Legend

  • Years 2020-2022
  • 2020 White
  • 2021 Red
  • 2022 Dark Red

Genres

  • Horror
  • Science Fiction
  • Fantasy
  • Mystery
Almost yearly I read about 200 books. Give or take, I don't always have the time and patience to read things cover to cover. And out of those 200 or so books, these are the ones I still think of from time to time.

As much as I would love to recount every year, there's some, shudder, teen reads best left in the ashes of youth. I've limited to the last two years, and include some read books of this year 2022 that I know I'll be thinking of forever.

Most have content warnings in the square clickable images. Some do not as I have long since lost the saved content warnings I note for every book I read.

The years are alphabetized and color coded in the side tabs. The year 2020 is Dark Red, year 2021 is Red, and year 2022 is White.
She had to grant him that; he might be utterly ruthless, but anyone who pledged and kept fealty with him knew that Asmodeus was behind them, no matter what happened—he would fight tooth and claw for their well-being. It was the others—those in Hawthorn’s path—who feared him. - The House of Shattered Wings, Aliette De Bodard
—breathing in orange blossoms, citruses, a strong, pungent mixture that seemed to make the entire world wobble and contract.

Details

  • Title A Certain Hunger
  • Author Chelsea G. Summers
  • Length Novel, 240 pages

Genres

  • Horror
  • Crime + Serial Killing
  • Cannibalism
Food critic Dorothy Daniels loves what she does. Discerning, meticulous, and very, very smart, Dorothy's clear mastery of the culinary arts make it likely that she could, on any given night, whip up a more inspired dish than any one of the chefs she writes about. Dorothy loves sex as much as she loves food, and while she has struggled to find a long-term partner that can keep up with her, she makes the best of her single life, frequently traveling from Manhattan to Italy for a taste of both.

But there is something within Dorothy that's different from everyone else, and having suppressed it long enough, she starts to embrace what makes Dorothy uniquely, terrifyingly herself. Recounting her life from a seemingly idyllic farm-to-table childhood, the heights of her career, to the moment she plunges an ice pick into a man's neck on Fire Island, Dorothy Daniels show us what happens when a woman finally embraces her superiority.

A satire of early foodieism, a critique of how gender is defined, and a showcase of virtuoso storytelling, Chelsea G. Summers' A Certain Hunger introduces us to the food world's most charming psychopath and an exciting new voice in fiction.
  • Contemporary
  • Crime
  • Excellent Prose
  • Gore
  • Murder
  • Serial Killing
  • White Author
  • Woman Author
  • Woman Main Character
It’s such an intimate thing, to witness another’s death. Orgasms are a dime a dozen. Any old human woman can see a man orgasm. We so rarely get to see them die; it has been my greatest gift and my most divine privilege. - Dorothy Daniels
Don’t believe the lies. Don’t believe those lies, anyway.

Believe others, if it makes you feel safe.

Safety, too, is a lie.

Details

  • Title Molly Southbourne Duology
  • Author Tade Thompson
  • Length Novella, 128, 112 pages

Genres

  • Horror
  • Science Fiction
  • Doppelgangers
  • Dystopias

The Murders of Molly Southbourne


The rule is simple: don't bleed. For as long as Molly Southbourne can remember, she's been watching herself die. Whenever she bleeds, another molly is born, identical to her in every way and intent on her destruction.

Molly knows every way to kill herself, but she also knows that as long as she survives she'll be hunted. No matter how well she follows the rules, eventually the mollys will find her. Can Molly find a way to stop the tide of blood, or will she meet her end at the hand of a girl who looks just like her?

The Survival of Molly Southbourne


Tade Thompson returns to his "bloody exploration of of identity and self in a changed world" (Publishers Weekly) in The Survival of Molly Southbourne. Who was Molly Southbourne? What did she leave behind? A burnt-out basement. A name stained in blood. Bodies that remember murder, one of them left alive. A set of rules that no longer apply. Molly Southbourne is alive. If she wants to survive, she'll need to run, hide, and be ready to fight. There are people who remember her, who know what she is and what she's done. Some want her alive, some want her dead, and all hold a piece to the puzzles in her head. Can Molly escape them, or will she confront the bloody history that made her?

The Legacy of Molly Southbourne


Whenever Molly Southbourne bled, a murderer was born. Deadly copies, drawn to destroy their creator, bound by a legacy of death. With the original Molly Southbourne gone, her remnants drew together, seeking safety and a chance for peace. The last Molly and her sisters built a home together, and thought they could escape the murder that marked their past.
But secrets squirm in Molly Southbourne's blood—secrets born in a Soviet lab and carried back across the Iron Curtain to infiltrate the West. What remains of the Cold War spy machine wants those secrets back, and to get them they're willing to unearth the dead and destroy the fragile peace surrounding the last copies of Molly Southbourne. The Legacy of Molly Southbourne brings the story to a bloody end.

  • Black Author
  • Contemporary
  • Doppelgangers
  • Dystopia
  • Excellent Prose
  • Gore
  • Man Author
  • Murder
  • Science Fiction
  • Woman Main Character
Sometimes she imagines all the music in the world, since the dawn of time, playing at the same time in a magnificent cacophony, from the first primates who beat out sounds with sticks to the most exquisite Stravinsky. She thinks at the end of time there will be nuclear symphonies played out as radio signals bouncing around on immortal satellites sent out to an uncaring universe. - Molly Southbourne
I sometimes imagine that she invented violence and the rest of us are pale imitators.

Details

  • Title Revelator
  • Author Daryl Gregory
  • Length Novel, 352 pages

Genres

  • Horror
  • Cosmic Horror
  • Dark Fantasy
  • Historical
The dark, gripping tale of a 1930's family in the remote hills of the Smoky Mountains, their secret religion, and the daughter who turns her back on their mysterious god--from the acclaimed author of Spoonbenders.

In 1933, nine-year-old Stella is left in the care of her grandmother, Motty, in the backwoods of Tennessee. The mountains are home to dangerous secrets, and soon after she arrives, Stella wanders into a dark cavern where she encounters the family's personal god, an entity known as the Ghostdaddy. Years later, after a tragic incident that caused her to flee, Stella--now a professional bootlegger--returns for Motty's funeral, and to check on the mysterious ten-year-old girl named Sunny that Motty adopted.

