Books Young Adult Spotlight

Most Anticipated Young Adult SFF/H for January & February 2026

A new year means new books!

By Alex Brown

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Published on January 6, 2026

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The new year means we have a new crop of young adult science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels. Despite the short days and long, cold nights, horror is in a downswing for the time being, replaced mostly by thrillers. Vampires are (temporarily?) out, dragons are in. And, as I have had to type on every Most Anticipated list for the last year or so, the stranglehold romantasy has on publishing continues unabated. There are also some intriguing queer stories coming in January and February that seem tailor made specifically to my interests, so thank you very much for that!

Science Fictional

If All the Stars Go Dark by S.G. Prince

(Godwin Books; January 20, 2026) Upon graduation, Keller lands his dream job as a gunner for the Legion. His pilot partner, Lament, keeps him at arm’s length, but as much of a bummer as it is, Keller throws himself into his work anyway. He and his new crew get into hot water when they investigate a strange space substance that attacked the last gunner. Space opera plus romance equals lots of adventure-y fun.

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Postscript by Cory McCarthy

(Dutton Books for Young Readers; February 17, 2026) In sharp contrast to the HEAs/HFNs that dominate in romantasy, this is a true dystopian story. The world West and Emil live in is hard and getting worse by the day. There is no deus ex machina or Chosen One to save the day. Six years ago the apocalypse happened and now these two young men are pretty much all that’s left of the human race. They wander the Massachusetts coastline with Emil’s dog, searching for dwindling resources and trying to survive as long as they can. It’s a love story at the end of the world. 

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Magic with a Twist

Soul of a Gentleman Witch by David Ferraro

(Page Street YA; January 20, 2026) Stuck as a seventeen-year-old forever, Callum will only be free after performing 666 tasks for Lucifer. One day, Lucifer agrees to wipe Callum’s debt clean and free his soul, all for the price of transporting an alchemist across the pond. But of course, once Callum gets to know Auggie, trading his own life for Auggie’s becomes an impossible choice. A necromancer hunting Auggie, an undead witch, and a winged cat complicate matters.

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Love Me Tomorrow by Emiko Jean

(Love Me Tomorrow #1 — Sarah Barley Books; February 3, 2026) After making a wish at the Tanabata festival, Emma, who doesn’t believe in love, starts receiving mysterious letters. The anonymous author claims to be her true love writing from the future. At first she doesn’t believe them, but they quickly become impossible to ignore. Who is this mysterious suitor? Is it someone she already knows or someone she hasn’t yet met?

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Call of the Dragon by Natasha Bowen

(Call of the Dragon #1— Random House Books for Young Readers; February 10, 2026) In a world of dragon gods, Moremi finds herself unexpectedly claimed by both Yida and Dam, something that isn’t supposed to be possible. It’s a good thing she is, because the king and his wicked advisor Addaf launch a coup to overthrow the dragon gods. Now Moremi, her friend Nox, and her nemesis Zaye have less than a week to save the world with a cleansing ceremony… if Addaf doesn’t catch them first.

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Outcasts, Outlaws, and Rebels

A Wild Radiance by Maria Ingrande Mora

(Peachtree Teen; January 20, 2026) A queer and neurodivergent romantasy reimagining of the War of the Currents was not on my 2026 bingo card, but I’ll take it. Josephine, imbued with the power of radiance (electricity magic), leaves the orphanage where she was raised, House of Industry. As punishment for constantly breaking rules, she’s packed off to the distant countryside town of Frostbrook to work as a Conductor. There she meets Julian and Ezra, two young men who tug on her heart. 

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Queen of Faces by Petra Lord

(Queen of Faces #1 — Henry Holt and Co.Books for Young Readers; February 3, 2026) In Caimor, people can transfer their souls into fake bodies. To save her from a terminal illness as a child, Ana’s parents put her in the only one they could afford, a defective model. Eight years later, the male body Ana’s trapped in is falling apart. Her last hope of stealing a better form is lost when she’s captured by the principal of an elite magic school. Either she works for him as a mercenary, dispatching rebels trying to take down the oppressive political system, or he has her arrested and executed. 

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Thrills & Chills

To the Death by Andrea Tang

(G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers; February 10, 2026) Sam vows revenge on the man who killed her brother in an illegal duel. That man also happens to be the father of Tamsin, a young woman who will do whatever it takes to win his respect. Their mutual desperation puts them on opposite sides of a duel, with Tamsin taking on dueling master Lysander Rook and Sam acting as Rook’s assistant.

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This Wretched Beauty: A Dorian Gray Remix by Elle Grenier

(Feiwel & Friends; February 17, 2026) Do you want a trans remix of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray? Of course you do! It’s 1867 and Dorian is miserable as the sole heir to their family’s estate. They meet the artist Basil who paints a stunning portrait of Dorian, displaying them in a light they’ve never seen themselves in before. Basil offers Dorian the confidence to explore the queer underbelly of London, and take to it like a fish to water. The deeper they sink, the more Basil’s painting changes.

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Competitive Streak

The Swan’s Daughter: a Possibly Doomed Love Story by Roshani Chokshi

(Wednesday Books; January 6, 2026) Two cursed teens work together to break destiny. Demelza is a veritas swan, a young woman with the ability to sing the truth out of her audience but also doomed to never be able to fall in love without losing her heart or freedom. Prince Arris is doomed to be murdered by his bride thanks to a curse from a sea witch, and his only way out is to find his true love. They meet at the palace and form an alliance—she’ll weed out the murderous suitors competing to marry him and he’ll protect her from a wicked wizard—in this fairy-tale-esque fantasy. 

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Heart’s Gambit by J.D. Myall

(Heart’s Gambit #1 — Wednesday Books; February 3, 2026) In the 1860s, two teens tried to escape their enslaver, the witch Sabine, but she captured and cursed them instead. While they now have their freedom, they cannot be around each other without wanting to fight. While they have magical powers and the ability to travel through time, in every generation one child from each family must fight to the death with their life feeding Sabine’s immortality. This year, it’s Emma and Malcolm’s turn at the Gambit. Can their love defeat systemic oppression?

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Until the Clock Strikes Midnight by Alechia Dow

(Feiwel & Friends; February 3, 2026) Immortal teens Calamity and Darling are competing for a mentorship from the prestigious Mortal Outcome Council. Calam guides clients to tragic endings while Darling dabbles in happily ever afters. Whoever exerts the most influence over mortal client Lucy wins the mentorship, but after a series of unlucky events they must pose as an engaged couple and win her over without magic. This is comped as The Good Place meets the Brandy version of Cinderella. Immediate preorder. Immediate. 

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Death Is Not the End

It Lurks in the Night by Sarah Dass

(Rick Riordan Presents / Disney Hyperion; January 27, 2026) A high school senior takes her friends on an adventure that turns deadly. Every year, Erica, Lystra, Pearl, and Maya sail around the Caribbean, leaving their cares behind them for a few days. Tragedy strikes when they’re grounded on a haunted island and Erica winds up dead. Or so they thought. A few days later, Erica returns home seemingly alive but very much not well. If you know anything about Caribbean folklore, you know Maya is about to have the fight of her life.

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They Call Her Regret by Channelle Desamours

(Wednesday Books; February 17, 2026) Horror-obsessed Simone plans a rager for her 18th birthday. At a cabin near Doll’s Head Lake, she anticipated scary stories around a campfire and creepy pranks. Instead she accidentally murders her best friend Kira. The ghost who haunts the lake, a witch called Regret, offers Simone a deal she cannot refuse: break the curse binding her spirit and she’ll resurrect Kira and erase all of Simone’s many regrets; fail within the two-week time limit and Kira’s life is forfeit.

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The post Most Anticipated Young Adult SFF/H for January & February 2026 appeared first on Reactor.

Books reading recommendations

Five Horror Stories About Inanimate Objects Coming to Life

Creepy dolls and sinister puppets are bad, but how about a haunted, sentient rollercoaster?

By Lorna Wallace

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Published on January 6, 2026

Photo: Tapio Haaja [via Unsplash]

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Photo: Tapio Haaja [via Unsplash]

The idea of inanimate objects coming to life may sound whimsical, but in the hands of horror authors, it can be absolutely terrifying. Stephen King has employed this strategy to great effect over the course of his career: Not only has he given sentience to objects with clear lethal ability, most notably a car in Christine (1983) and an industrial ironing machine in “The Mangler” (1972), but he’s even managed to transform seemingly harmless objects into the stuff of nightmares—I’m looking at you, topiary animals from The Shining (1977).

Of course, Stephen King isn’t the only author to imbue inanimate objects with life to sinister effect. Here are five other memorable examples.

“The Ancestors” by Adam Nevill (2009)

(Collected in Some Will Not Sleep) It’s not all that uncommon for small children to witness something creepy, but to not be aware of how disturbing the event is to the adults around them. This disparity helps drive the narrative, and the reader’s deepening sense of unease, in “The Ancestors.” Young Yuki has moved into a new house with her parents and although she initially didn’t want to leave her old life behind, she’s feeling better about it now that she’s befriended Maho, the resident ghost.

Friendships with ghosts aren’t necessarily scary or sinister—Casper is notoriously friendly, after all—but certain aspects of Maho’s behavior with Yuki would definitely freak out an adult. This includes Maho wrapping Yuki up in her long black hair when she sleeps (that’s a big no thank you from me). The one thing that does give Yuki pause is the fact that all of the toys in the house come to life at night, but Maho assures her that they’re friendly.

Given that this is a horror story and not Toy Story (1995), it’ll come as no surprise that the toys aren’t exactly innocent, but I’ll let you discover exactly how for yourself.

The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell (2017)

Set largely during the Victorian period, The Silent Companions is a creepy and atmospheric Gothic tale that unfolds over three connected timelines.

The main story begins in 1865, with Elsie Bainbridge, a recently widowed pregnant woman, moving into her late husband’s ancestral home, The Bridge. Along with the help of his cousin, Sarah, and a few housekeepers, Elsie works to fix up the dilapidated house. In a locked room, she finds life-size wooden figures—known as silent companions—and decides to decorate the house with them. She also finds the diary of Anne Bainbridge and this narrative, written during 1635, forms the second timeline. The third thread of the story follows Elsie in a psychiatric hospital at an unspecific time in the future.

We know from the jump that things go wrong for Elsie at The Bridge (the book opens with her confined to the hospital) and it’s obvious that the eerie silent companions had something to do with it, but there’s also a psychological element to this novel that leaves the reader constantly questioning events.

Gothic by Philip Fracassi (2022)

Tyson Parks was once a bestselling horror author, but his past few books have flopped and he’s struggling to get words down on the page for his current work-in-progress. That all changes when his girlfriend gifts him an antique desk for his birthday. Sure, the fact that the desk had fallen and crushed a worker at the antique dealers is a little unsettling. And yes, some of the ornate images carved into the wood are pretty grotesque. But Tyson doesn’t much care because at least he’s finally writing again.

It quickly becomes clear that the desk is possessed by something sinister, though, and while it reignites Tyson’s literary spark, it also twists him into an abhorrent person [CW: this involves a graphic rape scene]. Gothic is an exploration of a writer’s descent into madness, and along the way the reader is treated (or subjected, depending on your point of view) to some gruesome body horror courtesy of this demonic desk.

How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix (2023)

Based on the cover alone, How to Sell a Haunted House looks like a typical haunted house story, but there’s an extra horror element at play: creepy puppets and dolls.

The story starts with Louise learning that her parents have been killed in a car crash. Grieving is hard enough as it is, but she’s also tasked with settling her parents estate with the help (or, in her view, interference) of her brother, Mark. The siblings have never seen eye to eye and their combative dynamic is only exacerbated by their attempts to clean out the house so that it can be sold. But the situation goes from pretty bad to significantly worse when they discover that their mom’s extensive collection of puppets and dolls has been brought to life by a dangerous spirit haunting the house.

Grady Hendrix is known for his fun and intentionally campy writing style—something which lends itself well to possessed puppet horror—but this story manages to balance humor with a serious and heartfelt exploration of grief.

“The Merge Monster Incident: One Year Later” by Johnny Compton (2025)

If dolls and desks don’t seem like big enough threats when it comes to inanimate objects coming to life, then how about something on a grander scale—perhaps a whole rollercoaster? The Merge Monster is a coaster that was Frankensteined together from the parts of other decommissioned carnival rides. Then one day, the rollercoaster simply comes to life and walks out of the theme park—with people still strapped in.

This short story is told from the perspective of a journalist one year after the seemingly impossible event took place. Our protagonist is trying to piece together any information they can about the Merge Monster Incident by digging into the coaster’s construction, interviewing theme park guests who witnessed the event—clear video footage unfortunately doesn’t exist—and attempting to track the coaster’s movements since it simply walked away.

The idea of a rollercoaster coming to life might seem silly to begin with, but the story quickly takes on a chilling air and by the end leaves readers haunted by a few key questions which are only partially answered. Where exactly did the Merge Monster go? And what happened to the people who were still on the ride?

If you’d prefer to watch inanimate objects come to life on the screen, rather than read about them on the page, you can check out this list of horror movies! And please chime in below to recommend and discuss other scary stories about formerly inanimate objects come to life…[end-mark]

The post Five Horror Stories About Inanimate Objects Coming to Life appeared first on Reactor.

Books reading recommendations

Five Scary Short Stories That Read Like Urban Legends

When dark rumors, local legends, and disturbing memes suddenly become all too real…

By Lorna Wallace

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Published on December 18, 2025

Photo by William Nettmann [via Unsplash]

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Photo by William Nettmann [via Unsplash]

The first time I ever heard an urban legend, I was about 5 or 6 years old. My older brother and I each had a few friends staying over and while we sat in the dark, one of his friends told us a story called “Humans Can Lick Too.” It’s about a woman who lets her dog lick her hand for comfort when she hears a creepy dripping noise in the night. If you’ve not heard it before, I’m sure you can guess how it ends based on the title.

It was one of my earliest experiences of horror and while I was suitably terrified, I was also captivated. In that spirit, here are five spooky short stories that manage to perfectly capture the creepily compelling feel of an urban legend…

“each thing i show you is a piece of my death” (2009) by Gemma Files and Stephen J. Barringer

Although urban legends are often most effective when they’re whispered between friends or shared aloud with a gathering (maybe at a sleepover), “each thing i show you is a piece of my death” is perfectly suited to being read because it unfolds through articles, emails, chat logs, and interviews. The mixed media story kicks off with an article explaining an urban legend known as “Background Man.” Essentially, a naked man keeps popping up in the background of obscure movies. Originally “Background Man” was thought to be a hoax, but the unclothed figure has been appearing more prominently in an ever-increasing number of films, TV shows, and music videos, leading to the legend being taken more seriously.

Experimental filmmakers Soraya Mousch and Max Holborn find themselves caught up in the mystery surrounding “Background Man.” But although they’re treated as suspects by the police, they’re just as haunted by the unsettling phenomenon as everyone else.

This story was first published in Clockwork Phoenix 2: More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness (2009), but can also be found online at the link above, in The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen (2014), and in Dark Is Better (2023).

“Thirteen” (2013) by Stephen Graham Jones

The teenage protagonist of “Thirteen” lives in a small town that’s home to an urban legend surrounding the Big Chief Theater. According to local lore, at that cinema there’s a trick to thinning the veil between the world of the movie and the real world, allowing fiction to bleed into reality. All you have to do is close your eyes during the scariest part of the film—this trick is said to be exclusive to horror movies—and then hold your breath for two minutes.

It’s a simple idea pulled from childhood—I’m sure most of us were told at some point that we had to hold our breath passing a graveyard or going under a bridge for whatever superstitious reason—but in Stephen Graham Jones’ hands it becomes something far more creative and sinister.

An audio version of this story read by Jones himself is available online at the link above, but if you’d prefer to read it with your own eyes then you can find it in Halloween: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre (2013) and After the People Lights Have Gone Off (2014).

“Only Unity Saves the Damned” (2014) by Nadia Bulkin

Bay, Roz, and Lark are three outcasts who have big plans to get out of their small—and, in their eyes, dead-end—hometown. They decide to shoot a video at Goose Lake which supposedly catches Raggedy Annie—an alleged witch who was hanged by the townspeople hundreds of years earlier—on film. Tales of Raggedy Annie haunting the town and the lake have been circulating for years and many people are convinced that this footage finally proves that the stories are real.

But while the three friends should be enjoying their viral moment, their lives take an unfortunate turn for the genuinely creepy. Maybe it’s not Raggedy Annie they should be looking out for, though…

This story was first published in Letters to Lovecraft: Eighteen Whispers to the Darkness (2014), but it can also be found in Nadia Bulkin’s collection She Said Destroy (2017) and online at the link above.

“You Know How the Story Goes” (2018) by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

There are many urban legends about picking up hitchhikers in the dead of night (essentially, don’t do it!), but Thomas Olde Heuvelt flips the script in “You Know How the Story Goes” by having the hitchhiker be the protagonist.

Our main character is drinking at a bar and decides not to get a lift home with his friend—the designated driver—in the hopes of spending the night with a pretty girl. He fails. Faced with a long and cold walk home, he decides to try his hand at hitchhiking. The first lift he gets goes off without a hitch, but the strange woman who picks him up for the next leg of the journey takes him on the most terrifying ride of his life.

The English version of this scary supernatural story can be read right here at Reactor (link above!).

“The DEATH/GRIP Challenge” (2020) by Johnny Compton

As a lover of movies that are so-bad-they’re-good, I deeply wish that I could watch DEATH/GRIP—the fictional film that kicks off the events of this story. Teenager Alicia and her dad Benito bond over their shared enjoyment of not only the movie, but also of the meme challenge that it spawns. All people need to do is taken a picture of one of their hands restraining the other while reaching for something funny and add some text to accompany it, always ending with a quote from the movie: “IT’S NOT ME, IT’S THE DEATH/GRIP!”

When Benito gets a job at his brother’s office—which is not a working environment that he’s used to, being more of a hard hat kind of guy—he starts sharing increasing numbers of DEATH/GRIP Challenge memes to get through the day. It doesn’t take long for Alicia to start getting seriously worried about his growing obsession with the memes. There’s a good amount of humor in this short story thanks to the memes themselves, but that doesn’t take away from the horror, which really ramps up towards the end.

As well as at the link above, you can also find this story in Johnny Compton’s collection Midnight Somewhere (2025).

Have you got any recommendations of short stories that feel like urban legends? Whether it’s a new spin on a classic tale or an original story that has that happened-to-a-friend-of-a-friend feel to it, I’d love to hear your suggestions below![end-mark]

The post Five Scary Short Stories That Read Like Urban Legends appeared first on Reactor.

Books Best of 2025

Notable Young Adult Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror of 2025

Check out 30 of the best young adult titles of the year

By Alex Brown

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Published on December 16, 2025

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It’s that time of year: best of list time! “Best” is such a subjective term, so I like to craft my list more like a “most notable” or “top picks.” I’m less interested in star ratings and more at books that compelled me, moved me, made me think of the world in a new way, had interesting or creative narrative styles, that sort of thing. Some of these were bestsellers while some were released with little fanfare. 

There were around 300 young adult speculative novels traditionally published in 2025, and after a lot of research, reading, and hemming and hawing, I narrowed them down to 30 must-haves.

Science Fiction

Coldwire by Chloe Gong

(The StrangeLoom Trilogy #1) In a world ravaged by climate change and economic disparity, there are two main societies: the privileged who reside upcountry in virtual reality and everyone else in the harsh real world of downcountry. Several teens from both social stratuses are pulled into the cold war raging between two upcountry nations. Espionage, murder, kidnapping, and mass surveillance abound.

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The L.O.V.E. Club by Lio Min

A couple years ago, Elle disappeared, and the L.O.V.E. Club—best friends Liberty, O, Vera, and Elle—shattered. Now the three survivors find themselves sucked into a video game that seems to have been built by Elle. Each level seems designed specifically for each girl, and the boss fights test their relationships with each other as much as their physical strength. All the traumas the girls experienced in the real world bubbles up in the virtual one, with deadly consequences.

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Titan of the Stars by E.K. Johnston

(Titan of the Stars #1) Celeste and Dominic don’t have much in common other than both traveling on the maiden voyage of the spaceship Titan. She is a dirt poor engineer hoping for new opportunities on Mars, and he is the privileged and bored son of the ship’s builder who dreams of going to art school. Someone releases ancient aliens onto the ship, and the luxury liner becomes a killing floor. To survive, Celeste and Dominic must set aside their class differences and work together.

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Fantasy

Among Ghosts by Rachel Hartman

Several years ago, Eileen escaped her abusive noble husband with her young son, a knight, a lapsed nun, and a dragon in human form. They wound up in the perpetually muddy village of St. Muckle’s and rebuilt their lives. Now, the deaths of several of Charl’s bullies in an abandoned abby kick off a series of unfortunate events. A plague races through the villagers, a dragon burns the town down, and enemies threaten Charl and his mother. He’ll need the help of some grumpy ghosts and a guilt-ridden ex-nun to save the day. Although a standalone novel, this is set in the same vaguely medieval European world as Hartman’s other YA fantasies. 

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I Am Not Jessica Chen by Ann Liang

At the prestigious Havenwood Academy, Chinese American cousins Jenna and Jessica are always being compared, Jenna less favorably. So when Jenna wakes up one day in Jessica’s body, she thinks she’s won the lottery. Except now she’s stuck in a life that isn’t hers and one she doesn’t actually want to live. Worse, everyone seems to be forgetting the real Jenna even existed. 

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The Leaving Room by Amber McBride

This novel-in-verse begins in death. Teenage Gospel helps newly dead children move onto whatever comes next. As a Keeper of the Leaving Room, her whole world is contained in the small closet lined with shelves of jars with memories from those who have passed through. She doesn’t know what came before she entered that room, only that the rules say she can never leave. Everything changes when Melodee, another Keeper, leaves her room and enters Gospel’s. 

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Love at Second Sight by F.T. Lukens

Cam expected his sophomore year of high school to be boring. Instead, his best friend and witch-in-training Al ditched them right when he discovered he was psychic. Now he, his werewolf crush Mateo, a nemesis who also happens to be an elemental spirit, and a ninth grader who is far too nosy for her own good try to help him save the life of a young woman whose bloody future Cam prophesies. The themes of commentary on queerphobia, how adults try to legislate bigotry by pretending they’re “protecting” children, and the ways parents can push their own fears onto their kids give this cozy fantasy real depth.

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Needy Little Things by Channelle Desamours

Sariyah has the uncanny ability to hear what people need, but there is a cost. If she doesn’t get the person what they need soon, she’ll suffer a terrible migraine. After her best friend Deja vanishes in the wake of one of Sariyah helping someone, she feels partly responsible. Her homelife goes chaotic as the secrets of friends and family are exposed. As she searches for Deja, she makes choices that might bring her home or put her in the same danger Deja is in.

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Skipshock by Caroline O’Donoghue

The train Margo boards is supposed to take her to her boarding school in Dublin. Instead, she ends up on a train that can travel between worlds with a strange boy, Moon, who claims he’s an interdimensional salesman. The train goes North, where time is fast, and South, where time slows. Margo’s arrival throws the orderly Southern rules into chaos and puts a target on her back. Moon might be the only one who can keep her safe long enough to return her to Earth.

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Horror

And the River Drags Her Down by Jihyun Yun

Soojin has the magical ability to bring the dead back to life, but not without consequences. When she discovers her sister drowned in the river, she makes the impulsive decision to resurrect her. At first Mirae seems fine, but it becomes increasingly clear she came back…wrong. Mirae wants to use her second chance to get revenge on the people she blames for their mother’s death, and there may not be much Soojin can do to stop her bloody rampage.

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The Dead of Summer by Ryan La Sala

(The Dead of Summer #1) The vacation destination of Anchor’s Mercy, Maine, is a little slice of heaven for everyone except Ollie. He and his mother return after several months on the mainland where she’s been receiving cancer treatment. When he left he blew up his friendships, and repairing that is at the top of his list now that he’s back. Or, it would be if a terrifying eco-plague wasn’t spreading from the coral and turning people into zombies. The story is told partly in prose and partly through interviews, journal entries, and other ephemera gathered after the pandemic has already claimed the island.

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Hazelthorn by C.G. Drews

Evander has spent most of his life trapped on the rundown Hazelthorn estate owned by his ultra wealthy guardian, Byron Lennox-Hall. After Byron’s grandson Laurie tried to kill Evander, he was banned from the gardens and leaving the property, and never allowed to be alone with the only other kid on the estate. When Byron dies a suspicious death, both boys reunite to search for the killer before they strike again. 

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The Others by Cheryl Isaacs

(The Unfinished #2) Not much time has passed since the events of the first book, and Avery is trying to put that all behind her. But Key, who Avery rescued from imminent death, can’t move on, and other locals are still mourning their loved ones who never returned. Strange shapes begin to appear in reflective surfaces and once again she must draw on the stories of her Kanyen’kehá:ka (Mohawk) culture to stop the horrors trying to break free.

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Dystopian

All Better Now by Neal Shusterman

Like the next author in this category, Neal Shusterman is one of the all-time greats in YA dystopian fiction. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve also seen several YA books dealing with plagues and mass death. Shusterman does his take on the pandemic with Crown Royale, a virus that, if it doesn’t kill you, makes you permanently ecstatic and easy-going. Of course, capitalism immediately discovers how to exploit that. The stories of three teens, Morgan, Rón, and Mariel, converge as they move through this strange new world.

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Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins

(The Hunger Games) Collins takes readers back to the Hunger Games with this story of Haymitch as a teen. We already knew that Haymitch had won the 50th competition, and now we get to see how. This isn’t a cash grab “how did Han Solo get his last name” story. True to form, Collins fills this prequel with biting commentary on propaganda, authoritarianism, and resistance. 

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These Vengeful Gods by Gabe Cole Novoa

Sixteen-year-old Crow is one of the last descendants of the God of Death. The others were executed years ago at the behest of the powers that be, so Crow hides his abilities as a Deathchild. After his uncles are arrested, to secure their freedom Crow is forced to participate in the Tournament of the Gods. This takes the trope of highly stratified societies with economic and systemic disparities and runs it through a queer filter.

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This Is the Year by Gloria Muñoz

Julieta is a rising senior living in a near-future Florida wracked by climate change. After her sister Ofelia’s death, Juli would do anything to escape. Her lucky break comes with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work for the StarCrest’s Cometa Initiative, a private space program that plans to have New American teens establish the first colony on the Moon. The narrative structure is so compelling, part prose and part poetry.

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Anthologies

These Bodies Ain’t Broken edited by Madeline Dyer

YA anthologies on disability are few and far between, so it was a relief that this one was so good. Dyer does a good job of covering a variety of disabilities, from neurodivergence to chronic illness to physical disabilities, and often the same disability from multiple perspectives. Looking at disability from a horror perspective is what turns this from a run-of-the-mill premise into something fierce. This is a vital, well-written anthology.

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Why on Earth: An Alien Invasion Anthology edited by Vania Stoyanova & Rosiee Thor

I am a sucker for alien stories, especially of the YA variety, so this was practically tailormade for me. The concept revolves around Captain Iona, who is headed for earth to retrieve her brother, an extraterrestrial posing as a movie star. Their ship crashes, spawning eleven fun and funny stories about the aliens and humans dealing with the aftermath. I’ve been describing it as “cozy alien invasion.”

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Parallel Universe

Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe by C.B. Lee

Brenda Nguyễn and Kat Woo both live in Los Angeles, California, just not the same one. Brenda’s is wracked by climate change and underfunding while Kat’s is a magical utopia of wyverns and teleportation. When portals start to go haywire in Kat’s world, the two girls have an accidental meet-cute at Brenda’s father’s cafe. From there, they have to not only sort out who is creating the portals that are destabilizing the boundaries between the two worlds, but also things like college applications, prom, cat-sized dragons and dragon-sized cats, and being the Chosen One.

