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Night of the Living Queers

Hallowe’en is a magical time of year. It’s my favorite holiday, and like any other such night, it’s made all the more magical by the presence of a full moon. Since all Hallowe’en full moons are blue moons (the second full moon in a single calendar month) [source: literally NASA], they are exceptionally special, happening only once every 19~ish years. Enter Night of the Living Queers, an LGBTQIA+ horror anthology that features stories by queer authors of color about queer characters, all set on the night of a Hallowe’en blue moon.

Night of the Living Queers has a little bit of horror for everyone over the thirteen stories. We get classic haunted house stories, possession tales, and spooky revenge. They’re brief, yet powerful stories highlighting the dread that is faced by the queer community on a daily basis. The stories flow beautifully from one to another, a testament to the editing work of Shelley Page and Alex Brown, who also contributed stories to the collection. If you’re at all a fan of own-voices work and horror, you owe it to yourself to check it out. You’ll find some familiar names in these pages, and come across some spectacular new voices as well.

My utmost thanks to St. Martin’s Press and Netgalley for an eARC of the book in exchange for a fair review. Night of the Living Queers is out today, 8/29.

Oh, and look at that. Tomorrow’s a Blue Moon. Have a good week, y’all.

Unexpecting: A Review

Benjamin’s school year is not going according to plan. His best friend and robotics club teammate, Maxie, is pregnant, and he’s the father. And he’s gay. It’s complicated.

When Ben learns that Maxie’s pregnant, he’s immediately struck by the urge to take custody of the baby, providing the father figure that none of his three stepdads have been able or willing to be for him. When Ben’s mom and stepdad #3 learn about the baby, it’s all-hands-on-deck. His mom contacts stepdad #2, a lawyer, to get advice regarding Ben’s legal standing and path toward custody. She also reaches out to stepdad #3, a restauranteur, to arrange for Ben to get an after school job.

Soon, Ben is navigating a labyrinth of high school complications, juggling work, school, impending parenthood, and romance. He needs to find a path forward, and he’s going to have to learn the hard way which consequences he’s going to be able to live with. Everything that he’s done in his academic career hinges on his robotics team’s success, but Maxie’s pregnancy forces her to quit and leaves all of them grasping for understanding.

Unexpecting is a brilliant story. Jen Bailey does a fantastic job of presenting a realistic window into a high schooler’s life. It explores what family means (and the importance of different types of families), dives into the difficult choices that come with being a parent, and serves as a solid coming-of-age story for queer teens.

Unexpecting is available as of yesterday, 8/22/23. My thanks to St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley for providing an eARC in exchange for a fair review.

Thornhedge: A Review

I love fairy tales. I’ve got a special spot in my heart for Sleeping Beauty (I mean, the prince’s name in the Disney version is Philip, after all). So imagine my joy when I learned that T. Kingfisher’s newest novella, Thornhedge, was a retelling of one of my favorite fairy tales.

Thornhedge is the story of Toadling, a fairy who has a limited amount of magical ability and a very important task. There is a tower, and within that tower lies a sleeper who must never be permitted to awaken. Toadling keeps watch from a distance, ensuring that none who pass by ever realize that anything could be found at the center of the field of briars, let alone the remains of a castle. For over two hundred years, Toadling does her job. However, she underestimates the power of stories.

Stories have spread, filtering down through the generations. Stories of a lost tower, and an enchantment waiting to be broken. A young Muslim knight named Halim arrives, having heard the tales. Unlike the people who have come across the thorns before, Halim is not discouraged or distracted. Instead, he spots Toadling and recognizes her for what she is. Halim’s arrival disrupts everything that Toadling has come to know over the last centuries, and forces her to face the truth about the sleeper in the tower.

T. Kingfisher, as I have mentioned before, is an incredible writer. This is the second novella that I’ve read from her this year, and I’m absolutely thrilled to have been given the opportunity to go through Thornhedge ahead of its public release. My utmost thanks to NetGalley and Tor Publishing for an eARC in exchange for a fair review. Thornhedge will be out in stores on August 15th. I hope y’all like it as much as I did.