Sunny appears innocent enough, but she is more powerful than Stella could imagine--and she's a direct link to Stella's buried past and her family's destructive faith.

Haunting and wholly engrossing, summoning mesmerizing voices and giving shape to the dark, Revelator is a southern gothic tale for the ages.
  • Body Horror
  • Cosmic Horror
  • Dark Fantasy
  • Explicit Antiblackness
  • Folk Horror
  • Girl Woman Crone
  • Gothic
  • Historical
  • Horror
  • Men Author
  • Religious Horror
  • Us South
  • White Author
  • Woman Main Character(s)
Stella had threatened a god. Promised to kill its next child. In the moment, she meant it—and meant it still. But years from now, when the time came, would she still have the strength? Abraham was willing to sacrifice his child. God turned his son over to the mob. But she was no god, and no Bible hero. - Stella
She was a monster. Plain and simple.

The only question was how long could she live with that knowledge.

Details

  • Title She Who Became The Sun
  • Author Shelley Parker-Chan
  • Length Novel, 416 pages

Genres

  • Historical
  • Fantasy
  • Chinese
  • Lesbian
To possess the Mandate of Heaven, the female monk Zhu will do anything
“I refuse to be nothing…”
In a famine-stricken village on a dusty yellow plain, two children are given two fates. A boy, greatness. A girl, nothingness…

In 1345, China lies under harsh Mongol rule. For the starving peasants of the Central Plains, greatness is something found only in stories. When the Zhu family’s eighth-born son, Zhu Chongba, is given a fate of greatness, everyone is mystified as to how it will come to pass. The fate of nothingness received by the family’s clever and capable second daughter, on the other hand, is only as expected.

When a bandit attack orphans the two children, though, it is Zhu Chongba who succumbs to despair and dies. Desperate to escape her own fated death, the girl uses her brother's identity to enter a monastery as a young male novice. There, propelled by her burning desire to survive, Zhu learns she is capable of doing whatever it takes, no matter how callous, to stay hidden from her fate. After her sanctuary is destroyed for supporting the rebellion against Mongol rule, Zhu takes the chance to claim another future altogether: her brother's abandoned greatness.
Book 1 in the Radiant Emperor series
  • Dark Historical
  • Excellent Prose
  • Explicit Lesbian Sex Scene
  • GNC AFAB Main Character
  • Historical
  • Lesbian Main Characters
  • Lesbian Romance
  • Romance
  • Series
  • Wars
Then, very carefully, she cupped Ma’s cheek, leaned in, and kissed her. A soft, lingering press of lips against lips. A moment of yielding warmth that generated something infinitely tender and precious, and as fragile as a butterfly’s wing. - Zhu Chongba
He had a wound for a heart, and that made him a more dangerous opponent than anyone here realized.

Details

  • Title Sundial
  • Author Catriona Ward
  • Length Novel, 304 pages

Genres

  • Horror
  • Psychological
  • Psychiatric Horror
You can’t escape what’s in your blood…

All Rob wanted was a normal life. She almost got it, too: a husband, two kids, a nice house in the suburbs. But Rob fears for her oldest daughter, Callie, who collects tiny bones and whispers to imaginary friends. Rob sees a darkness in Callie, one that reminds her too much of the family she left behind. She decides to take Callie back to her childhood home, to Sundial, deep in the Mojave Desert.

And there she will have to make a terrible choice. Callie is worried about her mother. Rob has begun to look at her strangely, and speaks of past secrets. And Callie fears that only one of them will leave Sundial alive…The mother and daughter embark on a dark, desert journey to the past in the hopes of redeeming their future.
  • Animal Experimentation
  • Child Abuse
  • Contemporary
  • Domestic Abuse
  • Generational Trauma
  • Medical Experimentation
  • Psychiatric Horror
  • Psychological Horror
  • Sisterhood
  • Toxic Families
  • White Author
  • Women Author
  • Women Main Character(s)
Every fairy tale tells you: knowing someone’s true name gives you power over them. No one ever talks about how it might go the other way around. It might give something a hold over you. - Rob Cussen
It’s possible to feel the horror of something and to accept it all at the same time.

How else could we cope with being alive?

Details

  • Title The Fisherman
  • Author John Langan
  • Length Novel, 266 pages

Genres

  • Horror
  • Cosmic Horror
  • Folk Horror
In upstate New York, in the woods around Woodstock, Dutchman’s Creek flows out of the Ashokan Reservoir. Steep-banked, fast-moving, it offers the promise of fine fishing, and of something more, a possibility too fantastic to be true. When Abe and Dan, two widowers who have found solace in each other’s company and a shared passion for fishing, hear rumors of the Creek, and what might be found there, the remedy to both their losses, they dismiss it as just another fish story.

Soon, though, the men find themselves drawn into a tale as deep and old as the Reservoir. It’s a tale of dark pacts, of long-buried secrets, and of a mysterious figure known as Der Fisher: the Fisherman. It will bring Abe and Dan face to face with all that they have lost, and with the price they must pay to regain it.
  • Contemporary
  • Cosmic Horror
  • Folk Horror
  • Historical
  • Men Author
  • Men Main Character(s)
  • Ocean Horror
  • Otherworlds
  • Religious Horror
  • Supernatural
  • White Author
They’re in no language she’s ever heard, and between Rainer and living in the camp, she’s encountered a few, living and dead. The words seem little more than phlegmy coughs, grunts, and clicks of the tongue. For the briefest of moments, Lottie wonders if this is Helen’s original language, what she spoke prior to coming to America, but she rejects that idea immediately. She knows, in the way you just know some things, that this is speech Helen has brought back with her from the grave. It is a death-tongue, the tongue you learn once you leave this life for lands uncharted, and Lottie realizes she understands what Helen is saying. - Lottie Schmidt
Now, he is dust, dust which remembers what it was to be a man and can do nothing with that knowledge.


He curses me.

Details

  • Title White Tears
  • Author Hari Kunzru
  • Length Novel, 271 pages

Genres

  • Horror
  • Racial Horror
  • Folk Horror
Ghost story, murder mystery, love letter to American music--White Tears is all of this and more, a thrilling investigation of race and appropriation in society today. Seth is a shy, awkward twentysomething. Carter is more glamorous, the heir to a great American fortune. But they share an obsession with music--especially the blues. One day, Seth discovers that he's accidentally recorded an unknown blues singer in a park.

