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In a building that looks like a church, with faint green light, a woman in a wimple or white cloak and dark dress looks from the side toward a stained glass window.
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Book Review: THE LAST CANTERBURY TALES by Jean Ray (Translated by Scott Nicolay)

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Over the past years Wakefield Press has been doing a tremendous job releasing seminal works of Weird Fiction, chief among them the fiction of the “Belgian Poe” Jean Ray. One of several pseudonyms of Raymundus Joannes de Kremer, Jean Ray is a personality of enigmatic history, whose biography could double for that of a protagonist in one of his stories. Among the releases from Wakefield Press include multiple short story collections, starting with his alcohol and briny sailor-filled Whiskey Tales, and his best-known novel, the strange and exquisitely crafted 1943 gothic horror Malpertuis. Director Harry Kümel adapted the latter into a film featuring Orson Welles in 1972, which had a recent, gorgeous release from Radiance Films.   Translator and writer Scott Nicolay has brilliantly translated and annotated each volume of Jean Ray’s work released by Wakefield Press, and I’ve had the fortune of discovering Ray and reviewing several of those books through this. (I believe all the previous reviews I’ve done have been for Rachel Cordasco’s Speculative Fiction in Translation.) This year marks a new release of a Nicolay-translated Ray work, 1944’s Les derniers contes de Canterbury (The Last Canterbury Tales), the literary equivalent of a single-artist anthology film, a short story collection that contains both tremendous variety and precise construction to thematically and narratively tie individual stories together with wraparounds that themselves wrap (or warp) time and space. In introductions and postscripts Nicolay and others comment on the structural and thematic ties between Malpurtis and The Last Canterbury Tales, two forms of work that embody the core of Ray’s fiction and Weird creativity.

Cover of Heart of the Nhaga, by Lee Young-Do, featuring a bronze-skinned, bearded, long-haired man holding a bow, with a double-bladed sword on his back, with bridges in the foreground and background; wind is blowing hard, and a tower is leaning or toppling.
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Book Review: The Heart of the Nhaga, by Lee Young-Do (translated by Anton Hur)

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Lee Young-Do has been a renowned epic fantasy novelist in Korea for decades. His series The Bird That Drinks Tears originally appeared as an online serial in 2002 and was published in four volumes in 2003. Wikipedia calls the first book in the series Nhaga Who Extract Their Hearts, but the English translation of this novel by Anton Hur that’s being released June 2 is called The Heart of the Nhaga. I was very entertained in puzzling out the worldbuilding, the characters and the plot. I didn’t fall in love with any of the characters, but it was intriguing following them and their interactions. In some ways, it reads sort of like a fairly traditional journey-quest fantasy, or sword and sorcery with extremely low-level sorcery, but in some ways, it’s a pretty wild trip. Readers who are looking for a different kind of fantasy novel, especially anyone getting tired of romantasy, may want to consider giving this a try.

Cover of Murder at World's End, by Ross Montgomery, featuring a manor house on a cliff, with stars and Halley's Comet above, and ocean waves below.
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Book Review: Murder at World’s End, by Ross Montgomery

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Murder at World’s End (2025) is a mystery, not speculative fiction, but it involves scientific thinking (and hysteria) of 1910, when Halley’s Comet came relatively near to the Earth, and this novel also strongly reminds me of several works of science fiction; therefore, I think it’s worth reviewing here. There are a few points that annoy me a little, but on the whole, I find it quite enthralling, and I look forward to a planned sequel. (But don’t worry, the plot here resolves without leaving the reader hanging.)

Cover of Shoeshine Boy and Cigarette Girl, by P.A. Cornell (cover art by Kim Herbst), featuring a dark-haired young man in a cap with a shoeshine kit and a smartly dressed blonde with a cigarette tray; they are looking over their shoulders at each other, with a futuristic cityscape behind them.
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Review: Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl, by P.A. Cornell

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If you’re in the mood for a quick, cozy, elegantly crafted story, Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl, by P.A. Cornell, may be right up your alley. It’s highly stylized, so this novelette certainly won’t be to everybody’s taste, and the speculative elements could be removed without altering the retro-futuristic near-noir romance plot much, but it also has a great deal of charm. It also has a female protagonist you can cheer for, a smart one, who knows what she wants and takes action to get it. Additionally, it has a male co-protagonist who is, unfortunately, a sap. He’s a fool for love, but also foolish in other ways, not only trusting the wrong people but taking terrible risks with his own partner’s trust. After I lost most of my patience with him, fortunately, the book focused almost entirely on her.

Cover of And Side by Side They Wander, by Molly Tanzer, featuring a woman's silhouette (with an art-museum filling) superimposed on a male silhouette (with circuitry filling) in front of mushrooms.
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Book Review: And Side by Side They Wander, by Molly Tanzer

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Molly Tanzer, whom I first became aware of through her new Jirel of Joiry story for New Edge Sword & Sorcery magazine, has previously won recognition for her fantasy novels and steampunk historical fiction. Her new novella, And Side by Side They Wander, is her first longform publication in science fiction/space opera, but I certainly hope she continues writing in this genre, too! She explores interesting questions in an open-ended way, but neither the philosophizing nor some interstitial reminiscences slow down the interstellar art-heist plot significantly. This story goes down easily while leaving the reader hungry for more.

Cover of Mortedant's Peril by R.J. Barker, featuring birds flying within flames rising from a tree in the center of a city.
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Review: Mortedant’s Peril, by R. J Barker

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R.J. Barker’s Mortedant’s Peril fuses his effective  baroque and rugose sense of secondary world worldbuilding into a murder mystery and conspiracy plot. Irody Hasp has a problem. Sure, he can talk to the dead and using that power is making a living even if it’s a hardscrabble one. But, then a coincidental choice of client leaves his apprentice dead…and Hasp in the crosshairs. He’s on the hook for his apprentice’s death and if he can’t solve it, not only will Irody die, but the city he loves itself might suffer grievous harm.  This is the story of R.J. Barker’s Mortedant’s Peril.

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