No vampire is ever innocent…
The wandering Judge Dee serves as judge, jury, and executioner for any vampire who breaks the laws designed to safeguard their kind’s survival. This new case in particular puts his mandate to the test.
Every Halloween, an elderly woman hands out candy to a young trick-or-treater who’s dressed as a witch each time, looking exactly the same age. With each passing year, the woman grows more attached to the little witch and her odd nature. But she is no ordinary child, and an uncanny relationship develops between the two of them that may prove dangerous and deadly.
In this spell-binding tale, a Pakistani storyteller captivates a group of wide-eyed tourists with a nesting doll of interlocked stories about a trickster and a hidden city ruled by the Queen of Red Midnight.
Chris would rather be anywhere but here, cleaning out his deceased, hateful grandparents’ house with his relatives. Each room he visits takes him back in time to another traumatic memory. To escape this house and his grandparents and his past, he’ll need to take time travel into his own hands.
Content warning for fictional depictions of verbal, physical, and sexual child abuse.
The world doesn’t make sense. All rain has moved indoors, wrecking houses from the inside out while the skies remain cloudless. With ever greater devotion, people worship giant, inert, humanoid bodies as gods as civilization falls apart.
Lucy, who has never been religious, has no way to properly mourn her brother after his untimely death. Now, a year later, she will travel south on a makeshift pilgrimage with the help of her best friend Carve, who was once himself a believer, trying to find peace and some better means of understanding the world.
Justin C. Key’s “The Perfection of Theresa Watkins” is a skillful speculative exploration of the intersection of race, mental illness, and the American prison system.
Darius and Theresa Watkins confronted death once as fellow cancer survivors. Their lives are full and productive, their love a shield against Darius’s bouts of anxiety and Theresa’s occasional flare-ups. Yet when tragedy strikes, Darius will try everything to save his wife…even against his fears that she may have transformed into an entirely different person—literally.
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that The Mummy (1999) kicks ass. The last few years have seen an upswell of appreciation for the movie’s lighthearted tone, wacky humor, and the fizzy performances from Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz—but seeing all the tweets and online conversations made me wonder if there’s something more to The Mummy. Some secret truth buried beneath the sand, waiting to be found.
I believe there is, and if the reason for the love raining down like so many startled frogs is hard to quantify. People enjoy the surprisingly quirky romance, as well as the ways Rick O’Connell and Evelyn Carnahan sidestep the usual tropes of “action hero” and “damsel in distress”. But more even than that, my research (i.e. spending far too much time online) is showing me that a lot of kids watched The Mummy just as they were hitting puberty, and a lot of those kids, er, realized things about themselves, specifically because of that film.
Join me as I attempt to unpack those realizations.
You didn’t think we’d let the hype rest, did you? Rhythm of War is almost here! And because you know you need something to do while you’re waiting, we’re here to give you something to puzzle over, play with, or otherwise entertain yourselves. We here present to you, to whet your appetite, a small (but still huge) selection of the comments from the beta-read spreadsheets. All the comments have been carefully edited so as not to give actual spoilers. The idea (in case you haven’t played before) is that you read these reactions, totally without context, and see if you can guess what triggered them. While you’re waiting for the book, the guesses will of necessity be wild; after you get it, well… they might still be wild, but at least they’ll be more informed! Come on in and join us while you await the arrival of the latest hefty tome.
Over the last decade, a wide variety of live-action Marvel superhero shows have been released… and I’ve watched every single one of them (well, all except for Powers—a PlayStation network show. If you’ve ever actually seen it, please let me know where it should go on this list). In honor of Helstrom’s recent premiere and the upcoming WandaVision series, I wanted to look back on the fourteen shows I’ve seen and let you know which ones were most (and least) deserving of your time.