Carter puts the file online, claiming it's a 1920s recording by a made-up musician named Charlie Shaw. But when a music collector tells them that their recording is genuine--that there really was a singer named Charlie Shaw--the two white boys, along with Carter's sister, find themselves in over their heads, delving deeper and deeper into America's dark, vengeful heart. White Tears is a literary thriller and a meditation on art--who owns it, who can consume it, and who profits from it.
  • Author Of Color
  • Black Slavery
  • British Author
  • Classism
  • Contemporary
  • Explicit Antiblackness
  • Folk Horror
  • Historical
  • Jim Crow Laws
  • Men Author
  • Music Horror
  • Paranormal
  • Racial Horror
  • US History
  • White Main Character(s)
  • White Men Character(s)
Living things are those which resist entropy. They possess a boundary of some kind, a membrane or a skin; a metabolism; the ability to react to the world. And to make copies. To pass something on. That’s all Charlie Shaw wanted, to reach forward, to obey the urge of life. I have made no copies. I am a punctum, an end. A point, not a line. I do not know if I have ever been alive. How would I tell? Where in the living creature does life actually lie? No single part of a cell is alive. And life itself is just an aggregate of non-living processes, chemical reactions cascading, birthing complexity. There is no clear border between life and non-life. Once you realize that, so much else unravels. Death walked into me through Carter, but even before that I’m not sure. - Seth
...because each time I look at Miss Alberta, she becomes more terrifying. Her substance is absence.

She is made of it, made of loss.

I am slipping into darkness. It is enveloping me like a shroud.

Details

  • Title A Spectral Hue
  • Author Craig Laurance Gidney
  • Length Novel, 226 pages

Genres

  • Horror
  • Racial Horror
  • Folk Horror
  • LGBT
For generations, the marsh-surrounded town of Shimmer, Maryland has played host to a loose movement of African-American artists, all working in different media, but all utilizing the same haunting color.

Landscape paintings, trompe l'oeil quilts, decorated dolls, mixed-media assemblages, and more, all featuring the same peculiar hue, a shifting pigment somewhere between purple and pink, the color of the saltmarsh orchid, a rare and indigenous flower.

Graduate student Xavier Wentworth has been drawn to Shimmer, hoping to study the work of artists like quilter Hazel Whitby and landscape painter Shadrach Grayson in detail, having experienced something akin to an epiphany when viewing a Hazel Whitby tapestry as a child.

Xavier will find that others, too, have been drawn to Shimmer, called by something more than art, something in the marsh itself, a mysterious, spectral hue.
  • Art Horror
  • Black Author
  • Black Main Character(S)
  • Black Slavery
  • Classism
  • Contemporary
  • Explicit Antiblackness
  • Folk Horror
  • Gay Author
  • Generational Trauma
  • Historical
  • Lgbt Characters
  • Men Author
  • Paranormal
  • Racial Horror
  • Rotating Cast
  • Rotating Pov
  • Us History
But the house itself wouldn’t let her inside. She could walk around the ivy-covered house. Fuchsia could explore the roof, with its cracked ceiling tiles, where pigeons nested. But the house itself was impenetrable. When she tried, she would find herself in the marsh, or in a tree, or in the circular garden, beneath the chinaberry tree. Furthermore, time had passed, sometimes an hour, sometimes a week, before she could return. Maybe she wasn’t an angel after all. Maybe she was something to be feared. - Fuschia
But there are some things that, when you first see them, they seem perfect.

Things that can break you, things that call to you. Things that make you see your true self.

Details

  • Title Experimental Film
  • Author Gemma Files
  • Length Novel, 312 pages

Genres

  • Horror
  • Neurodivergent Horror
  • Folk Horror
Experimental Film is a contemporary ghost story in which former Canadian film history teacher Lois Cairns-jobless and depressed in the wake of her son's autism diagnosis-accidentally discovers the existence of lost early 20th century Ontario filmmaker Mrs. A. Macalla Whitcomb.

By deciding to investigate how Mrs. Whitcomb's obsessions might have led to her mysterious disappearance, Lois unwittingly invites the forces which literally haunt Mrs. Whitcomb's films into her life, eventually putting her son, her husband and herself in danger.

Experimental Film mixes painful character detail with a creeping aura of dread to produce a fictionalized "memoir" designed to play on its readers' narrative expectations and pack an existentialist punch.
  • Autistic Characters
  • Child Death
  • Contemporary
  • Eugenics
  • Folk Horror
  • Historical
  • Horror
  • Neurodivergent Horror
  • Paranormal
  • Religious Horror
  • Supernatural
  • White Author
  • White Main Character
  • Women Author
  • Woman Main Character
The problem with all numinous things is that you can’t just take somebody’s word about them, especially the ones you’re warned away from. You have to look at them, eventually, to know they’re really there. You look at them even though you know it’s not a good idea to. You can’t not. In the end, you will always look at the thing you’re told not to just because it exists, if only to prove it exists. -
So terrible, to be under a god’s eye, her attention.

To be pierced through, pinned, like an insect.

Details

  • Title Future Home of the Living God
  • Author Louise Erdrich
  • Length Novel, 352 pages

Genres

  • Dark Science Fiction
  • Indigenous Horror
  • Dystopias
A young woman fighting for her life and her unborn child against oppressive forces that manifest in the wake of a cataclysmic event.The world as we know it is ending. Evolution has reversed itself, affecting every living creature on earth. Science cannot stop the world from running backwards, as woman after woman gives birth to infants that appear to be primitive species of humans.

Twenty-six-year-old Cedar Hawk Songmaker, adopted daughter of a pair of big-hearted, open-minded Minneapolis liberals, is as disturbed and uncertain as the rest of America around her. But for Cedar, this change is profound and deeply personal. She is four months pregnant.Though she wants to tell the adoptive parents who raised her from infancy, Cedar first feels compelled to find her birth mother, Mary Potts, an Ojibwe living on the reservation, to understand both her and her baby’s origins. As Cedar goes back to her own biological beginnings, society around her begins to disintegrate, fueled by a swelling panic about the end of humanity.

