
With its slow-burn pacing and array of creative body horror surprises, Where the Dead Wait is perfect for fans of “Yellowjackets” and The Thing. Embarking with Day on his ghostly voyage is not an easy task but the rewarding end of this haunting adventure makes the harrowing journey worth it.
Where the Dead Wait is an exemplary (and gruesome) character study of a Victorian sailor who must confront the terrible things he did to survive a harrowing shipwreck.
Ever since I was a kid, I have loved reading books featuring a haunted house with a creepy resident; a feisty, determined heroine; and strange goings-on that gradually turn scary. But rarely, if ever, have I read a haunted house book that features such gorgeous prose as Alix E. Harrow’s latest novel, Starling House. Early on, Harrow describes how 26-year-old narrator Opal McCoy has been dreaming of the titular house since she was a child: “I often wake up with the taste of river water and blood in my mouth, broken glass in my hair, a scream drowning in my chest. But that morning, the first one after I set foot on Starling land, there’s nothing but a deep quiet inside me, like the dead air between radio stations.”
Opal works hard at Tractor Supply Company to try to save enough money to send her younger brother, Jasper, to a fancy boarding school. Their mother died a mysterious death, their father has never been in the picture and they live in a dingy motel room in the dying town of Eden, Kentucky. Opal is desperate to escape Eden, which offers nothing much besides two Dollar Generals and a strip-mined stretch of riverbank, thanks to the operations of nearby Gravely Power.
The big, churning wheels of this lusciously plotted book begin to quickly turn when Opal takes a job cleaning for Starling House’s current owner, a reclusive young man named Arthur Starling. Opal finds herself increasingly intrigued by Arthur despite his odd ways and off-putting looks. But Gravely Power representative Elizabeth Baine, in hopes of obtaining the mineral rights to Arthur’s land, demands that Opal spy on Arthur and his residence, threatening Jasper’s future if she declines.
Harrow invents a rich backstory for Starling House, making clever use of footnotes and even a fake Wikipedia page for 19th-century author Eleanor Starling, who married into the family and wrote and illustrated an unsettling children’s book, which may have been the source of Opal’s Starling House nightmares. Opal uncovers many different versions of the same stories about the house and its inhabitants, past and present, and the truth is hard to sort out. “The Gravelys are either victims or villains; Eleanor Starling is either a wicked woman or a desperate girl. Eden is either cursed, or merely getting its comeuppance,” she concludes.
Excellent social commentary unfolds in the matchup between feisty, sarcastic Opal and the greedy power company. Harrow has tons of fun along the way, noting in Eleanor Starling’s Wikipedia page, for instance, that “director Guillermo del Toro has praised E. Starling’s work, and thanked her for teaching him that ‘the purpose of fantasy is not to make the world prettier, but to lay it bare.’ ” Alix Harrow does just that in Starling House, a riveting fantasy overflowing with ideas and energy that clears away the cobwebs of corporate power and neglect.
Alix E. Harrow’s Starling House is a riveting Southern gothic fantasy with gorgeous prose and excellent social commentary.
Empty nester Margaret Hartman is thrilled when she and her husband, Hal, buy a gorgeous old Victorian home. But the house soon begins testing them with annual September “shenanigans”: blood oozing down the walls, creepy spirits of 19th-century children and a demonic boogeyman that even an experienced priest can’t exorcize. Margaret and Hal weather three cursed Septembers, but Margaret in particular is in it for the long haul. When Hal disappears on the eve of the fourth September and his and Margaret’s daughter, Katherine, arrives to search for him, family secrets are brought to light.
From the ghost of a murdered maid to swarms of giant flies, the house’s antics become routine for Margaret, and her wry, witty narration will also accustom readers to these supernatural events. Despite the house’s horrors, it still provides Margaret with a haven, a purpose and an emotional connection to an eerie spirit community. But when author Carissa Orlando reveals why Margaret is so good at putting out proverbial fires and quelling very real ghosts, The September House takes an unexpected emotional turn. Margaret knows that ugly secrets can be carried well beyond the grave, and it’s better to heal, forgive and protect when you can. Her interactions with Katherine are particularly tense and anxiety-inducing as Orlando explores an estranged parent-child relationship impacted by intergenerational trauma.
