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Cover of Angel Down, by Daniel Kraus, featuring clouds of smoke and red smears that could signify fire or blood.
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Book Review: Angel Down, by Daniel Kraus

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Daniel Kraus is a prominent SFFH writer whom I hadn’t heard about until I found out that Skiffy and Fanty’s Daniel Haeusser had scored an interview with him for the show, coming live on Friday, June 12, at 8 p.m. Eastern, at https://twitch.tv/alphabetstreams. Shaun Duke and I are talking with Kraus mostly about his upcoming science fiction novel, The Sixth Nik. However, at about the same time, I saw that his 2025 novel, Angel Down, had won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and that became available to me first, so here are my immediate thoughts on it.

Cover of Obstetrix, by Naomi Kritzer, featuring a hypodermic needle against a pink background.
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Book Review: Obstetrix, by Naomi Kritzer

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Naomi Kritzer has been publishing speculative fiction since 2003 and has won about 10 major awards since 2014. In 2024 I strongly recommended her book Liberty’s Daughter. Her latest work, Obstetrix, has been published today, and while it’s too close to today’s world to really call it science fiction, I can say that it’s a tense, exciting, and heartfelt thriller, with a strong and empathetic female protagonist, with a plot setup drawn from some ugly realities of modern society that seem to be getting worse. Technically a novella, although it’s being published as a short book, it’s a great fast read, and it illustrates some very important themes. From the publisher’s summary: Doctor Liz has just been acquitted for performing the last abortion in North Dakota when she’s kidnapped.They’re not just any kidnappers, but a fundamentalist cult, deep in the rural west, without respect for law or decency, and in desperate need of an OB/GYN.Guarded, isolated, without access to the outside world, Liz … is very aware of what happened to the last obstetrician they kidnapped.She must escape, and bring help to the girls trapped at the compound, if it’s the last thing she does.

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.)

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