Short Fiction Review: March–April 2026
One of my favorite things about science fiction and fantasy literature is its ability to portray nonhuman viewpoints. This month, all my favorite stories do that.
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Fantasy
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Review: Katabasis, by R.F. Kuang
There are some rather lovely ideas and bits here, especially in the extensive worldbuilding. The arguments over the geometry and topography of hell are fascinating. But the ultimate ending as well as what the novel builds up to feels underwhelming. It builds to a conclusion that really didn’t match up with what the novel seemed to be trying to do. I enjoyed parts of the journey far more than the destination itself.
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Book Review: An Accident of Dragons, by Cheri Radke
The publisher’s description of Cheri Radke’s novel, An Accident of Dragons, makes it sound like a romp: “An unlikely lord finally meets a problem he can’t flirt his way out of in this adventurous and light-hearted queer cozy fantasy featuring pirates, dragons, kidnapping, tea, and other high-fantasy delights…” It mostly is, and it’s a lot of fun, but there are also touches of long-set sorrow and suppressed issues that ended up having to be faced. So rather than just being cotton candy, there’s some meat on the bones of this story. Tasty, tasty meat.
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Book Review: The Killing Spell, by Shay Kauwe
I greatly enjoyed The Killing Spell, the debut urban fantasy novel by Shay Kauwe. I’ll admit that the first chapter was a little challenging for me, because the protagonist, Kea Petrova, starts out feeling a bit overwhelmed by her family responsibilities as the young head of a household, with siblings and cousins to support, and a somewhat unreliable magical talent. She continues to be off balance and seemingly gets in over her head when a political activist is assassinated and she becomes responsible for figuring out the killing spell and tracking down the killer, but eventually she hits her stride and finds some allies. She learns that she is most powerful when she stops trying to do everything by herself and leans into her heritage and her people’s connections with nature.
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Movie Review: DEAD LOVER (2025) Directed by Grace Glowicki
An unnamed lonely gravedigger (director Grace Glowicki) from a long line of gravediggers (Family Motto: Dig deep. Dig hard. Never stop digging.) yearns for a worthy man to love, a good man to love her back. The problem is that her dedication to the job makes the gravedigger smell of corpses; her flesh, hair and clothes emit a putrid rot that would turn aside any potential suitor. She experiments with botanicals whose scents might mask the stink of death, but to no avail. Her loneliness builds until the untimely death and burial of a famous opera diva (Leah Doz) brings the deceased’s mourning brother (Ben Petrie) into her graveyard. Catching her gaze, the brother professes a strong attraction to the gravedigger’s malodorous state, rather than the repulsion she’s used to. An intense relationship follows, but the man admits to the gravedigger that he has sterility issues that make their desire for children and a family difficult. He elects to travel abroad for a new experimental procedure to treat his infertility, but en route home he is lost at sea, only his ring finger bearing the symbol of their love retrieved to be returned to the stunned and heartbroken gravedigger. Dig deep. Dig hard. Never stop digging. The gravedigger refuses to give up on her love, and sets out to use her botanical skills to grow her lover back from the severed. Which only succeeds in growing an exceptionally elongated and comical animate finger that desires a body. Thankfully, there’s the dead body of her lover’s opera-singer-sister just outside. Only the aristocratic former husband (Lowen Morrow) of this corpse might object, and the creature the gravedigger forms might be more monster than lover.
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Book Review: The Everlasting by Alix Harrow
The Everlasting is Alix Harrow’s novel weaving myth, legend, time travel, destiny, and yes, a love story. Owen Mallory is an academic, a scholar in the country of Dominion. He has survived the last war and is now studying the national myth of his country. He is drawn, however, into doing much more than reading and writing about the myth. He winds up becoming part of that very myth cycle.¹ Una Everlasting IS that myth, the national myth of Dominion. Everyone knows her story, the Perfect Knight, who fought treachery, dragons, enemies within and without and found the Grail to heal a dying Queen.Everyone knows her story. But the ending of her story can change. Details in her story can change. Indeed the very fabric of her story can change. If someone plucks at the tapestry of her story long enough… Owen’s story, and Una’s story, is the story of Alix Harrow’s The Everlasting.