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The Singular Life of Aria Patel by Samira Ahmed

Science nerd Aria broke up with her boyfriend, Rohan, in anticipation of going off to college. After witnessing a terrible car accident, she comes to in a parallel world. Every day she wakes in a new version of her world. The only consistent things are a poem from English class, her ex, and a raging headache. The more things change, the less she’s able to hold onto them, and the more drawn she feels to Rohan. Can she get back to the “real” world or will she spend eternity tumbling through the multiverse?

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Dark Fantasy

Moth Dark by Kika Hatzopoulou

A few years ago, ruptures burst forth in our world, connecting it to a place now called the Darkworld. On the other side of the Dark portal are the elves, one of whom, genderfluid Nagau, tries to kill Sascia. The timelines are out of sync between the two worlds, so when Nugau returns, they are younger and have no idea who Sascia is. As the two keep meeting, the mystery begins to deepen, as do Nagau and Sascia’s feelings for each other. With a war between humans and elves on the horizon, their love may not be enough to keep them together.

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The Otherwhere Post by Emily J. Taylor

When she was a child, Maeve’s father was embroiled in a terrible tragedy that led to the Written Doors being destroyed and the people in Inverly killed. But when an otherwhere mail carrier delivers a letter to her declaring his innocence, she sets out to clear his name. Maeve scams her way into an apprenticeship at the Otherwhere Post to track down the letter writer and find out what really happened to her father all those years ago.

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Twin Tides by Hien Nguyen

A woman’s corpse turns up in Les Eaux, Minnesota, and Aria and Caliste are shocked to learn she is their missing mother. Even more shocked because they didn’t know they had a mother who was missing or that they were identical twins separated as toddlers. Both live very different lives—Caliste is a wealthy influencer with an emotionally distant father, while Aria is working as much as she can to help pay her sick aunt’s medical bills—but they’re forced together to understand why so many people keep dying in Les Eaux and what connection the town has to their mom.

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Historical

Costumes for Time Travelers by A.R. Capetta

Calisto lives in the town of Pocket, a place outside time where time travelers often wash up. One of those travelers is Fawkes, a teen on the run from the Time Wardens. They want to destroy all aberrations to their preferred timeline, and that includes Fawkes and many of the folks in Pocket. The two teens jump across time, trying to escape the Time Wardens and to stop a man calling himself Korsika who wants to run time travel through the machinery of capitalism. As their journey takes them farther from home, it pulls them closer together.

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Empty Heaven by Freddie Kölsch

In the early 21st century, Darian returns to the small New England village of Kesuquosh. She fled a year earlier after her crush, KJ, was sacrificed to a local god as part of centuries-old ritual. Now she’s back and with the help of her friends she’ll free KJ from Good Arcturus’ control. Except it turns out Good Arcturus has secrets of its own and something even more monstrous than a literal monster has its sights set on KJ.

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Monsters

A Feast for the Eyes by Alex Crespo

Shay and Lauren’s small Oregon town has a local legend about a creature, the Watcher, that haunts the local woods. The same woods Shay and Lauren are having a dramatic break-up in when they’re attacked. No one believes the Watcher is real, so Shay enlists the help of a new crush, Zoe, and a couple friends, to set the record straight. It’s all secrets and lies until someone gets hurt.

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He’s So Possessed with Me by Corey Liu

After a wild night in a club, Colin loses track of his bestie Ren. When he finally tracks him down, Ren has no memory of what happened while he was lost. All he knows is that he’s suddenly and inexplicably in love. Colin hates his new boyfriend, especially once he realizes the guy isn’t what he claims to be. How do you say no to a book comped as Jennifer’s Body meets Heartstopper?

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A Mastery of Monsters by Liselle Sambury

(A Mastery of Monsters #1) When August’s older brother Jules disappears from college, she is desperate to get him back. After she’s attacked by a massive, mysterious monster, she’s offered a spot in the secret organization, the Learners’ Society. They’ll teach her how to bond with and control the humans who can shift into monsters…humans like the hot guy who lured August into the society and is struggling to keep his powers in check. The two of them may be the only ones who can find Jules before it’s too late.

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The Transition by Logan-Ashley Kisner 

Shortly after top surgery, Hunter is attacked by a monster in his backyard. On the plus side, his wounds are healing very quickly. On the negative side, he becomes sensitive to silver and starts his period for the first time in years since going on T. His friends, convinced the monster was a werewolf, join Hunter as they track down the beastie and try to stave off his physical changes. The trans werewolf body YA horror story I’ve always wanted! 

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The post Notable Young Adult Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror of 2025 appeared first on Reactor.

Books john varley

Looking Back at the Work of John Varley, 1947-2025

Where to start reading — or rereading — Varley’s many series and stories.

By James Davis Nicoll

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Published on December 12, 2025

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John Varley has died, alas.

For readers of my vintage, John Varley was a formative author. He drew on classic SF traditions but also embraced more contemporary concerns and trends. For example, he set his fiction in the Solar System as revealed by space probes, not in the Barsoomian planets of older SF. His settings featured newer tech and more forward-looking social mores¹. Other authors had imagined space colonies; Varley imagined space colonies whose inhabitants were free to pursue self-actualization in quite unconventional ways.

Varley’s fiction was well received, as a look at his ISFDB page should make clear. Many awards!

It has been seven years since Varley’s most recent novel. Fame is fickle and younger readers may be unfamiliar with his works. For the Varley-curious, here follows a brief guide to his works, starting with the novels. Varley published three standalone novels and three series, as well as a cornucopia of stories (most of which are quite good and some of which are great). I will start with the standalone novels.

Millennium (1983)

Mistakes were made! Radiation-damaged, chemically mutated terrestrial humanity is doomed! Time travel offers an escape clause: viable colonists can be snatched just before the disasters in which history says they perished, and dispatched to the off-world colonies. It’s a perfect plan provided that none of the overworked teams responsible for doing the snatching make a fatal error, and as long as no investigators in the past prove all too canny. One slip and causality itself is imperiled.

This book took a toll on Varley. Actually, it wasn’t so much the book as it was the terrible movie based on it, and the experience Varley had working on the movie. Someone, I don’t remember who, once compared working in Hollywood to placing one’s testicles in a vise and being handed a hundred dollars to endure until the pain became unbearable. Pre-Millennium Varley was a much more optimistic writer than he was after this dire experience.

Mammoth (2005)

A frozen mammoth is an amazing discovery, but not as amazing as the two human corpses next to it, one of whom is wearing what appears to be a modern wristwatch. Time travel seems implausible but what other explanations can there be²? It’s up to a billionaire scientist to work out what happened.

You know, if I knew that some time traveller was going end up frozen in ice tens of thousands of years ago, the last thing I’d do is work on time travel. Let someone else look at an icesheet from the inside.

Slow Apocalypse (2012)

A well-meaning scientist successfully weans America off foreign oil through the simple expedient of an oil-destroying bioweapon. In less time than it takes to say “the sudden, brutal end of civilization,” the bioweapon spreads across the Earth, rendering all oil unusable and modern civilization as dead as a dodo. Screenwriter Dave Marshall lacks the necessary skills to keep himself and his family alive. Nevertheless, Dave is determined to try.

Eight Worlds

Aliens attack! Billions perish as terrestrial technology is suppressed! But that’s boring history to the protagonists of these books, who live long after the Invasion, on worlds overlooked by the Invaders. For these people, equipped with fantastically powerful technology, the post-Invasion era would be a golden age… if not for the need for plot.

The Eight Worlds novels fall into two sets: (1) The Ophiuchi Hotline, written contemporaneously with the Eight Worlds short stories (which I will get to later) and (2) the three later Metal novels.

Varley didn’t want to look at his old notes when he restarted the series after a long hiatus; as a result, there are many continuity glitches. I consider this a series with an asterisk. Perhaps not a series in the purest sense.

The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977)

The Eight Worlds are cheerfully transhumanist (aided by alien information provided by the hotline mentioned in the title) but there are limits. Prior to the novel’s beginning, protagonist Lilo was arrested, tried, and condemned for a capital crime involving human DNA. The penalty is as final a death as the Eight Worlds can arrange. Survival is possible but at a price: Lilo is sentenced to work for a zealot whose determination to drive the Invaders out of the Solar System is in no way inhibited by the fact that the Invaders possess nigh-godlike power, while humans do not.

Hotline marks Varley’s transition from writing mostly short fiction (where the money ain’t) to novels. IMHO, Hotline is a bit of a mess but at least it’s a very energetic mess, with several novels’ worth of ideas crammed into a slender 237 pages.

Steel Beach (1992)

After a long hiatus, Varley wrote three more Eight Worlds novels. They aren’t quite consistent with the first book and they are considerably more pessimistic. (Thanks, Millennium.) It makes sense to distinguish between Hotline and the last three books.

It’s been two centuries since the Invasion, long enough for space-based humanity to have solved every existential problem… so why are so many people miserable? Plucky reporter Hildy Johnson discovers mounting evidence suggesting that something has gone very wrong with lunar civilization. Whether that’s something a civilization entirely dependent on artificial life-support can survive remains to be seen.

The Golden Globe (1998)

Kenneth “Sparky” Valentine is a talented actor of dubious morals whose endless peregrinations across the Solar System are driven in part by his disinclination to discuss with police precisely how his father died, and even more so by the relentless Charonese assassins who dog his heels. It’s not a sustainable life, but escape seems impossible.

As revealed in flashbacks, Valentine comes by his profound flaws honestly, having had one of the most memorably awful fathers in science fiction.

Irontown Blues (2018)

After the Big Glitch, traumatized former cop Christopher Bach reinvented himself as a detective in the Philip Marlowe mold. Only problem: nobody on the Moon seems to need a PI, not even one with an adorable cybernetically enhanced dog like Sherlock. Bach is canny enough to realize that supposed client “Mary Smith” is lying about her name, and no doubt much more… but not the scale or purpose of her stratagems.

The Gaean Trilogy

This series comprises Titan (1979), Wizard (1980), and Demon (1984). They focus on former American astronaut Cirocco Jones and her troubled relationship with the moon-sized alien Gaea, who is both nigh-godlike and also barking mad.

Titan (1979)

The crew of the Ringmaster is delighted to discover a twelfth moon of Saturn. They are less delighted when on approach to the enigmatic object, Ringmaster is grabbed and dismantled and its crew kidnapped. Cirocco Jones wakes alone and naked inside what turns out to be an immense, living torus filled with a wonderous and diverse ecology. Finding her crewmates will not be easy³.

Wizard (1980)

Gaea offers humanity biotechnological miracles. Thus, where prudence might suggest avoiding or even destroying the 1,300-kilometer alien, humans prefer to trade with Gaea. Humans have nothing tangible to trade. Luckily, the bored god craves entertainment and humans are if nothing amusing. At least when prodded. It’s Jones’ unhappy lot to play intermediary between insufficiently prudent humans and a dubiously sane god.

Demon (1984)

Working for Gaea is sheer misery. Jones decides that the only way to free herself is to bring down Gaea. That may sound impossible but really, how hard could it to defeat a mad god?

Note that Wizard was written before Millennium; Demon came out after Varley had been put through the Hollywood wringer. Hence Wizard is much more cheerful than its sequel, Demon.

An interesting historical note: this series features many lesbians and bisexual women. That sort of inclusivity wasn’t often the case forty years ago. Unfortunately, these women seem to have been crafted to please a male gaze, but still may be of interest for those interested in LGBTQ+ representation in older SF. Just as an overall note, I should mention that not everything in Varley’s fiction has aged well, including the tendency of love interests to be alarmingly young, and readers may want to be aware of that along with the various merits of these works.

Thunder and Lightning

The Thunder and Lightning series is consciously retro, evoking the good old days when a single misunderstood genius could open up space, provide boundless cheap energy, and upend civilization… given only pluck, super-science, and a crew of teens. IMHO, it’s an attempt to emulate Heinlein⁴.

Red Thunder (2003)

An overlooked design flaw imperils Ares Seven, the first American expedition to Mars. The only way for help to reach the astronauts in time is for an inarticulate genius to invent an unprecedented space drive and for a collection of space-obsessed teens to kit-bash a spaceship together from spare parts. What are the odds of that succeeding?

Red Lightning (2006)

A generation after Red Thunder, Mars is a frontier no more, much to the distress of teen Ray Garcia-Strickland. What hope has he of interplanetary adventure? Be careful what you wish for: Ray gets all the excitement he could want when a relativistic object impacts Earth, endangering his terrestrial loved ones.

Rolling Thunder (2008)

This novel focuses on Ray’s daughter, a young Martian Navy lieutenant (who seems to be subtly modeled on Heinlein’s Podkayne). This younger Garcia-Strickland hates living on Earth. She hates dealing with the endless stream of Earthers who want to emigrate to Mars. The summons that calls her back to Mars is a welcome relief. The opportunity to venture on to Europa is even more promising… because neither Podkayne nor any other human suspects what’s waiting for humanity on Europa.

Dark Lightning (2014)

The starshipRolling Thunder sets out for the stars… only for Jubal, the man who gave humans cheap space and abundant power, to announce midtrip that the ship must halt mid-voyage or be destroyed. This proclamation sets in motion the inevitable fate of every generation ship: deep space mutiny! …Unless two plucky twins can somehow save the day.

Superheroes (1995)

In addition to the novels in the precis above and the short works I will discuss below, Varley edited a single anthology: Superheroes, co-edited with Ricia Mainhardt. I mention it for the sake of completeness, but it is an odd duck that I don’t think I ever reread—please chime in if you have!

The Short Works

As diverting as Varley’s novels could be, he made his mark as a short story writer. Unfortunately, such money as there is in writing is in novels. Thus, Varley pivoted to novels in the late 1970s. Despite the iron hand of the market, Varley still wrote an impressive body of short works. In fact, it’s to these short works I turn when I want to reread Varley. They are where I would recommend readers new to Varley should begin.

The shorts are too numerous to go through story by story—ALTHOUGH I COULD!—but my favourites include “Options” (a study of the early days of on-demand gender change), “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank” (a tale of holidays gone wrong, a frequent theme in early Varley), and “The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged)” (a short but memorable exploration of what atomic war could mean to you).

A decade ago, I’d have advised readers new to Varley to snap up Good-Bye, Robinson Crusoe and Other Stories, and The John Varley Reader, which between them⁵ had almost every Varley short work. Alas, while Reader is still in print, Robinson Crusoe does not appear to be. Used copies can be had but they don’t seem to be cheap. As I see it, new readers should keep their eye out for the two collections above or the older trio of collections, The Persistence of Vision (1978), The Barbie Murders (1980) AKA Picnic on Nearside (1984), and Blue Champagne (1986). The older collections appeared as mass market paperbacks in an era of vast print runs, and should be easy to track down.

Or perhaps some publisher could release a comprehensive Varley collection. Hint, hint. It would be a fitting tribute. In the meantime, what are your favorites? Which novels or stories would you recommend to a first-time reader?[end-mark]

1. In retrospect, those shiny futurist mores were merely 1970s hijinks with bigger tail fins. However, it was hard to notice that in the 1970s. Thank goodness that modern SF has finally settled on some truly timeless notions. Nothing written today will ever seem dated. ︎
2. Yes, yes: spacemen from an exploded fourth planet is another explanation but not the correct one. ︎
3. And in one case, undesirable. ︎
4. Seriously? “Podkayne” isn’t already in my Word dictionary? ︎
5. I can say this for Varley: there doesn’t seem to be much overlap in his contemporaneous collections. Varley wasn’t the sort of author to make readers buy the same story twice. ︎

The post Looking Back at the Work of John Varley, 1947-2025 appeared first on Reactor.

Books Horror Highlights

Ancient Gods and Arachnids: Horror Highlights for December 2025

Add a little horror to your holiday reading list!

By Emily C. Hughes

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Published on December 11, 2025

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While December is a slow month for publishing as a whole, and especially for horror publishing, you’d be a fool not to keep an eye on the month’s new books, lest they sneak up behind you in a dark alley. Here are five I’m particularly excited about.

Snake-Eater by T. Kingfisher

(Dec 1, 47north) Any new T. Kingfisher horror book pole-vaults to the top of my TBR pile (I like her fantasy very much as well, but horror always takes priority). This novella follows Selena, a woman fleeing a bad living situation for her late aunt’s desert home. Along with her dog, Copper, Selena starts to adapt to desert life—meeting her neighbors, making friends, and adjusting to a completely new ecosystem. But there’s something watching from the underbrush: an ancient god known as Snake-Eater. And it wants something from Selena—something her aunt promised it. One thing Kingfisher does especially well is writing the natural world in a way that’s reverent but not overly romantic—I loved her descriptions of the Appalachian woods in The Twisted Ones, and I can’t wait to see what she does with a whole new biome here. Plus, as with most Kingfisher novels, readers can expect an exceedingly charming cast of characters and a very, very good dog.

Down Came the Spiders by Ally Russell

(Dec 2, Scholastic) Now that I’m an adult, I have a healthy respect for spiders, even if I’d prefer they keep their distance. As a kid, however, I was significantly less chill about anything with eight legs. Andi, a spider-obsessed sixth grader, goes to a party hoping to get a good look at the host’s dad’s spider collection—and she gets way more than she bargained for. Soon, Andi and her friends are trying desperately to evade a veritable spider invasion, and the adults are nowhere to be found. It’s up to Andi to untangle this web. Nobody’s writing better horror for middle grade readers than Russell, and this one’s perfect for arachnophobes and -philes of all ages.

Dark Sisters by Kristi DeMeester

(Dec 9, St. Martin’s) DeMeester’s fiction is often concerned with forces that constrain women’s lives, and that’s certainly the case with her third novel. Dark Sisters is told across three timelines: in 1750, Anne, a healer fleeing accusations of witchcraft, starts a small settlement deep in the forest around a powerful, ancient tree. In the 1950s, Anne’s descendant Mary feels trapped in her existence as a housewife until she meets a woman who brings her to life again. And in 2007, Mary’s granddaughter Camilla, only daughter of the strict town preacher, is determined to unravel the mysterious power controlling the town—one that’s tied to the ancient tree at its heart. If you’re a fan of religious horror, feminist horror, cults, and/or witches, this one’s for you. 

Midnight Somewhere by Johnny Compton

(Dec 9, Blackstone) I consider it a gift when an author I like releases a short story collection—it’s like a tasting menu of the inside of their brain (not to torture a metaphor or anything). Compton’s 2023 debut novel The Spite House haunted me, and so I’m eagerly anticipating Midnight Somewhere, which features twenty one stories that span genres and themes. Of note: “The Merge Monster Incident: One Year Later,” about a roller coaster that comes to life and disappears with all its riders still aboard; “I Caught a Ghost in My Eye,” about, well, a haunted eye; and  “Doctor Bad Eyes is at the Top of the Stairs Again,” about a mother facing down the ghost who keeps scaring her kids.

The Writhing, Verdant End by Corey Farrenkopf, Tiffany Morris, & Eric Raglin

(Dec 9, Cursed Morsels) All three of these authors are making a name for themselves in the ecohorror space—Morris’ Green Fuse Burning, Farrenkopf’s Haunted Ecologies, and Raglin’s Extinction Hymns all come highly recommended (to you, by me). This volume contains new novellas from Farrenkopf and Raglin and several new short stories from Morris: tales of kudzu cities, unholy mutations, birds, bees, the Flower Man, and a birding vacation that glimmers with the promise of resurrecting an extinct species—at great cost.

It never gets easier choosing just a few books to highlight from the many released each month—to see the full list of December’s new horror books and beyond, head over to my website.[end-mark]

News and Notes

The 2026 new horror list: The 2026 horror list is live! Head over to Read Jump Scares to start building your TBR for next year—we’ll have new books from Paul Tremblay, Ronald Malfi, Bethany C. Morrow, Gemma Amor, Monika Kim, V. Castro, Catriona Ward, Clay McLeod Chapman, Sarah Gailey, Nick Cutter, Daniel Kraus, Eric LaRocca, CJ Leede, Mónica Ojeda, Nat Cassidy, Adam Nevill, Philip Fracassi, Gwendolyn Kiste, Kylie Lee Baker, Cynthia Pelayo, and so many more. As always, I’ll keep updating the list throughout the year (many titles for fall and winter 2026 haven’t quite been announced yet at this point), and if you see that I’ve missed something, please tell me about it here!

The year in horror: I picked my three favorites of the year for Talking Scared’s year-end State of the Horror Nation episode, and now I want to know: what were the best horror books you read in 2025?

The post Ancient Gods and Arachnids: Horror Highlights for December 2025 appeared first on Reactor.

Books ghost stories

Eight M.R. James Stories to Make Your Holidays a Little Scarier

Grab your eggnog and gather round for some spooky, spine-tingling tales from the master…

By Sam Reader

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Published on December 15, 2025

Illustration by James McBryde

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Illustration by James McBryde

Back when he was provost of a university, M.R. James had a special tradition for students. He would read aloud to those who came to his quiet Christmas gatherings, debuting his macabre tales before a rapt audience. In the modern day, while bright holiday cheer might have replaced traditions like reading ghost stories for Christmas, it’s still a treat for horror fans to gather around the fireplace (or the radiator, or the space heater—whatever you have handy) and read from one of the greats.

That said, despite James having an established reputation for Christmas reading, it can be hard to pick the right story: “Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad” is fantastic, but a little long for a nighttime read. “Lost Hearts” is short, but full of things you don’t want to imagine just before bed. And “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” starts with several pages of Latin. With this in mind, here are eight stories you can and should read aloud, if you like your holiday just a touch darker…

“The Mezzotint”

There’s not a lot to “The Mezzotint,” but it works specifically because it’s a minimalist story. The fear comes simply from watching the horrible way the events in the haunted photograph unfold, the scene growing more macabre each time. As each glance fills in the picture, the imagination fills in the blanks, with the grotesque figure dressed as a priest scrambling ever closer to the house and its inhabitants. While (like many of the stories here) the reveal offers some relief, it’s guaranteed to give readers just enough of a chill to last until morning.

“The Haunted Dolls’ House”

Another “observer of haunted artwork” story, “The Haunted Dolls’ House” focuses on the strange events in the titular dollhouse rather than a changing photograph, which takes some of the eerier aspects of “The Mezzotint” out of the picture but still delivers an odd enough ghost story for a Christmas read (especially if someone actually is getting a dollhouse). There’s something that’s just the right kind of scary about a ghost story playing out entirely in miniature, a sinister tale unfolding in front of a full-size human’s eyes, from inside what’s meant to be a pretty toy, creating just enough compelling weirdness to hold an audience when read aloud.

“The Ash-tree”

“The Ash-tree” has everything—quiet atmosphere, weird doings out in the dark, a murder mystery with a solution too strange to be believed, macabre visuals, and of course an unusually dark sense of humor. All these things make it perfect to be read aloud, as none other than the great Christopher Lee handily demonstrates here. The best thing about “The Ash-tree” is that it’s a tale, one as twisted and knotted as the haunted tree at its center. Whether you’re in the mood for a creature story, a murder mystery, a darkly comic gothic satire, or a bit of everything in between, this is one your audience is guaranteed to remember.

“Number 13”

A lot of the stories mentioned thus far are kind of grotesque but for a different sort of tale, “Number 13” has you covered. It’s still unnerving, but in a departure from the macabre images of the previous three, the ghost here is a presence and a hotel room that simply shouldn’t exist. For the most part, the story gets by on atmosphere, with the strangeness of the room that only appears at night and its ominously singing inhabitant taking up most of the plot. It’s light on scares and light on death, which might be just the perfect thing for a Christmas Eve read-along, even if its central questions are left ominously hanging.

“A School Story”

Framed as a story shared between old friends looking back on their old school days and name-checking one of the best “true ghost stories” out there (The Horror of Berkeley Square, referring to what’s been called the most haunted house in London), from its opening pages, “A School Story” is a perfect candidate for a Christmastime ghost story. There’s a full moon, a strange teacher, and a mysterious disappearance—but more than that, thanks to the framing device and the generally ambiguous and unnerving second half of its quick length, it captures the exact feel of a fireside ghost story or campfire tale. It sets up its premise of a teacher and his odd watch-chain keepsake, lays out its haunting, and leaves us with only questions to ponder in the night, just as any ghost (or any good ghost story) always does.

“Casting the Runes”

Another story with the cadence that begs to be read aloud, “Casting the Runes” has one hell of a pedigree behind it. A well-loved classic in the James canon (and adapted as the classic horror movie Night of the Demon), it’s a story that is M.R. James at his droll, strange best. What the horror-focused adaptations miss of course, is the deadpan humor (the villain is introduced terrifying kindergarteners, having offered to entertain them with a magic lantern show), fourth-wall breaks (James jumps scenes by writing “[t]he next scene that does require to be narrated is…”), and byzantine revenge plots. It’s a tale that’s ready-made for an audience, perfect for an evening read.

“The Diary of Mr. Poynter”

One of the quicker selections and one that requires significantly less historical context than some of James’ work, “The Diary of Mr. Poynter” is a short, sharp shock in story form. It’s great for reading aloud, given the accents and voice work James puts into the text, the central image of a two-legged animalistic creature is just on the right side of scary without being gruesome, and despite the shorter length it’s one of the more descriptive stories in the James canon. It might be small, but it definitely packs a punch.

“Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book”

A slower burn, “Canon Alberic” is a story that can be read multiple times while picking up different details, but also one with enough transfixing images that the atmosphere of the story will settle around readers as the evening grows darker. It’s also perfect fit for the long, sometimes lonely evenings of late autumn and winter, as the interplay between the main character and his guide is just weird enough to seem off, with each description of the story’s demon and strange, unsettling noises leaving enough to the imagination that the environment itself can be worked into the story. It allows the audience time to settle in, and gives readers an opportunity to draw on any lurking shadows and ambient noise (or lack of it) to hold them in place while James’ story weaves its spell.[end-mark]

The post Eight M.R. James Stories to Make Your Holidays a Little Scarier appeared first on Reactor.

Books reading recommendations

Five Books About Conversing With Animals

How great would it be to talk with animals, through magic or technology or… whatever?

By James Davis Nicoll

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Published on December 16, 2025

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We all understand that humans and animals cannot easily communicate with each other. Most animals find it hard to understand human speech (though some commands and phrases can be learned); we often find their body language (the product of millions of years of divergent evolution) opaque¹; and their handwriting is appalling (though some can push buttons). Even dogs, animals that have lived with and been shaped by humans—and have shaped humans in return—for a very long time, can be hard to understand. Bad luck for any Timmies stuck down a well.

Humans often think that they are capable of understanding what an animal understands or wants, or that they have communicated clearly, but they can be mistaken². How sure can you be that the animal understood you, or you them³?

It would be so convenient if there were some shortcut to bridging the gaps… Some way to tell the cat that no, he cannot scratch the sofa, to explain to the dog that you do not want a well-aged dead gopher, or to convince the local ravens that you are not their enemy. This common human wish makes for an engaging plot premise. An ability to converse with animals (magically or technically or somehow conferred) turns up in book after book. Such as the following.

The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling (1894)

Mowgli learns the language of the animals by the simple expedient of having been orphaned and then adopted and raised by wolves⁴. Conveniently for Mowgli, for the most part all animals speak the same language. This is not an unmixed blessing, as not everything animals say is something one wants to hear.

To be honest, I am pretty skeptical about many details of Kipling’s zoology. Dogs and cats are often baffled by the other’s body language. Canid and feline lineages diverged comparatively recently. Imagine the gulf between the snake Kaa and primate Mowgli. I don’t think that there is any fieldwork that supports the notion of a unified spoken language among animals. It’s almost as though The Jungle Book is not intended as a serious scientific hypothesis.

Daybreak—2250 A.D. by Andre Norton (1954)

Silver-haired Fors of the Puma Clan of the hidden city Eyrie is both victim of and beneficiary of the lingering radiation of the atomic war that was civilization’s final triumph. His visible deviation from local physiological norms makes him an outcast, but at least he is accompanied in his travels by his giant semi-telepathic cat Lura.