In my olden college days, while searching for the next movie that would let me procrastinate over not studying, I came across a website called Class Real. It’s a database of so-called “mindfuck” movies, organized by levels of just how much your brain will be fried upon consumption. I’ve always been a fan of narratives that will not just turn a premise on its head, but also make you question not just what you’ve seen, but how you got tripped up on the rug they just pulled out from under you.
It’s not about throwing in plot twists just for the sake of it. It’s about hiding those tiny details so well, that when they get revealed, you let out a scream that’s either “I KNEW IT!” or “Damn, I never saw that coming.”
Today, I bring you five books that made me feel like that: books that start one way, and by the time you’re done with them, there have been so many twists and turns your brain will feel like it’s completely lost in a maze.
Seanan McGuire’s Hugo and Nebula Award-winning Wayward Children series, which began with Every Heart a Doorway, has brought readers heartfelt magic, mystery, and occasional mayhem for years. Artist Rovina Cai has been a part of the Wayward Children books from the very beginning, illustrating scenes from Every Heart a Doorway, Down Among the Sticks and Bones, Beneath the Sugar Sky, In an Absent Dream and Come Tumbling Down. We’re thrilled to have Rovina on board again, bringing the world of Hooflands to life in a new standalone entry in the series, Across the Green Grass Fields.
In Across the Green Grass Fields, a young girl named Regan suddenly finds herself thrust through a doorway that asks her to “Be Sure.” Regan must learn to live in a world filled with centaurs, kelpies, and other magical equines—a world that expects its human visitors to step up and be heroes. But after embracing her time with the herd, Regan discovers that not all forms of heroism are equal, and not all quests are as they seem…
Photo by Mikel Ortega, with retouching by Richard Bartz (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Horses are very much a part of the space they live in. They’re meant to spend their lives within the structure of a herd: a complex social organization with a constantly evolving but ultimately consistent set of rules and hierarchies. Lead mare in charge, lesser mares and youngsters moving up and down beneath, stallion and any subsidiary males guarding the perimeters and fending off predators.
The territory they inhabit is likewise as consistent as terrain, predators, and natural phenomena allow. In a domesticated situation, that means they can become barnbound or stall-bound. They stick to the familiar surroundings and strongly resist change in or removal from those surroundings.
When I write about horses, one thing I try to do is see the world the way a horse would see it. This has the interesting effect of expanding my perception of the world I’m writing in. It teaches me to see not only the horses but the setting as characters in the story.
Curses are stories are histories, and Plain Bad Heroines is full to the brim with all three. In 1902 the Brookhants School for Girls witnessed the romance of two students, Flo and Clara, with each other and with Mary Maclane’s scandalous memoir—a romance ending with their gruesome demise in a swarm of yellowjackets. After three more untimely deaths the school closed for good, forgotten until the present, when young Merritt Emmons’s queer novel about Brookhants becomes a breakout bestseller. Hollywood comes calling, bringing along lesbian indie it-girl Harper Harper and former child star Audrey Wells to star in the adaptation. But naturally, when these three young women arrive at the old school grounds to begin filming, the situation goes frighteningly awry.
Plain Bad Heroines is Danforth’s first adult novel and second overall, following the much-beloved young adult book The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2012). Illustrated by Sara Lautman with an echo of Edward Gorey, the book plays luxurious games with the reader, nesting stories within stories (within stories) as the hauntings unfold. Whether it’s the straightforward gothic of the 1902 plot(s) or the compulsive, prickly-sexy contemporary film production’s messy queer attractions, Danforth nails each beat. Plain Bad Heroines is scary, witty, and darkly taunting—without ever losing the core of heart inside the ghoulish cleverness of the prose.
In Reconstruction, award-winning writer and musician Alaya Dawn Johnson digs into the lives of those trodden underfoot by the powers that be: from the lives of vampires and those caught in their circle in Hawai’i to a taxonomy of anger put together by Union soldiers in the American Civil War, these stories will grab you and not let you go.
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from the title story from the collection, publishing January 5, 2021 with Small Beer Press.