The September House pulls inspiration from classic settings such as the Bates Motel, Rose Red, the Overlook Hotel and Hill House, but Orlando’s characterization of the old Victorian is fresh and fascinating. The house serves as an analogy for the deterioration of family and mental health, with the collapse of a person’s mind being more terrifying than any specter lurking in the shadows. Some of the body horror moments may feel familiar, but Margaret’s delightfully matter-of-fact voice puts a new spin on even the oldest of tropes, and the novel’s horrifying events unfold at a furious pace. The September House is a riveting adventure that will grab you by the ankles and drag you down into the pitch-black basement you’ve been warned to avoid.
Carissa Orlando’s darkly funny and unexpectedly emotional The September House follows an empty nester who refuses to leave her extremely haunted Victorian home.
Do you ever get a little creeped out when you visit your grandparents’ house? There’s something about the stillness of unused rooms and the sweet, dusty smell that can give you a slight sense of dread. But if you were to visit the Montgomery house in T. Kingfisher’s A House With Good Bones, you’d leave with more than an uneasy feeling. In fact, you might not leave at all! (Cue thunder and lightning.)
Sam Montgomery has to move back in with her mom. The archaeoentomologist’s latest dig (she studies insects in archeological sites) has been put on an indefinite hold, but the good news is that Sam loves her mom, Edie, who lives in Sam’s grandmother’s old house in rural North Carolina. But Edie seems tired and nervous, very unlike her normal self. Sam has strange dreams about her dead grandmother, vultures circle outside all day, ladybugs spill out of the faucets and Sam swears that bony fingers touch her hair in the middle of the night. But Sam’s a scientist. Shouldn’t there be a reasonable explanation for all of this? Determined to find out the truth, Sam starts unearthing secrets about her family that were better left undisturbed.
Kingfisher is in her element when the tension is at its highest. She keeps a narrow focus on Sam and the handful of other major characters, amplifying the sensation that threats are imminent. Danger in horror can sometimes feel arbitrary and nonspecific, but in this house, you know what’s haunting you. As things get stranger and stranger, the writing gets choppier, like Sam’s panting breath and racing heart. And Kingfisher isn’t afraid to embrace the weird: A House With Good Bones’ climax is strange, scary and unforgettable.
That being said, don’t write off this book if you’re not a horror enthusiast—A House With Good Bones is also laugh-out-loud funny. Sam’s inner monologue is full of hilarious observations about living with her mom, not having reliable internet and simply being 32. The aforementioned vultures? They have names and belong to a neighbor. The book is balanced with knife’s-edge precision between fright and humor in a way that brings Jordan Peele’s sensational Get Out to mind. You’ll be craving the next tense moment, because it means the next joke is right around the corner too.
A House With Good Bones shares another key trait with Get Out: Both works derive their frightening power from placing reasonable people in unreasonable circumstances and forcing them to respond. It’s nerve-wracking for a character to ask “Is this real?” when faced with something strange; it’s downright terrifying when the answer is “Yes.”
Impressively weird, nerve-wracking but still laugh-out-loud funny, A House With Good Bones is another horror hit from T. Kingfisher.
Louise Joyner left home as soon as she could, fleeing the humidity of Charleston, South Carolina, for a career in industrial design in Silicon Valley. Her brother, Mark, stayed put, his meandering and dysfunctional lifestyle patronized to his face and savaged in his absence by his family, as is so often the case with mildly disappointing scions of good Southern families. But now, Louise and Mark must figure out what to do with the relics of their recently departed parents’ lives: their father’s idiosyncratic economics research, their mother’s vast collection of Christian puppets and their house. However, some revenants will not go quietly into that good night. There are burdens this family has politely buried for far too long, and the Joyners are about to discover that some hauntings are neither stagecraft nor hellspawn. Some hauntings are homemade.