Camp Damascus: A Review

By now, I think that just about anyone who spends time in literary circles on the internet has heard of the legendary Chuck Tingle. While the pseudonymous author is probably best known for his short erotica works (aka “Tinglers”) like Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt, Tingle has been making forays into longer stories in other genres. The one that caught my attention most was Camp Damascus, a horror novel about a gay conversion camp in Montana. Needless to say I leapt at the opportunity to read it as soon as I could.

Camp Damascus is the story of Rose Darling, a twenty year-old autistic woman living in Neverton, Montana. Rose and her family are members of The Kingdom of the Pine, a close-knit ultra-conservative Christian community that runs the titular camp. Unlike any other such camp, Camp Damascus boasts an unheard-of 100% success rate for kids who are sent there by parents who don’t want them to be gay. Rose’s life (and life at the Darling house in general) seems perfect. She’s about to finish high school (all Kingdom kids spend two years on church activities in between years of school, and so by senior year are older than any of their non-Kingdom or secular classmates). She loves volunteering for the church, and she loves her parents. She also loves research, and memorizing scientific facts alongside bible verses.

When Rose is out with her friends at the local swimming hole trying to build up the confidence to dive off the little cliff, she takes the hand of her classmate, Martina, and they leap together. It’s an exhilarating experience, and the first time that Rose has dared to do something so brave. However, when she returns to the top of the cliff to test her newfound courage and jump again, she sees something horrifying. An old, drowned-looking woman with unnaturally long fingers and white eyes appears to be staring at her, and no one else can see her. Later that night, in the middle of dinner with her parents, Rose coughs out a large mass that turns out to be a swarm of insects. Something is very, very wrong.

Soon, Rose’s investigative mind begins racing, trying to understand what she has seen and felt. Memories begin to surface, and she finds herself questioning everything that she has ever known about herself, her parents, The Kingdom of the Pine, and Camp Damascus. In Neverton, trying to uncover the truth is going to be impossible to do alone, but it’s the right thing to do, even if it means casting aside everything that she knew that made her Rose Darling.

Camp Damascus is a pitch-perfect horror novel. It’s a quick read, and it’s delightfully discomforting to a former member of a Christian community. This book is going to be absolutely life-changing for so many people. Tingle’s writing is tight, packing a solid story into under 300 pages. There are loads of little nods to his particular turns of phrase throughout as well. If you’ve ever given his Twitter feed a read, you’ll find yourself chuckling (ha) at some familiar wording. My utmost thanks to Tor Nightfire and NetGalley for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest review. Camp Damascus is out this Tuesday, July 18th. Go get yourself a copy and help to prove that love is real.

The Archive Undying: A Review

If you ask my coworkers what my most anticipated book of the summer is, odds are very good that they would mention Emma Mieko Candon’s The Archive Undying. The Star Wars: The Ronin author hooked me with the cover art alone, and the premise of the book intrigued me. A silly reference to Neon Genesis Evangelion in the description just ensured that I would pursue the book as publication approached.

Sunai doesn’t want to do a lot of things. He’s good at cooking, but bad at making rational decisions, especially when it comes to his taste in men. He’s good at identifying artificial intelligences, especially the older ones, but he’s reluctant to reveal why. He’s good at running from his past, but bad at staying unnoticed by the people who want to find him.

His world is full of robots. Massive artificial intelligences, beings that were practically gods, ruled over the city-states, each claiming territory and protecting the humans who lived there. While they all had different ways of doing things, almost all of them eventually went insane and became corrupted. The people who served as priests (and most residents still in the area) would be killed as the AI purged everything around it. The same thing happened in the city-state of Khuon Mo seventeen years ago, when Iterate Fractal lost stability, but on that day something unexpected happened. Sunai, serving as an archivist-priest for Iterate Fractal, died, but was brought back to life.