Honestly, the frequent existence of telepathic bonds with animals in the works of Andre Norton probably deserves its own essay. It feels like a bit of a cheat—surely, even a direct brain-to-brain connection between dissimilar species would involve a communications gap—but at least this novel isn’t about how wonderful or inevitable such bonds are. Not primarily, at any rate. Telepathic bonds with animals do seem awesome, but the plot is focused elsewhere.

The City of the Sun by Brian Stableford (1978)

The starship Daedalus surveys Arcadia to determine if the human colony on that alien world survived a century of isolation or if, like most of the colonies, it collapsed in the face of alien conditions. Arcadian humans did survive, thanks to a feature of the local ecology that was overlooked prior to colonization. Moreover, the colonists now enjoy an unexpectedly close relationship with the animals around them. Whether the result still counts as human is an open question.

This is a spoiler, so skip down to the next section if you want to avoid it… The local feature is an invasive fungus that every animal carries. Among its interesting properties is the ability to record and transfer information such as memories. Functionally, the fungus provides the network for a collective mind, to which human intelligence is a welcome addition. Whether this development is good or bad is rather ambiguous.

A Deeper Sea by Alexander Jablokov (1992)

Colonel Ilya Sergeiivich Stasov deciphers cetacean languages using intense research and also by torturing dolphins and their relatives until the sea creatures break three thousand years of silence. The unfortunate beasts are then drafted into Russia’s war with Japan and its allies, a development that proves less than ideal along a number of axes, before playing a key role in SETI… another development that is less than ideal.

Jablokov’s dolphins are a rather unpleasant lot, and only some of that is due to the trying circumstances in which they find themselves.

Applied research might seem an unsexy option for introducing inter-species communication, but it does have the advantage of being a lot more plausible than “telepathy,” “a very convenient fungus,” or “somehow”⁵. However, I must ask my readers not to take this book as a hint that torture might be scientifically productive.

The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay (2020)

Outback wildlife park guide Jean gains the ability to converse with animals the same way millions of other humans did, thanks to a novel and extremely contagious superflu with an unprecedented cognitive side effect. While zoanthropathy (or “Zooflu”) doesn’t provide ambiguity-free communication between species, it does make it far more difficult to ignore the gap between what animals are and what humans would like them to be.

This is just the sort of distraction one does not want while searching for a missing granddaughter.

Society basically falls apart as soon as zoanthropathy spreads. I am not sure why it does. I did like the detail that with the communications barrier greatly reduced, a lot of what animals have to say sounds like noisy (often hostile) gibberish. It’s difficult to convey concepts one does not have in common.

Would it be better if humans could talk to animals? Might it not be worse?⁶ Or would it do little? No doubt you have your own conclusions, for further discussion in the comments below.[end-mark]

1. Except in the case of my late cat Eddie, who didn’t really do body language. He maintained the same amiable demeanor whether he was thinking about head-bonking other cats, working out how to channel surf by messing with radio buttons, or contemplating waking me by lifting me by my left eyelid. ︎
2. I remain skeptical of one owner’s claim that their dog sank its teeth into my calf because it really liked me… except perhaps in a culinary sense. ︎
3. “Oh, good! The raised tail means that skunk is happy!” is not a sentence you want to hear from anyone standing next to you. ︎
4. Which as all DC Comics fans know is how Black Condor learned to fly like a condor. Do not try this at home. Or at the peak of a mountain. ︎
5. Some animals do a convincing job of seemingly learning to speak. Consider this angry cockatoo. ︎
6. I suspect that many farm animals would see the ability to ask not to be eaten as a plus. ︎

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Books reading recommendations

Five Freshly Reprinted SFF Books and Series

Did you miss these books the first time around? Good news!

By James Davis Nicoll

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Published on December 8, 2025

Image by 愚木混株 Yumu [via Unsplash]

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Image by 愚木混株 Yumu [via Unsplash]

There are many reasons one might miss books when they are first released. Perhaps the books were poorly distributed, the warehouse in which the print run was stored flooded, the cover art misled purchasers¹, you weren’t in the mood for that book at that particular time, you couldn’t afford it, you had to detour to the emergency room before reaching the bookstore, you had yet to be born when they were released², and so on. Given how short the shelf life of a book can be³, it’s not uncommon for readers to discover that they missed their window of opportunity.

Such readers need not despair and hurl themselves into the Seine⁴—there is such a thing as reprints. New editions provide readers with that rare thing, the second chance. You might want to consider these five recently (or soon to be) re-released books and series.

Dominion of the Fallen by Aliette de Bodard

For the last eight centuries, fallen angels have found refuge in Paris, the City of Lights. This has not always worked out to Paris’ benefit, as the Fallen’s Great Houses are as keen on competition as they are indifferent to collateral damage. Since the 1914 unpleasantness, Paris has become a desolation.

House Silverspires survived the conflict. It survived the loss of its founder, Morningstar. Can it survive what is to come?

Dominion of the Fallen includes three novels, The House of Shattered Wings (2015), The House of Binding Thorns (2017), and The House of Sundering Flames (2019). All are slated for re-release with brand-new covers.

Community Witch by Ash Kreider

Aspen Fahey is a non-binary aspiring community witch and failed witchfluencer living in downtown Toronto. When their aunt dies and bequeaths them a witching practice on Vancouver Island, their life unexpectedly turns into a Lifetime movie: early thirties enby leaves the big city to move to a beautiful small town, has meet-cute with beautiful stranger before running into The One That Got Away.

Community Witch is kind of an odd duck for this essay. Unlike the other examples, Community Witch is a recent release. But it began as a self-published work. A publishing deal with Varus Publishing offers a more prominent profile⁵. Accordingly, the book has been unpublished in its original form, and will be re-released in February of 2026 as Parksville Community Witch.

Arabella of Mars by David D. Levine

Raised on the frontier world of Mars, Arabella Ashby was dragged back to Earth by her very proper mother. Arabella will be groomed into a suitable young woman for the very best sort of husband. But Arabella prefers less ladylike pursuits. Confounding the homicidal machinations of her malevolent cousin will be only the first of her adventures.

The Arabella of Mars series is a steampunk—remember steampunk?—planetary romance series consisting of Arabella of Mars (2016), Arabella and the Battle of Venus (2017), and Arabella the Traitor of Mars (2018), all of which have since fallen out of print, as books do. However, they’ve just been reprinted, so you need not miss them⁶.

Sarah Tolerance by Madeleine E. Robins

Sarah Tolerance’s Regency England is a different regency than the one we know. For one thing, the Prince of Wales married Catholic Maria Fitzherbert, which is why the Regent is the Queen Regent. Other details are quite familiar. Poor George III is still quite mad and the roles open to fallen women such as Sarah are still limited, unpleasant, and designed to encourage prudent women to conform. Sarah rejects the role of cautionary tale in favour of becoming quite possibly England’s first woman consulting detective.

The Sarah Tolerance series of old consisted of Point of Honour (2003), Petty Treason (2004) (both from Forge) and The Sleeping Partner (2011) (from Plus One Press). However, the relaunch of the series isn’t confined to a reprise of old material. The reprints are companied by a brand-new fourth volume, The Doxies Penalty (2025).

Letters to the Pumpkin King by Seanan McGuire

Originally published in 2014, Letters was billed as the first collection of Seanan McGuire’s non-fiction works⁷. It offers a diverse assortment of short pieces, non-fiction as well as poetry, that might otherwise be difficult to obtain. It did so in one of NESFA’s nicely-bound hardcovers that last forever. The combination of “works by an author whose awards are so numerous word count limits preclude listing them,” and “durable, well-made artifact” was enticing enough that readers purchased the whole print run. Which is good! Much better than not selling the entire print run. But a disappointment for anyone who missed the initial release⁸.

Or it was a disappointment! Now you can purchase the second edition.

(McGuire fans may also be interested to know there’s a new Velveteen, Velveteen vs. the Consequences of Her Actions, available for preorder.)

Books are always being reprinted, and thank goodness for that. Did I miss some notable recent or upcoming examples? Please mention them in comments below.[end-mark]

1. I know, I know. That seems terribly unlikely. There’s even a saying about judging books by covers that I someday plan to read… ︎
2. Not being born yet is my excuse for not picking up Curme Gray’s 1951 Murder in Millennium VI. ︎
3. It is not practical to keep books on shelves indefinitely, because that would take up valuable shelf space needed for more editions of The Lord of the Rings and various Stephen King novels. ︎
4. Which would do no good, as the Seine is already full of despairing operatic police officers. ︎
5. Hmmm. I could write an essay on self-published works that found their way into trad publishing. There are certainly enough examples. ︎
6. I assume that ebook issue counts as a re-release. ︎
7. Awkward phrasing for two reasons, one reasonable and one not. The reasonable one is that first implies there might be a second, and I am not sure there were more McGuire non-fiction books. My sources failed me. The unreasonable one is that the collection includes the complete texts of two poetry collections. If poetry counts as non-fiction or at least didn’t disqualify collections containing it as non-fiction, then the two poetry collections might count as non-fiction? Fun fact: I once joked to my boss I had a 128-step system to avoid overthinking and she thought I was serious. ︎
8. Especially readers who have never heard of NESFA. ︎

The post Five Freshly Reprinted SFF Books and Series appeared first on Reactor.

Books reading recommendations

Five SFF Short Stories Told Through Articles and Reviews

Speculative tales that unfold through (fictional) pieces of journalism.

By Ratika Deshpande

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Published on December 4, 2025

Photo by Fabien Barral [via Unsplash]

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Photo by Fabien Barral [via Unsplash]

I love the possibilities inherent in found fiction narratives—stories told through seemingly non-fictional materials such as in-world letters, notes, documents, etc. It’s a similar experience to reading primary sources for research in our real world, giving us the sense that by reading these documents, we’re participating in the story, piecing the facts together as we’re drawn ever deeper into the author’s world. 

I tend to find stories told through in-world journalism especially interesting, because while letters or notes may tell you something about their composer, journalism provides you with details not just about the people involved but also the journalist writing the piece, the publication they’re writing for and its audience, and the larger society in which that newspaper, magazine, or blog circulates, contributing to the overall worldbuilding at multiple levels. Here are five examples…

“The Incursus by Asimov-NN#71” by Gord Sellar

This story takes the form of a fictional review of a book written by Asimov-NN#71—an “author emulation” reverse-engineered from the original’s cognitive patterns and writing style to create a newer, more ideal version of Asimov’s consciousness, updated for the present day (i.e., 2033). If I’d read this when Sellar first wrote this piece back in 2016, I might have found the story to be curious, fascinating in a theoretical way.

Nine years later, with AI-written content making it difficult to distinguish human and algorithmic writing, it now reads more like horror. Since the rise of ChatGPT, we’ve become so accustomed to hearing tech executives raving about the limitless potential of AI that the innovations Sellar mentions in his piece do not sound implausible. The horror comes from realising how much this fictional article reads like various actual articles about AI-written books. It’s a surreal piece that piles head-spinning references to computing, mathematics, and philosophy into winding sentences that seem to make complete sense; even still, I felt hypnotized and couldn’t stop reading. 

“Root to Sapling, Sapling to Stem” by Wendy Nikel

The ship’s childrearing procedures are being debated again—activists are advocating for changes which would result in families raising their children at home and individuals even opting for the “unnecessarily risky” method of carrying a child and giving birth. For the author of this article, the current system of genetic donors and ship-raised children seems just fine—why increase the risk of spreading germs, physical injury, and psychological trauma through play and physical contact? So they interview Willa Shuman, the last person on board who was raised in the old-fashioned way, as part of a family, running wild, playing tag, and hugging her parents. Willa explains that she was heartbroken when they passed the child-rearing laws; having a child, she tries to persuade our journalist, is about so much more than simply passing on one’s genetic code. But will our narrator be convinced, when the current system is just so much more efficient?

“Enchanted Mirrors Are Making a Comeback. That’s Not Necessarily a Good Thing.” by Mari Ness

We’re all familiar with the internet convention of explaining exactly what the article is about in the headline—ideally, embedding just enough of a hook to convince readers to click through to the full story. Mari Ness (who has written both fiction and non-fiction for Reactor) has come up with a perfect exemplar—which means that her story’s title leaves me with very little that needs to be explained, here: you can just dive right in! It’s an ironic look at the development and neglect of technology and our desire to purchase objects to use as status symbols. A hilarious read, almost a little too close to reality in its absurdity.

“The Fairy Godmother Advice Column” by Leah Cypess

Not everyone can have a fairy godmother of their own, so it’s good that there’s an advice column that anyone can access. Our dearest advisor has a huge readership, but lately, some readers have been disappointed in her tendency to tell advice-seekers to go to therapy instead of giving them magical artefacts to solve all their problems. They wonder now—has she lost her magic? 

I’ve always enjoyed reading advice columns—they’re gossipy without being mean—and I love Cypess’s take on retelling fairytales through a new form; I could read an entire book of these columns.

“The Year’s Ten Best Blood Diseases” by Rhonda Eikamp

This story takes a more experimental, blog-driven approach to online journalism, combining reportage, commentary, and personal narrative in this post describing all the novel blood diseases that people have been busy inventing and implementing through livestreams and performance art, even making telepathy possible. The bloggers behind Living TissYou have taken the reporting a step further by personally trying some of these inventions. The results were unexpected (…as you, the reader, might expect). For all its emphasis on objectivity, it’s actually the personal details leaking into the reportage that helps draw us in to the story unfolding between the lines, although in this case that meaning is braided with layers of grief, marital conflict, and worrying technological developments. A fascinating read.[end-mark]

The post Five SFF Short Stories Told Through Articles and Reviews appeared first on Reactor.

Books Best of 2025

Reviewers’ Choice: The Best Books of 2025

Reactor’s regular book reviewers talk about notable titles they read in 2025

By Reactor

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Published on December 9, 2025

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As readers of speculative fiction, we are spoiled for choice. The book releases in the genres of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and beyond this year took us from crumbling colonial manors and secretive magical academies to empires on the brink of disaster, with alien archivists, mystery-solving vampires, and cosmic whales—and we are so lucky to get to read them all.

Below, Reactor’s regular book reviewers talk about notable titles they read in 2025—leave your own additions in the comments!

I had a hankering for a lot of cozy reads in 2025. I enjoyed them all, but one I wanted to highlight that I don’t think got enough attention is The Keeper of Lonely Spirits by E.M. Anderson, where a man who sees ghosts and was cursed to live forever (and looks fairly old to boot) finds love and a family while working at a cemetery in Ohio. Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil by Oliver Darkshire also arguably falls in this camp, though perhaps it’d be better to call it a delightful book rather than cozy. Same goes for Annalee Newitz’s Automatic Noodle—the novella’s robots were endearing and gave me hope of finding joy in a dystopia.

The only book at the top of my list, in fact, that wouldn’t be categorized as cozy or cozy-adjacent is The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson. This novel was one of the best fantasy books I’ve read for a long time, and deftly balances interesting, complex characters with rich worldbuilding and more than a few twists. I can’t wait for the sequel to come out. 

—Vanessa Armstrong

The Checquy series has long been one of my favorites: I’m always a sucker for a government agency dealing with the supernatural, and author Daniel O’Malley’s wry, snappy style is a perfect accompaniment to the ridiculous incursions the Checquy operatives have to put up with—shapechanging actresses, rampaging stegosauri, and a perfect fist-sized cube of granite in the Prince of Wales’s head. Although Royal Gambit is the fourth entry in the series, O’Malley keeps it fresh with a mostly-new cast of characters, some of whom are even questioning the need for the Checquy itself…

On the fantasy side, no one’s doing it like Emily Tesh. The Incandescent is a novel of hubris, romance and most of all the reality of being An Adult With A Job; unfortunately, our protagonist Dr. Saffy Walden, professor of summoning demons at England’s premier magic school, thinks she’s a lot better at employed adulthood than she actually is. Its characters are tangible and evocative (one of them I wanted deeply to throw out a window within paragraphs of him being introduced), and, as in her first novel, Tesh is incredibly skilled at raising the stakes. The Incandescent is just one book, but in 400 pages it accomplishes the energy and drive of a whole trilogy.

Once Was Willem is another standout on my list just for how grounded it feels in 12th-century England. There is magic in this world—enough to raise a boy named Willem from the grave, reshaped into something unnatural—but it’s filtered through the understandings of medieval Christianity and Augustinian monks, devilish sorcery and angelic miracles. A friend of mine called it “Seven Samurai but with monsters”, and, yeah. If that sounds good to you, go read the book.

Finally, I like to include a bit of nonfiction on these lists, because how strange the real world can be! This year my pick was David Baron’s The Martians, discussing the Martian “canals”—illusory straight lines crisscrossing the planet which seemed to expand and shrink with the seasons. Touted by the fervent Percival Lowell, they led much of the world to believe in life on Mars for a brief time before the theory came crashing down. It wasn’t just misguided science and too-small telescopes that drove the craze, Baron argues, but something more akin to religious fervor. People wanted to believe, and so they did.

—Sasha Bonkowsky

Caitlin Starling’s The Starving Saints has the atmosphere of horror and the catharsis of epic fantasy. Gorgeously written and suffused with symbolism, this is a novel about hunger, loyalty, and betrayal. The king and his intimates are starving to death in a castle under siege. Divine figures appear at the gates. These figures are not the saviours they appear. Only three very different women—an excommunicate nun, a devout and loyal knight, and a dispossessed former noblewoman surviving as a castle servant—notice anything wrong. If they’re very lucky, they may survive.

Elizabeth Bear’s The Folded Sky is the latest entry in her White Space space opera continuity. Part thriller, part murder mystery, and part Big Ideas Space Opera Adventure, it has pirates, professional adults doing their best under stressful circumstances, really old alien constructs, and a star that could enter its final death throes at any time. Dr. Sunyata Song is a specialist historian, not a hero of the spaceways. But when push comes to shove, she’ll do whatever she has to keep people safe. It’s a hell of a good book.

Not since Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice has a book delighted me as much as Tasha Suri’s The Isle in the Silver Sea. Like Ancillary Justice, albeit in a sprawling, magnificent, Arthurian-influenced-but-all-its-own-thing fantasy fashion, The Isle in the Silver Sea is a book that takes apart the furniture and structure, the assumptions and expectations of the genre at the time of its writing, with a fierce and angry affection. Its concerns are life and stasis, power and transgression: a love story, a quest story, and a vigorous argument against monarchy. Resonant with tragedy and resounding in triumph, it’s a masterful book.

Honourable mentions to Melissa Caruso’s The Last Soul Among Wolves, Elizabeth Bear’s Angel Maker, Deva Fagan’s House of Dusk, Martha Wells’ fantastic Queen Demon, Emily Tesh’s brilliant The Incandescent, Katherine Addison’s The Tomb of Dragons, JR Dawson’s The Lighthouse at the Edge of the World, and Kate Elliott’s magnificent The Witch Roads.

—Liz Bourke

Two of my favorite adult speculative novels this year are probably going to make it to a lot of folks’ best of lists: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones and The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar. Although these are very different books—Jones’ is about a Blackfeet vampire who torments a preacher with his afterlife story of killing and being killed, while El-Mohtar’s is a lyrical fairytale about two sisters who tell the patriarchy to fuck off—but both had me hooked. It’s been months and I haven’t stopped thinking about either. The craft level is off the charts, seriously, just, oh my god.

As far as anthologies go, As the Earth Dreams: Black Canadian Speculative Stories edited by Terese Mason Pierre and Signos: A Fiction Anthology of Filipino Supernatural edited by Tilde Acuña, John Bengan, Daryll Delgado, Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III, and Kristine Ong Muslim are must-reads. Some utterly fantastic short speculative fiction by authors both well-known and new-to-me. I absolutely inhaled these anthologies.

I haven’t had as much literary fun in a hot minute as I did with Kat Hillis and Rosiee Thor’s Dead & Breakfast. Cozy mystery isn’t my usual reading fare, but this story of middle-aged married gay vampires having to solve a murder mystery while trying to keep their small-town B&B afloat was so cute. There’s a surprising amount of depth, thought, and social commentary. I can’t wait for the sequel!

I hadn’t realized how much I missed L.D. Lewis as an author until I read The Dead Withheld. Lewis takes on urban fantasy with her novella about a private eye who tries to solve the cold case of her wife’s murder. Ghosts, demons, succubi, and shitty men abound. My only complaint is that I want more! I want a whole series of Dizzy getting up to no good in San Guin.

As for young adult speculative fiction, you’ll have to wait for my Best of YA picks—coming soon! But I’ll tease you with a few of my favorites: Among Ghosts by Rachel Hartman is perfection, Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe by C.B. Lee had me in a cozy chokehold, and Costumes for Time Travelers by A.R. Capetta is all charm and heart.

—Alex Brown

My chosen favorites of the year, always difficult to narrow down, all share the word “epic,” among them. Some of that epic nature has to do with the length and breadth of the tale covered, of histories explored from monstrous, wondrous, or mortal perspectives. Others have moments of epic intimacy with beauty earthly and otherworldly, or horrifying brushes with the strange, the weird, and the uncanny. But all are epic in their pursuit of transformation, in using every tool at their disposal to inspire in others a changing of ways, a turn towards justice, reminders of how beautiful the everyday can be, and ultimately, the power of stories to transmute the human heart into a better, stronger, more love-filled vessel inside us. 

The Antidote is a 1920s dust bowl epic set in Nebraska, and author Karen Russell brings her brand of deeply human and incandescently strange to a small town where devastation is the new norm, save for one farmer who cannot understand his fortunate turn. Memory, faith, family, and basketball braid together in a story that emphasizes what we’re capable of when we forgive one another, and hold ourselves accountable.

Good Stab, a Native American vampire, tells his bloody tale of life everlasting to a skeptical priest, more interested in converting the quote-unquote savage than understanding his role in the undead man’s history. Stephen Graham Jones never misses, and The Buffalo Hunter Hunter may be his finest work yet, as he brings to life the tragedy of Good Stab, and what it means to be that which America is most terrified of, “the Indian who can’t die.” A true, new horror classic that will be revisited for decades to come.

A story of a story, an ouroboros within an ouroboros—Alix E. Harrow has crafted her most compelling book yet in The Everlasting, the time loop of a knight and a scholar, and a love to outlast history itself. The less you know, the better. I had my heart ripped apart, page after page, and I would not trade that pain even once for the value of the beauty within it, nestled like a burning coal in the flames. 

There are stories that sink into your heart like seedlings, and in The River Has Roots, Amal El-Mohtar brought forth the blooms in all their shades and scents and verdancy—their thorns, too, because even happy endings draw blood. A story of sisters and song, heartbreak and heart-mending, and love in every facet of the word, love and magic, intertwined like vines upon the trestle, this is a new favorite of mine and only affirms my belief of El-Mohtar’s place in my pantheon of immaculate storytellers. 

Special book shout outs include Uncertain Sons and Other Stories by Thomas Ha, Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab, Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders, and Saint Death’s Herald by C. S. E. Cooney’s. For video games, I was absolutely blown away by Star of Providence, Blue Prince, Sword of the Sea, and Silksong, which of course was everything I had hoped for, and much more. Finally, RPG podcast Worlds Beyond Number wrapped their first Book this year for The Wizard, The Witch, and the Wild One; if you’re looking for a great fantasy story, let me tell you, that’s 54 episodes of pure gold.

—Martin Cahill

There are years where nearly every book I read seems to be part of a larger syllabus, arranged by the universe or some minor literary deity in such a way that they spell out a broader argument, a trenchant commentary on our times and How We Live Now. 2025 was not such a year, but that doesn’t mean that there weren’t at least some interesting motifs spreading their wings and making a compelling argument.

Punk Horror. As someone whose tastes were shaped by the Dell Abyss imprint during his formative years—which included a novel that shares a name with an especially influential hardcore band—I have long considered horror to be a genre well-suited to channeling anger at authoritarian, oppressive, or otherwise stifling elements of society. Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Black Flame, which I reviewed earlier this year, is a sterling example of this. It’s both an outstanding example of one of my favorite subgenres, the story of a haunted film, and a book that juxtaposes eldritch horrors with the damage self-loathing and an unsettling familial dynamic have done to the novel’s protagonist.

The Exalted Weird. We live in strange times, and sometimes the only way to make sense of things is to get a little phantasmagorical. Olga Ravn’s The Wax Child (translated by Martin Aitken) is a tale of 17th-century witchcraft and authoritarian politics, along with moments of transcendental escape; it’s also narrated by, well, the titular wax child, an omniscient being capable of seeing through time but also possessing a haunting sense of yearning. And Roque Larraquy’s The National Telepathy (translated by Frank Wynne) is a surreal period piece about a group of people given access to an ability that could remake human society for the better, who never quite grasp the utopian potential of what they have encountered.

The Subtly Epic. Initially, it isn’t entirely clear where or when Isaac Fellman’s Notes From a Regicide is set. There are moments where it seems as though we’re in a funhouse mirror reflection of our own world, akin to Peter Carey’s The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith—but periodically, Fellman includes hints of where this setting, where art and radical politics dovetail, exists in relation to the present day. Fellman doesn’t hold the reader’s hand through the process, and that makes for an acutely rewarding payoff as the novel develops. A very different reckoning with art, politics, and identity comes to the forefront in John Pistelli’s Major Arcana, which reimagines decades’ worth of superhero comics history and adds magic into the mix—both in terms of characters’ literal practice of it and of the powerful alchemy that emerges from great creative collaboration. These sorts of memorable payoffs can also emerge in shorter forms; John Langan’s collection Lost in the Dark and Other Excursions includes several works that tick this box, including one wholly unexpected combination of two different literary threads. 

—Tobias Carroll

I expected to enjoy Freya Marske’s Cinder House, because I love her writing and a fairytale reimagining seemed like a perfect vessel for it—but I didn’t expect just how thoroughly crisp and tender this one turned out. It’s even cleverer and dreamier than I could’ve hoped. A taut novella with not a word out of place, this one hit heavy with haunting, longing, and the perfect sort of spicy magic. 

While the conversation I had with Joey Batey about his debut novel It’s Not A Cult made me love the book all the more, it was already a definite favorite read for the year. It’s brilliant and strange, a tumult of anxieties and desires and the mundane shot through with the divine. His language is so lyric, specific, and inviting. I both couldn’t stop reading and couldn’t bear it ending. I can’t wait for his next novel.  

The Villa, Once Beloved by Victor Manibo is my showstopper of the year, the book I’m going to gift to everyone, the sort of book that reads like relief—finally, someone said it! It’s horrific and hilarious, the perfect execution to a terrific premise, and Filipino as hell. 

—Maya Gittelman

Margaret Owen’s emotional, heisty Little Thieves series came to an end this year with Holy Terrors, and wow, I haven’t loved a YA series like this since Jordan Ifueko’s Raybearer. I don’t think it’s spoiling anything to say that this is the Into the Spiderverse of the trilogy (complimentary), so you’ll have to stay on your toes as you read. Owen is juggling so many elements it’ll dazzle and dizzy you, and perhaps necessitate an immediate reread (dommage!) to make sure you didn’t miss anything. Most importantly, she gives us a beautifully satisfying conclusion to Emeric and Vanja’s romance. I am obsessed with Owen’s decision to make Emeric a wee bit of a dirtbag in this one. Like, whomst among us hasn’t been a bit of a dirtbag in our young adulthoods? Never ever has an HEA been so thoroughly earned, by two screwed-up, imperfect characters. Packed full of murders, broken engagements, and angry gods, Holy Terrors was fully worth the four years I spent waiting for it.

Despite my many complaints about tropes and fanfiction and boring samey sex scenes, I do still love romantasy, and Maggie Rapier’s debut novel Soulgazer reminded me why. The protagonist, Saoirse, has always considered her foresight as a curse, and within her family, she’s very much the Bruno they don’t talk about—until her father needs her to marry to advance the family’s interests. So she runs away with a pirate (as you do). Raised to believe there’s something fundamentally broken and dangerous about her, Saoirse spends the book trying to find her voice and her strength, without becoming the kind of cookie-cutter badass heroine we’ve grown accustomed to seeing. She’s a normal girl, and her pirate love interest is an absolute goober, and it felt great to watch them navigate their struggles and imperfections as they fell inexorably in love. I can’t wait for book 2.