Author Grady Hendrix is a Charleston native, and How to Sell a Haunted House completely nails its Lowcountry setting. This reviewer is also a South Carolinian and can confirm that neither the idea of a Christian puppet ministry nor the actual Fellowship of Christian Puppeteers are made up. The depiction of Carolina culture is also accurate, especially Hendrix’s portrayal of how someone who grew up in it, left and then came back would perceive it: familiar and peculiar, unsettling and comforting, prompting a reckoning with how deeply strange its version of normal truly is. Hendrix only departs from this reality in one way: In no gauzy South Carolina summer that I can recall did the knickknacks acquire a vengeful sentience and wreak havoc on the strained psyches of a family’s prodigal offspring.
How to Sell a Haunted House effectively marries tropes ripped straight from the pages of a midcentury pulp magazine to a Pat Conroy-esque chronicle of Lowcountry generational trauma. Families are warm and lovely but also stifling, just like the summers; rituals are banal but also sacred, their violation the gravest of transgressions; and there are always skeletons (or puppets) in the sewing closets. How to Sell a Haunted House may be a heightened tale of horror, but it is built on something true. And it’s a lot of fun, as well.
How to Sell a Haunted House blends pulp horror with a Pat Conroy-esque chronicle of Lowcountry generational trauma—plus haunted puppets.
A woman in search of a husband finds one with more than his fair share of deadly secrets in the latest atmospheric, well-plotted horror novel from author Caitlin Starling.
The Death of Jane Lawrence takes place in an alternate version of Victorian-era Britain, known as Great Bretlain. The eponymous heroine is headstrong, wonderfully smart and knows that to live independently, she must wed. It seems illogical, but finding the right man would allow Jane to continue her own hobbies and pursuits, as a married woman is afforded far more freedom than an unmarried maiden.
Bachelor Augustine Lawrence, the only doctor in town, seems like a fine option for Jane. He agrees without too much fuss, under one simple condition: Jane must never visit his ancestral home. She’s to spend her nights above his medical practice, while he retires to Lindridge Hall for the evening. Eventually, of course, Jane finds herself spending the night at Lindridge Hall following a carriage accident, and where she slowly and methodically uncovers the skeletons lurking in Augustine’s closet.
Anyone who has ever read a gothic novel knows exactly where this is going, but Starling does a magnificent, twisted job steering clear of the obvious plot beats. There are surprises galore in the secrets these characters keep and the lengths they’ll go to conceal them. Key to many a successful horror novel is having a main character to root for, one whom readers will want to see come out of everything not only alive but also stronger. Jane is absolutely that kind of character, a beacon of light in a dark world through her sheer tenacity alone, making her exploration of Lindridge Hall a white-knuckle reading experience.
Fans of Starling’s debut, the sci-fi horror novel The Luminous Dead, will find the same steadily growing sense of eeriness here, despite the markedly different setting. Jane isn’t exploring caves on an alien planet, but her journey still feels claustrophobic, almost asphyxiated by the estate’s mysterious walls. Are the horrors she senses of a supernatural nature? Or are they merely born of a man with too many internal demons? “Both” is also an option, and Starling keeps readers guessing until the very end.
For those who crave intense and detailed gothic horror, or those who just want more Guillermo del Toro a la Crimson Peak vibes in their life, The Death of Jane Lawrence is a must-read.
A woman in search of a husband finds one with more than his fair share of deadly secrets in the latest atmospheric, well-plotted horror novel from author Caitlin Starling.
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Veteran narrators Michael Kramer and Kate Reading return to this fantastical world, along with a new POV portrayed by Marisa Calin.
V. E. Schwab, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, opens another door to a new fantasy series set in the dazzling world of Shades of Magic.