Now, Sunai can’t die. Or at least, he can’t stay dead. Injuries that he receives heal fast, and even being killed again will really only inconvenience him for a little while. He’s spent most of the last seventeen years trying to find out why Iterate Fractal sought to save him, and running away from the people he needs most so that he doesn’t hurt them. Plying his knowledge of AI, he’s made a living as a roaming salvage hunter so that he can stay one step (or more) ahead of the Harbor.

The Harbor run much of the world now, scavenging pieces of corrupted AI gods to create their own combat mechs. They want to control even more, but they need relics to do so. Relics like Sunai. After a drunken one-night-stand leads him to the knowledge that the Harbor have managed to make a mech out of remnants of Iterate Fractal, he feels compelled to find a way to stop them, but he’s going to have to face his past in order to get there. And Iterate Fractal is waiting, and hungry.

Y’all, this book is baffling, but I love it. Sunai is a complete disaster of a person. Emma Mieko Candon has crafted a dizzying (honestly at times overwhelming) world. There’s a lot to take in over the course of The Archive Undying, and it can be a trick to keep track of who and what are where, never mind the fact that Sunai isn’t particularly reliable as a narrator. However, I believe that it’s an engaging work with some narrative tricks that remind me of Harrow the Ninth. I feel like I’m not going to have gotten everything I can out of The Archive Undying in a single read-through, and I’m grateful for a text that challenged my expectations of what a sci-fi novel can be.

My utmost thanks to Tor and NetGalley for providing me with an eARC in exchange for a fair review, and thanks to Tor for taking a chance on a book this bold. I sincerely hope to see more of Sunai’s world, because a story this unique deserves to continue to be told.

It’s out in the world as of Tuesday, 6/27/23. Get in the robot.

The Surviving Sky: A Review

Earth has been uninhabitable for hundreds of years due to the earthrages, massive earthquake-storm hybrids that literally reshape the face of the planet. Luckily for humanity, individuals known as architects learned how to traject, manipulating plants to do their will. Before the earthrages wiped the surface clean, cities made of plants were guided into the air, and the architects expended their energy to keep them aloft until the storms passed. Now all of mankind that remains lives in these ashrams, where the architects can guide the lives of everyone aboard, only landing during lulls in the storms so that the architects can rest.

Not all citizens are architects, however, and no one is more upset about that than Ahilya. She’s an archaeologist, and the only one in Nakshar. She has studied the surface in between rages, and staunchly believes that there might be something out there that is surviving through the storms somehow. But to gather the proof that she needs, she’ll need an architect’s assistance and approval from Nakshar’s council to even leave the ashram the next time it lands. Complicating things for her is her husband Iravan. He’s not just an architect, but a senior architect, and a member of the council. After a fight they had a few months ago, he’s not so sure that her research expedition is necessary. Is he just trying to keep her safe, or is he trying to maintain the status quo and help the architects keep their stranglehold on power?

When Iravan decides at the last minute to replace the junior architect who had been assigned to accompany Ahilya and her young assistant, all of the plans for the expedition are thrown into disarray. Both of them are hiding secrets from the other, and trajecting is getting more and more difficult. What they find in the jungle could change everything about their world and their marriage, if it doesn’t kill them both first.

The Surviving Sky is a tense, brilliant piece of sci-fi/fantasy. Kritika Rao has built (or maybe trajected) a phenomenal new world hovering just above danger at all times. The characters are well-rounded, and the tension between Ahilya and her husband is palpable. Class warfare is interwoven throughout, with the long-running conflict between architects and non-architects showing beautifully in the strain on Ahilya and Iravan’s marriage. It’s available as of yesterday, and I highly recommend you check it out at your earliest convenience. My utmost thanks to Titan Books and NetGalley for an eARC in exchange for a fair review.

Witch King: A Review

Kaiisteron, the Witch King, has awoken and claimed a new sacrificial mortal body to serve as his own. He has escaped his imprisonment in an underwater tomb and regained much of his power, but now he must seek answers. Which of his loyal friends and followers betrayed him, allowing him to be trapped in the first place?