I tried to describe Tashan Mehta’s Mad Sisters of Esi to a friend and failed so completely that they sent me a whale emoji in response, and nothing else. If asked to explain what Mad Sisters of Esi is about, I will hereafter send a whale emoji and feel that I have done my best. But let me give it one more try, because I really loved this book. Mehta plays with ideas about how we tell stories, how we hold our memories, how we explore and understand the world beyond our homes, and most of all how we live in community. For me, the middle one of four sisters, it’s an extra bonus that all of this is wrapped up in stories about sisters and their complex relationships. Mad Sisters of Esi is a bewildering stunner of a book, cheerfully unexplained and wholly unexplainable.

—Jenny Hamilton

Much of my best speculative reading for 2025 wasn’t “current”: I finally caught up to such fantastic books as Francis Spufford’s brilliant alternate history Cahokia Jazz, for one, and I re-read Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. 

My sole Reactor review this year was a rave for André Alexis’ Other Worlds, one of the most enjoyable collections I’ve read in a long time. These are smart stories, mostly but not always speculative, that grapple with issues of identity, colonialism, responsibility, and art; they have lingered in my mind for months and led me to acquire a whole stack of Alexis backlist titles.  

Finally, I’m now in the middle of Philip Pullman’s Book of Dust trilogy, which concluded in October with The Rose Field. Since there was a six-year gap between installments, I don’t regret that I waited until all three were finished before I began reading. As someone who read His Dark Materials in grade school and re-read Pullman’s original trilogy as an adult, these books are a fine mix of the comfortable and the bracing; I don’t quite know where they’re going, but I can’t wait to find out. 

—Matthew Keeley

Most of my friends and family could name my favorite book of 2025, since I talked to them about it constantly for a month: Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan. Anyone who would listen heard me gush about Kwan’s moody gorgeous prose and how her debut struck the perfect balance between tough climate realism and soft human hope. Now, even six months after I finished this story of a strange visionary artist and the 130-year-old woman she cares for in an almost-underwater San Francisco, I’m still looking for new ears to fill with the words: Just read it, ok?

So many other books brought light to me this year, too. Aimee Phan’s The Lost Queen sucked me into a high school girl’s reckoning with her burgeoning power and hidden identity more than anything has since Buffy. (And y’all… I love Buffy.) I crave sibling stories, and Phan more than delivered with this retelling of the Truong Sisters. Every time I thought I knew what mythic twist was coming, the tale veered onto an unexpected yet perfect new path.

Then it’s always a boon when Charlie Jane Anders releases a new novel. Even better, this time she totally surprised me. I’ve come to rely on her work for deft magic systems and painfully truthful relationships. But a fully imagined 18th century novel within the novel? What a flex! What a delight! Byatt’s Possession meets joyfully queer magic realism: a chimera I knew never I wanted. Even if invented ephemera isn’t your thing, Lessons in Magic and Disaster is a book for anyone who’s ever tried to “fix” a parent and every grown-up kid who’s ever whispered wishes to a tree. 

Speaking of grown-up kids, Caskey Russell’s indigenous epic The Door on the Sea got me out of a major reading slump. I came for the raven who describes all humans as varying types of “turd” (this may sound like a limited vocabulary, but no—he gets creative) and stayed for the daydreaming youth who must captain a canoe full of unusual warriors in pursuit of a seductively dangerous weapon. A straightforward adventure tale that is nonetheless morally complex is rarer than you might think. I couldn’t put it down.

And while it’s not speculative, Jeanne Thornton’s gritty love letter to queer gamers growing up in the ’90s, A/S/L, broke my brain. In a good way. I think? I did have to take a break from reading it when I realized the interior of my mind felt crowded: me plus the three trans women at the center of the novel. Perhaps I relate a little too deeply to folks using video game mechanics as a framework for understanding our puzzling, violent, and beautiful world.

—Maura Krause

Karen Russell’s The Antidote, published this April was Pulitzer winner Russell’s first novel in over a decade, and it did not disappoint. It’s a haunting, tender story set in Nebraska in 1935, after Black Sunday, when one of the worst dust storms in America’s recorded history destroyed multiple towns in the Midwest. The story focusses mainly on three women, all witches, one way or another. The Antidote herself is a prairie witch, a woman capable of siphoning people’s memories out of their minds and returning them later, without actually knowing the stories she has stored within herself. After Black Sunday, the Antidote loses her ability and has to hire an assistant to help her fool the townspeople. Asphodel, the young female assistant is certain she could be a prairie witch too, but right now she’s the captain of her basketball team, and she will do anything to get her girls to their games. Meanwhile Cleo is a black woman photographer whose lens captures more than just images of Midwestern life. She may set up her pawn shop camera for a perfectly ubiquitous shot, but in the darkroom the exposures tell an entirely different story. It’s as if time weaves a different narrative for Cleo’s camera, and the images she prints are a strange surreal mix of what could be an alternate future for the land. Or is it the past?

Alongside the stories of these women (and what makes them witches), is the story of America in the 1930s, the climate damage caused by ruthless capitalist colonisation of a land previously venerated and kept safe by Native tribes. Russell draws elegant parallels between different sets of marginalised people, and explores the ecological losses caused by ethnic cleansing in what is a poetic look at how much false history can be created by those in power, and how the worst of history can, and does repeat itself.

Augustina Bazterrica’s 2017 novel Tender is the Flesh left such a huge impact on most readers (whether negative or positive really depends on how much you can handle), that it was always going to be a tough act to follow. Her next novel The Unworthy is an entirely different beast, but is just as powerful a look at some of the themes present in Tender in the Flesh, too. A group of women are ruled over by the Superior Sister and “Him” in a convent that appears safe from the dangers of an unknown climate apocalypse. The women are controlled by an extreme focus on violent religiosity, punishment viewed as piety, and absolute cult-like indoctrination. There is a lot that is left unsaid; Bazterrica is great at leaving things to the reader’s imagination. That she does not pander to the reader in any way is a huge part of the charm of her writing. There are many banks artfully left, that we are expected to fill in.

The narrative is a first person diary entry, a secret, clandestine act, which means it is told by an unreliable narrator whose very act of writing is an act of rebellion. It’s an engaging read in every way, intimate because it is epistolary, and jarring because enough is suggested to keep the reader on their toes, imagining the very worst. The book asks questions about power, about control and about humanity, questions Bazterrica is not going to provide answers to. That would be much too easy.

Mona Awad gave us the deranged and delightful Bunny in 2019, and this year we were served up the equally batty sequel We Love You, Bunny, in which Awad gleefully explores the liminal space between beauty and violence, when it comes to the creation of true art. We go back to the college campus setting of the first novel, and this time we hear from all the other bunnies, the girls who we didn’t meet firsthand in the first novel, the ones who created Franken-men from bunnies, intent and desire.

The grotesque surrealism present in the first novel is expanded on here, with plenty of strange hallucinatory style narration used, especially when Awad takes on the perspective of one of the bunny-boys. The whole thing is a wild riotous romp, full of self-aware humour and cleverness, with little left as subtext. This is a very meta, self-referential novel that does not hold back on flippancy or sarcasm about creativity, elitist higher education or modern society. It’s also just a whole lot of mad fun, and we could all do with some of that.

—Mahvesh Murad

There’s no doubt that Sayaka Murata’s Vanishing World remains king of weirdo mountain on my book list this year—a delightfully upsetting story animated by Murata’s signature deadpan style. I love the way she takes a common taboo, reimagines the whole thing through a totally different lens, and presents it to us on a platter like an unignorable cryptid head at the world’s most uncomfortable banquet.

Another stellar read this year was Theodora Goss’ anthology Letters From an Imaginary Country, which was a fantastic, rambling journey through semi-autobiographic fairytale and fantasy, with layers and caches of intertextual treasure to enjoy along the way (my favorite was “Child-Empress of Mars,” a brilliantly funny take on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ work with bite and brains).

I also read Waterblack—the final entry in the Cities of the Weft trilogy by Alex Pheby—not the strongest of the three, but I like to think about the trilogy as a single entity in terms of how it provokes and challenges the reader, for better or worse, to give their all to such a vast and formidable text.

—Alexis Ong

Ed Park’s An Oral History of Atlantis is a collection of short stories that is surreal, nostalgic, and one that will leave you both laughing and crying. Written over a span of twenty-five years and most for in-person readings, the stories are punchy and range in emotional resonance with a lot of room for reader reflection and interpretation. I love how Park plays with form, and if you are a ’80s or ’90s kid, you would appreciate the trip down memory lane. 

Akwaeke Emezi has established themselves as a genre-hopping writer and they are damn good at it, but I really believe they shine the brightest in the young adult genre. My belief was once again validated with Sọmadịna, a YA fantasy novel set in a magical West African world about a teen girl on a quest to find her missing twin, Jaiyeki, as she learns to navigate her immense powers. Although this book is for young adults, Emezi explores themes like generational trauma, identity, and belonging that anyone, no matter your age or background, could relate to.

Luminous by Silvia Park is a sci-fi literary fiction that is set in a reunified Korea where robots are integrated into humans’ daily lives, as nannies, boyfriends, and even children. In the book, Park examines the complexities and boundaries of identities—what we physically look like, what gender we identify with, where we are from, and who we love—and how they all begin to blur. The integration of robots with humans and how they/we evolve is thought-provoking and will lead you into deep philosophical questions about humanity and the lengths we will go to ensure our survival and salvation. 

—Helen Rhee

Does anyone else feel like they just didn’t read this year? No? Just me? I mean, my spreadsheet says otherwise, but when I look back at 2025 books, I feel like I read about four of them. If that’s true, though, thankfully they’re all pretty great. (And there are still some I’ve not yet gotten to: I have high hopes for Sarah Hall’s Helm and Bethany Jacobs’ This Brutal Moon). 

The SFF book of the year for me is still Antonia Hodgson’s The Raven Scholar. It’s one of those books that sounds on paper like it shouldn’t work: animal-themed factions and a competition for the crown and a whole lot of secondary mysteries and a pedantic protagonist who’s in over her head and about seven more major things stuffed into the book’s copious pages—but it works because Hodgson does it just right. It’s a massive tome that reads like a charm, speedy, immersive, funny, occasionally sexy, cleverly plotted, cleanly drawn. The revelation of who, exactly, is narrating the story is a magic trick that worked on me; the careful balance between cleverness and strength that the story requires of its characters is reflected in the telling. It’s smart! It’s fun! It’s voicey and delicious! I still can’t believe she pulled off that brazen 50-pages-in character switch! Ugh, I need book two like yesterday.

Strangely, or not strangely, it’s been a year for ghosts: Rachel Hartman’s Among Ghosts, a loving, inventive, affecting story set in the same world as her Seraphina series; and Bora Chung’s Midnight Timetable, a novel in stories set at an Institute that tends to haunted objects. You could look at Kathleen Jennings’ Honeyeater as a sort of ghost story, too—an Australian Gothic tale of a small town and its secrets, which simply refuse to stay buried. Wen-Yi Lee’s When They Burned the Butterfly centers on not ghosts but humans, Singaporean gang leaders, who act as conduits to gods and goddesses, but it has a haunted quality, too: the haunting of grief, the constant sense of loss, the feeling of moving from one world, one era, to the next, not knowing quite what’s coming.

But the book that will stay with me the longest isn’t SFF at all. Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This more than deserved the National Book Award for Nonfiction that it won earlier this month. El Akkad is a novelist making his nonfiction debut with a book that is about the genocide in Palestine, specifically, but is also about what we are willing to tolerate in the world, in our country, in ourselves. I genuinely don’t know how to summarize it, to talk about it, but it is short, fierce, angry, heartbroken, beautiful, moving, and—to use a word I am generally reluctant to use about books—necessary. I’ve seen El Akkad speak several times over the past few years, and every time I’ve come away with ideas and thoughts and beauty just bouncing around inside my head like superballs. The book has the same effect, with the fury, moral clarity, and power that comes from an argument, a rage, precisely distilled.

—Molly Templeton

This year a number of retellings stuck with me, for how they weren’t afraid to reach deep inside the guts of their respective source material and wring out new meanings. Emery Robin concluded their Stars Without End duology with The Sea Eternal, which outdoes The Stars’ Undying’s space opera take on Cleopatra by interrogating how we log our personal and political histories—the truthful and the poetic license—once we’ve conquered the stars. Freya Marske’s novella Cinder House is not just Cinderella as a ghost haunting her home, it’s a bittersweet open letter for all of us still carrying various scars of pandemic lockdown and long covid. I’d also like to shout out a bunch of books that I just didn’t get to finish but that I can’t wait to curl up with over the winter: Fran Wilde’s A Philosophy of Thieves, Ilana Masad’s Beings, Antonia Hodgson’s The Raven Scholar.

As always, the SFF short fiction slaps. I discovered Tia Tashiro’s writing this year, especially the wry gut-punch of “Missing Helen” (Clarkesworld), about having to be the mature one post-divorce when your ex is dating your younger clone. I appreciated the gorgeous language of Catherynne M. Valente’s “When She Calls Your Name” (Uncanny) elevating an admittedly killer elevator pitch into a lived-in, feel-it-in-your bones tale of longing from an unexpected source. And Amber Sparks’ “Your Life in Parties” (Short Story, Long) takes readers on a trippy, body-jumping unspooling of the narrator’s long existence hosting and managing others’ experiences at parties when all she wants to do is return to her simpler, happier celebrations; the very last moment took me by such surprise that I was suddenly bawling and so grateful to have read it.

—Natalie Zutter

The post Reviewers’ Choice: The Best Books of 2025 appeared first on Reactor.

Books reading recommendations

Five SFF Narratives That Start With Characters Waking Up With Amnesia

“Who am I?” is always a great way to kick off a story…

By Lorna Wallace

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Published on December 3, 2025

Photo: David Matos [via Unsplash]

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Photo: David Matos [via Unsplash]

The idea of waking up without memories is terrifying to me, but I can’t help but be captivated when it happens to the main character at the start of a story. Whether they don’t know anything at all about who and where they are, or whether it’s more specific information that they can’t remember, I love the mystery element that this introduces into the story from the very start. Here are five sci-fi, fantasy, and horror books and stories that follow characters experiencing temporary memory loss.

Pines by Blake Crouch (2012)

Pines is a fast-paced thriller that starts with a man waking up next a river in a small town surrounded by mountains. He can only remember a few specific things, such as the name of the current president and the fact that he’s 37 years old. He’s also in a lot of pain; not only does he have a raging headache, but he’s suffered some kind of blunt force trauma to his left side.

He stumbles into town, which he learns is Wayward Pines, Idaho, with two hopes: that something will trigger his memory and that he’ll find a hospital. It’s not long before he passes out again, but this time when he wakes up (in hospital, thankfully) he has a bit more information. His name is Ethan Burke and he’s a Secret Service agent who came to Wayward Pines in search of two missing colleagues.

But Ethan still has a lingering feeling that something is very wrong—is it his faulty memory, is it the strange town itself, or is it both? These big questions are answered by the end of the book, but there’s still more story to tell in the next two installments of the Wayward Pines trilogy.

The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton (2018)

Technically, the protagonist of The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle doesn’t wake up with amnesia, he simply snaps into his current consciousness while he’s standing in the middle of the woods and yelling out “Anna!” But now he doesn’t remember who Anna is or even who he is. Even worse, he doesn’t feel a single twinge of familiarity when looking down at his body. It turns out that there’s a good reason for that: he’s not in his own body.

Our main character soon finds out that his name is Aiden Bishop and that he’s trapped in a time loop murder mystery. Aiden is tasked with solving the murder of Evelyn Hardcastle, who is due to be murdered at a party thrown at the manor house next to the woods later that night. He’s forced to relive the day eight times in a row, but each time he inhabits the body of a different party guest. And it’s not just the identity of the killer that’s a mystery, with the details of Aiden’s previous life and how he ended up in this situation also remaining unknown.

I found the constant body-hopping and time-looping to be a little confusing to begin with, but it’s worth getting to grips with these mechanics in the first few chapters so that the reader can be rewarded with the satisfaction of the mystery gradually unravelling.

“How Alike Are We” by Kim Bo-young (2019)

(Translated by Jihyun Park and Gord Sellar) HUN-1029—usually simply called HUN—is the Crisis Management AI of a spaceship who has just been transferred into a prosthetic body. Unfortunately, the transfer didn’t go totally smoothly, so when they wake up there are some gaps in their short-term memory that the ship’s human crew have to fill in. HUN learns that they wanted to be treated like a human, complete with a human body, and went on strike until this demand was met—all of which comes as a surprise.

Although seemingly not as pressing, HUN is also aware that something important—yet not mentioned by the crew—is missing. This lost piece of programming subtly haunts HUN in the background of the story, but at the forefront is the crisis that the crew are currently facing—one that they desperately need their Crisis Management AI to solve.

HUN does their best to be helpful, but the human crew is cracking under the pressure. Of all of the places to suffer memory loss, this novella makes a compelling case for deep space being the worst, which leads me onto the next book…

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (2021)

A man wakes up from a coma covered in medical tubes and wires, with no idea of what his own name is. He thinks he must be in some sort of high-tech hospital—there are robot arms in the ceiling trying to look after him—but then he sees that his two roommates have been reduced to desiccated corpses. After further exploration, but still not knowing his name, he realizes that he’s aboard a spaceship.

Flashes of his life slowly start coming back to him while he tries to figure out why he’s in space. He learns his name (Ryland Grace), his job (high school science teacher), and what his mission is (humanity’s last hope of saving Earth). Feeling entirely unequipped—in no small part thanks to some remaining gaps in his memory—he gets to work trying to figure out the science to save everyone back home.

Project Hail Mary (perfectly balances all of its various elements. The science feels grounded without being overcomplicated, there’s a substantial sprinkling of humor to lighten the tense situation, and the novel’s portrayal of both isolation and connection tugs at the heartstrings. (And of course, the movie adaptation will be out in March next year, though the latest trailer reveals quite a lot, edging into what some readers might consider spoiler territory).

The Burial Tide by Neil Sharpson (2025)

Space might be the worst place to be when dealing with amnesia, but there’s an even worse location to suddenly wake up in (with or without memories): a coffin. That’s where a woman finds herself at the start of The Burial Tide. Understandably panicked, she kicks and claws her way out of the grave and stumbles to the first house she can find to try and get help.

She can’t remember anything about herself, but the doctor she sees finds it far more surprising that she’s alive at all. She’s told that she’s called Mara Fitch and that she was the first casualty of an Ebola-like outbreak on the Irish island of Inishbannock. How she survived what was seemingly her death is unknown, but she’s assured that her memory will return as she settles back into her old life. And yet Mara can’t help but feel that something is amiss.

The Burial Tide goes to some creatively weird places with its style of horror, which is rooted in Celtic mythology, but you won’t have to wait long to figure out what’s happening on this strange and eerie island because the short chapters ensure things move along at a rapid pace.

Have I missed out any notable stories or books that start with the main character experiencing amnesia? Feel free to recommend your own favorite works of fiction involving memory loss in the comments below![end-mark]

The post Five SFF Narratives That Start With Characters Waking Up With Amnesia appeared first on Reactor.

Books Short Fiction Spotlight

Must Read Short Speculative Fiction: October 2025

This month’s short fiction recommendations include ghosts and grief, recipes and multiverses…

By Alex Brown

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Published on November 25, 2025

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No themes for this spotlight, only vibes. I’m too tired for themes. My brain is goo and my energy level is negative 62. October sucked the life outta me, y’all. These are the ten science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories I read last month that managed to break through the noise.

“Affinity Gradient” by Miah O’Malley

“It had been two years since Ori’s burial, and her tree was thriving.” Dr Kar Reul is studying changes in a tree after her human love is buried in its roots. Most trees bound up with a human, their “anomalies” fade over time, but Ori’s seem to be getting stronger. Kar doesn’t know if she’s imagining these changes or if it’s really Ori in some new form trying to send a message. A compelling story about grief and loss. (Phano—October 2025; issue 10)

“Ghosts of Summer” by Catherine Tavares

Tavares jumps around in time with her story about two people summoning ghosts as a sort of supernatural air conditioner during the heat of summer. It starts off rather playful, just two people playing around with necromancy. The ghosts are not bound by the linearity of time, which leads to a shocking revelation. The narrative is little vignettes from different days over the course of a long summer, including their temperatures, so that by the time the temperature dips, you know something very bad has happened. (Apex Magazine—October 2025; issue 151)

“Knife Plus” by Tracie McBride

The first of two stories on this list with an inanimate thing as the protagonist. In this case, it is, of course, a knife. “Knife does not exist on its own. It is always Knife plus. Knife in forge. Knife on bench. Knife in hand. Knife in flesh.” Things take a, ahem, sharp turn toward the end of this flash fiction story when Knife realizes it isn’t just for butchering meat. The story cuts to the bone, figuratively and literally. (Fantasy Magazine—Autumn 2025; issue 98)

“Mother Tongue” by Pooja Joshi

I’ve read a lot of short stories about language loss, but this is the first where the language itself is the narrator. Here, a language brought to a new land slumbers and wakes as the few remaining speakers pick it up on and off through their lives. It’s a bittersweet look at the cultural costs of colonization, assimilation, and immigration. But Joshi also uses the words “slumber” and “sleep,” reminding us that even though our cultures can be lost, sometimes we can regain them, even if only in fragments. (Augur—October 2025; issue 8.2)

“Phantom View” by John Wiswell

The narrator, the son of a man on hospice, discovers a vaguely human-shaped “rusty orange-and-black blurry streak” that is visible only through a digital screen. While he tries to balance his dying father’s medical care and his own needs as a disabled person with shifting mobility issues, he finds a strange sort of comfort in the presence of this entity. He reaches out to the being, and the response is not what he expects. The entity felt a little like an analogy to a neurodivergent person who was non-verbal, someone whose perception of the world and ways of interacting with others differs from what is more common, but that also doesn’t make their needs or ways of expression any less valid. It’s always nice to have a story about the complexities of being disabled run through the speculative lens. (Reactor—October 22, 2025)

“The Pretendian” by Jason Pearce

This was so interesting! The protagonist of this story, a man calling himself Leroy Whiskeyjack, claims to be Lakota. But it’s not that simple. I’ll let you discover for yourself what the twist is on this story. All I’ll say is that when I finished I was thinking a lot about identity, culture, and cultural appropriation. This is The Deadlands, so get ready for blood and bones. (The Deadlands—Fall 2025; issue 40)

“Singularities” by Cressida Roe

This is a story about stories. It’s also a clever use of the multiverse trope. A man lives his life non-linearly. Sometimes he meets a woman, sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes he rescues her, sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes they lie in bed together, sometimes he’s alone. But always their stories circle back to each other. Will he ever be able to grab a hold of her and not let go? Which version of their endless lives is the real one? Does it matter? (Kaleidotrope—Autumn 2025)

“Soul Food” by C. M. Harmon

Family recipes aren’t just about the food. They carry our history and heritage, our stories and dreams. In Harmon’s piece, the protagonist summons the Crossroads Man in a last-ditch attempt to save their grandmother’s life. The price? A prized family recipe for candied yams. But it’s more than just some side dish. “No one in the family knows where the recipe came from. My grandma insisted it was old when her grandma passed it to her. And not too far past that, our family history drops off into the jagged-toothed maw that was slavery. Where some families have black and white photos and ship manifests, we have that recipe.” Giving up the yams means losing much of what the protagonist is trying to save. What will they choose? (FIYAH—Winter 2025; issue 36)

“The Superposition of Ramen” by Jed Looker

“For now, let us simply speak from your subjective standpoint. It is sometime in the early 21st century and you are reading what we understand to be a highly regarded science-fiction and fantasy magazine.” Okay, lol, you got my attention. The penultimate On Spec before it shutters forever is full of excellent stories, but this was my favorite. I will tell you nothing about it at all except it involves alternate timelines, aliens, and the life-altering choice between “a French bistro and a Japanese noodle house.” A funny, clever tale. (On Spec—October 2025; issue 133)

“A Taxonomy of Extinct and Extant Birds of the Twenty-First Century” by A.P. Golub

I love an unusual narrative format, and this piece is a good example of why. It’s structured as little snippets on various birds, and written in second person POV. Each segment tells the reader a little about the “you” in this story, about their meet-cute, marriage, and that person’s eventual illness. And because it’s a Reckoning joint, there’s a strong throughline of environmental commentary. (Reckoning—Fall 2025)[end-mark]

The post Must Read Short Speculative Fiction: October 2025 appeared first on Reactor.

Books reading recommendations

Six Dark, Chilly Reads to Liven Up Late Fall

Ghost stories, gothic tales, and other works perfect for autumnal evenings…

By Sam Reader

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Published on November 24, 2025

Photo: Timothy Eberly [via Unsplash]

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Photo: Timothy Eberly [via Unsplash]

As the weather here in the Northern Hemisphere gets colder and nights get longer, there’s nothing better than curling up near the closest heat source (natural or otherwise, we don’t judge) with a good book. But it has to be the right book. After all, the general feel of a book can make or break it at the wrong time of year—a book with a chillier atmosphere and a darker feel just hits better when it’s frosty and dark outside. After all, it’s a tradition to tell ghost stories at Christmas, and the gothic always just feels right when the air’s a bit sharper, when twilight creeps in a little earlier, and the things that go bump in the night seem to get a bit louder, and move a bit closer…

With Halloween over and the manic rush of the holidays not quite upon us yet, here are six reads to liven up this very particular time of year, when the temperatures plummet and the nights fall a little quicker and harder than usual.

Ghost Story by Peter Straub

Halloween and autumn may be the domain of horror stories, but the cold months after are the domain of ghost stories, especially in the colder regions here in the U.S., where a chilly silence seems to fall over rolling hills and sprawling cityscapes and all the places in between. This makes it the perfect time to pick up Straub’s classic novel of the mid-Atlantic gothic, a frigid affair that sees four old friends telling each other ghost stories in an effort to keep the past at bay—but the terrible secret they share will not stay buried. Ghost Story depicts a quiet sort of horror, one that unfolds at a deliberate and terrifying pace, a perfect accompaniment to the kind of cool post-October silence where a strange noise in the dark will carry from hundreds of feet away. As the supernatural manifestations ramp up and the deaths start, snow also blankets the town where most of the novel takes place, creating a nice parallel with the changing weather outside your window.

The Lost District and Other Stories by Joel Lane

Joel Lane’s chilling collection of stories set in Birmingham and the West Midlands begins with a story drenched in autumn rain and then descends into frigid mornings and bitter nights, with more than a handful of the stories within evoking nighttime frost on every available surface and brutal, numbing cold. It mirrors the horror titan’s brutal but restrained stories, each one an unusually uplifting feel-bad experience, like you’re sharing a quiet word outside with a friend who’s having just as much of a rough time as you are. It’s a book for when the long nights feel unending and daybreak always comes a few hours later than it should, both emotionally and seasonally.

Blue Light of the Screen by Claire Cronin

A unique combination of memoir, short film essays, and fiction, Blue Light is an unnerving and heartfelt work. In short vignettes accompanied by capsule summaries, art, and fragments of fiction and poetry, Cronin takes the reader through her thoughts on horror, film, TV, and her life and personal experiences with various works, but also the underlying emotions and societal triggers surrounding horror in all its visual forms. It’s the kind of book that can go from a meditation on the eeriness of an almost empty movie theater to a discussion of technological insomnia which then ties into a brief discussion of the movie Pulse. The eerie ebb and flow of Cronin’s work creates an almost liminal feeling, like a dream where you walk through an empty house hearing only the sound of a TV blaring somewhere in the distance. It’s a quiet, meditative, sort of unsettlement, perfect for evenings in when all is cold and dark.

