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Monthly Archives: February 2023

Seeds of the Swarm: A Review

I’ve followed Sim Kern on Twitter for a while, and so when they put an open call out for ARCs of Seeds of the Swarm last year, I jumped at the chance. What a perfect companion piece to Annalee Newitz’s The Terraformers. Climate change fiction (or cli-fi), is a hot topic, and Sim handles it marvelously.

Sassparylla “Rylla” McCracken lives in The Dust, a dried-out portion of the United States devastated by manmade climate disasters. Specifically, Rylla and her mom live in a trailer house in Texas, near what remains of the Guadalupe River outside of Austin. Rylla is a high school senior, attending virtual classes and spending her free time studying the insects and other wildlife that are managing to survive in the harsh, dry climate. When she learns that a new piece of corporate legislation is aiming to dam up what’s left of the river, Rylla begs her brother Tyler for a ride to the state capitol, where she delivers an impassioned speech to the apathetic legislature.

Thanks to a video edit of her speech at the capitol going viral, Rylla is approached by representatives from Wingates University, a school located deep in the Lush States where water and other resources are still abundant. Before she knows it, Rylla is whisked away to Michigan, where she is quickly overwhelmed by how different of a world her classmates come from. Rylla is placed in the Humanities department at Wingates, where she is tasked with studying the behaviors that lead to the current state of the world. She also befriends a group of engineering students working on different types of new technologies that they believe can save the planet and the human race.

After a trip through the campus transport system goes wrong, the existence of a secret series of laboratories deep beneath Wingates is uncovered. Soon, Rylla and her classmates finds themselves caught up in a conspiracy of nanotechnology, bioengineering, and political intrigue that could very readily lead to a new civil war, with Rylla’s mother and brother stranded in The Dust. As if just going to college and juggling a social life and homework wasn’t stressful enough…

Seeds of the Swarm is a brilliant piece of climate-focused science fiction, taking an unflinching look at what our world could look like in a few short decades. Rylla is a delightfully and frustratingly human protagonist, reminding me of many of my own college friends (though we didn’t have world-ending tech at our fingertips). Her struggles to fit in among her fellows at school are fantastically well-rendered and realistic. Kern’s vision of the near-future manages to still stay hopeful, even in the face of overwhelming odds.

Seeds of the Swarm is available from Stelliform Books on Wednesday, March 1st. Get it from your library or bookstore of choice, and enjoy.

My utmost thanks to Sim and to Ren Hutchings at Stelliform Books for an eARC in exchange for a fair review.

The Crane Husband: A Review

I am utterly broken by this book.

Maybe it’s because I was the farm kid who left that life behind. Maybe it’s because I’m a parent, and I can’t help thinking that I’m not doing enough for my children. Maybe it’s because Kelly Barnhill just has a way with words that makes me want to weep.

The Crane Husband is a fairy tale set in the near future of the midwestern US. The protagonist, a young girl of fifteen, is doing her best to help manage what’s left of the family farm, raise her nine-year-old brother, Michael, and promote and sell her mother’s art. She misses her father, who died several years before, and wonders about the life she might’ve had if he hadn’t succumbed to illness.

Everything about her life changes drastically when her mother brings home a crane dressed in a hat and glasses and her dad’s shoes, telling her and Michael that they can call the crane “Father.” Soon, their mother’s life is upended by the arrival. Their mother has taken lovers in the past, but none of them stayed long. The crane is different, and not just because he’s a bird. She withdraws from her time with her children, leaving her daughter to cope and take care of Michael. She stops helping around the farm, and neglects her own health, all to please the crane’s whims. Our protagonist must learn the hardest lessons about what she’s willing to tolerate and what sacrifices can or should be made for family.

This novella is beautiful, and haunting in the best way. It’s a powerful retelling of the story of the crane wife, but it transcends the bounds of the original story and encompasses a new view of heartache, labor, gender expectations, and love.

The Crane Husband will be in stores on February 28th. You’ll want to read this one, but brace yourself. Nothing is what it seems. My thanks to both NetGalley and Tordotcom for an advance copy in exchange for a fair review.

Don’t Fear the Reaper: A Review

It’s spooky season!

Yes, I know it’s February, but the joy that is Halloween cannot possibly be contained in a single day, let alone a single month. Especially not when there’s a new Stephen Graham Jones book to be had.

I’ve read a lot of SGJ’s work over the last few years. From Mapping the Interior to The Only Good Indians to My Heart is a Chainsaw to Night of the Mannequins. He has rapidly become my favorite modern horror writer, and Don’t Fear the Reaper only serves as further evidence of his brilliance.

When I first picked up My Heart is a Chainsaw back in 2021, it started a string of slasher movie viewings as, like Jade, I immersed myself in things like Halloween, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Candyman, Scream, and Children of the Corn. Unlike Jade, I wasn’t trying to hide from my trauma within the slasher genre. But at the end of that novel, Jade had faced her demons, triumphed over the threat to her home. She had faced the killer and survived. She was the final girl.

But as any slasher fan knows, there’s nothing more common in the films than a sequel…

Now, four years have passed since the Independence Day Massacre shattered the town of Proofrock, Idaho. Four years since Jade opened the dam above Indian Lake, saving the town from a rapidly spreading wildfire. Four years since she was accused of murdering her abusive father that night on the water. Going by her birth name of Jennifer again, our final girl has come back home to a town that has tried to move on, but is still obviously traumatized. Jennifer herself has tried to move on as well. She abandoned her collection of movies, finished her associate’s degree (it looked good for the courts, after all), and strives to connect with people and events in real life. She wants to find a home again, to reconnect with Letha and Sheriff Hardy, and even her mom.

It’s December 12th, 2019 in Proofrock, and the snow has complicated things for the citizens. Not only has it disrupted the usual Thursday by blocking most of the traffic through town, but it also interrupted the prisoner transfer of one Dark Mill South, a hook-handed serial killer. Given where his convoy was when an avalanche wiped out the escort, Dark Mill South should be dead too. No one thinks to look for him in town until after the first high schoolers start turning up dead. And tomorrow is Friday the thirteenth…

“The way I see it, someone’s out to make a sequel. You know, cash in on all the movie murder hoopla. So, it’s our job to observe the rules of the sequel. Number one: the body count is always bigger. Number two: the death scenes are always much more elaborate. Carnage candy. And number three: never, ever, under any circumstances, assume the killer is dead.” – Randy Meeks, Scream 2

Caught in between the desire the move beyond her past and the need to protect her friends and family, Jennifer is forced to confront a killer again, but this one knows the rules just as well as she does. After four years away from the movies that she used to wield as weapons, there may be some new tricks she hasn’t learned. Don’t Fear the Reaper is a pitch-perfect follow-up to Chainsaw, and a solid second entry in a planned trilogy, leaving readers eager to learn what’s next for Jade and the people of Proofrock. It’s out in stores today.

My utmost thanks to Gallery Books and NetGalley for providing an eARC of Don’t Fear the Reaper in exchange for an honest review. This one was an absolute treat.

And yes, I started reading this one in the middle of a power outage, by kerosene lamp light, as is only proper for good horror.