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Cover of Hole in the Sky, by Daniel H. Wilson, featuring a dark hole in a light blue sky, with a glowing ball in the center, with clouds streaming in from the edges, floating about green hills.
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Book Review: Hole in the Sky, by Daniel H. Wilson

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Hole in the Sky, by Daniel H. Wilson, is an entertaining, pleasantly eerie, and occasionally scary adventure novel told from four perspectives about what is initially treated as first contact science fiction but is also connected with cosmic horror, and reawakening mythology. It may encourage readers to think a little more about different perspectives, and connecting with others, and even the nature of reality, but mostly it’s a fun page-turner (288 pages, slated for release Oct. 7).

Cover of Hornytown Chutzpah by Andrew Hiller, featuring an impressionistic person wearing a fedora and trenchcoat, firing off multicolored water balloons, one with googly eyes.
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Book Review: HORNYTOWN CHUTZPAH by Andrew Hiller

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No, the title probably doesn’t refer to what you think it does. Andrew Hiller’s Hornytown Chutzpah is an urban fantasy noir with a Yiddish twist, and the title refers to a demon-populated neighborhood that suddenly popped up beside Washington D.C., years prior, as sort of a colony of Hell. Think Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, but with horned-demons of Hornytown rather than the famous animated characters populating Toontown. That Zemeckis film, or Gary K. Wolf’s Who Censored Roger Rabbit? that inspired it, serves as a good reference for the tone of Hornytown Chutzpah: plenty of noir that leans into the tropes of the genre with humor. Urban fantasy noir and comedy are elements often mashed up as a subgenre, but two things make Hornytown Chutzpah stand out. First is the aforementioned Yiddish twist. Before the story begins, Hiller gives readers “The Ten Commandments according to Sol the Wise Guy” that already got me chuckling. And after the story’s end is a glossary of (some) Yiddish and Jewish terms that one finds in the book, with cleverly and humorously crafted definitions in Sol’s voice.

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