The Bone Mother by David Demchuk

There’s no place that does cold, dark, and quiet better than the deep woods of Europe, and especially Eastern Europe. Demchuk’s unnerving mosaic novel unfolds in such a place through a series of character portraits of mythological figures—ghosts, water spirits, witches, and other creatures of dark Slavic legends. As the residents of the book’s border villages reveal their stories (complete with vintage photographs, like a darker Miss Peregrine’s), a parallel narrative emerges long after their clashes with the shadowy Night Police, detailing the lives of their descendants in Canada. It’s a book with such a chilly atmosphere that even in sequences set in the summer, the cold still whips through the characters’ bodies, just as the quiet dread still engulfs everything around them. While perhaps a bit more lurid than most other works on this list, Demchuk nonetheless perfectly captures the feel of stories told by firelight about the things lurking just outside in the deep, dark woods.

Pine by Francine Toon

Highland gothic and late fall go together so well this entire list could just be a showcase of Highland gothic titles, but Pine sets itself apart. Not only by the sense of loneliness the book imparts in its quiet and disconnected village, which carries an unnerving number of secrets, or in the sudden appearance of a mysterious woman who kicks off the plot by running in front of the main characters’ car on Halloween night, but in its cool atmosphere, heavy quiet, and how it makes even the most pleasant of interactions feel somewhat unnerving. It’s a book as cool and stark as the hills and mysterious stone circles it inhabits, and every bit an unsettling read that serves as a perfect complement to sudden dips in temperature.

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones

Some places just lend themselves to a chill in the air and quiet dread on the wind. Montana and North Dakota are those sorts of places, the peace and quiet turning sharper as the temperature drops and the sun sinks earlier each day. This makes Montana the perfect setting for The Only Good Indians, Jones’ unnerving Northwestern gothic novel about four young Blackfeet men whose butchery of an elk has haunting repercussions for them years later. Jones’ novel proceeds at a deliberate pace, moving quietly and sure-footedly from one scene of grotesque violence to the next, letting the lingering psychological dread and awful events of the novel sink in… It’s the perfect thing to read on silent nights in the stretch between the final warm days of October and the rush of winter holidays.

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Books reading recommendations

Musical Magic: Five SFF Stories About the Power of Song

Tales about finding your voice and singing your heart out.

By Ratika Deshpande

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Published on November 20, 2025

Photo by Kati Hoehl [via Unsplash]

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Photo by Kati Hoehl [via Unsplash]

I don’t have a particularly good voice, so I’ve always envied those who can create magic with their singing—who sound melodious even when they’re humming a tune as they work around the house. The act of singing connects our bodies and our emotions, transforming our innermost workings into something external, something to be shared; there’s something so primal about it, when you think of how prevalent song is in nature. I always find it interesting to read about characters who are profoundly connected to songs and music—what powers can arise out of voice and melody? How might such a gift be put to use? And how painful is it to be separated from that magic? Here are five stories that consider these questions:

“I Will Sing Your White Bones Home” by Cat Hellisen

Dying in battle against the finless is a thing of glory, but dying for the love of a finless is not something that Osam had thought her brother Diev would ever do. But he is gone now. Their mother is planning a ghost-wedding for Diev so that further deaths can be avoided in the fight against the finless. She can’t see his ghost, but Osam can, and he tells her that he doesn’t want to marry another ghost. Instead, he has a different request, something that feels impossible—a request that requires song and painful sacrifice. Will Osam’s love for her brother prove adequate for the task, or will the pain be too great to bear? An immersive, melancholy, and deeply evocative story.

“The Vessels of Song” by Avram Klein

The great Badchen Yankel and his troupe of musicians were on their way to play at a wedding when they decided to take rest at a ramshackle inn. The place wasn’t in good condition but would have to do, for they were cold and tired and their journey was not yet over. So it’s no fault of their own when they find themselves battling the shaydim—or demons, as the Christians call them—instead of enjoying a warm place to rest for the night. 

…and if you provide sufficient zlotys, he’ll tell you what happened next, for the Badchen Yankel is not only a klezmer who can create songs to destroy the shaydim, but also a storyteller whose skillful tales make people more than happy to meet his price.

“On the Origin of Song” by Naim Kabir

Letters, transcripts, notes, testimonies and reports gradually reveal the story of Ciallah Daroun, a scholar from the Plateau who is excited to discover the world and wants to know the origins of Song—a force that in our world would be the equivalent of artificial and natural energy—and why his people cannot Sing in the way that Men and Beasts encountered during his explorations can. He is a simple scholar, but to the rest of the world, his comes from a race of people who cannot think, let alone conduct scholarship, which is enough to put them on guard and pursue him out of fear. As one peruses these documents, the story that emerges is dark and sad, a story of judgement, and prejudice resulting from misinformation, fear, and baseless stereotypes.

“As the Prairie Grasses Sing” by Sarah L. Edwards

On a trip with her father, Ghemma gets the chance to observe and share brief interactions with wild animals. She reaches out to them out of curiosity, but her father is keeping an eye out—watching to see if she can understand them, like her mother does. For Ghemma speaks with signs, not spoken words. Her mother lives in fear because her ability to speak to animals scares other people. Does Ghemma possess a similar connection with other creatures? Her parents don’t know. For Ghemma, only nine, it’s not something she had considered to be very different from speaking with signs. But now, as she feels the weight of her father’s desire that she be one of them—that hopefully, she’ll sing the way her father does—Ghemma is forced to consider—does she want to speak? Does she want to sing, be like her father? Or does she want to be like her mother? Is it even possible to choose either option?

“Do As I Do, Sing As I Sing” by Sarah Pinsker

Guerre’s people cultivate koh with the help of cropsingers. They trade their harvest with the Osa people, who raise goats for milk. Both the koh and the milk are essential to the people’s survival and the community’s wellbeing depends upon this balance this creates.

One day, people come to her village in a flying machine and inform the villagers of her cousin’s passing. Aro had been chosen by them several years earlier to be trained in cropsinging. Now, he’s gone and the village’s current cropsinger is failing. They need to train someone else and Guerre passes their little test, with no idea of what’s in store for her future. Acco, her brother, volunteers to join her, but he’s rejected. At that moment, the siblings’ paths diverge completely. While Guerre learns the science of plants and undergoes intense, life-threatening training—for it takes months to cultivate a field through singing—Acco leaves for The City. He returns with a “gift” that promises ease for the village, but which could actually bring about the destruction of cropsingers and the village’s harmony with the Osa people. Guerre is worried, but how can she reach out to her brother without dismissing his work, while also preserving her own?[end-mark]

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Books Indie Press Spotlight

Can’t Miss Indie Press Speculative Fiction for November and December 2025

Astronauts in crisis, visions of the future, and the creepiest piece of furniture you’re likely to encounter in 2025. 

By Tobias Carroll

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Published on November 20, 2025

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With two months left in the year, what do independent presses have to offer as the nights get longer and the mercury drops? Plenty, it turns out. A look at what’s due out in November and December reveals stories of astronauts in crisis, visions of the future both optimistic and terrifying, and the creepiest piece of furniture you’re likely to encounter in 2025. 

File Under: Wolves and Ghosts, But Not Ghosts of Wolves 

Writing in these very pages in 2013, Grady Hendrix called Vernon Lee “[t]he best, and most flamboyant, forgotten female writer of the 19th century.” This new edition of her book Hauntings, a collection of disquieting ghost stories, comes with a discussion of Lee and her work from Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya and Gretchen Felker-Martin, a writer who knows plenty about disquieting tales of the uncanny. (Unnamed Press; November)

Publisher HYLDYR describes William Morris’ The House of the Wolfings as a “historic proto-fantasy novel.” Given that Morris was a thoroughly fascinating figure—and given that J.R.R. Tolkien cited Morris as an influence on his own work—this story of pagans resisting the Roman Empire may well be of interest. (HYLDYR, Nov. 20)

Subtitled “(A Ghost Story),” Kathleen Novak’s Come Back, I Love You follows the experiences of a woman who moves into a lakeside cottage, only to find that a spectral occupant has lingered there. We’re not really in The Haunting of Hill House territory here; instead, the tone here is elegiac and concerned with the very stuff of memory. (Regal House; November)

As its title suggests, Howl: An Anthology of Werewolves is, well, a collection of stories and poems where lycanthropy plays a significant role. Lindy Ryan and Stephanie M. Wytovich are the book’s editors; contributors include Ai Jiang and Gwendolyn Kiste. And as a bonus, Play Nice author Rachel Harrison contributed this book’s introduction. (Black Spot; November)

File Under: Troubled Astronauts

Sometimes, the lives of astronauts can get very weird. Rascal Hartley’s new novel Dear Stupid Penpalwhich also gets high marks for its title—focuses on an astronaut testing the boundaries of space and his Earthbound correspondent. Things take a turn when the astronauts’ method of traveling through the cosmos does strange things to time, making for a head-spinning narrative. (Tenebrous Press; Nov. 11)

Alan Smale has written for this very site about memorable stories set in alternate timelines. He’s also written quite a few books that fall into this category as well; his latest novel Burning Night is set in a version of the 1980s where the space race between the US and Soviet Union never ended. It’s also the conclusion of his Apollo Rising trilogy, following Hot Moon and Radiant Sky. (CAEZIK SF & Fantasy; Nov. 11)

File Under: Location, Location, Location

As someone who’s long enjoyed music writing, I was thrilled to see that Marcel Feldmar is a contributor to the excellent long-running publication The Big Takeover. Feldmar’s new novel Awkward on the Rocks has an intriguing-sounding protagonist: a fire elemental who uses his skills to become an excellent bartender. Throw in a murder that needs solving and you have the makings of a compelling yarn. (Dead Sky; Dec. 9)

The publisher describes the protagonist of Leif Høghaug’s novel The Calf —translated by David M. Smith—as “a mechanical barn gnome with a metal bucket for a head.” The aforementioned gnome works in an office and is reckoning with a traumatic event in his history; also, there’s an extraterrestrial in the mix. In a review for lønningspils, Ursula Carroll (no relation) observed, “It is mystery, it is science fiction, it is Lutefisk Western, it is tragicomedy.” And, again, the protagonist is a mechanical gnome. In other words, this sounds amazing. (Fum d’Estampa; Nov. 11)

Sam Munson’s fiction has covered everything from troubled comings-of-age to magicians going to war. His latest novel is The Sofa, and it’s about—well, you could have probably guessed this—a sofa. More specifically, it’s about a family whose environment begins to subtly alter, the first example of which is indeed a certain piece of furniture. At what point does the familiar become terrifying? Read this and find out. (Two Dollar Radio, Nov. 11)

Wakefield Press and translator Scott Nicolay have been engaged in the admirable work of bringing the late Belgian writer Jean Ray’s fiction to Anglophone audiences. The latest effort in this ongoing project is The Last Canterbury Tales—and if you guessed from the title that this is something of a riff on Chaucer, albeit with space and time growing malleable, you’re on the right page. Ray’s work is deeply strange and eminently rewarding, and this new edition is a welcome addition to libraries of the weird. (Wakefield Press, November)

File Under: Futures Optimistic and Otherwise

Do you enjoy your horror fiction laced with a keen sense of the world around us? The new collection The Writhing, Verdant End features work from Corey Farrenkopf (who calls his contribution “Princess Mononoke meets True Grit in a post-apocalyptic desert landscape”), Tiffany Morris, and Eric Raglin. Get ready for some very strange cautionary tales. (Cursed Morsels, Dec. 9)

There’s never a bad time to read the disquieting fiction of Kathe Koja, which encompasses everything from surreal body horror to bawdy period pieces. Her latest work, the novel Dark Matter, concludes the trilogy that began with Dark Factory and Dark Park. Advance word is promising: Publishers Weekly called it “dizzyingly ambitious.” (Meerkat Press, December)

Editors Darcie Little Badger, Stacie Shannon Denetsosie, and Kinsale Drake collaborated on the powerhouse anthology Beyond the Glittering World: An Anthology of Indigenous Feminisms and Futurisms. The subtitle provides a sense of what to expect; contributors include Moniquill Blackgoose and Chelsea T. Hicks. Publishers Weekly called it a “beautiful anthology of poetry and prose.” (Torrey House; November)

Who doesn’t love a good publishing experiment? The central concept behind The End Times is a compelling marriage of form and content: a short novel set after the end of the world and told serially via newspapers. That this comes from Benjamin Percy, with Stephen King also contributing, is another reason to tune in, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor. Who needs metaphors after the apocalypse, after all? (Bad Hand, November)

In her new novel Reclamation, Kristen Zimmer tackles a motif that is all too relevant in 2025: societal divisions and class warfare. Set in a future where the US has given way to the Unified American Territories, Reclamation finds its protagonist dealing with an authoritarian society with a penchant for brainwashing amidst a sinister agenda. (Bywater Books; Dec. 9)

File Under: Short Fiction Reimagined

This fall brings with it another newly-translated book from Alla Gorbunova, (Th)ings and (Th)oughts. This one is also translated by Elina Alter, who had the same role in Gorbunova’s earlier It’s the End of the World, My Love. This one finds Gorbunova exploring the world of fairy tales and transforming familiar forms into something altogether new. (Deep Vellum, Nov. 4)

To take in the full scope of Stephen Graham Jones’ bibliography is to witness metafictional takes on the horror genre, visceral reimaginings of history, and expansive road novels. (He’s also a frequent Reactor contributor.) His flash fiction collection States of Grace is getting an expanded reissue this December, and it’s another example of his range as a writer. (Open Road; Dec. 9)

In a recent interview with Typebar Magazine, Luke O’Neil explained one of the influences on his new collection We Had It Coming. “There’s also a lot of Barthelme in there,” he said.” I feel like a lot of my characters are sort of wandering around through the absurd with a concussion.” These stories provide a bleak, surreal spin on the challenges of modern life. (OR Books; November)[end-mark]

The post Can’t Miss Indie Press Speculative Fiction for November and December 2025 appeared first on Reactor.

Books Horror Highlights

Abandoned Mines and Secret Societies: Horror Highlights for November 2025

Spooky Season doesn’t have to end with October!

By Emily C. Hughes

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Published on November 18, 2025

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When you’re a year-round horror fan, the coming and going of October causes a sort of whiplash. The first day of October hits, and everyone who ignores horror for the other eleven months of the year is suddenly talking about it nonstop. Just as suddenly, Halloween is over and they’ve dropped it again in favor of Thanksgiving, Christmas, or even Edmund Fitzgerald season. I often find myself a little disoriented in early November, the calendar equivalent of the sensation you get when you step off one of those moving walkways at the airport. As much as I’d like to leave our 12 foot skeleton up year-round, the New England winters wouldn’t be kind to him, so we moved him into the barn for hibernation season.

The pumpkins have been split and left out as a buffet for for raccoons and possums. There’s woodsmoke in the air, and the trees have shed the last of their leaves. But horror doesn’t stop, and neither does publishing (as much as I wish it would pause occasionally so I can catch up). And there’s an argument to be made that November, with its steely chill, may even be a more apt month for horror reading than October. Here are six November releases I’m particularly excited about.

The Great Work by Sheldon Costa

(Nov 4, Quirk) It’s the late 1880s in newly-minted Washington State, and everyone’s hunting a legendary giant salamander. But Gentle Montgomery’s reason for seeking the creature is personal: his friend and mentor died in his own quest for the salamander, and Gentle suspects its blood might be able to bring him back. With his nephew, Kitt, in tow, the grief-stricken Gentle embarks on a fraught, dangerous journey across a landscape full of cults and hunters and brigands. This novel leans more toward the Weird than it does toward straight horror—think of it as a dark Western with some deliciously horrifying imagery. It’s also a strange and sensitive meditation on the staggering price of progress, and the magic we lose when there are no more frontiers left unexplored. 

The Long Low Whistle by Laurel Hightower

(Nov 4, Shortwave) I love extreme settings in horror: deserts, ice caps, the deep sea, outer space, and other places I will never go. Abandoned mines certainly fall under that category (when was the last time you heard about anything good happening in an abandoned mine?), and so I’m rushing to pick up Laurel Hightower’s newest novella. The day her father died, Trish heard the emergency whistle sound from the local mine. Twenty years later, she’s still seeking closure, or something like it. When a group of cryptid hunters come to town with a plan to explore the mine, Trish feels compelled to join them, especially given the video footage they have of the mine’s collapse. What follows is a claustrophobic and visceral journey into the earth, where, they quickly find, they’re not alone. Fans of The Descent or The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling will have a great time with this one. (Whistle is part of Shortwave’s wonderful Killer VHS series, standalone novellas meant to pay homage to that classic horror format, the videotape—the publisher describes them as “Goosebumps for adults.”)

Bones of Our Stars, Blood of Our World by Cullen Bunn

(Nov 11, Gallery) This is Bunn’s debut novel for adult readers; horror fans will likely already know his name from his work in comics (consider this a bonus plug for Harrow County, which rules). Set over the course of one week on an island off the coast of North Carolina, Bones starts out as a slasher and expands into something much darker and far more cosmic. Bunn puts in the work, creating a huge cast of characters in a lively community before unleashing an absolute bloodbath—fans of Salem’s Lot or Midnight Mass, this one’s for you. It’s gory, epic, and over-the-top in the best way.

God’s Junk Drawer by Peter Clines

(Nov 11, Blackstone) I’ve been a fan of Clines’ since I picked up his wildly underappreciated sci-fi horror novel The Fold years back, and I’m thrilled every time I see a new release with his name on it. In his newest, a family on a rafting trip find themselves lost in an inexplicable, impossible valley, one filled with neanderthals, dinosaurs, robots, aliens, and more. Decades later, after years of searching, the now-grown son finds a way back to the valley–but accidentally brings a small group of grad students with him. The setup is reminiscent of Sid and Marty Krofft’s 1970s cult classic TV series Land of the Lost, which is an unalloyed positive in my mind, and if you need something to scratch that Jurassic Park death-by-dino itch, look no further.

I’ll Make a Spectacle of You by Beatrice Winifred Iker

(Nov 18, Run For It) Iker’s atmospheric, creepy debut novel follows Zora, a grad student in Appalachian Studies at Bricksbury University, a venerable HCBU. When her studies lead her to research the history of the university, Zora finds a centuries-long trail of stories about a dangerous beast stalking the woods around campus and a secret society with murky connections to both the beast and the school. Before long, students start to go missing, and Zora is forced to confront whether the past is really past after all. This is a slow burn, full of rich character and textured details, and the payoff is worth it. Told in dual timelines (one present day, one during Bricksbury’s founding in the 1820s), I’ll Make a Spectacle of You is a Hoodoo-laced dark academia creature feature for our time.

The Villa, Once Beloved by Victor Manibo

(Nov 25, Erewhon) When his grandfather dies, Adrian Sepulveda brings his girlfriend Sophie home with him to the Philippines. For Adrian, it’s a chance to see family and mourn his grandfather; for Sophie, it’s an opportunity to learn about her own distant Filipino roots. But when a landslide traps the family in their remote villa, long-simmering secrets, conflicts, and curses come to a head, many of which are tied to the Sepulvedas’ involvement with the darkest parts of Filipino history. And for Sophie, the odd woman out, the trip rapidly becomes a fight for survival. What follows is dripping with Gothic atmosphere, postcolonial trauma, bad omens, demons, and more. Manibo’s newest is perfect for readers of Isabel Cañas or Trang Thanh Tran.

It never gets easier choosing just a few books to highlight from the dozens released each month—to see the full list of November’s new horror books and beyond, head over to my website.[end-mark]

News and Notes

Call for 2026 horror titles: I’m deep in the process of compiling my horror new releases list for 2026, and you can help! Let me know about any horror/horror-adjacent books publishing next year right over here. I’m looking for adult, YA, and middle grade books, fiction or nonfiction, publishing in English in the calendar year 2026. Go nuts!

’Tis the season to give horror: Just because Halloween’s over for another three hundred forty-odd days doesn’t mean you can’t continue to peer pressure your loved ones into reading it! Prime gift-giving season approaches, and inquiring minds need to know: what’s the horror book you can’t stop giving people? For me, it’s long been The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins—let me know yours in the comments.

The post Abandoned Mines and Secret Societies: Horror Highlights for November 2025 appeared first on Reactor.

Books dragons

Six Sinister Serpents to Put the Fear of Dragons Back Into Readers

There is nothing warm and fuzzy about these horrifying creatures…

By Sam Reader

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Published on November 18, 2025

Riverrun cover art by by Tim White

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Riverrun cover art by by Tim White

For all that dragons have the capacity to be absolutely terrifying, you’d think there’d be more horror and weird fantasy that leans into their darker, more savage aspects. They’re horrifying beasts, forces of nature equipped with devastating physical strength and fearsome physiologies, long lifespans, and often cunning far outstripping the average human. Yet much of the time they’re confined to the realms of high fantasy, posing a dangerous but conventional challenge for the hero to (almost inevitably) defeat. And of course, there are plenty of works that present dragons as wise and helpful, even downright cuddly.

For those of us who prefer our fantasy creatures deadly and devious, and perhaps strange and otherworldly, it’s high time that scaly wyrms got their groove back—thus we present six sinister and terrifying serpents to whet your appetite for draconic destruction.

St. George’s Dragon — Fool on the Hill by Matt Ruff

Matt Ruff’s epic fantasy novel is a riff on the traditional tropes—it’s a mythological tale about a god of stories who keeps trying to bend events towards tragedy, and it’s a deeply unnerving supernatural horror novel that also works as a heroic epic fantasy featuring modern-day knights clashing with witches and monsters. The climax, as befits the story, involves the villain animating a kaiju-size dragon parade float to wreak havoc in Ithaca, NY, then setting the hero Stephen Titus George in its path to either stop the beast or (the desired outcome) die tragically. In this first novel, Ruff shows off the horror chops that would later make him famous by turning a fire-breathing handmade kaiju stalking Ithaca into a threat of genuine doom, despite how absurd it might sound.

The Serpent — The Ceremonies by T.E.D. Klein

Klein’s rural horror epic (expanded from his earlier novella “The Events at Poroth Farm”) was once called “The Moby-Dick of horror” by no less than Stephen King. Given that endorsement, it’s no surprise its twisted earth-dwelling abomination would be just as fearsome as the object of Ahab’s obsession: a gigantic white serpent that spends its time terrorizing the farming community through its agents before finally waking during the final ritual to devour the world. While perhaps more snakelike (the titular creature featured in The Lair of the White Worm shares some aspects of Klein’s elder god, the d’Ampton Worm being a fearsome dragon in and of itself), the virgin sacrifice, pagan rites, and final clash with the hero hit all the beats of a classic knight-fighting-a-dragon tale—even if the knight in this case is pretty far from a heroic figure in shining armor.

King Sorrow — King Sorrow by Joe Hill

Klein has described The Ceremonies as his attempt to update Arthur Machen (and seems to have been inspired in large part by “The White People”). Joe Hill, also a fan of riffing on horror classics, chose Machen’s The Great God Pan as his inspiration instead, penning a story of dark academia, New England noir, and dark magic. The focal point of the story is, of course, King Sorrow, a dragon called forth from the Long Dark where spirits reside who feeds on negative emotions. Summoned using a stolen occult book bound in the writer’s own skin and announcing his presence through a psychedelic horror sequence that begins with the summoners staring into a huge golden eye in the darkness. Sorrow makes an instant impression even before he starts demanding sacrifices. Once he makes himself known, he’s a terrifying presence through the rest of the book—the kind of villain who knows he has all the time in the world to play with his food. Sorrow is unnerving, as alien as his speech is convoluted, and memorable enough to ensure that you’ll never hear “Puff the Magic Dragon” without shuddering ever again.

The Dragon/Gideon Winter — Floating Dragon by Peter Straub

Another freshly summoned psychedelic entity, the unholy union of an airborne hallucinogen and an ancient cursed spirit, The Dragon in Floating Dragon spends much of its time as more of a malevolent force than a physical creature but it fulfills a lot of the same purpose a dragon might in these stories—it’s a terrifying ancient presence that swoops overhead and feeds on the people of a specific area. Its seat of power is a series of caves beneath the town where it emerges every so often to descend like a wrathful, violent force of nature. If that doesn’t sound draconic enough, it even takes the form of a literal dragon for the final confrontation, facing down a hero who suddenly finds himself wielding a sword.

Illustrious Daverak — Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton

Walton’s xenofiction, which takes the suffocating conventions of repressive Victorian society and adapts them to gigantic flying lizards, is strange and unnerving to begin with. There are biological distinctions based on class, a predilection towards cannibalism as part of dividing up earthly possessions, and some absolutely terrifying implications relating to the eating of dragonets. Daverak, however, manages to make this even more horrifying by being an abusive husband and the villain of a Victorian novel starring a cast of dragons. This means he revels in things like trying to devour the majority of his father-in-law’s corpse over the objections of his spouse’s family, walling someone up in their own bedroom, and eating multiple infants (one of which is implied to be his own). In a world full of bizarre biology and even stranger social conventions, Daverak stands out as truly vile and deeply horrifying.

Katastrofa Darkling — The Riverrun Trilogy by S.P. Somtow

Composer, filmmaker, and writer S.P. Somtow’s epic Riverrun tells the story of two families locked in combat for existence: The Etchisons, a family from Virginia on a cross-country roadtrip to an experimental clinic in Mexico; and the Darklings, the vampire and dragon offspring of an evil king warring for control of the universe. Katastrofa cuts a fearsome figure even before she makes her first official entrance into the narrative, arising in a vision as a dragon-woman driving a chariot. Every time we meet her following that initial introduction only increases her threat as she terrorizes the Etchisons—making her brother Thorn (a vampire king who drinks blood from dead souls he yanks out of the River Styx, and who we first encounter threatening to murder his father) somehow seem like the lesser of two evils.

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The post Six Sinister Serpents to Put the Fear of Dragons Back Into Readers appeared first on Reactor.

Books reading recommendations

Five Stories Set in Terrifying Sci-Fi Prisons

From AI-run cells to mysterious bunkers to interplanetary prison camps

By Lorna Wallace

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Published on November 12, 2025

Cage of Souls cover art by Leo Nickolls

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Cage of Souls cover art by Leo Nickolls

Real-world prisons tend to be overcrowded, violent places, plagued by a host of systemic problems which often go ignored and unaddressed, but in the world of science fiction, some authors have reimagined the experience of being locked up in new and terrifying ways. From being trapped in a tiny high-tech cell controlled by AI to being caged in an underground bunker with no hope of ever seeing of sunlight, there’s a seemingly endless variety of ways to punish and isolate whole populations of people—if you want to consider the horrors of incarceration with a sci-fi twist, here are five stories to delve into…

Borders of Infinity (1987) by Lois McMaster Bujold

Borders of Infinity opens with Miles Vorkosigan entering Dagoola IV Top Security Prison Camp #3. The prison is essentially a massive impenetrable dome over a barren landscape. Prisoners are provided with a few necessities—basic clothing, a sleeping mat, and a cup—and then set loose. There are no guards and no rules, which means that things often get messy and violent.

Almost immediately, Miles is beaten up and his few possessions are stolen. It’s not a promising start, but our protagonist is whip-smart and quickly begins putting a plan into action—one which he doesn’t fully reveal to the reader. We might be a step or two behind, but there’s method in Miles’ madness and it’s satisfying to watch his progress.

Miles also features in other stories by Lois McMaster Bujold, but this novella can easily be read as a standalone without wider knowledge of the world of the Vorkosigan Saga or Miles himself.

I Who Have Never Known Men (1995) by Jacqueline Harpman (translated by Ros Schwartz)

The unnamed narrator of I Who Have Never Known Men has lived in an underground prison for as long as she can remember. She’s the youngest of 40 caged women, but she doesn’t know her actual age, partly because her physical development stalled at the start of puberty. While the rest of the women all have memories of life before their incarceration, they’re reluctant to share. They also have no idea of what the world outside is currently like, with the male guards never letting them out of the bunker.

The narrator’s life is routine, sparse, and monotonous—that is, until a never-before-heard alarm sounds and all of the guards rush out, setting the lives of the captive women on a new course. Although this French novel isn’t very long, it manages to dive deep into themes of anger and isolation, but also of hope and resilience.