Prepare for tangled schemes and perilous adventures with friends old and new in The Fragile Threads of Power.
Once, there were four worlds, nestled like pages in a book, each pulsing with fantastical power and connected by a single city: London. Until the magic grew too fast and forced the worlds to seal the doors between them in a desperate gamble to protect their own. The few magicians who could still open the doors grew more rare as time passed and now, only three Antari are known in recent memory—Kell Maresh of Red London, Delilah Bard of Grey London, and Holland Vosijk, of White London.
But barely a glimpse of them have been seen in the last seven years—and a new Antari named Kosika has appeared in White London, taking the throne in Holland’s absence. The young queen is willing to feed her city with blood, including her own—but her growing religious fervor has the potential to drown it instead.
And back in Red London, King Rhy Maresh is threatened by a rising rebellion, one determined to correct the balance of power by razing the throne entirely.
These two royals from very different empires now face very similar struggles: how to keep their crowns—and their own heads.
Amidst this tapestry of old friends and new enemies, a girl with an unusual magical ability comes into possession of a device that could change the fate of all four worlds.
Her name is Tes, and she’s the only one who can bring them together—or unravel it all.
A Macmillan Audio production from Tor Books.
V. E. Schwab, bestselling author of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, opens another door to a new fantasy series set in the dazzling world of Shades of Magic, narrated by Kate Reading, Marisa Calin and Michael Kramer.
Born of a real-world nightmare, Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory is a beautiful and bracing novel that melds historical fiction with speculative elements. Like many masterpieces, it is grounded in a fearsome experience. In late 2012, still reeling from the death of her mother, Due received an unexpected call from the Florida attorney general’s office. They told the acclaimed horror author, screenwriter and scholar that her mother’s uncle, Robert Stephens, had likely been buried on the grounds of the state’s now infamous Dozier School for Boys, a reform school that became a site of grotesque abuse. Researchers and state officials were looking for family members to approve exhumation at the site in order to document what happened.
As Due vividly remembers, “All this came as a shock.” Here was a close relative that she hadn’t even known about, and her family had already seen its share of violent trauma. In fact, she reflects, “When I first got the call, I thought it was in reference to another [boy] on my grandmother’s side who was actually put to death as a juvenile. And that was a family story we had heard about, but I had no idea about Robert Stephens.”
Getting to the root of what happened to Stephens would require excavating a painful history and risking reviving intergenerational trauma, but it was also a way to honor her mother. Due knew she had to see it through. Within months of that call, Due traveled to the town of Marianna in the Florida Panhandle to witness the moment when her great-uncle’s remains were brought to light.
“It was really almost as if history was trapped at that site.”
Upon arrival, one of the sheriffs on site pointed her down the road and told her to “follow the mudhole. I was like, what mudhole?” For Due, who was born in Tallahassee and was raised in Miami, with its distinctly urban and Latin American flavor, “this small Panhandle town was a whole new world.”
“The whole experience was so immersive,” Due says. “It was really almost as if history was trapped at that site.” While in Marianna, Due attended a meeting of Dozier survivors. A man recounted “a beating so severe that the poor child couldn’t see his parents on visiting day because his clothes had actually been whipped into the skin of his back.”
What Due witnessed in the swampy Florida heat transformed a strange obligation into a visceral and deeply felt mission, and cemented her desire to write about the boys at Dozier. She “couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be a child at this hell house.”
Finding the right genre and narrative for a subject this brutal, though, was a challenge. Though the former journalist had written a memoir with her mother, Civil Rights advocate Patricia Stephens Due (Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights), excellent memoirs had already been published by survivors, and Due felt too removed from the events to take a nonfiction angle on the subject. Ultimately, what Due really wanted to do was give Robert a better story than he had experienced in his short life. To do that, she needed to write a novel.
