The They Cloned Tyrone movie has earned critical and general audience acclaim in a little over a month since, and Skiffy & Fanty followers with access to Netflix should check it out if they haven’t already.
Within these two apocalyptic settings where all four of the Horsemen of Revelation ride, the stories of three protagonists intertwine via multiple points of views and narrative voices (first- and third-person). In both Puerto Rico and in the Yucatán, these characters face their dystopic present to envision positive Indigenous-led futures enacted by purposeful decolonization and embrace of their ancestral ways.
Dehiscent has a form of New Weird that combines eco-horror with what might be considered cozy horror, despite unsettling themes of the prison that can form from the recognition of privilege while feeling powerless to change it. With rich, quiet atmosphere and an exceptionally compelling and realistic, empathetic protagonist, Deng lifts a mirror to our current lives to reflect a fantastic image of how divisions of humanity would continue.
From its opening pages, the surreal atmosphere of Morowa Yejidé’s exceptional, otherworldly novel Creatures of Passage envelops readers in a hazy pairing of familiarity and disorientation.
The eponymous Escape Pod represents a ‘best-of’ anthology of sorts, celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of the audio short fiction podcast. Edited by Mur Lafferty and S.B. Divya, the book features some of the biggest names in speculative fiction published through the podcast’s history. While I don’t have interest in listening to stories, I adore them in print form, and this collection from Titan Books offers a diverse selection of high-quality writing. With the current exclusive focus of Skiffy & Fanty on writers/works by the BIPOC community, I’ll highlight here that this collection features superb stories by Maurice Broaddus and N.K. Jemisin. In what follows, I’ll briefly review the stories in this collection.
Evan Winter self-published The Rage of Dragons in 2017. It soon received notice from an editor at Orbit, and in 2019 the publisher gave a freshly edited version of the novel a release, along with a deal for three further novels in its series entitled The Burning. The second novel of the series, The Fires of Vengeance, has recently been released, and a copy I picked up of that from my local bookshop (for this purchase, the aptly named Burning Books) now sits on my massive TBR stack. If you’re a regular follower of Skiffy & Fanty, you probably have already at least heard of The Rage of Dragons and its author. We featured Winter in episode #53 of the Signal Boost series (found here), and my fellow reviewer Paul Weimer praised the novel on Goodreads and Twitter. Paul even included it among books recommended to his followers at the start of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, right as we all began self-isolating and looking for worlds to escape into within pages. (Also: see Paul’s review on Barnes & Noble here).