There are rumors of martial law, of Congress confining pregnant women. Of a registry, and rewards for those who turn these wanted women in. Flickering through the chaos are signs of increasing repression: a shaken Cedar witnesses a family wrenched apart when police violently drag a mother from her husband and child in a parking lot. The streets of her neighborhood have been renamed with Bible verses. A stranger answers the phone when she calls her adoptive parents, who have vanished without a trace. It will take all Cedar has to avoid the prying eyes of potential informants and keep her baby safe.

A chilling dystopian novel both provocative and prescient, Future Home of the Living God is a startlingly original work from one of our most acclaimed writers: a moving meditation on female agency, self-determination, biology, and natural rights that speaks to the troubling changes of our time.
  • Abortion
  • Apocalypses
  • Author Of Color
  • Contemporary
  • Dark Science Fiction
  • Excellent Prose
  • Forced Birthers / Natalists
  • Gestational Rights
  • Indigenous Author
  • Indigenous Main Character
  • Pregnancy Horror
  • Woman Author
Perhaps we are experiencing a reverse incarnation. A process where the spirit of the divine becomes lost in human physical nature. Perhaps the spark of divinity, which we experience as consciousness, is being reabsorbed into the boundless creativity of seething opportunistic life. - Cedar Hawk Songmaker
And the sky has bloomed, it is verdant with stars. I’ve never seen stars like this before. Deep, brilliant, soft.

I am comforted because nothing we have done to this earth affects them.

Details

  • Title Machine's Last Testament
  • Author Benjanun Sriduangkaew
  • Length Novel, 288 pages

Genres

  • Dystopias
  • Suspense
  • Science Fiction
To give humanity peace, the artificial intelligence Samsara will wage an eternal war . . . In a universe torn by combat, Samsara's world is the final haven that refugees will pay any price to enter.

At the Selection Bureau, Suzhen Tang upholds the AI's will and grants citizenship to those deemed worthy. When she meets new arrival Ovuha, she judges Ovuha a model candidate--educated, beautiful, a perfect fit for utopia.

But Ovuha carries with her the seeds of battle, and what she brings may spell apocalyptic change: the breaking of Samsara, the end of paradise . . .
  • AIs
  • Asian Author
  • Asian Characters
  • Author Of Color
  • Classism
  • Excellent Prose
  • Futurism
  • Genocide
  • Lesbian Characters
  • Nonbinary Characters
  • Polyamory
  • Suicide
  • Torture
  • Violence
  • Wars
What it is like to be enslaved by that, held in thrall to helpless love for creatures that were so out of reach they might as well have gone extinct. For so long, for that immeasurable span. - Suzhen
All of us are undone by love. Sometimes we find a person who inspires tenderness in us and we unravel like a skein of thread, helpless before the fact.

Details

  • Title Mirrorstrike
  • Author Benjanun Sriduangkaew
  • Length Novel, 160 pages

Genres

  • Dark Fantasy
  • Dystopias
  • Asian
  • Myths
With her mother s blood fresh on her hands, Nuawa has learned that to overthrow the tyrant Winter Queen she must be as exact as a bullet ... and as pitiless.

In the greatest city of winter, a revolt has broken out and General Lussadh has arrived to suppress it. She s no stranger to treason, for this city is her home where she slaughtered her own family for the Winter Queen.

Accompanying the general to prove her loyalty, Nuawa confronts a rebel who once worked to end the queen's reign and who now holds secrets that will cement the queen s rule.

But this is not Nuawa s only predicament. A relentless killer has emerged and he means to hunt down anyone who holds in their heart a shard of the queen s mirror. Like the general.

Like Nuawa herself.On these fields of tumult and shattered history, the queen s purposes will at last be revealed, and both Lussadh and Nuawa tested to their limits.One to wake. Two to bind. These are the laws that govern those of the glass.
  • Asian Author
  • Asian Characters
  • Author Of Color
  • Duology
  • Excellent Prose
  • Fairy Tales
  • Fantasy
  • Futurism
  • Genocide
  • Lesbian Characters
  • Nonbinary Characters
  • Royalty
  • Torture
  • Violence
The mirror shard inside her numbs who she is, what she feels. It leeches her humanity, perhaps converts it to something else, and that thought must have summoned something—the hallucination, the inexplicable phenomenon. The shed dims, the casket and Ulamat recede, and she becomes the single source of illumination. Her skin like a veil, and the tendons underneath overrun with crystals. - Nuawa
Two species of creatures commit unthinkable atrocities: the tyrant, and those who fight them.

Details

  • Title Night Film
  • Author Marisha Pessl
  • Length Novel, 624 pages

Genres

  • Folk Horror
  • Horror
  • Mystery
  • Thrillers
  • Religious Horror
On a damp October night, beautiful young Ashley Cordova is found dead in an abandoned warehouse in lower Manhattan. Though her death is ruled a suicide, veteran investigative journalist Scott McGrath suspects otherwise. As he probes the strange circumstances surrounding Ashley’s life and death, McGrath comes face-to-face with the legacy of her father: the legendary, reclusive cult-horror-film director Stanislas Cordova—a man who hasn’t been seen in public for more than thirty years.

For McGrath, another death connected to this seemingly cursed family dynasty seems more than just a coincidence. Though much has been written about Cordova’s dark and unsettling films, very little is known about the man himself.

Driven by revenge, curiosity, and a need for the truth, McGrath, with the aid of two strangers, is drawn deeper and deeper into Cordova’s eerie, hypnotic world.

The last time he got close to exposing the director, McGrath lost his marriage and his career. This time he might lose even more.
  • Film Horror
  • Horror
  • Men Main Character
  • Mysteries
  • Paranormal
  • Religious Horror
  • Suicide
  • Supernatural
  • Transmisogyny Scene(s)
  • White Author
  • Woman Author
“Be the good guy,” he said.
“How do I know I’m the good guy?”
He pointed at me, nodding. “A very wise question. You don’t. Most bad guys think they’re good. But there are a few signifiers. You’ll be miserable. You’ll be hated. You’ll fumble around in the dark, alone and confused. You’ll have little insight as to the true nature of things, not until the very last minute, and only if you have the stamina and the madness to go to the very, very end. But most importantly—and critically—you will act without regard for yourself. You’ll be motivated by something that has nothing to do with the ego. You’ll do it for justice. For grace. For love. Those large rather heroic qualities only the good have the strength to carry on their shoulders. And you’ll listen.” - Beckman, to McGrath
She was a beacon of mysterious origin and intention, impossible to determine if heading toward me or away.