Due cares deeply about the social history she’s bringing to life, and sought to make dark realities accessible to readers. But she is also cognizant of the dangers of that quest and was loath to create anything that could be exploitative. This, Due is clear, is one of the greatest hurdles with this kind of material: “When we’re writing about difficult times in history, the line between trauma porn and honoring the past can be very thin.” That said, ignoring the violence that took place in real life was not an option. “I felt I had no choice but to have my protagonist experience at least a taste of what those survivors had talked about.”
Getting it all right felt urgent to Due, but also posed a perilously high degree of difficulty, the literary equivalent of performing a triple axle. In a testament to her skill, The Reformatory deftly delivers on all of its author’s aims.
Though it springs from the same grim institutional history as Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys, Due’s supernatural period thriller is riveting and highly original. Set in the 1950s, the novel centers a fictionalized version of Robert Stephens, a 12-year-old African American boy living in Florida whose life is changed when he tries to rescue his sister, Gloria, from being harassed by a wealthy white teenager. Thanks to the attacker’s powerful father, Robert is quickly arrested, convicted and sentenced to six months at the Dozier-esque Gracetown School for Boys. His stint at the cruel institution, euphemistically known as “the Reformatory,” comes 30 years after a fire that killed 25 boys, many of whom were buried on the grounds along with the bodies of other inmates. The ghosts of these dead boys haunt the school and Robert becomes their emissary, communicating with them and acting as an intermediary between the corrupt warden and the spirits seeking both revenge and release.
Before ‘The Reformatory,’ the longest Due had spent on a single work was two years. This one took seven.
This spectral element unlocked something crucial for Due: “The ghosts can represent the violence without me having to basically write a book that is just about beating after beating after beating, murder after murder after murder.” That blending of genres, history and the fantastical, struck an important balance, enabling her to tell hard truths without inflicting maximum trauma on herself or her readers.
Weaving history and the speculative is one of Due’s talents as a writer, but that particular mixture also has an established literary tradition as seen in works by other Black authors, such as Beloved by Toni Morrison. The rich history of how the African American experience has found expression in horror is a story Due has long worked to tell, both as executive producer on Horror Noire, a documentary on the history of Black horror, and through her groundbreaking college courses on the Black horror aesthetic. While the creative path that emerged felt like a fit to the veteran horror writer, it was still rocky. Threading the needle between truth and exploitation required skill and more time than she had ever devoted to a project. Before The Reformatory, the longest Due had spent on a single work was two years. This one took seven.
For part of that time, Due was immersed in and, she admits, “hiding behind” the research process. In 2018, she published a short story also titled “The Reformatory” in the Boston Review that tackled the most difficult scene from her work in progress. Then came COVID-19 and a jolting sense of her own mortality.
“It was COVID that really kicked me in the pants and made me realize on a deep visceral level that I could die without finishing the book,” Due says. The memory of that time is still vivid. “This was before the vaccine. This was when we didn’t know what was going on. So it was during that time that I put myself on a very strict page quota and I kept a chart up on my wall.” The placement was meaningful. “There was a day I didn’t write, and all those zeros were right in my face. That was the kind of discipline it took to finally finish the book. It was a real push.”
That life-altering visit to Marianna was a perfect matching of subject, artist and moment: The result is a genre-crossing masterwork. Ten years after it was begun, The Reformatory has come to fruition.
Photo of Tananarive Due by Melissa Herbert.
In her masterful horror novel, Due fictionalizes her great uncle’s experiences at the notorious Dozier School for Boys—the same institution that inspired Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys.