“Message in a Bottle”
Written by Rick Williams and Lisa Klink
Directed by Nancy Malone
Season 4, Episode 14
Production episode 1551
Original air date: January 21, 1998
Stardate: unknown
Captain’s log. Seven summons Janeway and Chakotay to astrometrics. She has found an alien sensor net that seems to be abandoned. The far end of the net’s range is on the edge of the Alpha Quadrant, and is picking up a Starfleet vessel in that region.
[You know, you really should keep a personal log. Why bore others needlessly?]
If you’ve been waiting to read John Scalzi’s latest story, The Dispatcher: Murder by Other Means, rather than having Zachary Quinto read it to you, you’re in luck: Subterranean Press has announced a limited print edition of the novella.
Rhythm of War cover art by Michael Whelan
You didn’t think we’d let the hype rest, did you? Rhythm of War is almost here! And because you know you need something to do while you’re waiting, we’re here to give you something to puzzle over, play with, or otherwise entertain yourselves. We here present to you, to whet your appetite, a small (but still huge) selection of the comments from the beta-read spreadsheets. All the comments have been carefully edited so as not to give actual spoilers. The idea (in case you haven’t played before) is that you read these reactions, totally without context, and see if you can guess what triggered them. While you’re waiting for the book, the guesses will of necessity be wild; after you get it, well… they might still be wild, but at least they’ll be more informed! Come on in and join us while you await the arrival of the latest hefty tome.
If you were craving a tv show about a vigilante that strikes in the night that isn’t one of 104-shows-and-counting set in Gotham, you’re in luck! According to Variety, the Darkwing Duck animated series is getting a second life on Disney Plus. And judging by the production team, this iteration has the potential to be even greater than the first go around.
Over the last decade, a wide variety of live-action Marvel superhero shows have been released… and I’ve watched every single one of them (well, all except for Powers—a PlayStation network show. If you’ve ever actually seen it, please let me know where it should go on this list). In honor of Helstrom’s recent premiere and the upcoming WandaVision series, I wanted to look back on the fourteen shows I’ve seen and let you know which ones were most (and least) deserving of your time.
Netflix has appropriated funding for another season of its Steve Carrell comedy series Space Force, a take on the newest branch of the US Military. The show debuted way back in May, and the long wait for a renewal has had fans wondering if the series would ever return.
Get ready to have “Where’s Johnny” stuck in your head forever: Short Circuit is getting a do-over. Deadline reports that Spyglass Media Group are bringing the 1986 film back for a remake.
When Harlan Ellison died in 2018, he left behind a project that he’d long promised to complete: The Last Dangerous Visions, an infamous third anthology that would have followed his Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions anthologies.
Now, it looks like it’ll be completed, nearly half a century after its first intended publication date. Ellison’s friend and now estate executor J. Michael Straczynski (the creator of Babylon 5 and co-creator of Sense8) has promised that he’ll complete the anthology.
CJ Cherryh’s long-running Foreigner series has a lot of interesting linguistics in it. One of her specialties is writing non-human species (or post-human, in the case of Cyteen) with an almost anthropological bent. Whenever people ask for “social-science fiction,” she’s the second person I recommend (Le Guin being first). These stories usually involve intercultural communication and its perils and pitfalls, which is one aspect of sociolinguistics. It covers a variety of areas and interactions, from things like international business relationships to domestic relations among families. Feminist linguistics is often part of this branch: studying the sociology around speech used by and about women and marginalized people.
In Foreigner, the breakdown of intercultural communication manifests itself in a war between the native atevi and the humans, who just don’t understand why the humanoid atevi don’t have the same feelings.
To possess the Mandate of Heaven, the female monk Zhu will do anything…
We are thrilled to share the cover for Shelley Parker-Chan’s debut novel, She Who Became the Sun! This epic historical fantasy will be available from Tor Books on July 20, 2021.