What, really, was the difference between something hounding you and something leading you somewhere?

Details

  • Title Strange Bodies
  • Author Marcel Theroux
  • Length Novel, 376 pages

Genres

  • Science Fiction
  • Speculative Fiction
  • Suspense
It started when Nicky Slopen came back from the dead . . .Nicholas Slopen has been dead for months.

So when a man claiming to be Nicholas turns up to visit an old girlfriend, deception seems the only possible motive, yet nothing can make him change his story.

From the secure unit of a notorious psychiatric hospital, he begins to tell his tale: an account of attempted forgery that draws the reader towards an extraordinary truth—a metaphysical conspiracy that lies on the other side of madness and death.

Strange Bodies takes the reader on a dizzying speculative journey that poses questions about identity, authenticity and what it means to be truly human.
  • Contemporary
  • Dark Science Fiction
  • Historical
  • Identity
  • Medical Experimentation
  • Men Author
  • Men Main Character
  • Science Fiction
  • Suspense
  • White Author
  • White Main Characters
I cannot make you understand what it is to look at the moon through this stranger’s eyes and know that I will never hold my children again. Sometimes I wake up on the ward with a pain in my chest that feels like my heart breaking. Yes, my heart breaking. The description lacks either medical or literary merit, but it ameliorates nothing to know that my house of suffering is bricked and barred with clichés. Tears, heartbreak, pathetic fallacies of weeping skies and bleeding sunsets: these aren’t lousy approximations of lived experiences, they’re the nerves and fibre of human life itself. I was never a Whorfian, and yet I have woken up to find I am made of words. - Nicholas Slopen
It meant there was something exhausting about being together.

We were open books to one another. We couldn’t outrun each other’s consciousness.

Wherever one of us went to hide, the other was there before him.

Details

  • Title The Changeling
  • Author Victor LaValle
  • Length Novel, 431 pages

Genres

  • Dark Fantasy
  • Myths
  • Changelings
  • Horror
Apollo Kagwa has had strange dreams that have haunted him since childhood. An antiquarian book dealer with a business called Improbabilia, he is just beginning to settle into his new life as a committed and involved father, unlike his own father who abandoned him, when his wife Emma begins acting strange.

Disconnected and uninterested in their new baby boy, Emma at first seems to be exhibiting all the signs of post-partum depression, but it quickly becomes clear that her troubles go far beyond that. Before Apollo can do anything to help, Emma commits a horrific act--beyond any parent's comprehension--and vanishes, seemingly into thin air.

Thus begins Apollo's odyssey through a world he only thought he understood to find a wife and child who are nothing like he'd imagined. His quest begins when he meets a mysterious stranger who claims to have information about Emma's whereabouts. Apollo then begins a journey that takes him to a forgotten island in the East River of New York City, a graveyard full of secrets, a forest in Queens where immigrant legends still live, and finally back to a place he thought he had lost forever.
  • Black Author
  • Black Main Character(S)
  • Changelings
  • Child Death
  • Contemporary
  • Dark Fantasy
  • Epics
  • Folk Horror
  • Horror
  • Men Author
  • Myths
  • Racial Horror
In those old stories, the myths and fairy tales Cal had talked about, the heroes did what they did but you never knew why. In the stories, at least, they had no interior life. Their job was simply to act. Gods and gorgons allied against them, and still they bore the spear and shield. Still they walked into the deep, dark forests. But did those heroes ever feel like Apollo did now? The real people, not the characters they became. They were human beings too, after all. They must’ve shivered in the shadow of the world’s great horrors. They must have wondered how they would ever see the quest through. And somehow they persevered. Maybe that was the point of telling those stories again and again, one generation to the next. If they could be brave, then we might be, too. - Apollo Kagwa
All the deceptions were gone.

To believe in only the practical, the rational, the realistic was a kind of glamour as well. But he couldn’t enjoy the illusion of order anymore.

Monsters aren’t real until you meet one.

Details

  • Title A Luminous Republic
  • Author Andres Barba
  • Length Novel, 208 pages

Genres

  • Literary
San Cristóbal was an unremarkable city—small, newly prosperous, contained by rain forest and river. But then the children arrived.

No one knew where they came from: thirty-two kids, seemingly born of the jungle, speaking an unknown language. At first they scavenged, stealing food and money and absconding to the trees. But their transgressions escalated to violence, and then the city’s own children began defecting to join them. Facing complete collapse, municipal forces embark on a hunt to find the kids before the city falls into irreparable chaos.

Narrated by the social worker who led the hunt, A Luminous Republic is a suspenseful, anguished fable that “could be read as Lord of the Flies seen from the other side, but that would rob Barba of the profound originality of his world” (Juan Gabriel Vásquez).
  • Author Of Color
  • Characters Of Color
  • Classism
  • Contemporary
  • Literary
  • Men Author
The Eré itself, all four kilometers wide, has often struck me as a vast river of blood, and there are trees in this part of the country whose sap is so dark it’s almost impossible to think of them as plants. Blood courses through everything, it fills everything. Beneath the green jungle, beneath the brown river, beneath the red earth there is always blood, a blood that flows and completes things. - Lorem Ipsum, Dolor Sit
When she spoke, I felt as if I were heading deeper and deeper into thick, suffocating vegetation before abruptly coming upon a heavenly Eden.

Details

  • Title And Shall Machines Surrender
  • Author Benjanun Sriduangkaew
  • Length Novel, 143 pages

Genres

  • Science Fiction
  • Asian
  • Thrillers
  • Futurism
On the dyson sphere Shenzhen, artificial intelligences rule and humans live in luxury, vying to be chosen as host bodies—called haruspices—for the next generation of AI, and thus be worshiped as gods.