Long before the events of Legends & Lattes, Travis Baldree’s bestselling novel about an orc who opens a coffee shop, Viv was a young warrior who acted first and asked questions later—and it got her into trouble. While on the hunt with her mercenary companions for the necromancer Varine, Viv takes a sword to the leg, temporarily hobbling her and leaving her stranded in the town of Murk, far from the front and feeling absolutely useless. With her expenses temporarily paid for by her boss, Viv is left with nothing to do but concentrate on healing. Boredom and curiosity draw her to Fern, the rattkin (a toddler-sized talking rat) purveyor of a failing bookstore on Murk’s outskirts. In Viv, Fern sees a book lover who just doesn’t know it yet. In Fern, Viv sees a new friend in need of a helping hand. As their friendship grows, Viv looks for ways to help Fern turn her failing bookshop into a place where people actually want to be. Together, they build a community of found family and literary enthusiasm that sustains them both. But the darkness that Viv once chased lurks on the horizon. In order to protect her temporary home, Viv will need to trust in the new friends she has grown to love, even as she knows that none of it can last.
Bookshops & Bonedust is the perfect prequel to Legends & Lattes. Seeing Viv before she leaves the mercenary life for good gives fans of Travis Baldree’s cozy fantasy novel a new perspective on a beloved character. The Viv of this book is a little more rough around the edges: She hasn’t learned to love books (yet) and the sword is the only life she’s ever known. Her transformation via the powers of friendship and a good story is the soul of Bookshops & Bonedust. Baldree’s sophomore novel is comfortable in its pacing and generous with its characterization. It thrives in the “medium stakes”: danger is present in the background, but nothing ever feels so pressing that readers are legitimately worried for the characters. And since readers already know that Viv survives to retirement, Bookshops’ dark action subplot is still relatively lighthearted. The lack of real danger gives the characters freedom to explore and grow outside the context of a standard fantasy adventure story, keeping Viv and her new friends the focal point of the story.
Baldree’s novel revels in those budding (but time-limited) friendships. As in Legends & Lattes, what romance exists between Viv and her compatriots is fairly chaste and builds relatively slowly. This isn’t a book for grand gestures or dramatic declarations of love. After all, we know going into this book that Viv isn’t with any of her friends from Murk in Legends & Lattes. Instead, Bookshops & Bonedust is a gentle, relatively quiet story perfectly designed for people who love books. It’s also a great entry point for anyone who wants to start the series—just wait to read the epilogue if you don’t want spoilers for Legends & Lattes!
Bookshops & Bonedust is the perfect prequel to Legends & Lattes: a gentle, relatively quiet story perfectly designed for people who love books.
We sometimes forget that the descent in Dante’s Divine Comedy is a journey toward God. Jesmyn Ward’s portrayal of slavery is the profound manifestation of
Natalia Shaloshvili’s finely tuned visual humor in Pavlo Gets the Grumps dovetails nicely with her comforting, uplifting message to any reader who’s ever been a bit cranky (aka all of us).
Read by Cynthia Nixon, Anna Montague’s moving and surprisingly humorous debut, How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund? shows grief’s potential to lead to reconciliation and hope.
Nuanced, hopeful and insightful, Ava Robinson’s Definitely Better Now is an endearing portrayal of a young woman redefining herself after one year of sobriety.
The leader of a family of thieves, Balthazar Valdaren is about to attempt the most challenging heist of his career: pilfering a jade idol right out from under the nose of its owner, on the day of its consecration. From that description, a reader might expect this story to be about a crew of con men in the early 21st century. Instead, Greta Kelly’s TheQueen of Days takes readers to the island of Cothis, in a fantasy realm resembling the 17th century. The swagger and the cons are still here, but instead of casinos and 21st-century technology, Balthazar and his crew are tangling with gods and demigods.
Kelly begins by introducing the book’s other primary protagonist: the Queen of Days, Tassiel. Tassiel, who will be joining Bal on the job, is one of the Septiniri: half-human, half-Ankaari, a god that can manipulate time. Bal and his crew—his bastard brother, Kai; his cousin Zee and her husband, Edik; and Bal’s young sister, Mira—quickly discover just how powerful a Septinri can be. Tass, as the Queen of Days prefers to be called, charges each crew member a month of their life to help them with the heist.