Kai is a demon, eating the life force of others to power his magic. Now he’s gathering the allies he believes he can trust in order to solve the mystery of his captivity. Interspersed throughout his reawakened life are chapters relating one of his past mortal lives, and his rise to claim the title of Witch King.

Martha Wells is one of my favorite contemporary writers of science fiction novellas (honestly, who doesn’t love Murderbot?) and so when I found out that she had a new fantasy novel coming out this year, I knew that I had to read it as soon as possible. Witch King is a phenomenal journey through Kai’s past and present, finding family and friends and seeking revenge. It’s out in the world as of yesterday, so you can enjoy it too.

My utmost thanks to NetGalley and Tor.com for the eARC of Witch King in exchange for a fair review.

Perilous Times: A Review

“Sir Lancelot:
We were in the nick of time. You were in great peril.

Sir Galahad:
I don’t think I was.

Sir Lancelot:
Yes, you were. You were in terrible peril.

Sir Galahad:
Look, let me go back in there and face the peril.

Sir Lancelot:
No, it’s too perilous.

Sir Galahad:
Look, it’s my duty as a knight to sample as much peril as I can.

Sir Lancelot:
No, we’ve got to find the Holy Grail. Come on.

Sir Galahad:
Oh, let me have just a little bit of peril?

Sir Lancelot:
No. It’s unhealthy.

Sir Galahad:
I bet you’re gay.

Sir Lancelot:
No, I’m not.”

Reader, he absolutely was. But that’s beside the point.

Okay. So. Monty Python and the Holy Grail is not my only experience with Arthurian legend, but it makes for a fun starting point when diving in to Thomas D. Lee’s Perilous Times, which came out this Tuesday. A long time ago, after the death of their king, the Knights of the Round Table made a deal with Merlin to be resurrected any time the realm (that is England) finds itself in great peril. Over the centuries, Sir Kay, Lancelot, and the rest have come back to defend England from whatever threats may have arisen. This time, though, it’s something none of them could have foreseen (except Merlin, of course). When Kay, Arthur’s brother, awakens beneath his tree and pushes his way to the surface, he finds a fracking facility nearby. Upon investigation, he meets a young climate activist named Mariam who is in the process of planting a bomb at the facility. After rescuing her from the private security firm guarding the site, he accompanies her back to the camp where he meets the rest of her group. There, they explain to Kay just how dire the Earth’s situation is. Climate change has flooded almost half of England, and there are no signs of it slowing or stopping on its own. So, Kay has found his peril. But how do you fight climate change with a sword and shield?

Meanwhile, elsewhere in England, Sir Lancelot has awoken as well. He’s accustomed to coming back for wetwork and other clandestine purposes, and his handler Marlowe (yes, that Marlowe, having achieved a sort of immortality by his own means) has a new target for him. Someone he knows who has recently gotten on the wrong side of Marlowe’s bosses. Someone he’s known for a very long time: Kay. The realm is in grave danger, and it may be time to bring about the prophecy of Arthur’s return…

Thomas D. Lee’s love for Arthurian legend shines through every bit of Perilous Times, as Kay learns more about the current state of the world and what new evils are caught up in it. Mariam and her friends are a sympathetic and diverse crew of women bent on saving Earth, but they don’t stand a chance against dark magic without Kay’s help. Cam he explain himself to Lancelot before finding himself dying yet again?

My utmost thanks to NetGalley for an eARC of Perilous Times in exchange for a fair review. It’s out in the world as of Tuesday, May 23rd. Do yourself a favor and check it out.

To Shape a Dragon’s Breath: A Review

Anequs is a young Indigenous woman born and raised on the island of Masquapaug, far from the colonizing influence of the Anglish people. After spotting a Nampeshiwe, one of the dragons once common in the area, she quickly goes home to tell her family what she has seen. Uncertain if it was really there or just a vision, she ventures back out the following day and finds not the adult dragon, but a Nampeshiwe egg—the first one seen in generations.