Doctor Orfea Leung has come here to escape her past of mercenary violence. Krissana Khongtip has come here to reinvent herself from haunted spy to holy cyborg. But the utopian peace of Shenzhen is shattered when the haruspices begin committing suicide, and the pair are called upon to solve the mystery—and survive the silent war between machines . . .
  • AIs
  • Asian Author
  • Asian Main Characters
  • Author Of Color
  • Excellent Prose
  • Futurism
  • Mystery
  • Suicide
  • Thrillers
  • Woman Author
When we were in the Armada,” Orfea says, “I thought you lived like a weapon. That attracted me. To have that clarity of thought and action. To enjoy total confidence that the Amaryllis banner provided a perfect path, that any atrocity committed under its name was sublimated by definition. I chose to sign up, but you were the one who made me stay. I was a monster but I was among my own, and you were my closest in kind of all.” - Orfea
Their hands rest secure in each other’s: somehow that has happened without either of them noticing. The distance bridged. The wasteland crossed.

Details

  • Title Carnivalesque
  • Author Neil Jordan
  • Length Novel, 288 pages

Genres

  • Dark Fantasy
  • Myths
  • Changelings
It looked like any other carnival, but of course it wasn’t. The boy saw it from the car window, the tops of the large trailer rides over the parked trains by the railway tracks. His parents were driving towards the new mall and he was looking forward to that too, but the tracery of lights above the gloomy trains caught his imagination . . .

Andy walks into Burleigh’s Amazing Hall of Mirrors, and then he walks right into the mirror, becomes a reflection. Another boy, a boy who is not Andy, goes home with Andy’s parents. And the boy who was once Andy is pulled—literally pulled, by the hands, by a girl named Mona—into another world, a carnival world where anything might happen.
  • Changelings
  • Contemporary
  • Fantasy
  • Magical Realism
  • Men Author
  • Men Main Character
  • Myths
  • Religious Fantasy
  • White Author
‘Poor Walter. Did curiosity kill him?’ ‘It made him old before his time.’ And the truth was, it exhausted him. The attempt to rationalise the fundamentally irrational. To trace the untraceable. For the carnival, by the time Walter experienced it, was such a mélange of changelings and Ur carnies, that if a proper genealogical study had been made (and no such study was ever likely to be made, because carnies would have scarpered long before such a study got close to beginning; Walter’s codex is the closest one comes to one) it would have been well-nigh impossible to distinguish between the original and the ersatz, between the one true inherited link to the Land of Spices and the interlopers, the wannabe carnies (of which Walter himself was one) and the changelings.
On their worst, they knew some great reality had to be hidden, some truth that itched them like a scab they knew they should not scratch, lest the wound beneath revealed itself. As if to live, it was necessary to forget.

Details

  • Title If We Were Villains
  • Author M. L. Rio
  • Length Novel, 368 pages

Genres

  • Mystery
  • LGBT
  • Crime
On the day Oliver Marks is released from jail, the man who put him there is waiting at the door. Detective Colborne wants to know the truth, and after ten years, Oliver is finally ready to tell it.

A decade ago: Oliver is one of seven young Shakespearean actors at Dellecher Classical Conservatory, a place of keen ambition and fierce competition. In this secluded world of firelight and leather-bound books, Oliver and his friends play the same roles onstage and off: hero, villain, tyrant, temptress, ingénue, extras.

But in their fourth and final year, good-natured rivalries turn ugly, and on opening night real violence invades the students’ world of make-believe. In the morning, the fourth-years find themselves facing their very own tragedy, and their greatest acting challenge yet: convincing the police, each other, and themselves that they are innocent.
  • Academia
  • Contemporary
  • Crime
  • Gay Main Characters
  • Mystery
  • Theatre
  • White Author
  • White Main Characters
“But I stayed where I was, afraid to move toward him, afraid I might lose my footing on solid ground, detach from what had anchored me before and drift out into the void of space - a vagabond, wandering moon.” - If We Were Villains
It's not the whole truth. The whole truth is, I'm in love with him still.

Details

  • Title In the Night Wood
  • Author Dale Bailey
  • Length Novel, 214 pages

Genres

  • Dark Fantasy
  • Gothic
  • Horror
In this contemporary fantasy, the grieving biographer of a Victorian fantasist finds himself slipping inexorably into the supernatural world that consumed his subject.

Failed father, failed husband, and failed scholar, Charles Hayden hopes to put his life back together with a new project: a biography of Caedmon Hollow, the long-dead author of a legendary Victorian children’s book, In the Night Wood, and forebear of his wife, Erin. Deep in mourning from the loss of their young daughter, they pack up their American lives, Erin gives up her legal practice, and the couple settles in Hollow’s remote Yorkshire

In the neighboring village, Charles meets a woman he might have loved, a child who could have been his own daughter, and the ghost of a self he hoped to bury. Erin, paralyzed by her grief, immerses herself in pills and painting images of a horned terror in the primeval forest surrounding Caedmon Hollow’s ancestral home, an ancient power is stirring, a long-forgotten king who haunts the Haydens’ dreams. And every morning the fringe of darkling trees presses

Soon enough, Charles and Erin will venture into the night Soon enough, they’ll learn that the darkness under the trees is but a shadow of the darkness that waits inside us all.
  • Contemporary
  • Dark Fantasy
  • Fae Horror
  • Folk Horror
  • Forest Horror
  • Gothic
  • Location Horror
  • Men Author
  • Supernatural
  • White Author
Never, she did not say, though she felt the truth of the statement chime inside her. I will never be ready. I will never be ready, because being ready would mean that I have accepted the awful truth that I will never see my daughter again. Being ready would mean letting go, letting her fade into memory at last, letting her become just a passage in my life rather than my life itself. Being ready would be a betrayal of my love, and I have had enough of betrayal. I have had all I can take of it. - Erin
The horror had both divided them and drawn them irrevocably together, binding them up in knots of guilt and recrimination and grief that could not yet (and maybe never) be undone.

Details

  • Title The Tensorate series
  • Author Neon Yang
  • Length Novellas, Series

Genres

  • Asian
  • Fantasy
  • Futurism

The Black Tides of Heaven


Mokoya and Akeha, the twin children of the Protector, were sold to the Grand Monastery as infants.

While Mokoya developed her strange prophetic gift, Akeha was always the one who could see the strings that moved adults to action. While Mokoya received visions of what would be, Akeha realized what could be. What's more, they saw the sickness at the heart of their mother's Protectorate. A rebellion is growing.