After that less-than-happy revelation, the action begins and does not let up. Balthazar, Tass and their scrappy crew run from planning to fighting to hiding to heisting with a ferocity that makes the book difficult to put down. Kelly efficiently relays the crew’s history and relationships through their interactions: Kai makes an off-color comment, Edik admonishes him, Zee rolls her eyes, then Bal keeps the plan moving. These quick moments of characterization allow Kelly to focus on the beat-to-beat action without pausing for exposition. As the outcast in more ways than one, Tass is the only exception. The chapters from her point of view are far more introspective as she learns new things about herself and the humans she is helping.
By the end of the book, some amount of heisting has completed, Tass has grown and evolved as a result of her time with the crew, and the stage is set for this motley team’s next adventure. TheQueen of Days is a fantastic piece of escapist fantasy for readers looking to leave planet Earth for a few hundred pages.
A fantasy following a crew of thieves and con men on an increasingly dangerous heist, The Queen of Days is a fantastic piece of escapism.
The Reformatory is a fantastical, elegant and miraculous delivery of justice for historic atrocities by master of horror Tananarive Due. The NAACP Image-award winner reimagines the deadly abuse that took place at Florida’s Dozier School for Boys—including the tragic experience of the author’s own relative, Robert Stephens, who died in 1937 at the institution—as a 1950s-era tale of ghosts and redemption.
From the start, Due reminds us of the humanity of these children. Twelve-year-old Robert “Robbie” Stephens Jr. lives a hard life marked by striving and discipline, watched over by his 16-year-old sister, Gloria. Their mother is dead and their father, a would-be union organizer, fled to Chicago to find work and escape the Ku Klux Klan. The money he sends home never lasts long. Still, Robert retains his child’s sense of wonder and sweetness, as well as nascent otherworldly abilities he strains to use to connect with his mother. And despite Gloria’s emphasis on discipline, she takes thoughtful care of her brother, trapping wild game after church as a treat or adding smoked pork from a neighbor to their greens “so he could remember the taste of something other than cornmeal and soup.”
Due excels in both style and storytelling, her sentences singing with specificity and creativity. The conflict that changes Robert and Gloria’s lives is simple and fleeting, but Due’s finely honed choreography makes the precise, exacting nature of Jim Crow racial etiquette visible. Here as in every other page of The Reformatory, historical context emerges organically, interwoven through story and character. When white teenager Lyle McCormack’s leering gaze—and overbearing, insistent physical presence—fixes on Gloria as they walk home, Robbie recalls one of the rules his father taught him. “He was never, ever to wink his eye at a white girl or white woman. Foolishness like that can get you killed.” Even though he doesn’t yet fully understand the sexual undertones and dangers implied in his father’s warnings, it makes Robbie see red that the rule doesn’t go both ways. Instinct overrules home training, and in a violation of racial codes several layers deep, “Robert ran toward Lyle McCormack, swinging his foot at the bigger boy’s left knee.”
Due captures every nuance and every horrible, deadly implication of these moments with surgical precision. Red McCormack, Lyle’s infamously vindictive and racist father, sees what happens, and Robbie is soon sent to the reformatory. And Robbie and Gloria’s threatening encounter with Lyle seems bucolic when compared to subsequent ones at the school, a site of institutional cruelty where the souls of Black boys snuffed out too early yearn for family and freedom. There, his ability to see ghosts puts Robbie in an awkward but powerful position. His second sight not only becomes a window to the truth of what happens at the reformatory and what happened to the boys who went missing there, but it also may offer the possibility of salvation.
Due’s humane and meticulously researched retelling reminds us that nothing is scarier than the demons that walk among us. Beautiful and expertly executed, The Reformatory is a horror masterpiece that derives its power from both the magical and the mundane.
Beautiful and expertly executed, The Reformatory is a horror masterpiece that derives its power from both the magical and the mundane.
In a distant star system known as the Kindom, a group of noble families rule with an unbreakable grip. But a single secret, in the right person’s hands, can change everything. A multilayered saga full of courtly intrigue and indelible characters, Bethany Jacobs’ These Burning Stars warps readers across the galaxy on a devilishly fun thrill ride.
