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From the Wreck by Jane Rawson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book was insane. Fabulism meets historical fiction meets generational drama/trauma meets cultural commentary meets well-meaning alien life forms who just kind of accidentally muck things up big time. Fascinating!
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Blob: A Love Story by Maggie Su
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
BLOB: A LOVE STORY is a gelatinous and generous debut from Maggie Su. The fantastical premise–what if you could mold a sentient blob into the ideal partner?–is grounded by the nightmare of being in one’s moorless early twenties. The protagonist’s life is a study of despair. Humor pervades the unraveling in a way that cuts through to confront the reader, daring us to ask if hitting rock bottom can or should be laughed away, asking us to consider if our vices and hurts can ever be evicted from the childhoods where they were formed. Within a fever-dream of a plot, Su raises interesting questions about cruelty, autonomy, bodies, and goodness.
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The Crane Husband by Kelly Barnhill
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I read THE CRANE HUSBAND by Kelly Barnhill in one long, breathless go. A dark fairytale for the past, present, and future, this novella is earnest in a way that makes it feel immediate. The world she creates has fantastical rules, but feels lived-in and inevitable. A stunner.
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Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
OUR WIVES UNDER THE SEA broke me a little bit, but wow was it good. A tale as insidious as it is inventive, and as much surrealism as it is a life drawing, this story is a slow-burn time bomb. Anxiety, devotion, grief, and ghosts… sink into this one and expect to fall down further than you might be prepared to go. I adore the absurd, especially when it’s taken extremely seriously, and that’s exactly what this is.
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The Animals by Cary Fagan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is a strange, awkward tale of a strange, awkward man in a town where nothing ever happens, except the occassional high absurdity that gets assimilated into everyday life quite seamlessly. The humor is painfully subtle, but ever-present, and there’s a lot of the main character falling asleep with pizza on him. Reads like one of those dreams that makes sense while you’re dreaming it, but then you wake up and say– “What… was that?”
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Shark Heart by Emily Habeck
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Listen: I think we all believe, deep down, that there’s a chance we wake up one day and have begun to transform into an animal. In Shark Heart Emily Habeck takes this idea for kindling in a book that burns with hyponotic energy and familiar truth. Life’s hardest roles are those of inevitability and release, and Habeck casts them brilliantly in this moonlight-drenched, ocean-wide love story.
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Fish Gather to Listen by Jes McCutchen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A memorable collection from a dynamic new press thematically unified around that most primal of fears: deep, murky water occupied by things unknown. The grotesque swims parallel to the lyrical in Fish Gather to Listen. There is much here to disturb and delight, often simultaneously.
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The Devourers by Indra Das
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
What if you met a monster who opened your eyes to things no human was ever meant to know, to feel, to see? The Devourers takes us there. Das’ writing is gruesome and gorgeous in this blood-soaked tale. Wholly original, sensually charged, graphically violent, and yet also tender, this book reads like an ancient record of horrifying magic that should have been destroyed long ago, but exposes the fabric of our world. Sensational.
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The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Isabel Cañas brings a dreamy haunted song of a story into the world with her debut, The Hacienda. Deeply atmospheric and psychological, this novel explores the costly war for the soul of one house that is both isolated from and shaped by the social unrest that surrounds it. Cañas brings us a tale that is dark and beautiful, that will make you want to light at least one candle against the late hours of the night, examine the unspoken yearnings of your heart… and listen to your walls.
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The Unfamiliar Garden by Benjamin Percy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I absolutely love the cinematic, pulp-meets-literary quality of Benjamin Percy’s writing. His pacing is fearless and fast, and this second installment in his Comet Cycle is a wild, dark, slippery ride filled with horrors and lots of very wonderfully gross mushroom action. But also banter. I liked this book even more than the first (would totally work as a standalone). I’m excited to see even more of Percy’s twisted imagination unleashed in the next installment. What on earth… or elsewhere… could be next?
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