When the baby Nampeshiwe hatches in front of the entire community of Masquapaug, she chooses Anequs to be her bonded partner. Anequs names her Kasaqua and becomes the first Nampeshiweisit (dragon partner) in the memory of anyone on the island. Now Anequs would’ve been perfectly content to stay in her family home and raise the dragon there until Kasaqua, in a moment of fear and pain, releases her breath weapon. Seeing the raw destructive power even a baby dragon possesses convinces Anequs to follow her older brother’s advice and apply for Kuiper Academy, the Anglish dragoneer school in the distant city of Vastergot.

Soon, Anequs is off to another world, one where the white men control everything from how history is taught to who gets to be paired with a dragon. The school accepts her application, but the threat of death for Kasaqua if she can’t learn to be tamed to their standards looms over everything.

Anequs doesn’t fit in at the school, since she wasn’t raised in Anglish society. She doesn’t know the rules that she’s supposed to follow, and so she rapidly befriends the other “misfits” of sorts, including an autistic student (in one of the most accurate and sympathetic portrayals I’ve ever encountered in literature), the one other Indigenous dragoneer, and one of the laundry maids. She spurns the use of the assigned surname Aponakwesdottir, insisting that the only name that she needs is Anequs. She can read and write, which is more than many of the white students and professors expect of her. In short, neither Anequs nor Kasaqua are what the students and staff and Kuiper anticipated. Nor is the school what Anequs had hoped for, with the narratives and views of white men dominating every aspect of the society. Now she must navigate adolescence, dragon-rearing, school, and an openly hostile culture that would prefer her not to exist.

To Shape a Dragon’s Breath is brilliant. The world is simultaneously strange and familiar, set on an Earth in the early industrial age with technological innovations driven by dragons, who can break matter down into component elements with their breath. The breadth and depth of the worldbuilding is staggering, with tremendous care put into the little details. The scientific processes are as thoroughly explored as any contemporary fantasy’s magic system, with almost every aspect having a real-life counterpart. I loved following Anequs as she learned about the world beyond the boundaries of her island, and I can’t wait to come back to the world of the Nampeshiweisit.

Moniquill Blackgoose’s To Shape a Dragon’s Breath is out in the wild today. Go catch yourself a copy.

My utmost thanks to Random House/Ballantine and NetGalley for providing me with an eARC of the book in exchange for an honest review.

The Warden: A Review

When Aelis arrives in Lone Pine, she’s struck almost immediately by the smell of sheep shit. This doesn’t bode well for her scheduled two-year tenure as the new Warden of the small farming village out on the border with orc country. Still, she has no way to contest her station, despite her wealthy heritage. The Lyceum where she studied wizardry saw fit to send her to Lone Pine, even if it doesn’t seem like a proper location for a Warden who specialized in Necromancy.

Truth be told, Aelis would rather be anywhere else. Any urban post. Somewhere closer to her friends and lovers from school. Anywhere were her contractually obligated housing isn’t a broken down, falling apart tower. Anywhere she might have people to protect who aren’t deathly afraid of her. But no. She’s in Lone Pine, and only Martin and Rus, the local innkeepers, have any tolerance for her presence. Almost everyone else shuns her and attempts to avoid her at all costs. It’s a rough start, to be sure, but it’s Aelis’s station, and she’ll do her job. She’s a Warden, after all, not just a wizard.

When a group of adventurers make their way into Lone Pine from a frontier excursion, cart laden with gold to spend in the small town, it seems like the fortunes of the villagers are about to change. However, a violent encounter shatters the peace and sends Aelis on a quest to track down the guilty party. Her journey will take her into the wilderness, and bring her face to face with threats both old and new.

Daniel M. Ford’s The Warden is out in stores today, and I highly recommend it to any D&D player or fantasy adventure fan, especially for those who’ve enjoyed Travis Baldree’s Legends and Lattes or Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth. It was an absolute treat to read, playing with tropes and expectations throughout the book. I’ve loved every minute that I’ve spent in this world, and I hope to get to visit it again soon.

My utmost thanks to NetGalley and Tor Publishing Group for access to an eARC in exchange for an honest review.