Jun Ironway has just nabbed the biggest score of her thieving career: a data drive containing explosive evidence that one of the ruling families was involved in planetary genocide. It could bring in quite the payday. Or, it could get her killed. Hunting her are two of the Kindom’s finest clerics, members of a religious order that serve as law enforcement. Esek, heir to the Nightfoot family fortune, leads enigmatically and punishes ruthlessly while her counterpart, Chono, is impassive, devout and efficient. Haunting the steps of this trio’s deadly dance is a wanderer known only as Six, who seems to have a stake in the data drive as well. But who is Six and whose side are they on? And can Jun find a way to expose the truth before Esek and Chono catch her?
These Burning Stars is plotted like a chess match, confident and surprising as Jacobs moves each piece thoughtfully across her board. There’s a sense of delicate control as the pace and tension ebb and flow, and the characters approach and retreat from each other. Enriching flashbacks fill in relevant information, but only when the narrative calls for it. Jacobs has an applause-worthy restraint, holding her cards until they can be played for maximum effect.
All four main characters are extremely fun to follow, and this reviewer will be thinking about them long after filing this piece. Esek in particular stands out: a brilliant, haughty, rule-bending and gregarious sociopath who is as unpredictable as she is determined. Her scenes feel electric, like anything could happen, with Chono, her shadow and opposite, playing foil time and time again.
I’m happy to report that These Burning Stars opens a trilogy set in the Kindom. If Jacobs’ second entry is anything like the first, we’ll have so much more to discover across her universe in the years to come.
Bethany Jacobs’ These Burning Stars is a confident and surprising start to a sci-fi trilogy that boasts memorable characters and excellent plotting.
Living through a real-life slasher attack changes a town. For Proofrock, Idaho, the Independence Day Massacre has left scars but has also drawn in new residents—some for the horror of it all, and others for the offer of free college in the aftermath of the traumatic event at the center of Stephen Graham Jones’ My Heart Is a Chainsaw. Set four years later, Don’t Fear the Reaper returns to Chainsaw’s protagonist, Jade Daniels, who is not the same slasher-obsessed girl she once was. She is older and wiser, less compelled by the tidy plots of the films that once captured her imagination. But when a vehicle convoy transporting serial killer Dark Mill South wrecks outside of Proofrock, a whole new terror is unleashed on the town. The killer is out for revenge for the death by hanging of 38 Dakota men in 1862, and he walks into Proofrock with carnage on his mind. Over the course of 36 hours, the town’s carefully rebuilt peace is shattered as Dark Mill South carves his way through its residents, high schoolers and older townies alike. Jade’s fight to survive will test the very mettle of her being and every lesson she’s learned from her beloved horror films.
Jones’ second entry in his Indian Lake Trilogy is an all-consuming dive into the aesthetics of slasher films of yore, married with prose that takes itself seriously enough to be captivating but not so seriously that it feels needlessly glum. Don’t Fear the Reaper is a love letter to horror classics: Its characters reference iconic Final Girls and blood-spattered, seemingly immortal murderers in their dialogue even as Dark Mill South (a hulking monster whose preternatural gift for gore is remarkable even compared to his predecessors) plays out those tropes in front of them. Even the chapter titles are named after classics of the genre, from It Follows to Silent Night, Deadly Night. However, Jones doesn’t just deftly employ the tropes of slasher films; he expands them, giving his cast of teen characters the depth and motivation that is often lacking in a film genre that demands a tight 90-minute timeline. A perfect mix of compelling writing, characters who never cease to surprise and just the right amount of schlock, Don’t Fear the Reaper is a modern essential for anyone who loves rooting for the Final Girl.
A perfect mix of compelling writing, characters who never cease to surprise and just the right amount of schlock, Don’t Fear the Reaper is essential reading for anyone who loves rooting for the Final Girl.
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.