The Machinists discover new levers to move the world every day, while the Tensors fight to put them down and preserve the power of the state. Unwilling to continue as a pawn in their mother's twisted schemes, Akeha leaves the Tensorate behind and falls in with the rebels.

But every step Akeha takes towards the Machinists is a step away from Mokoya. Can Akeha find peace without shattering the bond they share with their twin?

The Red Threads of Fortune


Fallen prophet, master of the elements, and daughter of the supreme Protector, Sanao Mokoya has abandoned the life that once bound her. Once her visions shaped the lives of citizens across the land, but no matter what tragedy Mokoya foresaw, she could never reshape the future.

Broken by the loss of her young daughter, she now hunts deadly, sky-obscuring naga in the harsh outer reaches of the kingdom with packs of dinosaurs at her side, far from everything she used to love.

On the trail of a massive naga that threatens the rebellious mining city of Bataanar, Mokoya meets the mysterious and alluring Rider. But all is not as it seems: the beast they both hunt harbors a secret that could ignite war throughout the Protectorate. As she is drawn into a conspiracy of magic and betrayal, Mokoya must come to terms with her extraordinary and dangerous gifts, or risk losing the little she has left to hold dear.

The Descent of Monsters


Neon Yang continues to redefine the limits of silkpunk fantasy with their Tensorate novellas, which the New York Times lauded as "joyously wild." In this third volume, an investigation into atrocities committed at a classified research facility threaten to expose secrets that the Protectorate will do anything to keep hidden

You are reading this because I am dead.

Something terrible happened at the Rewar Teng Institute of Experimental Methods. When the Tensorate’s investigators arrived, they found a sea of blood and bones as far as the eye could see. One of the institute’s experiments got loose, and its rage left no survivors. The investigators returned to the capital with few clues and two prisoners: the terrorist leader Sanao Akeha and a companion known only as Rider.

Investigator Chuwan faces a puzzle. What really happened at the institute? What drew the Machinists there? What are her superiors trying to cover up? And why does she feel as if her strange dreams are forcing her down a narrowing path she cannot escape?

The Ascent to Godhood


For fifty years, the Protector ruled, reshaping her country in her image and driving her enemies to the corners of the map. For half a century the world turned around her as she built her armies, trained her Tensors, and grasped at the reins of fate itself. Now she is dead. Her followers will quiver, her enemies rejoice.But in one tavern, deep in rebel territory, her greatest enemy drowns her sorrows.

Lady Han raised a movement that sought the Protector's head, yet now she can only mourn her loss. She remembers how it all began, when the Protector was young, not yet crowned, and a desperate dancing girl dared to fall in love with her.

Tensorate series
  1. The Black Tides of Heaven
  2. The Red Threads of Fortune
  3. The Descent of Monsters
  4. The Ascent to Godhood
  • Asian
  • Asian Author
  • Asian Characters
  • Author Of Color
  • Civil Wars
  • Excellent Prose
  • Families
  • Fantasy
  • LGBT Characters
  • Mystery
  • Nonbinary Author
  • Novella
  • Royalty
  • Series
  • Siblings
  • Wars
I knew that I had been tipped into madness, thrown into an arena where dragons fought, where a mere mortal like me did not belong. But I was young. I was scared, and excited, and I was also a fool. I wanted to the play the dragons’ game. I wanted to play her game. I was flattered that she’d picked me. That’s the problem with being vain. In the days that followed, I kept replaying the kiss in my mind. The memory of her lips was a ghost haunting me. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. - The Ascent to Godhood
Even in her terrible sorrow, she was angry. Burning with rage.

Her fire is not like the kind that sweeps forests and leaves only ashes behind.

It’s the kind that burns underground, hollowing out the ground from under you.

Details

  • Title The Aosawa Murders
  • Author Riku Onda, Alison Watts (Translator)
  • Length Novel, 346 pages

Genres

  • Mystery
  • Japanese
  • Crime
On a stormy summer day the Aosawas, owners of a prominent local hospital, host a large birthday party. The occasion turns into tragedy when 17 people die from cyanide in their drinks. The only surviving links to what might have happened are a cryptic verse that could be the killer's, and the physician's bewitching blind daughter, Hisako, the only person spared injury.

But the youth who emerges as the prime suspect commits suicide that October, effectively sealing his guilt while consigning his motives to mystery. The police are convinced that Hisako had a role in the crime, as are many in the town, including the author of a bestselling book about the murders written a decade after the incident, who was herself a childhood friend of Hisako' and witness to the discovery of the murders.

The truth is revealed through a skilful juggling of testimony by different voices: family members, witnesses and neighbours, police investigators and of course the mesmerizing Hisako herself.
  • Asian Characters
  • Author Of Color
  • Child Abuse
  • Japanese Author
  • Japanese Characters
  • Murder
  • Poison
  • Rotating Cast
  • Suspense
  • Woman Author
But as I grew older, every time I saw an injustice or something I couldn't understand, I felt something surreptitiously stirring deep down inside, slowly working its way up from the depths. Over time this sense of unease built up and felt more solid. I don't remember what the trigger was, but one day I realized I had to do something about it. I knew I couldn't go on with life as usual until I'd removed that accumulation of uneasiness. If I didn't, I knew I'd suffocate. - The Aosawa Murders
Fear is a spice that lends credibility.

Just the right amount sprinkled in any story makes it plausible.

Details

  • Title The Singing Hills Cycle series
  • Author Nghi Vo
  • Length Novellas, Series

Genres

  • Asian
  • Fantasy
  • LGBT

The Empress of Salt and Fortune


With the heart of an Atwood tale and the visuals of a classic Asian period drama, Nghi Vo's The Empress of Salt and Fortune is a tightly and lushly written narrative about empire, storytelling, and the anger of women.

A young royal from the far north, is sent south for a political marriage in an empire reminiscent of imperial China. Her brothers are dead, her armies and their war mammoths long defeated and caged behind their borders. Alone and sometimes reviled, she must choose her allies carefully.

Rabbit, a handmaiden, sold by her parents to the palace for the lack of five baskets of dye, befriends the emperor's lonely new wife and gets more than she bargained for.