A word of warning though: don’t go into this bleak book expecting answers. While some people might find that frustrating, I personally think that the not knowing—and the resulting search for meaning, by both the narrator and the reader—is where the story’s power lies.

Cage of Souls (2019) by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Cage of Souls is set in the far future, with civilization in the last stages of decline while the Earth circles the dying sun. The landscape has changed profoundly over the years, with life mutating in an attempt to fit the new environment. Our protagonist is Stefan Advani, who was born and raised in Shadrapar—the last city standing. Advani is an academic-turned-activist who, after getting into trouble with the law, is sent to the Island—a partially-submerged floating prison in a lake in the depths of the jungle.

There’s a lot going on in Cage of Souls—we also traverse the city and the desert in the telling of Advani’s story—but the current timeline is set in the prison. Adrian Tchaikovsky shines when it comes to worldbuilding and he crafts a rich vision of the jungle, which is alive with strange life, and the prison, which is a brutal micro-society. Advani may be a fish out of water in this dangerous environment—both the animals outside the walls and the inmates inside pose a threat—but he’s smart enough to adapt.

“Sacrid’s Pod” (2019) by Adam-Troy Castro

(Originally published in Lightspeed and collected in The Best American Science Fiction And Fantasy 2020) Sacrid Henn wakes up paralyzed, without sight or hearing, and with an AI voice in her head. Via a brain implant, the AI explains that she’s been imprisoned in what is essentially a high-tech coffin, where she’ll live out the rest of her days in comfort, but without freedom. As soon as Sacrid calms down, the AI (which she names Shithead) will give her back her senses and she can begin her new restricted, although relatively pampered, life. But Sacrid has a rebellious personality (which partly led to her imprisonment in the first place), and she isn’t about to accept a constrained pod life without a fight.

This short story is largely written in the second person—aside from a few diary entries from Sacrid—which makes it feel immersive. While this prison may seem cushy in comparison to the other prisons on this list—which come with the ever-present risk of bodily harm and even death—being trapped in a box with an AI is most definitely its own kind of hell.

Chain-Gang All-Stars (2023) by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Set in a dystopian future, Chain-Gang All-Stars is the name of an incredibly popular show that pits prisoners against each other in brutal gladiator-style fights. Joining a chain-gang is voluntary, with the incentive being that if an inmate wins enough matches, they’ll eventually gain their freedom. Although joining in this unconventional prison entertainment might be tempting for prisoners with few other options, there’s a very high mortality rate.

We’re mostly led through the story via the perspectives of Loretta “Blood Mama” Thurwar, the leader of a Chain, and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker, Thurwar’s next-in-line and lover. Thurwar is just a few fights away from finally walking free, but—to tweak a line from a different death games story—the odds aren’t exactly in her favor.

The fights themselves are bloody and exhilarating, but Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah never lets the reader forget the point of the book: highlighting the dehumanization of the incarceration system. While this theme is woven through the story via the inclusion of protesters against the program and conversations between the fighters themselves, the point is really driven home by footnotes, which provide real-world information and statistics detailing the injustices of the American prison system.

If you want to explore even more SFF prisons, check out this list—and please feel free to leave your own suggestions of creatively terrifying prisons in the comments below…[end-mark]

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Books Romantasy Report

Vampires, Time Travel, and Rebellions: Romantasy Report for November and December 2025

These 26 new romantasies will whisk you from fall to winter…

By Natalie Zutter

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Published on November 12, 2025

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Faustian bargains, court politics, and plenty of vampires to whisk you from fall to winter…

It’s time to build your autumnal TBR, and we’ve got all the cozy—and chilling, and thrilling, and downright dark—romantasy to carry you into the start of winter. What are you waiting for? Light some candles, especially since it’s dark so damn early, and get to it.

Scratching the Itch: Demons, Gods, and Faustian Bargains

Son of the Morning by Akwaeke Emezi

(Avon/Harper Voyager; November 4, 2025) For their tenth novel, literary fiction author Emezi explores paranormal romance by way of angels and demons in the Black South. Specifically, the enigmatic Lucifer Helel, the devil himself, to whom Galilee Kincaid can’t help but be drawn—even when it becomes clear that neither of them is of this plane. But when Leviathan, prince of Hell, seeks to protect his master, Gali must tap into her own otherworldly powers.

The Sacred Spaces Between by Kalie Reid

(Harper Voyager; November 4, 2025) This fantasy examines the hold that religious institutions have on their most fervent, even as—in the case of the Abbey—they literally feed upon their flock’s memories. Jude is an exiled saint, whose memory magic allows the Abbey to control its loyal followers. When they send Maeve to paint an updated icon of him, Jude recognizes not her devoutness but the same magic he possesses, except hers manifests through her iconography.

As Many Souls as Stars by Natasha Siegel

(William Morrow; November 25, 2025) We can’t get enough of reincarnation romance, not least a queer love story in which a witch and a demon chase each other across lifetimes to fulfill a long-ago bargain. Miriam Richter consumes mortal souls, but Cybil Harding’s is something else, pulsing with the bright light of a First Daughter. Though Miriam initially trades Cybil reincarnation for her soul, as they repeat their dance, each craves something more from the other.

Children of Fallen Gods by Carissa Broadbent

(The War of Lost Hearts #2 — Bramble; December 9, 2025) Former slave Tisaanah is bound by a blood pact to fight for the Orders, magic Wielders who can harness death itself. Thrust into a brutal war, she tries to free her lost friends, while her Wielder master Maxantarius Farlione grapples with his own magic in a new position of leadership.

Gimme Gimme Gimme: Rogues, Monsters, and Baddies

The House Saphir by Marissa Meyer

(Feiwel & Friends; November 4, 2025) Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles teleported familiar fairy tale princesses into space, so a Bluebeard-inspired murder mystery romantasy already sounds like a lot of fun. The Bluebeard mythos is part of the eponymous House Saphir, whose bloody history includes Count Bastien Saphir’s murder of multiple wives over a century ago, making the present building a bloody tourist attraction. Mallory Fontaine is a witch but mostly a grifter, using her ability to see the dead to fleece tourists. But when Armand Saphir pays her to exorcise Saphir House of his great-great-grandfather Le Bleu’s ghost, a fresh murder makes him a suspect and her fear for her life.

The Reluctant Reaper by MaryJanice Davidson

(Blackstone; November 11, 2025) Amara Morrigan’s quarterlife crisis involves whether to join the family business—Death, to which she is morally opposed after dear old dad whisked away both her childhood bestie and her favorite teacher. But when Death himself is comatose, someone has to play Grim Reaper, even temporarily. Joining Amara in her unexpected new position is Gray, her current best friend and unrequited love interest, who’s not scared of the fact that not only does she know exactly when he’s going to die… but it’s soon.

Violet Thistlewaite Is Not a Villain Anymore by Emily Krempholtz

(Ace; November 18, 2025) Following the death of her master, a former sorcerer’s apprentice, rather than embrace her fate as the Thornwitch, would rather go the Legends & Lattes route. That is, to get a fresh start in the quaint town of Dragon’s Rest, opening a flower shop and brewing only good spells for her new neighbors. But Violet Thistlewaite can’t help but clash with grumpy alchemist Nathaniel Marsh in their shared greenhouse space. And when a mysterious blight strikes Dragon’s Nest, only someone who knows dark magic can fix it—even as she doubts whether she can actually do good.

I’ll Find You Where the Timeline Ends by Kylie Lee Baker

(Feiwel & Friends; November 18, 2025) Yang Mina thought that moving to Seoul would aid her in training to join the Descendants, a cabal of time travel agents protecting the timeline against unauthorized changes. Granted her own time traveling powers by her ancestor, a Japanese dragon god, Mina is stunned to discover that the Descendants answer to a corrupt influence. Working with Yejun, a rogue agent who wants to restore the Descendants’ goodness, Mina could save her sister from being erased and change history.

Hollow by Caroline Peckham and Susanne Valenti

(Crown of Hearts & Chaos #1 — King’s Hollow; November 25, 2025) Game recognizes game with two equally dark love interests: Prince Bane, the man cloaked in shadow that good girls don’t trust—and Ferris Creed, who meets his black heart with her own ruthlessness in her goal to survive the Great Hunt. Willing to face every monster in the Hollows, Ferris is the kind of Champion who will change her fate and everyone else’s.

Ember Eternal by Chloe Neill

(Souls Burn Brightest #1 — Ace; November 25, 2025) It seems intentional that Fox is a Robin Hood-esque thief with her own morals, however self-serving; she only steals from those who won’t miss it. But when she happens upon intel about an assassin targeting the crown prince, she can’t cheat a man of his life. But her good deed throws her into court politics and highlights the rare magic she’d been trying to keep on the down-low.

Love Bites: Vampires

The Last Vampire by Romina Garber

(Wednesday Books; December 2, 2025) I low-key love that this modern vampire tale starts more in the vibe of Austenland, with a Jane Austen fangirl desperately seeking Darcy at a Victorian manor-set boarding school accidentally awakens an ancient vampire instead. Pride and… Prey? I already ship Lorena/William and can only hope for more Austen-esque Easter eggs.

The Dark is Descending by Chloe C. Peñaranda

(Nytefall #3 — Bramble; December 2, 2025) At the start of the Nytefall trilogy, Astraea (named for the Greek goddess of justice) was a prisoner trying to save humanity from a cycle of hunting by a vampire population. But after becoming a star-maiden—like her namesake, who transformed into the constellation Virgo—Astraea is still drawn to Nyte, the vampire who stalks her dreams. In the trilogy’s conclusion, Astraea must set out into a world robbed by daylight to discover the key to freeing Nyte and learning her true destiny.

A Steep and Savage Path by JJA Harwood

(Harper360; December 30, 2025) This has shades of the ol’ “sacrifice a maiden to the dragon” tale (except this time it’s a vampire) and Dante’s Inferno, as a mortal bride makes a bargain with her immortal husband: Take her to the underworld to rescue her sister’s soul, and he can drink as much of her blood as he wants. Irina may regret that oath far more than til death do us part…

We Who Will Die by Stacia Stark

(Empire of Blood #1 — Avon; December 30, 2025) Ancient Roman vampires? Say less. To protect her younger brothers from the cruelty of the Thorn district, Arvelle binds herself to an oath to kill the emperor… who happens to be an immortal vampire. To do so, she must both compete in the Sundering, where she is shocked to discover that the vampire known as the Primus, the emperor’s bodyguard, is the same man who once broke her heart.

Desperately Seeking: Big Heart on the High Seas

Ship of Spells by H. Leighton Dickson

(Entangled: Red Tower Books; November 4, 2025) Naval fantasy where the protagonist goes from shipwreck to haunted ship? Go on. Found family in the form of a misfit crew? Yes. A world-changing threat related to swelling seas and crumbling barriers? Thirsting for it. And let’s not forget swashbuckling love interests and dangerous magik. All aboard!

This Gilded Abyss by Rebecca Thorne

(Titan’s Wrath #1 — Tor Books; November 11, 2025) This book’s cover copy goes in every possible direction, but in really unexpected and fun ways. A soldier-turned-bodyguard for her royal ex is romantasy catnip. But Sergeant Nix Marr isn’t guarding Princess Kessandra at balls; they’re on a submersible investigating the drowned city of Fall. And then a mysterious deadly disease is set loose on their sub! That this is getting comped to Titanic just has me hoping we won’t have another floating door debate…!

Break Wide the Sea by Sara Holland

(Wednesday Books; November 11, 2025) This sounds like the kind of book that will sweep you away: Annie, young heir to a whaling company, suffers from a heartbreak-induced sickness that threatens to transform her into a scaly monster. The only way to find a cure is to ally herself with the bloodthirsty finfolk—or at least one Captain Silas Price, rumored to be half-finfolk. But the cost will be turning her back on the family business.

Thirst Trap: Court Politics

The Bridge Kingdom by Danielle L. Jensen

(The Bridge Kingdom #1 — Del Rey; November 4, 2025) This deluxe hardcover reissue of the popular series features new character art and a world map to really immerse you in warrior princess Lara’s devastating dilemma. Trained to be offered as a bride to King Aren of the Bridge Kingdom, Lara finds herself doubting her own complicity in the subterfuge as she begins to fall for her husband. But is her new home of Ithicana the selfish bridge kingdom that she’s always known it as, or the only thing keeping their storm-ravaged world together?

A Heart of Crimson Flames by A.K. Mulford

(Golden Court #3 — Avon / Harper Voyager; November 4, 2025) The shifter romantasy trilogy concludes the storylines of the three leads. Former Golden Court heir Briar Marriel struggles to trust her ex-lover Maez, even as the dark sorceress offers to rescue her from imprisonment. Briar’s twin, Queen Calla, must put aside their worries about her whereabouts in order to arm the kingdom for war. And Songkeeper Sadie, dragon by her side, uncovers secrets that could turn the tide of the war.

Fallen City by Adrienne Young

(Fallen City #1 — Saturday Books; November 4, 2025) This start of a duology immerses readers in the middle of rebellion inside the walled city of Isara, introducing them to legionnaire Luca Matius and Magistrate-in-training Maris Casperia. He represents the Forum, she the Citadel, tentatively united in a shaky alliance… only for Luca to become the face of the rebellion, and for their forbidden love to almost bring everything crashing down for both sides.

The Seventh Champion by Sylvia Mercedes

(The Dragon Queen Duology #1 — Ace; November 11, 2025) From apothecary’s apprentice to demonic court, poor Rosie Harpwood discovers that her mother is the fearsome Dragon Queen—who doesn’t seem to want a long-lost daughter. The High King’s competition to find Rosie’s champion is also a sneaky way to marry her off, but this resourceful healer decides to take the reins of her own love life and political future. The only problem is her choice of champion: Valtar, an assassin posing as a prince, intending to kill Rosie in service of his lady the Dragon Queen… only to find himself falling under Rosie’s wholesome spell.

The Last Wish of Bristol Keats by Mary E. Pearson

(The Courting of Bristol Keats #2 — Flatiron Books; November 11, 2025) Pearson’s romantasy duology concludes with the eponymous Bristol Keats reluctantly harnessing her mother’s monstrous magic, if it means saving her beloved King Tyghan as well as Ephame itself. Though she has resisted her birthright, Bristol may have no choice when it comes to ensuring the continued survival of the fae realm. Add to that that Tyghan must confront his former best friend and betrayer, Bristol’s father (!?), as well as a secret about Tyghan’s past.

Brimstone by Callie Hart

(Fae & Alchemy #2 — Forever; November 18, 2025) In Quicksilver, pickpocket Saeris Fane crosses to the icy divide between worlds and accidentally bonds herself to dark Fae warrior Kingfisher of the Ajun Gate. Now that Saeris has been crowned the Blood Queen, she must draw upon Kingfisher again—this time to travel back to her homeland in her stead, as she is too transformed by the crown to brave the Quicksilver again.

Something Wicked by Falon Ballard

(Idle Reputations #1 — G.P. Putnam’s Sons; December 2, 2025) Contemporary romance author Ballard spins a heady web for her first romantasy, set in the realm of Avon during a time of flux. An uprising overthrows the monarchy, and the first president will be elected by bloodshed; that is, by killing the former monarch of their home province. Disgraced prince Callum intends to keep royal blood controlling Avon by campaigning… except that it requires him to kill his own father. Enter Lady Caterine, a courtesan Gifted with the ability to manipulate others’ emotions. All Callum must do is visit Cate at Avon’s sex club La Puissance, let her take on his guilt at climax, and proceed with the bloody business of wresting back control of Avon. Except that Callum feels a real connection to Cate, and suddenly orgasm-induced mind control isn’t close enough for him. But how else will he make sure Avon doesn’t fall into the wrong hands?

Yearning For: Bookish Loves

The Bookshop Below by Georgia Summers

(Redhook; November 18, 2025) Love me the growing “secret magical underground bookshop” subgenre, especially when the protagonist is a dishonored bookseller. Cassandra Fairfax was heartbroken when her former mentor Chiron kicked her out of his magical bookshop; but she’s gotten by with selling magical books and readings to wealthy collectors. But when Chiron dies, prompting a bookshop succession crisis, Cassandra is determined to take back the home she trained to preserve… except she’ll have to compete with Lowelle Sharpe, a bookseller with his own agenda.

An Archive of Romance by Ava Reid

(HarperCollins; December 9, 2025) If you loved A Study in Drowning, you’ll swoon over this companion novella chock full of illustrations, endpapers, and new text. It’s a treasure trove for dark academia fans of Effy and Preston’s romance, with his diary entries, her annotations of Angharad, the architectural blueprints that brought them together in Hiraeth, and, wonder of wonders, their epilogue.

[end-mark]

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Books reading recommendations

Five Ways to Build a Story Around an Unlikeable Protagonist

Thoughts on hateable, problematic, and morally bankrupt characters.

By James Davis Nicoll

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Published on November 11, 2025

From the cover of Astounding Science Fiction, October 1941; Art by Hubert Rogers

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From the cover of Astounding Science Fiction, October 1941; Art by Hubert Rogers

Terrible people can make interesting characters. But there’s a catch: getting readers to care about protagonists who are deeply, unpleasantly flawed can be a challenge. Reveal their egregious defaults in the wrong way and readers will nope out.

My go-to example is Thomas Covenant, whose adventures I stopped following the moment I got to that scene. You know the one I mean. I don’t remember how far into the first volume that scene is¹. I hope it was early enough to save me reading time better invested elsewhere.

How, then, to keep the reader engaged? These are the coping mechanisms I most often encounter, in reverse order of preference.

License

The novel offers readers hope that in just the right circumstances, they too would be able to indulge their worst impulses. The enabling mechanism is often a calamity of one sort of another. It does not really matter if the problem is that commies nuked LA, the dead walk, almost everyone has gone blind, or just that young people are rude and everyone is writing a book. The important thing is, a bad thing happened, the old rules no longer apply, and it’s every person for themselves.

I know I’ve mentioned it here before, but the 1962 film Panic in the Year Zero! is such a perfect example I cannot resist mentioning it again. For Ray Milland’s Harry Baldwin, atomic war means launching a relentless crime spree, robbing people and sabotaging infrastructure in the name of protecting his family from exactly the sort of chaos he himself is causing².

This is not my favourite solution, to put it mildly. Still, I don’t hate Panic in the Year Zero!, although I am not sure the movie I enjoy is the movie Milland thought he made.

Obliviousness

The protagonist (and sometimes the author) is so completely blind to their own flaws that they manage to create a sort of narrative momentum where the fact that they are terrible, terrible people doesn’t carry the weight it should.

Case in point, Robert A. Heinlein’s 1941 novella By His Bootstraps. Bob Wilson is a feckless, unintrospective nincompoop³ who, when offered the chance to set himself up as a global dictator, is far more interested in the harem potential of the position than the inherent moral issues. A guy like Bob, one of whose go-to political texts is Mein Kampf, does not seem like ideal leader material, but watching Bob deal with causal loops is sufficiently entertaining to distract from that glaring fact.

How favourably I react to this ploy is entirely dependent on whether it’s the protagonist who is completely oblivious or the author. I couldn’t shake the sense that the late Leo Frankowski was entirely on board with his protagonist’s reprehensible behavior, which is why I stopped reading his series at that scene. You know the one I mean—and if you don’t, lucky you.

Contrast

If an author wants their character to look good or at least not as bad as they could be, confront them with antagonists who are even worse. Yes, saintly is better than morally compromised, but morally compromised can look pretty darn good next to complete fucking evil.

Walter Jon Williams’ 1991 Days of Atonement centres on Atocha Chief of Police Loren Hawn, who believes himself to be a paragon of virtue but who is in fact a violent, close-minded, xenophobic bully. Even his wife treads carefully around him. Luckily for Hawn, William Patience is a monster. Hawn brutalizes suspects. Patience murders people for what amounts to professional convenience⁴.

The above isn’t all that’s going on with Hawn. The skill with which Williams makes the fate of this legitimately awful guy tragic is astonishing. In fact, Days is the book that made me think about this subject in the first place, inspiring this article.

Consequences

This comes in a few flavours. Either the protagonist belatedly realizes the error of their ways (the classic concept of “The Man Who Learned Better”) or the reader gets the satisfaction of watching a hateful character receive their just deserts.

An example of the first strategy (recently encountered) would be Lester del Rey’s 1961 Moon of Mutiny. Moon’s protagonist is young Fred Halpern, whose exuberant faith in himself has already caused an avoidable death by the time he is kicked out of the Academy. A good chunk of the book recounts Fred’s dawning realization that he is often incredibly arrogant and irresponsible and that these character traits are bad⁵.

John Brunner’s 1974 Web of Everywhere exemplifies the second. Hans Dykstra is sufficiently unpleasant that Mustapha Sharif, who exploits his wealth and status to acquire underage bed partners, is somehow only the second worst person in the book. Watching Hans’ plans go horribly awry is quite enjoyable.

Charm

Sufficient charm and personal magnetism can compensate for many personal flaws. Make your protagonist witty, pleasant, entertaining, and (particularly if it’s a visual medium) good-looking, and the audience may well overlook minor quirks like dishonesty, predatory inclinations, and the odd spot of homicidal mania.

The title character from Angélica Gorodischer’s 1979 Trafalgar is at best a flawed man, a man who should not be left unsupervised near an untended wallet or a pretty lady (or entire planets of women). Furthermore, his tales of interstellar trading strain credibility, living as he does in 1970s Argentina, a nation notoriously short on working starships. Trafalgar’s accounts of his adventures are too amusing to end his storytelling by dispatching him to the prison time he likely deserves.

In practice, of course, authors don’t focus on just one technique for any potentially unlikable character. They mix and match: the protagonist is a charming cad and their antagonist gleefully eats live babies, or the cad learns better but circumstances force them to revert in the next installment, and so on and so forth.

Furthermore, I’ve probably overlooked some obvious methods, which will no doubt come to me at 3 A.M. Feel free to point them out in comments.[end-mark]

1. And I didn’t keep my copy. Used bookstores mean… actually, you know what? This thought deserves more than a footnote. ︎
2. Panic in the Zero! would benefit from an Airplane!-style parody. ︎
3. A number of Heinlein protagonists are not as smart as they think they are. Now, some compensate for that with extraordinary qualities such as a sterling character, being a lightning calculator, or being both willing to ask for advice and then heed it… but is it possible that Heinlein was drawing readers in with characters who were just a smidge dimmer than the reader, so the reader could have the pleasure of outthinking the lead? It’s probably tricky to hit “just thick enough” without wandering into “irritatingly dense.” ︎
4. Days does not, happily, try to make the case that bad men like Hawn are necessary to stop worse men like Patience. A better cop would have worked out what was going on faster than Hawn did, if only because they would not have been distracted by impending police brutality charges. ︎
5. Which is somewhat undermined by the fact that Fred saves the day by doing the one thing that consistently annoyed adults, violating orders because he was sure he knew better. Fred has a talent that compensates in part for his flaws, which is being lucky. Luck is invaluable. Luck is the difference between Fred (who survives) and Blish’s boy protagonist Chris deFord, who gets executed between A Life for the Stars and Earthman, Come Home for doing the sort of thing that made Chris the protagonist of A Life For the Stars. Earthman was written before Life, which means Blish wrote Life knowing Chris would get it in the neck. ︎

The post Five Ways to Build a Story Around an Unlikeable Protagonist appeared first on Reactor.

Books reading recommendations

Five Southern Gothic Books about Generational Trauma That You (Probably) Haven’t Read

Families grappling with ancestral sin and the crimes of the past

By Elizabeth Broadbent

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Published on November 10, 2025

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Social obligation and an ex-boyfriend once landed me at a lineage society dinner in Charleston, South Carolina. The exact association doesn’t matter; pick one, and you’re probably right. Beneath stern portraits of Confederate generals with epic facial hair, white people ate rubbery chicken and celebrated the fictions they willed into history. Anyone with money and connections enough to join that particular society owed both to the blood and sweat of enslaved people. No one acknowledged it. And as I scanned the dining room of that vaunted Charleston club, I realized that every member of the waitstaff was Black. I kept my mouth shut as a server took my plate. I’m sorry, I wanted to say. I hope y’all spit in our food. At the turn of the twenty-first century, a hundred and thirty-years after the War ended, that roomful of white people continued to enact the crimes of their ancestors. It’s no wonder Southern literature lends itself to narratives about generational trauma.

Southerners pass down their legacy of violence and repression like genetic inheritance. Regardless of ethnicity, we live in the shadow of our historical past: oppressor or oppressed, perpetrator or victim, and often both (Martiniquais poet Aimé Césaire notes that colonialism “decivilizes” the colonizer, inevitably corrupting and ensavaging those responsible for it. While the nature and severity of violence differs, colonizers are not immune to colonialism’s ravages). Since our historical past continually intrudes upon the present, horror lurks behind every Southern story, no matter how innocent. We love to forget it. But even at their most repressed and liminal, those horrors leave smeared, bloody fingerprints behind. When I tell Richmonders that I write Southern Gothic, they imagine Spanish moss, mint juleps, and gracefully ruined plantations. They forget that down here, beauty and brutality are close as brothers.

Substitute “love” for beauty, and it’s obvious why Southern Gothic remains particularly prone to examining familial trauma. In his seminal, problematic treatise, The Mind of the South, W. J. Cash lingers on the Southern propensity for horrifying, sudden acts of violence, which he attributes to our frontier roots; paradoxically, that tendency exists alongside an addiction to redemption. We sin on Saturday so we can be saved on Sunday. Those grand, conflicting impulses create ripe conditions for the powerful to abuse the powerless, including vulnerable ethnic and cultural minorities, the poor, or women and children.

Add our tendency to view people not as discrete entities, but as members of complex societal webs—the quintessential Southern question remains Who are your people? Our past may be violent and repressive, but we remain in its thrall. Cash also notes our collective obsession with genealogy, and though The Mind of the South was published in 1941, the proliferation of lineage societies shows that they remain a collective pastime on par with SEC football. Genealogy might be “a vast collection of stories, both intimate and cosmic, that bind the living to the dead and to one another, the past to the present and the present to what is to come,” as Thomas Laqueur says in the London Review of Books, but its inclusion also “entail[s] exclusion.” Genealogies enforce racial oppression as well as rank classism.

If love and brutality, violence and courtesy, sin and redemption are close Southern kin, is it any wonder that our literature examines their persistence in the personal, intimate present? The microcosm of an abusive family mirrors the macrocosm of Southern history. In my own Southern Gothic books, I write circles around my abusive past; the personal stands in for the collective. Ever since Ellen Glasgow dismissively coined the genre’s name, functional families have been rare in Southern Gothic; other than Atticus Finch, a good dad is hard to find. The genre has a rich tradition of dysfunctional clans whose offspring grapple with personal, societal, and historical demons.

Consciously or unconsciously, Southerners remain captive to ancestral sin; the past is our wound, and the past is our anchor. While historical trauma is a hallmark of the genre, some books deal with the ways those horrors are passed down through generational trauma. As William Faulkner says in Absalom, Absalom!, this trauma becomes “a kind of vacuum filled with wraithlike and indomitable anger and pride and glory … an entailed birthright passed from father to son.” Faulkner’s a master at tracing that madness, and so is Toni Morrison, but if you’ve read this far, you probably already know that. Here are five Southern Gothic books about generational trauma that perhaps you haven’t read yet.

The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy

If all you know about this book is its movie adaptation starring Nick Nolte and Barbra Streisand, the novel itself will surprise you. Much of Pat Conroy’s writing is an attempt to exorcise his childhood trauma, and The Prince of Tides stands as perhaps his most artistic and eloquent depiction of dysfunction. Conroy often copped to his obsession with OG Southern Gothic author Thomas Wolfe; the proof is in the prose. If you’re a fan of spare, concrete language, stay far away. This book elevates the Southern love affair with language into a fetish.

The Prince of Tides tells the story of Tom Wingo, whose estranged, possibly schizophrenic twin sister Savannah long ago fled their South Carolina home for New York City. A celebrated poet, Savannah survives a suicide attempt, and when Tom arrives in New York to look after her, he discovers that her seemingly incoherent ramblings are anything but—instead, “she’s screaming out her autobiography.” He agrees to decode those ravings for Savannah’s psychiatrist, and the narrative becomes a nonlinear history of the Wingo family at the hands of a violent father and a narcissistic mother.