At once feminist high fantasy and an indictment of monarchy, this evocative debut follows the rise of the empress In-yo, who has few resources and fewer friends. She's a northern daughter in a mage-made summer exile, but she will bend history to her will and bring down her enemies,...

When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain


The cleric Chih finds themself and their companions at the mercy of a band of fierce tigers who ache with hunger. To stay alive until the mammoths can save them, Chih must unwind the intricate, layered story of the tiger and her scholar lover--a woman of courage, intelligence, and beauty--and discover how truth can survive becoming history.

Into the Riverlands


Wandering cleric Chih of the Singing Hills travels to the riverlands to record tales of the notorious near-immortal martial artists who haunt the region. On the road to Betony Docks, they fall in with a pair of young women far from home, and an older couple who are more than they seem. As Chih runs headlong into an ancient feud, they find themselves far more entangled in the history of the riverlands than they ever expected to be.

Accompanied by Almost Brilliant, a talking bird with an indelible memory, Chih confronts old legends and new dangers alike as they learn that every story—beautiful, ugly, kind, or cruel—bears more than one face The Singing Hills Cycle series
  1. The Empress of Salt and Fortune
  2. When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain
  3. Into the Riverlands
  • Asian
  • Asian Author
  • Asian Characters
  • Author Of Color
  • Civil Wars
  • Excellent Prose
  • Fantasy
  • Historical
  • Lesbian Characters
  • Lesbian Romance
  • Lgbt Characters
  • Novella
  • Royalty
  • Series
  • Supernatural
  • Wars
The firelight glittered over the garnet threads woven through her stiff black tunic. It had a high collar like the robes worn in Anh, but it came down nearly to the jeweled slippers on her feet and was split up to her waist on both sides over wide white silk trousers. Rough rubies dangled from her ears, and she had painted her lips with red cream. She looked beautiful, and dressed for summer while the wind left ice crystals in her hair, she was certainly no human. - Chih, When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain
...it was tremendously unlucky to hear a tiger laugh, but they couldn’t remember why.

Was it a cultural taboo? Was it a curse? Was it simply that tigers thought that killing and eating people was funny?

Details

  • Title Void Star
  • Author Zachary Mason
  • Length Novel, 400 pages

Genres

  • Science Fiction
  • Dystopias
  • Futurism
A riveting, beautifully written, fugue-like novel of AIs, memory, violence, and mortality

Not far in the future the seas have risen and the central latitudes are emptying, but it's still a good time to be rich in San Francisco, where weapons drones patrol the skies to keep out the multitudinous poor. Irina isn't rich, not quite, but she does have an artificial memory that gives her perfect recall and lets her act as a medium between her various employers and their AIs, which are complex to the point of opacity. It's a good gig, paying enough for the annual visits to the Mayo Clinic that keep her from aging.

Kern has no such access; he's one of the many refugees in the sprawling drone-built favelas on the city's periphery, where he lives like a monk, training relentlessly in martial arts, scraping by as a thief and an enforcer. Thales is from a different world entirely—the mathematically inclined scion of a Brazilian political clan, he's fled to L.A....
  • AIs
  • Classism
  • Climate Change
  • Dystopia
  • Futurism
  • Men Author
  • Men Characters
  • Rotating Cast
  • Thrillers
  • White Author
  • Woman Characters
But they didn’t understand—I wasn’t crying from fear of pain, but because I was afraid I would hurt them. “There were four of them. They were drunker than usual, and my bonds were loose, and I prayed that they’d just kill me before giving me an opening, but the devil was near, I could hear his footsteps as he walked through the house, opening drawers and looking in closets, and then he was listening behind the kitchen door, and despite my prayers one of the men went outside to call a girlfriend and another went off to take a piss and another went to get a beer and the last was a friend, a man whose life I had saved many times over, and I thought he might even let me go, and I tried to keep God’s face in my mind’s eye while he stood there telling me how badly he would make me die, and I prayed fiercely for the strength to just let it happen, but then I stopped, because suddenly I knew beyond question that I’d been praying to the void, that no one was listening, or ever had been, and with that I felt nothing but a profound emptiness and a slight sorrow. Before that, I’d thought I didn’t fear death, but it was only then that I realized that fearing death was all I’d ever done, and in that moment my fear was gone, which made me free, though all the light had left the world. Then my friend turned his back on me to find a cigarette. - Void Star
He hated his enemies for dying and leaving him alone, but by then there wasn’t far to go.

Details

  • Title Zero Zone
  • Author Scott O'Connor
  • Length Novel, 320 pages

Genres

  • Thrillers
  • Literary
Los Angeles, the late 1970s: Jess Shepard is an installation artist who creates environments that focus on light and space, often leading to intense sensory experiences for visitors to her work.

A run of critically lauded projects peaks with Zero Zone, an installation at the once upon a time site of nuclear bomb testing in the New Mexico desert.

But when a small group of travelers experience what they perceive as a religious awakening inside Zero Zone, they barricade themselves in the installation until authorities are forced to intervene. That violent showdown becomes a media sensation, and its aftermath follows Jess wherever she goes.

Devastated by the attack and the distortion of her art, Jess retreats from the world. Unable to work, Jess unravels mentally and emotionally, plagued by a nagging uncertainty as to her culpability for what happened.

Three years later, a survivor from Zero Zone comes looking for Jess, who must move past her self imposed isolation to face down her fears and recover her art and possibly her life from a violent cult intent of making it their own.
  • Art
  • Contemporary
  • Cults
  • Men Author
  • Thrillers
  • Trauma
  • White Author
  • White Main Characters
When the wind blew they covered their faces with bandanas against the swirling dust and Martha couldn’t help but see it as crematory ash. She tried to push the vision to the side of her mind but it was insistent: this was a trail of the granulated dead, lifted by the wind to cover her boots and clothes, her hands and hair, inhaled through the bandana’s thin fabric. Bodies within her body. The idea terrified her for most of the first day’s walking and that night’s restless sleep in the tent, but when she woke at the second dawn she thought of it in a different way. What if these were the souls of all those who had dreamed of making this walk but had been unable to reach this place? What if she could carry those souls with her along the path? The thought was no longer fearful; it was a responsibility, an honor. - Martha Reed
She floated in that space, the bubbles in the light like a thousand stars surrounding.