The novel examines the roots of Tom and Savannah’s trauma, both familial and societal; they were doomed, Tom suggests, not only by their parents but also by the “fragrant prison” of the small-town South. Trigger warnings abound, including on-page child abuse, misogyny, sexual assault, and self-harm. Conroy nails maternal narcissism so well that my own mother confiscated the book so she wouldn’t tell on herself. A stunningly beautiful read, but a heart-wrenching one.

A Visitation of Spirits by Randall Kenan

The 2020 loss of queer North Carolina author Randall Kenan dealt a severe blow to Southern letters. A gay writer who fled the South for New York City, Kenan was known for blending speculative and literary fiction. Both his short story collection Let the Dead Bury Their Dead and A Visitation of Spirits could properly be called horror, though in his obituary, The New York Times preferred “magical realism.”

A Visitation of Spirits uses nonlinear narrative and experimental structure to explore marginalization, queer identity, and historical trauma. A sixteen-year-old, queer Black teenager, Horace Cross has been forced to hide his identity from his fundamentalist, small-town family. To escape, he wants to turn himself into a bird—echoing the folkloric tradition in which enslaved people take flight to escape their bondage. Syncretizing old-time religion, Black spiritual tradition, comic books, and science fiction, Horace concocts a transformation ritual. Spoiler alert: it goes badly.

At the same time, Horace’s second cousin Jimmy Greene drives two relatives to the deathbed of a third. A small-town minister and high school principal, Jimmy reflects on familial life as he attempts to reconcile his relatives. While Horace deals with his personal demons, Jimmy examines the macroforces of generational and historical trauma as the novel spirals to an explosive close.

A Visitation of Spirits discusses the dual marginalization of being Black and queer in the American South, especially when coupled with the weight of familial and societal expectation. Kenan also spends plenty of time critiquing Christianity; the novel is laden with the detritus of religious trauma. A beautiful horror of a book.

A Choir of Ill Children by Tom Piccirilli

When I discovered Piccirilli was a native New Yorker, I was stunned. A Choir of Ill Children is his only true Southern Gothic work, but the novel reminds me of Faulkner in all his nonlinear, literary glory (though Piccirilli’s sentences are far easier to follow). Piccirilli pairs Flannery O’Connor’s affection for the grotesque with occasional doses of Harry Crews’ meanness, and the result is a gloriously bizarre novel with a core of stark beauty.

With his parents gone, Thomas has inherited his father’s position as the big man in the backwater swamp town of Kingdom Come, as well as The Mill, a crumbling mansion, and care of his conjoined triplet brothers, who share a brain. Witches are trying to manipulate him. He’s haunted by a murder which may or may not have happened. His best friend babbles prophecy (usually while naked), and he’s pining for the girl he loved as a child. As Thomas rambles through Kingdom Come, he tries to cope with both his personal demons and his family responsibilities. Hang tight and pay attention; Piccirilli is a master, and this plot does come together.

We move in spasms, says the first line of this novel—observation and announcement, a comment on both the book’s characters and structure. Thomas does what he must because the forces of family, town, and Southern society will not allow him to do anything else. The novel’s conclusion feels as inevitable as the tides, and the residents of Kingdom Come—including Thomas—are shackled by their past. If O’Connor loved the bizarre, Piccirilli positively worshipped it.

Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison

A native of the South Carolina Upstate, queer author Dorothy Allison was born to a fifteen-year-old mother. Bastard Out of Carolina, a 1992 finalist for the National Book Award, deals with a fictionalized version of Allison’s physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather; it’s been banned in numerous states for its graphic content. Allison says that, “The novel is mean, meant to rip off all that façade of imagination and lies we place around sexual violence and children.” It’s a political novel, but it’s also a heartbreakingly beautiful work that illuminates the struggles of the poorest of poor white folks in the American South.

Ruth Anne “Bone” Boatwright is born (like Allison) to a fifteen-year-old mother, and when hospital authorities won’t accept the family’s lies about a fake husband, winds up with “illegitimate” stamped at the bottom of her birth certificate. Her mother Annie does her best, but marries “Daddy Glenn” when her daughter is around five. Soon after, he begins physically and sexually assaulting Bone. Annie knows and doesn’t know; she deeply believes that her husband will change. Of course, he never will.

This complex picture of generational trauma, poverty, and family dynamics in the 1950s is a Southern feminist scream. “Girl children in my family are taught to endure and survive and not to fight back,” Allison once told NPR. She wrote for herself, but she speaks for all of us. Laced with beautiful prose, the author captures the beauty and horror of life in the South like few others. Serious trigger warnings, but a necessary tale that gives voice to those who have struggled to survive the terrible forces of poverty and abuse.

Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia by Dennis Covington

As a South Carolinian, I thought I’d grown jaded to the bizarreness of life in the South, but Dennis Covington’s true account of snake handling churches left me jaw-dropped. A city boy from Birmingham, Covington attended the murder trial of a preacher accused of attempted murder by rattlesnake at the behest of The New York Times. What follows is an examination of the social and historical forces behind a religious culture in which people pick up snakes, drink strychnine, and prophesy in the name of God.

Covington admits in a new afterward that he didn’t intend to write New Journalism (a form of writing popularized by Southern great Tom Wolfe, in which literary style and subjectivity insert themselves into traditional reporting). But after he attends his first snake handling service, the heady danger reels him in. Soon, preachers and congregants are calling him “Brother Dennis,” and as he discovers his own family ties to the Holiness practice, he falls deeper and deeper into the bizarre world. Covington makes this descent seem almost logical, or at least understandable.

The poverty and alienation of Appalachian folk come down from the mountains is never over-dramatized, but Covington makes a compelling case for the generational trauma at the root of snake handling practices. With characters like “Prophetess Daisy,” and twins “Burma and Erma,” this story could easily have been reduced to caricature; Covington never takes the bait. Instead, his self-involvement gives the book authenticity. And while the book ostensibly focuses on the (literal) agony and ecstasy of people who handle serpents, it ends up being about the author, about faith, and about the generational trauma which drives people to clutch it tight.

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Books reading recommendations

Five SFF Stories About the Power of Fire

Sometimes destructive, sometimes giving warmth and light, always a bit magical.

By Ratika Deshpande

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Published on November 7, 2025

Photo by Jamie Street [via Unsplash]

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Photo by Jamie Street [via Unsplash]

I am fascinated by all the different ways that we can perceive, interpret, and understand fire. For historians, it’s a tool that changed humankind. For the arsonist, it’s a weapon. For the cold, it’s life-giving warmth. For the lost or stranded, it’s hope. And for the writer of speculative fiction, it’s an element that can come alive, literally, figuratively, and/or spiritually to bind and to protect, or to curse and to kill, as in the following stories:

“The Fires of Mercy” by Spencer Ellsworth

The assassin, a mind-eater, and her men had gone to the palace to kill everyone living there, as revenge for the emperor’s lack of belief in the Thirteenth Prophet. She spared one woman, however, along with her child—the heir, still only a baby—and escaped with them into the desert. She carries with her a pendant, a forbidden weapon that could end the world with fire. A weapon that wasn’t made to be used—unless her men have been stripped of those secrets of her Order which must never be known to anyone.

She knows her men will follow her, to finish their job. And so as they run out of food and water and strength, she decides it’s better that the mother and the child die by her hand, for “each act of war must have at its heart an act of mercy.”

But what is mercy, exactly? And how does our interpretation of it affect the consequences? A vivid story that keeps you tense throughout.

“Our Fire, Given Freely” by Seth Dickinson

Rider Bray was made “şövalye, first of all the Horse People” by the Queen. The people of her retinue give their fire—their strength—to her every morning so she has the power she needs to fight the war against the King of Emmer Wheat for her Queen, who also receives the tribute of fire from all her subjects. 

Meanwhile, all over the land, the people starve and fall sick, devoid of their fire. But Rider Bray has been given her role by the Queen and it is the war she must care about, above all else.

Still, she can’t ignore that reality anymore once she meets Marantic Lind, who has somehow managed to convince the Walkers and the Horse People to work together. He thinks he can help the Queen end the war—and do much, much more—but as a şövalye, Rider is resistant. There’s a reason the fire is given to the şövalye. What would become of those like her, if she were to listen to Marantic Lind—and if, despite her reservations, he turned out to have a better approach?

“Fireskin” by Joanne Rixon

One day the warrior Aun-ki wakes up to find that her skin has become hot as fire—anything that touches it burns and leaves behind blisters. Even the lightest fabrics on her skin hurt; the water she bathes in turns to steam. Court magicians and healers and alchemists fail to help her, and as she hides away from the world, people start to speculate what could have cursed her and what could treat it. 

To seek a cure, she takes leave of her king, whom she’d served loyally in battle, most notably by defeating the Great Winged Lion Chiar-shu. She travels to icy lakes and holy places, but the fire remains. As she attempts yet another journey to seek a cure, she comes across a village where things are very, very wrong. She’d been on a quest to help herself, but Aun-ki the warrior may yet have a lot of work to do.

An engrossing tale that had me rooting for Aun-ki, sharing her frustrations, and finding myself heartbroken at the bittersweet ending. A wonderful story!

“After the Fire” by Aliette de Bodard

Jiaotan finds herself woken up from hibernation by the ship’s Mind; there are repairs to be done. But that’s the job of Sukuang, her sister and an engineer. Why didn’t the ship wake her up instead? 

As Jiaotan makes her way to the navigation room, she discovers that Sukuang is already up—but she’s not fixing the ship. She’s considering suicide, haunted by the destruction they all brought upon earth before they left, for the human-made White Fire that killed the planet and everyone on it, except those who left on the ship. 

Jiaotan, only a poet, knows that seeking death is not an answer, despite her grief—which she’s aware of, now that she’s awake and conscious. But then, what is the answer that they’re headed towards? And would it really help? The Fire left its mark on everyone, after all…

“Daughter, Mother, Charcoal” by Akis Linardos

The fire in the hearth keeps the people safe from faerie who lure women and girls with their song. Only the men are immune, and so only they can go out to work and put food on the table. The women and girls must never leave their house. They must tend to the fire by giving it life from their own body. 

At present, the narrator’s mother performs this task. Next, it would be our narrator’s turn. She has to accept her role, but there’s only so long one can spend trapped inside four walls. So one night, our narrator takes a candle, steals the fire from the hearth and steps outside, to see what’s so dangerous about the faerie. The answers are both exciting and disappointing. So she continues sneaking out. But then the fire starts to weaken. Is she responsible? And what would happen if she has to forget everything she wants and take up the responsibility of keeping the fire ablaze, to keep them all “safe”?[end-mark]

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Books Backlist Bonanza

Backlist Bonanza: 5 Underrated Novellas

It’s time to add something short and sweet to your TBR stack…

By Alex Brown

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Published on November 6, 2025

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From Halloween on October 31 through New Years Day on January 1, we’ve hit peak holiday season in the United States. It’s a hectic slide to the end of the year, one full of holidays, events, finals, and, if you’re lucky, a couple vacation days off. The last thing I have the energy for this month is some massive, overly complicated doorstopper of a series. I need something short, sweet, and to the point. So let’s celebrate November with five fantasy and science fiction novellas you might have missed when they first came out.

Flyaway by Kathleen Jennings

(Tordotcom, 2020) Nineteen-year-old Bettina Scott’s life is cloistered and suffocating. Her father is dead, her brothers are gone, and she feels trapped by her overbearing mother. That’s how many of the great fairytales start, right? With a lonesome young woman searching for love and finding only misery. One of those missing brothers reaches out through a cryptic note, and despite her mother’s discouragement, Bettina pursues the letter and letter-writer. At the end of the quest, she may learn the secrets of her past, but sometimes the truth hurts worse than the lie. Jennings’ gothic tale is lyrically lush and beautifully evocative. Set in a fictional small town in Western Queensland, it is a prime example of rural fantasy (as opposed to urban fantasy). 

Stone and Steel by Eboni Dunbar

(Neon Hemlock Press, 2020) Several years ago, orphans Aaliyah and Odessa overthrew the corrupt king of the land of Titus. Odessa took the throne for herself and installed Aaliyah as the general of their new army. While Odessa established herself as ruler, Aaliyah was off fighting and killing, backing Odessa’s words up with blood and broken bones. Now Aaliyah is back in the capital, but their reunion isn’t a happy one. Turns out, Odessa may be just as cruel as the last guy. With the help of a former lover and current gangster, Mercy, Aaliyah must once again launch a revolution… or die trying. This was nominated for an Ignyte Award in 2021, and for good reason. With a creative magic system and compellingly messy sapphic relationship dynamic, it’s an excellent novella.

Another Life by Sarena Ulibarri

(Stelliform Press, 2023) Stelliform Press publishes books on “climate change, ecological destruction, and the effect of these issues on how we relate to each other and to the other beings that live with us in the world,” and anytime I want something interesting, weird, and environmentally focused, this publisher is where I start first. Ulibarri’s solarpunk novella begins in a not-too-distant future still mired in the past. In the settlement Otra Vida on the banks of the human-created lake in what was once Death Valley, Galacia is running for reelection as Mediator, or community leader. So when she discovers she’s the reincarnation of a man loathed by Otra Vida citizens for pushing a movement to abandon Earth for another planet instead of fixing the one they were destroying, things get complicated. The younger generation of Otra Vidans are also making matters more complicated for Galacia. With little sense of the history before and after their community was established, their calls to action feel too radical to some. Ulibarri offers no easy answers or quick condemnations; this is a novella full of questions the reader must grapple with about your personal actions and choices.

A Necessary Chaos by Brent Lambert

(Neon Hemlock Press, 2023) This was one of my favorite novellas of 2023, and I’ve spent the last two years haranguing people to read it. It’s This Is How You Lose the Time War meets action-adventure meets supernatural horror. Althus and Vade are on opposite sides of an espionage war. They’re also boyfriends. Every so often, they meet in a neutral place, party and hook up, then part ways. Vade is a corporate assassin while Althus fights for the rebellion. When a particularly violent act forces them to take sides once and for all, will they choose each other? And if they do, what happens to the war around them? This is a sexy, intense novella that feels like a snapshot of a much larger world. If you want worldbuilding you can sink into, Lambert is your guy.

Countess by Suzan Palumbo

(ECW Press, 2024) I hate to repeat myself but: this was one of my favorite novellas of 2024, and I’ve spent the last year haranguing people to read it. Palumbo remixes The Count of Monte Cristo with a queer Caribbean main character. In the colonial space empire Æerbot, Virika has worked her ass off to become a first lieutenant on an imperial cargo vessel. But when her captain is murdered, she’s blamed for it. While imprisoned, she plots her revenge, and when she finally gets free, she extracts that revenge with as much blood and pain as possible. This is a remarkable reclamation of a book often reproduced through the lens of whiteness even though the author, Alexandre Dumas, was Black. By centering the experiences of people colonized by the British in the West Indies, Palumbo is able to call out racism, colonialism, sexism, capitalism, and climate change. 

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Books Fletcher Hanks

Enter the Unsettling World of Fletcher Hanks

A new anthology explores the disturbing work of an outsider artist.

By Paul Morton

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Published on December 2, 2025

Courtesy of Fantagraphics

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Courtesy of Fantagraphics

Fletcher Hanks’ career in comics lasted just over a year, from the end of 1939 to the winter of 1941. In that short period, he produced, in the words of the cartoonist Paul Karasik, “the most twisted comic book stories of all time.”

First rediscovered in the 1980s by Art Spiegelman’s RAW magazine, where Karasik was associate editor, Hanks both fascinated and alienated comics creators, all of who asked the same question: Where did this come from?

Two decades later, Karasik came back with answers.

In the aughts, Karasik co-edited two volumes of Hanks’ complete work, I Shall Destroy All Civilized Planets! and You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation! In 2016, Fantagraphics published the collection in a one-volume edition, Turn Loose Our Death Rays and Kill Them All!, and last month, they re-released the book for another half-generation of readers. Karasik’s oeuvre includes a graphic adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass, and, with Mark Newgarden, the landmark study How to Read Nancy—but for me, his attempt to solve the enigma of Fletcher Hanks may be his most important achievement.¹

Hanks, he discovered, was a man rooted in a very different culture than the one which shaped the Roosevelt-ian humanism of Golden Age superheroes. His was a world of violence, masculinity, and stern religiosity. It was nasty and all too American.

“What’s remarkable is that in story after story he comes up with new ways of depicting holocausts,” Karasik told me. “He never repeats himself in terms of his visual language.”² Giant spiders devour the inhabitants of an African city. Disembodied hands murder men, women, and children. The punishments are the stuff of Dante. A Fifth Columnist transforms into a Bosch-ian man-rat.  A mass murderer is jailed out in space in a “prison of eternal ice.” “You shall become a frozen spacite, able to see and think, but always motionless!” Stardust, the Super Wizard, tells him. “In your frozen condition, you’ll live forever—to think about your crimes!”

Hanks’ heroes alienate. They lack the goofy charisma of Superman or Batman. They are not your friendly big brothers and they are not objects of your pre-adolescent sexual fantasies. Stardust stands at least three regular humans wide and four humans tall, and his expression is creepy and stoical. Fantomah has a muscular frame and the face of a sweet starlet, but her visage transforms into a skull when she indulges her powers.

Hanks’ villains, with their oversized heads and gargoyle features, recall the rogues gallery of Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy. They are Hitlerian, far more than the debonair Germans in Warner Bros. melodramas, and their schemes defy in both narrative and visuality the most batshit worlds of Hanks’ contemporary Surrealists. 

Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay turns the Golden Age comics creator into an archetype. He is a Jewish boy in his teens or very early twenties, unpretentious but precocious, a genius and a kibitzer. He can’t get a job on Wasp-dominated Madison Avenue, but he can find freedom working in a medium that lacks respect. His stories have subtext: New Deal politics, a celebration of the American immigrant, a deep love for New York, memories of the Old World Yiddishkeit, homosexuality, and heterosexual kink.

The full story of the era is even richer, more complicated, and it includes several tragic characters, superfluous men cast out of the American economy. Most remain anonymous. Karasik learned about Hanks, who didn’t leave much of a paper trail, from his son, Fletcher Hanks Jr. Hanks, it turned out, was a brute.

Born in 1889, Hanks grew up the son of a Methodist minister in Oxford, an oystering town on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. His father’s sermons were apocalyptic, the society of Oxford mean. In his early twenties, his mother gave Hanks money for an art correspondence course, and it led to a decades-long pattern. Hanks would take trips to Westchester County, New York, paint murals for wealthy householders, and then return home to waste his pay on drink.

Hanks trespassed against God and man, his community, his family, and his children. He refereed wrestling fights in the woods, one of which led to a man’s death. He crushed the bones of his wife’s face and demanded that her injuries be left to heal on their own. He threw his four-year-old son down the stairs. And he was petty. One night, when he was 40, right at the dawn of the Great Depression, he stole the change from Fletcher Jr.’s piggy bank and took off for New York.

Karasik locates Hanks everywhere in the comics, both the minister’s son and the adult sinner. His heroes, good-looking men who achieve a manly ideal, are aspirational. His villains have damned themselves. Is the skeletal face of Fantomah a portrait of the woman he disfigured? Does Hanks desire, maybe even need her retribution?

When I first attempted to write this essay a year ago, I tried to make sense of what I felt to be a connection between Fletcher Hanks and MAGA ideology. At first glance, to this urbane, agnostic liberal, Hanks is born of the soil that produced our moment, but no—the apocalyptic fantasies of nineteenth-century America are vivid and grand. They demand that the worshipper listen and reevaluate everything about his body and soul, that he stare straight at the Devil, refuse his temptations, and then seek out the undeserved love of God. The aesthetics of MAGA, in contrast, are tawdry. The avatars of the current administration—a fascist Defense Secretary obsessed with male grooming, a monomaniacal xenophobe with a skull-like face—are not all that weird, just shallow and pathetic. 

When Karasik showed Fletcher Jr. his father’s comics, the son saw the father who had robbed his piggy bank—not in metaphor as Karasik would as he pieced together the artist’s biography—but literally, on the page.  He appears as a regular G-Man, a human extra, a decent fellow, neither a hero of a serial feature nor a German Expressionist grotesque. Perhaps, during his quiet, steady moments, when Hanks forgot the words of his father’s sermons, and the need for drink felt less urgent, that is all he wanted for himself. 

Hanks’ comics are rooted in an America that has little to do with today’s rising authoritarian state. Hanks is a citizen of a New World rooted in the Old Testament. He sees, wholly feels greatness and evil, but unlike a MAGA bully, he secretly yearns for a country in which neither extreme exists, a land in which he can live in peace.[end-mark]

Buy the Book

Turn Loose Our Death Rays and Kill Them All! The Complete Works of Fletcher Hanks

Edited by Paul Karasik

Buy Book

Turn Loose Our Death Rays and Kill Them All! The Complete Works of Fletcher Hanks

Edited by Paul Karasik

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• IndieBound
• Target

1. A graphic adaptation of Paul Auster’s entire The New York Trilogy, art directed by Karasik, with collaborators David Mazzucchielli and Lorenzo Mattotti, was released earlier this year. ︎
2. This quote is taken from a 2009 interview was conducted for a website that is no longer available online. ︎

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Books reading recommendations

Spooky Reads From Yonder: Horror in Translation

Venture into the unknown: horror literature… in translation!

By Marian Womack

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Published on October 30, 2025

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This spooky season I dare you to venture into the unknown: horror literature … in translation! Bwa-ha-ha. Translated titles still make up a very small slice of the total publishing pie in anglophone countries, and yet, as the list below proves, there are increasingly more titles out there to enrich our reading experience. Not sure where to start? Hopefully this list will help you—as will a chat with your favourite bookseller: some of the following titles were pressed on me by the knowledgeable people at Argonaut Books in Edinburgh, Scotland, one of my very favourite bookstores.

The Hole by Hye-Young Pyun
Translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell

The destabilising sensation of a progressive physical collapse, of being unable to do anything about it, the claustrophobia of becoming a prisoner within your own body: these are terrifying prospects. The Hole doubles down on this scenario by proposing a protagonist suddenly thrown into a position of total dependence after an accident, and whose care lies with his not-always-well-meaning mother-in-law. The book has been marketed as a Korean take on Misery, but the psychological terrors here are much subtler than those of King’s modern classic, as twists and revelations keep us wondering whether there’s something else behind Oghi’s mother-in-law’s acute resentment. True, Oghi is left unable to make decisions relating to his own life; he is at the mercy of someone else, and his progressive descent into losing his dignity, his humanity, are horrifying to watch. But the novel refuses to present a black and white portrayal of evil, as the twists and revelations, each more shocking than the last, force the reader to wonder who the real villain of the story is. A masterclass in slow, creeping horror, and winner of the Shirley Jackson Award.

Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung
Translated from the Korean by Anton Hur

We owe those who came before us their due, and we ought not to forget these stories, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, which seem directly responsible for the recent trend of body horror emerging from the experience of being a woman. Cursed Bunny has it all: women’s horrific descent into invisibility brought about by aging; the endless, torturing toll of the feminine blood cycle; the uncertainty of any future when inherited trauma haunts all familial dynamics… Chung mashes all these themes together with revenge ghosts, commentary on the futility of patriarchal structures—especially marriage—and the unavoidable gaslighting women are subjected to, the relentless notion that their woes are not ‘problems’ but a refusal to recognise normality. There’s space for fantasy and dark fairy tales within these tense stories about domesticity gone wrong, although Chung perhaps excels in the modern narratives. But the whole collection is delivered with panache, and even a certain surreal humour: Chung studied Slavic languages and literature, and one can see her stories as a half-way house between the harsh nonsense peddled in Dostoevsky’s humorous tales and the surreal horror of Angela Carter. A book rightfully emerging as a modern classic.

Strange Houses by Uketsu
Translated from the Japanese by Jim Rion

This is one of the most terrifying and gripping books you will read this year, and it begins with a very simple premise—a house plan is not what it seems. Only when looking very closely does this become apparent: Uketsu has found a perfect metaphor for the way in which everyday horrors are hidden from an onlooker. This uncanny plan is the seductive starting point to what grows into an intriguing mystery. The truly remarkable thing is how cleverly it’s done: even with the floor plans in front of you—and they are liberally reproduced throughout the book—the reader is confronted with their own blindness until the author opens things up. The narrative starts from what is a seemingly small point, and, like pulling a thread, revelations appear that sketch a substantial picture of horror, of families with terrifying secrets, of strange rituals, and horrid crimes hidden in plain sight, the pace building and the tension ratcheting all the way to the overwhelming finale. This book could be the very definition of ‘guilty pleasure’. It is grim and dark, but also fun: like binging a true-crime documentary.

Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval
Translated from the Norwegian by Marjam Idriss

This seductive tale is a picture-perfect dissection of the literally unheimlich experience of moving to another country for the first time. The novel follows Jo, a Norwegian student who finds herself experiencing a half-understood world where subtle distortions to the everyday make her experience akin to a dream. The novel captures to perfection this dream-like quality, exquisitely rendered by Marjam Idriss translation. This is also the tale of sexual awakening, of a primeval transformation, and Hval is particularly good at highlighting small sensory details that punctuate Jo’s disconnection from reality, as the strange house she inhabits progressively becomes a luscious setting where boundaries both psychic and psychological are transcended. This is also at times a haunted house tale, where the space becomes a subverted version of paradise. But this weird tale refuses any predetermined horror labels, functioning instead—with its poetic and lyric quality—as a song. Hval is a musician, and the intoxicated rhythm of this tale replicates the strange quality of her sound. The moniker ‘fever-dream’ is applied left, right and centre these days to female, slightly weird writing: in this case it would be entirely justified. 

Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk
Translated from the Spanish by Heather Cleary

No horror list would be complete without a vampire novel, and this lush meditation on modern life as a series of mournings for the people we can’t be, the families we can’t protect, the promises that we can’t keep, powerfully subverts the classical vampire narrative to deliver its modern message. There are two life-in-deaths in this tale, the undead who are overcome with the titular thirst, and the protagonist’s mother, whose prolonged illness evokes similar trappings, a sort of unlife within borrowed time, whereas modern life is equally designed to keep us in limbo. Nevertheless, this novel is a lush and sensual tale of rebirths, of new and frightening possibilities. Yuszczuk delivers a glorious and refreshing new take on classic vampire mythology, and this is no mere fangsploitation narrative: there’s been nothing quite so sexy, dark and original since Poppy Z. Brite. This book is one of those rare birds, a beautifully told novel of proper literary ambition from a writer who has thankfully been more than faithfully rendered by Helen Cleary’s excellent translation. Yszczuk is without a doubt the most interesting voice to emerge from Argentina in years, even if that odious publishing term ‘track’—and that tedious one ‘trend’—are making some female writers invisible in favour of excessive praise and importance given to a few of their female compatriots. One can only hope that this is going to change.

Apple and Knife by Intan Paramaditha
Translated from the Indonesian by Stephen J. Epstein

If we’re being cynical, the new Vintage Classics ‘Weird Girls’ collection has a slight air of bandwagon-jumping about it. However, the abundance of truly wonderful books and writers amassed for decades by this particular publisher and its associated imprints means that, despite the mildly opportunistic packaging, these books are more than worthy of recognition. These six offerings are to be savoured,and one of the highlights of the list is this wonderful collection of tales by Indonesian writer Intan Paramaditha. Featuring parallel realms, demons, ghostly lovers, vampires, and what is possibly the best, darkest rewriting of ‘Cinderella’ that I’ve ever encountered, Apple and Knife takes down patriarchy one horror at the time, subverting the enduring narratives of ‘feminine sins’: blood, aging, or any form of power, whether societal or occult … In the title story, a woman takes a lover fourteen years her junior, is there a more assured version of witchcraft than that? A wondrous discovery.

[end-mark]

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Books Spooky Season

Spooky Stories Set on Halloween

Strange rituals, haunted houses, famous monsters, scary nuns… these Halloween-themed stories have it all!

By Lorna Wallace

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Published on October 31, 2025

Photo by Szabó János [via Unsplash]

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Photo by Szabó János [via Unsplash]

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! No, Christmas hasn’t come early, it’s Halloween! If you’re looking to maximize the fun and frights of Halloween this year, I suggest immersing yourself into a few horror stories that are set on that very special night…

The Halloween Tree (1972) by Ray Bradbury

If it’s a nostalgic Halloween atmosphere you’re after, you can’t go wrong with The Halloween Tree. The novella starts with a group of nine friends getting ready to go trick-or-treating. But then Pipkin is stolen away by a supernatural entity—to get him back, his friends have to venture though Halloween celebrations from different historical eras and cultures.

The Halloween Tree can be read as the Halloween version of a true-meaning-of-Christmas story, à la Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843). The boys think the holiday is all about candy and scary costumes, but on their mission to rescue Pipkin, they realize that Halloween lore runs far deeper than that. This spooky, whimsical, and wholesome story captures the essence of the Halloween spirit, perfectly distilled through Bradbury’s lyrically flowing prose.

It should also be noted that the 1993 animated adaptation of the story (starring Leonard Nimoy) is a Halloween delight and a classic in its own right.

Dark Harvest (2006) by Norman Partridge

Each Halloween in a small unnamed Midwestern town, a strange ritual called the Run takes place. All of the town’s teenage boys are locked up without food for a few days before the 31^st and when they’re unleashed (and incredibly hangry!) they’re tasked with hunting down and killing the October Boy. This creature has a jack-o’-lantern head and a candy-stuffed body made of vines.

Dark Harvest requires a higher than usual suspension of disbelief. The story behind this bizarre ritual is drip fed to the reader through gossip and rumor, and even when some answers are revealed, there are still question marks over certain plot points. But those who are happy to leave their questions at the town’s outer limits will be rewarded with an action-packed and gore-soaked story.

The novella is very different to the 2023 film adaptation. Not only do the two plots massively diverge, but the October Boy’s design in the movie doesn’t hold a candle to the description in the book.

“The October Game” (1948) by Ray Bradbury

“The October Game” is only a few pages long, but it’s one of Bradbury’s darkest tales. It’s told from the POV of a man who absolutely despises his wife, Louise, and feels nothing towards their eight-year-old daughter, Marion. The family are hosting a Halloween party—there are jack-o’-lanterns in the windows, guests in scary costumes, and the apple bobbing is in full swing—when the disturbed narrator comes up with a horrific idea for how he can make his wife suffer as much as possible.

Many readers will be familiar with Bradbury’s science fiction and even his works of dark fantasy, but “The October Game” may come as a surprise, grounded as it is in the evil of humanity. Bradbury doesn’t actually describe anything horrifying; the story simply ends with the implication of something horrific, and the reader is then left sitting with that inescapable implication as it grows dark wings and takes flight through their mind.

Originally published in a 1948 edition of Weird Tales, readers can find this short story in the collections Long After Midnight (1976) and The Stories of Ray Bradbury (1980).

“Bone Fire” (2018) by Storm Constantine

Storm Constantine’s “Bone Fire” is inspired by the Celtic origins of Halloween (called Samhain), which I personally adore as a Scot who grew up learning about those origins and always said “guising” instead of “trick-or-treating.” The short story follows two fourteen-year-old girls, Emlie and Jenna, who have donned their guises to confuse the spirits on All Hallows’ Eve. As they go from house to house collecting edible offerings for the ghosts, they encounter a mysterious skeleton-clad boy who changes the course of their night—and their lives.

This spooky folklore tale was first printed in The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories (2018), but can also be found in Constantine’s collection Mythotenebrae (2020).

“The Folding Man” (2010) by Joe R. Lansdale

William, Jim, and drunken Harold are driving home from a Halloween party when they see a strange-looking black car full of nuns. Jim decides to moon them as they pass by, but instead of his bare butt evoking the expected mildly annoyed reaction, the nuns—who maybe aren’t regular nuns after all—are so furious that they speed up in hot pursuit. The rest of the story is a wild ride that is teeth-clenchingly tense and goes to some horrifyingly weird places.

The story was first printed in 2010 in the Haunted Legends anthology, but it can be read for free on Nightmare Magazine’s site.

“With Graveyard Weeds and Wolfsbane Seeds” (2017) by Seanan McGuire

The centerpiece of “With Graveyard Weeds and Wolfsbane Seeds” is the creepy Holston house—a grand mansion that has been sitting empty and abandoned for years. Strangely though, the house has never fallen into disrepair, and its imperviousness to the elements has added to its unsettling aura. Of course, such a house has inspired a ghost story, a local legend featuring a young girl called Mary Holston, who is apparently doomed to wander the house forever.

Too old for trick-or-treating, but too young for alcohol-fueled parties, a small group of bored teens decide to investigate (i.e. break into) the Holston house on Halloween night. Although they’re looking for some suitably Halloween-y scares, they definitely get more than they bargained for.

First published in the Haunted Nights (2017) collection, this story is also available for free on Nightmare Magazine.

“Universal Horror” (2015) by Stephen Graham Jones

“Universal Horror” is about a group of friends—whose ranks have gradually thinned over the years—who play the same Halloween game every year. Each person gets a costume category—animals, superheroes, age-inappropriate, etc.—and they have to do a shot for every trick-or-treater at the door who fits the description. Rachel gets Universal Monsters, horror staples such as Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, and the Invisible Man. But as well as getting progressively drunker as the night goes on, she also finds herself getting progressively more freaked out by a kid in a mummy costume who keeps coming to the door.

The story first appeared in October Dreams II: A Celebration of Halloween (2015), but it’s another one that’s been published for free on Nightmare Magazine.

I hope you treat this list like a spooky fiction pick-n-mix! Please feel free to recommend your own delectably dark Halloween-set stories in the comments below.[end-mark]

Originally published October 21, 2024.

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Books worldbuilding

Five Ways Science Fiction Can Expand Beyond Homo sapiens

Modern humans are fine, but what if we had a bit more variety in our stories?

By James Davis Nicoll

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Published on November 3, 2025

Gameplayers of Zan cover art by Michael Whelan

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Gameplayers of Zan cover art by Michael Whelan

Humans are prone to focussing on inconsequential differences within their own species and thus tend to believe that humans are quite diverse. An intelligent Brassica would point out that, despite a light spicing of genes from Neanderthal, Denisovan, and other now-extinct humans, we’re all members of a single species, anatomically modern Homo sapiens, and that the range of traits displayed is extremely narrow… at least compared to, say, the Brassica.

In fact, you would not have to go too far back in time to find an era when multiple humans species shared the Earth: Neanderthal, Denisovan, anatomically modern Homo sapiens, Homo floresiensis, and Homo erectus, perhaps others. The current state of affairs, when there is just one human species, is at least a little peculiar.

This does raise the question of whether modern humans are incredibly successful or simply a currently numerous but clearly doomed last holdout of a generally unsuccessful genus¹. More importantly, it presents SF authors² with a challenge: if they want to expand the possibilities and craft a setting with greater biodiversity in the human population, what can they imagine and how can they justify it? As I see it, there are at least five plausible approaches…

The Past

As previously mentioned, not too long ago there were numerous human species. Simply set your story back then and bob’s your uncle. Conveniently for authors, our knowledge of archaic humans is limited to those aspects that leave durable evidence³. This means authors have considerable leeway for speculation about archaic human culture without earning more than a grumpy frown from John Hawks⁴.

The obvious example here is Jean M. Auel’s The Clan of the Cave Bear, which among other things speculates about how Neanderthal genes found their way into modern humans… something that was not established to be the case until long after Cave Bear was published.

Cryptic Populations

Perhaps archaic Homo survived into the modern day and we’ve simply, somehow, overlooked them. It does seem a bit of a stretch but after all, bonobos were only recognized as their own species of Pan in the 1920s. It would help plausibility considerably if the archaic Homo population was located somewhere out of the way, such as an isolated island⁵.

David Kerr’s “Epiphany for Aliens,” first published in Again, Dangerous Visions, provides an example. A small community of modern-day Neanderthals is discovered in a particular desolate region of Corsica. Obscurity and isolation spared these Neanderthals the fate of their mainland kin. How will they fare discovery by their Homo sapiens kin?

Extremely poorly, as it turns out. Well, the story was in ADV so a happy ending was likely ruled out from the start.

Sideways in Time

Anatomically modern humans displaced or assimilated every other flavour of Homo in our timeline. Not so in other timelines! Modern descendants of lineages long vanished on our Earth might be found in trouser-legs of time that diverged from ours ages ago. Some may be happily puttering along with the reliable Stone Age technology that served our ancestors so well for so long. Others may possess technology well in advance of ours.

Take, for example, Keith Laumer’s The Other Side of Time, in which Imperial Intelligence Agent Brion Bayard encounters two different species that might be kin to humans: the Xonijeel, whose last common ancestor with Homo sapiens was long enough ago that while the Xonijeel are definitely primates, they may not be Homo, and the Hagroon, very definitely Homo and far more unpleasant than the Xonijeel.

The Future

Diversifying the genus Homo could be as easy as arranging for a lengthy period of isolation. A calamity sufficient to knock us down to small pockets of neo-paleolithic survivors might do the trick (or perhaps not: Stone Age Homo sapiens got around). Alternatively, one could imagine spreading humans across the galaxy on habitable worlds dissimilar to Earth, while denying them the means to rapidly share genes.

Unfortunately, the best example of this ploy is also a story for which listing it here would be a huge spoiler. Consider instead H.G. Wells’ classic The Time Machine, in which two very distinct, yet symbiotic, species of humans are created through simple socio-economic isolation and time.

Science!

Absent the ability to time travel backwards, sideways, or forwards, one can always turn to present day or near future science chappies for some means to rapidly diversify Homo. Genetic engineering is popular, although it lacks the simple elegance of irradiating the planet.

In the backstory of M.A. Foster’s The Gameplayers of Zan, scientists set out to create the Superman. They created instead the Other, the ler: behaviourally distinct and reproductively incompatible with Homo sapiens, but neither superior nor inferior. The Earth being crowded, and humans not known for their toleration of other human species, ler survival demands that bold steps be taken.

Have I overlooked something obvious? Feel free to point out the omission in comments below.

1. See, for example, Lystrosaurus, which in the early Triassic accounted for 95% of the fossils in some fossil beds. It’s easy for lucky survivors to thrive, at least for a time, if they somehow make it through a mass extinction. Humans are, as you know, survivors of the Late Pleistocene extinctions. Possibly the cause as well. In any case, our success may prove short-lived. ︎
2. Fantasy authors have it easy. Gods are notoriously lazy, and frequently plagiarize each other’s homework. Thus, a myriad of human-like species just barely different enough from each other to avoid a repeat of Marduk versus Jehovah. ︎
3. Archaeological evidence ranging from obvious things like stone tools and cave art, to indirect evidence, such as the implications of lice evolution as a marker for the time when humans adopted clothing. ︎
4. That said, I’d probably draw the line short of having one species of archaic Homo able to generate electric shocks like an electric eel, a detail in a 1970s-era story whose title and author I now forget. ︎
5. I only omit Marc Miller’s Traveller, in which human populations were taken to other worlds 300,000 years ago, because I mention it so often. ︎

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Books Horror Highlights

Dragons, Cults, and Vampires: Horror Highlights for October 2025

Emily Hughes recommends seven new horror releases for your Spooky Season TBR stack!

By Emily C. Hughes

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Published on October 29, 2025

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Real horror heads know that the season for creepy reads is year-round—years ago, I read Dan Simmons’ Arctic exploration novel The Terror on a beach vacation, which was actually the ideal setting for it. But there really is something special about a horror novel in October. This morning, my New England neighborhood was misty and atmospheric, and I very nearly didn’t finish writing this because I was so tempted by my currently-reading stack. (In progress now: Daniel Kraus’ excellent World War I epic Angel Down and Caitlin Starling’s weird medieval tale The Starving Saints.) But if there’s one thing I love more than reading horror, it’s helping others find the horror they’re going to love to read.

It’s a tremendous era in which to be a horror fan: our creepy orchard is laden with fruit. We’re blessed with dozens of new horror books each month. Sifting through them to find the ones that will really speak to you can be tricky—but I’m here to help. Here are seven October releases I’m particularly excited about.

Her Wicked Roots by Tanya Pell

(October 7, Gallery) Pell has been a new favorite of mine since her 2024 novella Cicada, and her debut novel is out this month. A queer retelling of “Rappacini’s Daughter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Her Wicked Roots follows Cordelia, who’s searching for her long-lost brother Edward. When her search brings her to Edenfield estate, she takes a job as maid and companion for Lady Evangeline’s daughters. But all is not right at Edenfield: Lady Evangeline keeps a greenhouse full of dangerous specimens, Cordelia has to don gloves before touching either of her young charges, and there’s evidence to suggest that Edward spent time there as well. It’s a lush and beautiful Gothic nightmare that’s steamy both in atmosphere and in content.

Herculine by Grace Byron

(October 7, Saga) Trans fiction about separatist utopias is having a bit of a moment right now—see: this Harron Walker feature on Mattie Lubchansky’s Simplicity, Torrey Peters’ Stag Dance, and Grace Byron’s debut, Herculine. When Byron’s protagonist, an unnamed trans woman, flees New York for her ex-girlfriend’s commune in Indiana, she thinks she’s found a safe haven: the commune, Herculine, is populated exclusively by other trans women. But breaking into an established social group is never easy, and the protagonist has been haunted by demonic visitations ever since she was forced to see a conversion therapist as a teen. And demons, it turns out, are very hard to shake. Herculine is a wild, surreal, sexy, and very funny tale about internalized hatred, the line between cult and community, and the long, pointed tail of trauma. 

The Salvage by Anbara Salam

(October 7, Tin House) In the 1960s, Marta, a marine archaeologist, travels to a remote Scottish island to study a recently-rediscovered shipwreck. When she finds herself stuck there due to the nasty combination of winter weather and the pesky Cuban Missile Crisis, she forms a bond with a local woman, Elsie. But the rest of the islanders are frosty, artifacts from the wreck keep disappearing, and Marta is sure she saw someone in the ship’s remains on one of her dives. This Gothic gem is so intensely atmospheric you’ll need a hot water bottle and a pair of wooly mittens handy while you read. 

Good Boy by Neil McRobert

(October 9, Wild Hunt) Horror fans will already know McRobert as the mind and voice behind Talking Scared, one of the biggest scary fiction podcasts in the game. His debut novella starts as a story about a missing child and a woman who sees something troubling, and unspools into an old man’s life story, from a formative childhood moment all the way to the present day. There are shades of Stephen King’s IT and John Langan’s The Fisherman here, but the novella’s small-English-town flavor sets it apart (it’s part of Wild Hunt’s Northern Weird Project, a novella series meant to highlight the strange and spooky corners of northern England—if this one’s intriguing to you, make sure to check out the rest!). Fair warning on this one: have your tissues handy. 

Caramelle & Carmilla by Jewelle Gomez & Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

(October 14, Aunt Lute) Many horror lovers will already know J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, a vampire novella that predates Dracula and features a tortured, sensual, deeply queer central relationship. Many more will know Jewelle Gomez from The Gilda Stories, her massively influential Black lesbian vampire novel from 1991. Here, the full text of Carmilla is paired with a brand-new short story set in the world of The Gilda Stories. Inspired by a moment from Le Fanu’s text, Caramelle tells the story of two vampires seeking sanctuary at a stop on the Underground Railroad—and Gomez’s foreword connects the two stories through themes of sexuality, oppression, and Black womanhood.

King Sorrow by Joe Hill

(October 21, William Morrow) New fiction from Joe Hill is always a cause for celebration, and King Sorrow is Hill’s first novel since 2016’s The Fireman. In 1989, college student Arthur and five of his friends summon an arcane dragon to get themselves out of a tight spot. But the dragon isn’t interested in ending the transaction there. He requires an annual sacrifice from Arthur and his friends—or else he’ll take one of them. Told over the course of thirty years, King Sorrow is a gripping, detailed, character-driven marriage of horror, dark academia, and fantasy from an auto-buy author. Pick up a copy, but make sure to lift with your knees, not your back—this one’s almost 900 pages. 

Clairviolence: Tales of Tarot and Torment by Mo Moshaty

(October 23, Tenebrous) Moshaty’s newest collection is a collection of ten stories and one novelette, each of which is based on a card from the tarot’s Major Arcana. It’s a framing device that could easily be cheap or obvious, but in Moshaty’s hands becomes something much more subtle: these stories aren’t about the tarot, not really. Instead, each story here explores characters forced to play the (metaphorical) cards they’re dealt. In “The Fever Man,” a couple reeling from a recent miscarriage find themselves haunted by a parasitic entity. In “Magic Hour,” a survivor of violence barricades herself inside her home until she’s isolated herself from the world. And in “Surface,” a dock worker encounters an aquatic being who challenges his understanding of desire, consent, and, uh, tentacles. The book plays with the anxiety of impossible choices and learning to live with circumstances you can’t change—it’s everything a horror collection should be.

It never gets easier choosing just a few books to highlight from the dozens released each month—to see the full list of October’s new horror books, head over to my website. (Admittedly, starting a new horror fiction column in October is like deciding to try jogging by hopping the barrier and joining an in-progress marathon—I have no one to blame but myself.)[end-mark]

News and Notes

Two new horror bookstores: Any new bookstore is a good bookstore, but any new horror bookstore has a very special place in my heart. A recent Publishers Weekly feature highlighted The Twisted Spine in Brooklyn, NY, along with Midslumber Media in Portland, OR, Dreadful Bookshop in Casper, WY, and Haunted Burrow in Seattle, WA. And my sleuthing has turned up another new horror and thriller-centric bookstore coming soon to the fine city of Philadelphia: Ladies and gentlemen and others, I give you: Thrillerdelphia. 

Bram Stoker Awards® Recommended Reading List: A note to horror professionals: we’re coming up on the end of the year, and as such, it’s time to start submitting and recommending books for next year’s Bram Stoker Awards! Submit your works published in 2025 for jury consideration here, and recommend books for the Stoker Reading List through the Horror Writers Association member portal. (While only HWA members can recommend works for the reading list, the list itself is publicly available and a great way to discover new horror you might’ve missed—the reading list for works published in 2025 is here.) Works published between Jan. 1, 2025 and Nov. 30, 2025 must be submitted by Nov. 30, 2025, and works published in December 2025. And if you’re curious about how the Stoker nomination and jury process works, this interview is a great rundown.

The post Dragons, Cults, and Vampires: Horror Highlights for October 2025 appeared first on Reactor.

Books Peacemaker

SFF Reading Recommendations for the Characters of Peacemaker

Peacemaker’s friends (and foes) should take a trip to the library…

By Alex Brown

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Published on November 3, 2025

Credit: HBO

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Credit: HBO

Doing book recommendations is not only one of my favorite parts about being a librarian, but I also like to think of it as my superpower. I’m very good at it—or, at least. so say my patrons. I love being able to synthesize what I know about a patron with what their interests are and finding the right book for them. Since the Peacemaker season two (and series???) finale dropped in early October, my personality has become about 75% 11th Street Kids and 25% Foxy Shazam, so this seems like a good time to combine my two passions. If the characters in Peacemaker walked into my library today looking for something to read, these are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror novels I’d recommend to them.

Light spoilers for both seasons.

Chris Smith/Peacemaker should read… 

Coyote Run by Lilith Saintcrow and Scythe by Neal Shusterman

I’m starting Peacemaker himself off with something wild and punchy and fun. Coyote Run is reminiscent of early 20th century era pulp fiction but with an antifascist lens. It’s a bloody rampage through a dystopian future North America complete with a thoroughly bad-ass antihero and a whole lotta fights. Using violence to help people and take down your oppressor? Chris “I made a vow to have peace. No matter how many people I have to kill to get it.” Smith would definitely be into this. I’d tell him to give it to Vigilante when he’s done.

Once the pandemonium is out of the way, Chris is getting Scythe. Dystopian sci-fi again, but this time on the young adult fiction side. In this book, the world is perfect and all humans are immortal. Enter Scythes. To keep population growth in check, Scythes, working on behalf of the omniscient AIs that run the world, “glean” people. It’s supposed to be random and objective. It’s supposed to be a lot of things. What the world is, what the regular people think it is, what the AI “wants,” and what the Scythes have to do don’t often align. I hope this book would get him to reflect on his childhood with his father and how he’s trying to forge his own path in season two.

Leota Adebayo should read… 

The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed and Spells to Forget Us by Aislinn Brophy

Ades is also getting two recs. In the first season, she was under her mother’s thumb and in the shadows of her marriage. By the second season, she’s standing tall and being supported by her found family of misfits and queers. Which is exactly why I’m handing her The Butcher of the Forest. Not only does it offer a conversation about destructive parenting styles, but it’s also thematically relevant, what with its tyrannical leader who forces her into a job she doesn’t want to do and having to rethink her assumptions about others and what sort of people they might become when free of their toxic parents. 

Next, I’d follow that heavy read up with something lighter. Spells to Forget Us is a YA romantic fantasy about two Black girls whose familial expectations are at war with their dreams for their futures. The novel has a hopeful ending rather than a happy one. Adebayo is in a similar space at the end of season two now that she’s come into her own. Especially with the journey she goes through with her wife, Keeya, this book is especially pertinent.

Emilia Harcourt should read… 

My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones

The temptation to give Harcourt something calming and romantic is strong, but this is a woman who went through the ringer and instead of trying to relax decided to start fights in bars and get the shit kicked out of her. She doesn’t want bath bombs and cozy blankets. She wants to feel alive, feel powerful, feel vindicated, to feel literally anything, to just feel. A book about a girl everyone discounts but who takes on a serial killer anyway would suit Harcourt well. Both she and Jade had rough childhoods and live on the fringe of their communities, and both meet someone special who shakes up their lives in good and bad ways. 

Adrian Chase/Vigilante should read… 

All Systems Red by Martha Wells

I have to be honest. The whole reason I pitched this list in the first place was because I wanted to write about convincing my darling beloved chaos gremlin Adrian Chase to read the Murderbot Diaries. Adrian would probably balk at first at being ordered to read, then get sucked into Murderbot’s sarcasm. Next thing you know he’s spouting off space facts that are so wrong it makes you want to throw things at him. He’d dig the violence, the tone, the narrative style, and Murderbot itself. The way Murderbot feels both disconnected from Preservation Auxiliary’s community and also drawn to it would feel extremely familiar to him.

Economos should read… 

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

Look, I have a soft spot for Quentin Coldwater in the Magicians books—as much as I prefer TV!Q, Book!Q has my heart. Yes, he’s a massive dork who is often unlikeable at best and insufferable at worst. He makes choices he knows are selfish, and even on the rare occasions he feels bad about it, he doubles down anyway. He’s very smart at one specific thing and largely mediocre at everything else. He’s not great with people but still finds himself with a circle of friends who try to see the best in him. Sound familiar? Grossman’s dry humor and bursts of brutality and danger would also be appealing to him. 

Judomaster should read… 

The All-Consuming World by Cassandra Khaw

Judomaster is a challenging character to give a recommendation to since we know so little about him beyond being relentless as hell, great at scrabble, and a bottomless pit for cheetos. What makes me want to give him this particular book is not only the riotous and bizarre vibes of a book about a gang of ex-criminals led by an immortal cyborg doing a space heist but mostly that it’s also a bunch of folks who built a community out of their differences. These characters are, in their own weird ways, all striving to do one not terrible thing even if it costs them everything. I think Judomaster would get as much of a kick out of Khaw’s evocative prose as he would the violence and offkilter plot.

Sasha Bordeaux should read… 

War Girls by Tochi Onyebuchi

Sasha is another tough rec. We don’t know much except that she’s a meta, she disapproves of the hard right turn her boyfriend takes by the end of season two, and that, like Harcourt, she has complicated and muddled feelings about working for A.R.G.U.S. under Flag. Similarly, War Girls is in part about a young woman drafted into a war she didn’t start that’s being managed by leaders who care more about exercising personal power than in doing what’s right. Sisters Onyii and Ify think they are willing to do whatever it takes to win, but the cost that they and others have to pay soon becomes too high. Sasha, who, like Onyii, is also cybernetically enhanced, goes through a similar personal journey in the show.

Rick Flag Sr. should read… 

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

Speaking of being willing to do anything and everything to get your way even if that means betraying the moral code you once lived by, Rick has a lot of explaining to do by the end of season two. Rick is what happens when a man opts to burn millions of government dollars, waste countless lives, suck up to a sociopathic billionaire, and colonize an alternate reality instead of just going to therapy. I think he’d see a lot of himself in Essun. Both are motivated by their sons being murdered, but I hope Rick Sr could learn a thing or two from Essun’s trials and tribulations. Plus, I think he’d enjoy an epic fantasy series with some heft and crunch to it. 

Auggie Smith/White Dragon/Blue Dragon should read… 

Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark

Work in libraries long enough and you encounter some absolutely terrible human beings. Every library worker has a story about a creepy dude being inappropriate with the public computers, being screamed at by a patron outraged at something extremely trivial, having to clean up a bathroom or area in the Children’s section that is so hazardous it should be sealed off like Chernobyl, or any number of other horrifying and infuriating experiences. And if you’re a library worker who is BIPOC, you’ve also had to deal with racism from patrons (and your fellow staff members). The only way to survive those patrons is by finding little ways to get your digs in, and this book recommendation is mine. Yes, I’m giving the white supremacist a book about a Black woman killing racists. I want to see the look on his face when he sees that cover.

Keith Smith/Captain Triumph should read… 

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

The book is an alternate history where Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan won World War II. It’s tailor-made for a character living on Earth X. With this, I’d get to lure him in with a classic novel about American might written by a white guy and then sucker punch him with morality and ethics.

Langston Fleury should read… 

Flap Your Wings by P.D. Eastman

This was one of my favorite picture books as a kid (my mom and I still say “Flap your wings, Junior!” to each other four decades later). If you’re unfamiliar, it’s about a pair of birds who find a strange egg in their nest. When it hatches, the bird parents struggle to get it to behave like a baby bird… mostly because it’s a baby alligator. What with Langston’s “bird blindness,” this book should give him much to think about. 

Eagly should read… 

Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach

After that mid-season scene of Eagly becoming—temporarily?—an all-powerful being, of course I’m going to give him a book about self-actualization, identity, and freedom written from the perspective of a bird.

Foxy Shazam should read… 

A Necessary Chaos by Brent Lambert

If you’re like me, “Oh Lord,” the theme song for the second season of Peacemaker, has been on heavy rotation on your music player the last few weeks. Based solely on that song, I’d choose A Necessary Chaos for the band. The song is a loving and spirited letter from a parent to a child about wanting to protect someone you care about while also knowing you can’t fight their battles for them. While the novella isn’t about parenting, both the book and the song deal with freedom, choice, and never giving up the fight. Like the band, the novella is bombastic, flamboyant, and contemplative. It exuberantly jumps across genres, but underneath all that intensity is all heart and soul.

James Gunn should read… 

The Last Hour Between Worlds by Melissa Caruso

The Echo Archives is an expansion of many of the themes in Peacemaker, particularly the first book, The Last Hour Between Worlds. I’ve been catching up on James Gunn’s Peacemaker podcast and interviews he’s given about the show, the 2025 Superman movie, and his general approach to making movies in the DCU, and the themes that pop out the most often are his passion for creativity, his love of good character work, exploring what makes us human, and celebrating into the joys of community and compassion. All of that is in this book through the relationship between Kembral and her spy companion Rika. In this entry they descend into the depths of a multiverse fantasy world and face off against immensely powerful entities, all to protect Kembral’s infant daughter. High stakes action, lush worldbuilding, and intricate character development should appeal to him, as will the conversations about navigating trying to be a good parent in a dangerous world.

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